J. M. Robertson

BEFORE THE GREAT REBELLION

It is after the great Civil War that English political development becomes most directly instructive, because it is thenceforward that the modern political conditions begin to be directly traceable. Constitutional or parliamentary monarchy takes at that point a virtually new departure. But we shall be better prepared to follow the play of the forces of attraction and repulsion, union and strife, in the modern period, if we first realise how in the ages of feudal monarchy and personal monarchy, as the previous periods have been conveniently named, the same fundamental forces were at work in different channels. The further we follow these forces back the better we are prepared to conceive political movement in terms of naturalist as opposed to verbalist formulas. Above all things, we must get rid of the habit of explaining each phenomenon in terms of the abstraction of itself—as Puritanism by "the Puritan spirit," Christian civilisation by "Christianity," and English history by "the English character." We are to look for the causation of the Puritan spirit and English conduct and the religion of the hour in the interplay of general instincts and particular circumstances.

§ 1

At the very outset, the conventional views as to the bias of the "Anglo-Saxon race"[987] are seen on the least scrutiny to be excluded by the facts. Credited with an innate bent to seafaring, the early English are found to have virtually abandoned the sea after settling in England;[988] the new conditions altering the sea-going bent just as the older had made it, and continued to do in the case of the Scandinavians. Credited in the same fashion with a racial bias to commerce, they are found to have been uncommercial, unadventurous, home-staying; and it took centuries of continental influences to make them otherwise. Up to the fourteenth century "almost the whole of English trade was in the hands of aliens."[989] And of what trade the "free" Anglo-Saxons did conduct, the most important branch seems to have been the slave trade.[990] As to the mass of the population, whatever were their actual life-conditions—and as to this we have very little knowledge—they were certainly not the "free barbarians" of the old Teutonic legend. Unfree in some sense they mostly were; and all that we have seen of the early evolution of Greece and Rome goes to suggest that their status was essentially depressed. In the words of a close student, English economic history "begins with the serfdom of the masses of the rural population under Saxon rule—a serfdom from which it has taken a thousand years of English economic evolution to set them free."[991] This is perhaps an over-statement: serfdom suggests general predial slavery; and this cannot be shown to have existed. But those who repel the proposition seem to take no account of the tendency towards popular depression in early settled communities.[992] If we stand by the terminology of Domesday Book, we are far indeed from the conception of a population of freemen.

That the mass of the "Saxon" English (who included many of non-Saxon descent) were more or less "unfree" is a conclusion repeatedly reached on different lines of research. Long ago, the popular historian Sharon Turner wrote that "There can be no doubt that nearly three-fourths of the Anglo-Saxon population were in a state of slavery" (History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4th ed. 1823, iii, 255); and he is here supported by his adversary Dunham (Europe during the Middle Ages, Cab. Cyc. 1834, iii, 49-52). J.M. Kemble later admitted that the "whole population in some districts were unfree" (The Saxons in England, reprint, 1876, i, 189). Yet another careful student sums up that "at the time of the Conquest we find the larger portion of the inhabitants of England in a state of villenage" (J.F. Morgan, England under the Normans, 1858, p. 61). (The interesting question of the racial elements of the population at and after the Conquest is fully discussed by the Rev. Geoffrey Hill, Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest, 1904, ch. i.)

Later and closer research does but indicate gradations in the status of the unfree—gradations which seem to have varied arbitrarily in terms of local law. (On this, however, see Morgan, p. 62.) The Domesday Book specifies multitudes of villani, servi, bordarii (or cotarii), as well as (occasionally) large numbers of sochmanni, and liberi homines. In Cornwall there were only six chief proprietors, with 1,738 villani, 2,441 bordarii, and 1,148 servi; in Devonshire, 8,246 villani, 4,814 bordarii, and 3,210 servi; in Gloucestershire, 3,071 villani, 1,701 bordarii, and 2,423 servi; while in Lincolnshire there were 11,322 sochmanni, 7,168 villani, 3,737 bordarii; and in Norfolk 4,528 villani, 8,679 bordarii, 1,066 servi, 5,521 sochmanni, and 4,981 liberi homines. (Cp. Sharon Turner, as cited, vol. iii, bk. viii, ch. 9.) Thus the largest numbers of ostensible freemen are found in the lately settled Danish districts, and the largest number of slaves where most of the old British population survived (Ashley, Economic History, 1888, i, 17, 18; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 1891, i, 88). "The eastern counties are the home of liberty" (Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 23). The main totals are: bordarii, 82,119; villani, 108,407; servi, 25,156; that is, 215,000 heads of families, roughly speaking, all of whom were more or less "unfree," out of an entire enumerated male population of 300,000.

The constant tendency was to reduce all shades to one of nativi or born villeins (Stubbs, Constitutional History, 4th ed. i, 465); that is to say, the number of absolute serfs tends to lessen, their status being gradually improved, while higher grades tend to be somewhat lowered. Prof. Vinogradoff's research, which aims at correcting Mr. Seebohm's, does but disclose that villenage in general had three aspects:—"Legal theory and political disabilities would fain make it all but slavery; the manorial system ensures it something of the character of the Roman colonatus; there is a stock of freedom in it which speaks of Saxon tradition" (Villainage in England, 1892, p. 137; cp. Seebohm, as cited, p. 409; and Stubbs, § 132, i, 462-65). Even the comparatively "free" socmen were tied to the land and were not independent yeomen (Ashley, i, 19); and even "freedmen" were often tied to a specified service by the act of manumission (Dunham, as cited, iii, 51). As to Teutonic slavery in general, cp. C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i, 41-44, and U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. 1900, i, 116; as to France, cp. Guizot, Essais sur l'Histoire de France, Édit. 1847, pp. 162-72; Histoire de la civilisation en France, 13e Édit. iii, 172, 190-203; and as to the Netherlands, see above, pp. 295-96.

There is a tendency on the one hand to exaggerate the significance of the data, as when we identify the lot of an ancient serf or villein with that of a negro in the United States of sixty years ago;[993] and on the other hand to forget, in familiarity with scholarly research, the inevitable moral bearing of all degrees of bondage. The villanus "both is and is not a free man"; but the "not" is none the less morally significant: "though he may be liber homo, he is not francus";[994] and his name carries a slur. An immeasurable amount of moral history is conveyed in the simple fact that "slave" was always a term of abuse; that "villain" is just "villein"; that "caitiff" is just "captive"; and that "churl" is just "ceorl." So the "neif" (= naÏf = native) becomes the "knave";[995] the "scullion" the "blackguard"; and the homeless wanderer the "vagabond"; even as for the Roman "the guest," hostis, was "the enemy." The "rogue" has doubtless a similar descent, and "rogue and peasant-slave" in Tudor times, when slavery had ceased, stood for all things contemptible. Men degrade and impoverish their fellows, and out of the created fact of deprivation make their worst aspersions; never asking who or what it is that thus turns human beings into scullions, churls, blackguards, knaves, caitiffs, rogues, and villains. The Greeks knew that a man enslaved was a man demoralised; but saw in the knowledge no motive for change of social tactics. Still less did the Saxons; for their manumissions at the bidding of the priest were but penitential acts, in no way altering the general drift of things.

Green (Short History, ch. i, § 6, ed. 1881, pp. 54, 55), laying stress on the manumissions, asserts that under Edgar "slavery was gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church." But this is going far beyond the evidence. Green seems to have assumed that the laws framed by Dunstan were efficacious; but they clearly were not. (Cp. C. Edmond Maurice, Tyler, Bale, and Oldcastle, 1875, pp. 14-18.) Kemble rightly notes—here going deeper than Prof. Vinogradoff—that there was a constant process of new slave-making (Saxons, i, 183-84; cp. Maitland, p. 31); and in particular notes how "the honours and security of service became more anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom" (p. 184). There is in short a law of worsenment in a crude polity as in an advanced one. Green himself says of the slave class that it "sprang mainly from debt or crime" (The Making of England, 1885, p. 192; cp. Short History, p. 13). But debt and "crime" were always arising. Compare his admissions in The Conquest of England, 2nd ed. pp. 444, 445. Elsewhere he admits that slaves were multiplied by the mutual wars of the Saxons (p. 13); and Kemble, recognising "crime" as an important factor, agrees (i, 186) with Eichhorn and Grimm in seeing in war and conquest the "principal and original cause of slavery in all its branches." A battle would make more slaves in a day than were manumitted in a year. Some slaves indeed, as in the Roman Empire, were able to buy their freedom (Maurice, as cited, p. 20, and refs.; Dunham, as cited, iii, 51); but there can have been few such cases. (Cp. C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, French tr. i, 41-44, as to the general tendencies of Teutonic slavery.) The clergy for a time promoted enfranchisement, and even set an example in order to widen their own basis of power; but as Green later notes (ch. v, § 4, p. 239) the Church in the end promoted "emancipation, as a work of piety, on all estates but its own." Green further makes the vital admission that "the decrease of slavery was more than compensated by the increasing degradation of the bulk of the people.... Religion had told against political independence"—for the Church played into the hands of the king.

During the Danish invasions, which involved heavy taxation (Danegeld) to buy off the invaders, slavery increased and worsened; and Cnut's repetition of the old laws against the foreign slave trade can have availed little (Maurice, as cited, pp. 23-24). Prof. Abdy, after recognising that before the Conquest English liberties were disappearing like those of France (Lectures on Feudalism, 1890, pp. 322, 326-27, 331), argues that, though the tenure of the villein was servile, he in person was not bond (App. p. 428). "Bond" is, of course, a term of degree, like others; but if "not bond" means "freeman," the case will not stand. The sole argument is that "had he been so [bond], it is difficult to understand his admission into the conference [in the procedure of the Domesday Survey] apparently on an equality with the other members of the inquest." Now he was plainly not on an equality. The inquest was to be made through the sheriff, the lord of the manor, the parish priest, the reeve, the bailiff, and six villeins out of each hamlet (Id. p. 360). It is pretty clear that the villeins were simply witnesses to check, if need were, the statements of their superiors.

The weightiest argument against the darker view of Saxon serfdom is the suggestion of the late Prof. Maitland (Domesday Book, p. 223) that the process of technical subordination, broadly called feudalism, was really a process of infusion of law and order. But he confessedly made out no clear case, and historical analogy is against him.

Finally, though under the Normans the Saxon slaves appear to have gained as beside the middle grades of peasants (Morgan, England under the Normans, p. 225; Ashley, i, 18), it is a plain error to state that the Bristol slave-trade was suppressed under William by "the preaching of Wulfstan, and the influence of Lanfranc" (Green, Short History, p. 55; also in longer History, i, 127; so also Bishop Stubbs, i, 463, note. The true view is put by Maurice, as cited, p. 30). The historian incidentally reveals later (Short History, ch. vii, § 8, p. 432, proceeding on Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio HiberniÆ, lib. i, c. 18) that "at the time of Henry II's accession Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, in spite of Royal prohibitions and the spiritual menaces of the English Church." (Cp. Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 316, note.) He admits, too (p. 55), that "a hundred years later than Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was sometimes said to spring from breeding slaves for the market." The "market" was for concubines and prostitutes, as well as for labourers. (Cp. Southey, Book of the Church, ed. 1824, i, 115, following William of Malmesbury; and Hallam, as last cited.) Gibbon justifiably infers (ch. 38, Bohn ed. iv, 227) that the children of the Roman slave market of the days of Gregory the Great, non Angli sed angeli, were sold into slavery by their parents. "From the first to the last age," he holds, the Anglo-Saxons "persisted in this unnatural practice." Cp. Maurice, as cited, pp. 4-5. Gregory actually encouraged the traffic in English slaves after he became Pope. (Ep. to Candidus, cited in pref. to Mrs. Elstoh's trans. of the Anglo-Saxon Homily, p. xi.)

Thus, under Saxon, Danish, and Norman law alike, a slave trade persisted for centuries. As regards the conditions of domestic slavery, it seems clear that the Conquest lowered the status of the half-free; but on the other hand "there was a great decrease in the number of slaves in Essex between the years 1065 and 1085" (Morgan, as cited, p. 225; cp. Maitland, p. 35).

In Saxondom, for centuries before the Conquest, "history" is made chiefly by the primitive forces of tribal and local animosity, the Northmen coming in to complicate the insoluble strifes of the earlier English, partly uniting these against them, dominating some, and getting ultimately absorbed in the population, but probably constituting for long an extra source of conflict in domestic politics. A broad difference of accent, as in the Scandinavian States down to our own day, is often a strain on fellowship. In any case, the Anglo-Saxons at the time of the Conquest, as always from the time of their own entry, showed themselves utterly devoid of the "gift of union" which has been ascribed to their "race," as to the Roman. No "Celts" were ever more hopelessly divided: the Battle of Hastings is the crowning proof.[996] And in the absence of leading and stimulus from a higher culture, so little progressive force is there in a group of struggling barbaric communities that there was only the scantiest political and other improvement in Saxon England during hundreds of years. When Alfred strove to build up a civilisation, he turned as a matter of course to the Franks.[997] The one civilising force was that of the slight contacts kept up with the Continent, perhaps the most important being the organisation of the Church. It was the Norman Conquest, bringing with it a multitude of new contacts, and an entrance of swarms of French and Flemish artificers and clerics, that decisively began the civilisation of England. The Teutonic basis, barbarous as it was, showed symptoms of degeneration rather than of development. In brief, France was mainly civilised through Italy; England was mainly civilised through France.

Bishop Stubbs, after admitting as much (§ 91, i, 269, 270) and noting the Norman "genius for every branch of organisation," proceeds to say "that the Norman polity had very little substantial organisation of its own, and that it was native energy that wrought the subsequent transformation." His own pages supply the disproof. See in particular as to the legislative and administrative activity of Henry II, § 147, i, 530-33. As to the arrest or degeneration of the Saxon civilisation, cp. § 79, i, 227, 228; Sharon Turner, History of England during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. i, 1, 73; H.W. C. Davis, England under the Normans and the Angevins, 1905, p. 1; Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, 1867, i, 288, 308-12, 321, 343, 346, 347; Abdy, as cited above. Mr. Pearson's testimony, it should be noted, is that of a partisan and eulogist of the "race."

Gneist, after deciding that the number of the unfree population "erscheint nicht Übergross," admits that the dependent stratum of the population must needs always increase, "as a result of the land system. In time of war the class increased through the ruin of the small holdings; in time of peace through the increase of the landless members of families. The favourable effects of a new acquisition through conquest and booty were a gain only to the possessing class" (Geschichte des englischen Self-Government, 1863, p. 7). He concludes that "the social structure of the Anglo-Saxons appears to be on the whole unchanging, advancing only in the multiplication of the dependent classes." Among the symptoms of degeneration may be noted the retirement of nearly thirty kings and queens into convents or reclusion during the seventh and eighth centuries. This was presumably a result of clerical management.

In Normandy itself, however, half a century before the Conquest, there had arisen a state of extreme tension between the peasantry and their lords; and a projected rising was crushed in germ with horrible cruelty.[998] William's enterprise thus stood for a pressure of need among his own subjects, as well as for an outburst of feudal ambition; and in making up his force he offered an opportunity of plunder to all classes in his own duchy, as well as to those of other provinces of France. Domesday Book, says one of its keenest students, "is a geld book"—a survey made to facilitate taxation on the lines of the old Danegeld.[999] William was repeating a Roman process. His invasion, therefore, hardly represented the full play of the existing forces of civilisation. These, indeed, had to be renewed again and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the conditions of the Conquest were important for the direction of English political evolution. Its first social and psychological effect was to set up new class relations, and in particular a marked division between aristocracy and people, who spoke different languages. This involved a relation of distrust and close class union. When the people's speech began to compete with that of their masters, and the nobles separately began to be on good terms with their people, there would arise wide possibilities of strife as between neighbouring nobles and their retainers; and in Scotland the weakness of the crown long gave this free play. But in England, especially after the period of anarchy under Stephen, when the early baronage was much weakened and many estates were redivided,[1000] the strength of the crown, rooted in military custom and constantly securing itself, tended to unite the nobles as a class for their own aggrandisement and protection. King after king, therefore, sought the support of the people[1001] against the baronage, as the baronage sought their help against the king; while the Church fought for its own share of power and privilege.

The history of Christendom, indeed, cannot be understood save in the light of the fact that the Church, a continuous corporation owning much property as such, is as it were a State within the State,[1002] representing a special source of strife, although its non-military character limits the danger. What the Church has repeatedly done is to throw in its lot with king or nobles, or with the democracy (as in Switzerland and Protestant Scotland), according as its economic interests dictate. The famous case of Becket, transformed from the king's friend into the king's antagonist, is the most dramatic instance of the Church's necessary tendency to fight for its own hand and to act as an independent community. And it is in large part to the check and counter-check of a church, crown, and baronage, all jealously standing on their rights as against each other, that the rise of English constitutionalism is to be traced; the baronage and the Church, further, being withheld from preponderance by the strifes arising within their own pale. For even the Church, unified at once by its principle, its celibacy, its self-interest, and the pressure of outside forces, exhibits in its own sections, from time to time, the law of strife among competing interests.[1003]

The mere strife of interests, however, could not evolve civilisation in such a polity without a constant grafting-on of actual civilising elements from that southern world in which the ancient seeds were again flowering. Mere mixing of Norman with Saxon blood, one Teutonic branch with another, could avail nothing in itself beyond setting up a useful variability of type; and the element of French handicraft and culture introduced in the wake of the Conquest, though not inconsiderable,[1004] could ill survive such a pandemonium as the reign of Stephen. Like Henry I, Stephen depended on the English element as against the baronage; but the struggle brought civilisation lower than it had been since the Conquest. With the accession of Henry II (1154) came a new influx of French culture and French speech,[1005] albeit without any departure from the monarchic policy of evoking the common people as against the nobles. Thenceforward for over a hundred years the administrative methods and the culture are French, down to the erection of a French-speaking Parliament by the southern Frenchman Simon de Montfort. The assumption that some inherent "Teutonic" faculty for self-government shaped the process is one of the superstitions of racial and national vanity.

Dr. C.H. Pearson's reiteration of the old "race" dogma (History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, i, 277) is its sufficient reductio ad absurdum. In the English manner, he connects with old Welsh usages of revenge the late Irish tradition of "lynch law" that has been "transplanted to America"—as if it were Irishmen who are to-day lynching negroes in the southern States. He explains in the same way "the contrast of French progress by revolutionary movements with the slow, constitutional, onward march of English liberty." On his own showing there was not progress, but deterioration, as regards liberty among the Saxons; and the later history of the English common people is largely one of their efforts to make revolutions. In France the revolutions were rather fewer. In Denmark and Germany, again, there was long relapse and then revolution. For the rest, Mr. Pearson has contrasted Welsh usage of the sixth century with Saxon usage of the eleventh, this while admitting the lateness of the latter development (pp. 275, 276). We should require only to go back to the blood-feud stage in Teutondom to prove the ineradicable tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon to the Faustrecht, which in Germany survived till the sixteenth century, and to the fisticuffs which occurred in 1895 in the English Parliament. The reasoning would be on a par with Mr. Pearson's.

Mr. J.H. Round's way of taking it for granted (The Commune of London, 1899, pp. 138-40) that a tendency to strife is permanently and "truly Hibernian," belongs to the same order of thought. Irishmen are represented as abnormal in inability to unite against a common foe, when just such disunion was shown through whole centuries in Saxondom and in Scandinavia and in Germany; and they are further described as peculiar in leaving their commerce in foreign hands, when such was the notorious practice of the Anglo-Saxons.

One of the most remarkable reversions to the racial way of reasoning is made by Mr. H.W. C. Davis in his England under the Normans and Angevins (1905). After setting out with the avowal that the Anglo-Saxons at the Conquest were "decadent," he reaches (p. 223) the conclusion that the Teutonic races "climb, slowly and painfully it is true, but with a steady and continued progress, from stage to stage of civilisation," while the Celtic, "after soaring at the first flight to a comparatively elevated point, are inclined to be content with their achievement, and are ... passed by their more deliberate competitors." How a Teutonic race, given these premises, could be "decadent," and be surpassed and finally uplifted by a "Latin civilisation" (id. p. 2), the theorist does not attempt to explain.

To no virtue in Norman or English character, then,[1006] but to the political circumstances, was it due that there grew up in island England, instead of an all-powerful feudal nobility and a mainly depressed peasantry, as in continental France, a certain balance of classes, in which the king's policy against the nobility restrained and feudally weakened them, and favoured the burghers and yeomen, making sub-tenants king's liegemen; while on the other hand the combination of barons and Church against the king restrained him.[1007] A tyrant king is better for the people than the tyranny of nobles; and the destruction of feudal castles by regal jealousy restrains baronial brigandage. Regal prestige counts for something as against baronial self-assertion; but aristocratic self-esteem also rests itself, as against a reckless king, on popular sympathy. On the other hand, the town corporations, originating in popular interests, became in turn close oligarchies.[1008] Even the class tyranny of the trade gilds, self-regarding corporations in their way,[1009] looking to their own interests and indifferent to those of the outside grades beneath them,[1010] could provide a foothold for the barons in the town mobs, whom the barons could patronise.[1011] What was done by the Parliaments of Edward III to allow free entrance to foreign merchants was by way of furthering the interests of the aristocracy, who wanted to deal with such merchants, as against the English traders who wished to exclude them. Yet again, the yeomanry and burghers, fostered by the royal policy, develop an important military force, which has its own prestige.

Nothing can hinder, however, that foreign wars shall in the end aggrandise the upper as against the lower classes, developing as they do the relation of subjection, increasing the specifically military upper class, and setting up the spirit of force as against the spirit of law. In particular, the king's power is always aggrandised when nobility and people alike are led by him to foreign war.[1012] Edward III, indeed, had to make many legislative concessions to the Commons in order to procure supplies for his wars; and the expansion of commerce in his reign,[1013] furthered by the large influx of Flemish artisans[1014] encouraged by him,[1015] strengthened the middle classes; but all the while the "lower orders" had the worst of it; and the jealousy between traders and artisans, already vigorous in the reign of John, could not be extinguished. And when, after nearly eighty years without a great external war, Edward I invaded Scotland, there began a military epoch in which, while national unity was promoted, the depressed class was necessarily enlarged, as it had been before the Conquest during the Danish wars;[1016] and the poor went to the wall. Instinct made people and baronage alike loth at first to support the king in wars of foreign aggression; but when once the temper was developed throughout the nation, as against France, the spirit of national union helped the growth of class superiority by leaving it comparatively unchecked. In the period between the Conquest and Edward I the free population had actually increased, partly by French and Flemish immigration in the train of the Conquest; partly by Norman manumissions; partly through the arrivals of Flemish weavers exiled by domestic war;[1017] partly by the new growth of towns under Norman influence; partly by reason of the development of the wool export trade, which flourished in virtue of the law and order at length established under the Angevin kings, and so stimulated other industry. But from the beginning of the epoch of systematic national war the increase was checked; and save for the period of betterment consequent on the destruction of population by the Black Death, the condition of the peasantry substantially worsened.[1018] Frenchmen were struck by the number of serfs they saw in southern England as compared with France, and by the stress of their servitude.[1019]

An apparently important offset to the general restriction of freedom is the beginning of a representative parliamentary system under the auspices of Simon de Montfort (1265). It is still customary to make this departure a ground for national self-felicitation, though our later historians are as a rule content to state the historical facts, without inferring any special credit to the "Anglo-Saxon race."[1020] As a matter of fact, Simon de Montfort's Parliament was the application by a naturalised Frenchman, under stress of the struggle between his party in the baronage and the king, of an expedient set up a generation before by the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, and a century before in Spain. There, and not in England, arose the first Parliaments in which sat together barons, prelates, and representatives of cities. Simon de Montfort, son of the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, may well have known of the practice of Spain, where in the twelfth century the householders in the cities elected their members. But he must at least have been familiar with the details of the system set up in Sicily, to which English attention had been specially called by the effort of Henry III to obtain the Sicilian crown for his son Edmund; and Simon imitated that system in England, not on any exalted principle of justice, but because the smallness of his support among the barons forced him to make the most of the burgher class, who had stood by him in the struggle. He may even, indeed, have taken his idea proximately from the practice of the rebels in Normandy before the Conquest, when deputies from all the districts met in general assembly and bound themselves by a mutual oath.[1021] Thus accidentally[1022] introduced, under a French name,[1023] the representative system is one more of the civilising factors which England owed to Southern Europe; and, as it was, baronage and burgesses alike failed to maintain Simon against the power of the crown, the monarchic superstition availing to divide even the malcontents, as had previously happened after the granting of Magna Carta by King John.

Reiterated claims had secured in the eighteenth century the general acceptance of the view that England "set the example" of admitting cities to representation in national diets (so Koch, Histor. View of the European Nations, Crichton's tr. 3rd ed. p. 46). But as to the priority of the institution in Spain, see U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. i, 370; and Prescott, Hist. of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 10 and refs. As to its existence in Sicily (circa 1232), see Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity, vi, 154, proceeding on Gregorio, Considerazioni sopra la Storia di Sicilia, 1805 (ed. 2a, 1831-39, vol. ii, cap. v); and Von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen (Aufg. 1857-58, B. vii, Haupt. 6, Bd. iii, p. 249). Cp. Von Reumont, The Carafas of Maddaloni, Eng. tr. 1854, p. 61, and refs. Frederick's assemblies, too, were called Parlamente. He in turn had, of course, been influenced by the practice, if not of Spain, at least of the Italian cities, which he wished his own to rival.

As to Simon's object in summoning burgesses, Hallam admits (Europe during the Middle Ages, ed. 1855, iii, 27) that it "was merely to strengthen his own faction, which prevailed among the commonalty," though the step was too congruous with general developments not to be followed up. Compare the admissions of Green, pp. 151-53; Stubbs, ii, 96, 103; and the remark of Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii) that the representation of burghs in the states-general of all the great European monarchies originated spontaneously in the desire of the kings for support against the barons. Freeman's statement (General Sketch of European History, p. 184) that under Simon we find "the whole English nation, nobles, clergy, and people, acting firmly together" against the king, is quite erroneous. Cp. Gneist, Geschichte des Self-government in England, 1863, p. 143. Dr. Gardiner (Student's History, p. 245), speaking of the presence of city burgesses and knights of the shire in the same Parliament under Edward III, writes that "in no other country in Europe would this have been possible." He seems to have been entirely unaware of the Spanish practice.

As the roots of the temper of equality are weakened, the relative prestige of the king is heightened,[1024] provided that in a turbulent age he is strong enough for his functions; though, again, he runs new risks when, in peace, he is weak enough to make favourites, and thus sets up a source of jealousy in the act of surrendering some of his own special prestige. Then he doubles the force against him. History has generally represented favourites as unworthy; but there is no need that they should be so in order to be detested; and whether we take Gaveston, or Buckingham, or Bute, we shall always find that the animosity of the favourite's assailants is so visibly excessive as to imply the inspiration of primordial envy quite as much as resentment of bad government. Whether it is noble denouncing favoured noble or Pym impeaching the Duke, there is always the note of primary animal jealousy.

§ 2

A very obvious and familiar general law, here to be noted afresh, is that the constant and extensive employment of energy in war retards civilisation, by leaving so much less for intellectual work. Some sociologists have arrived at the optimistic half-truths that (1) warfare yields good in the form of chivalry, and that (2) great wars like the Crusades promote civilisation by setting up communication between peoples. But it is not asked whether the good involved in chivalry could not conceivably have been attained without the warfare, and whether (as before noted) there could not have been commerce between East and West without the Crusades.[1025] The ancient Phoenicians had contrived as much in their day. Even the expansion of Italian commerce which followed on the Crusades went on the lines of a trade already in existence, as is proved once for all by the mere numbers of the vessels supplied to the crusaders by the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians;[1026] and inasmuch as these republics fought furiously for the monopoly, each grabbing for special privileges,[1027] till Genoa overthrew Pisa, the total expansion must have been small, and the political disintegration great.

Nor was it on the whole otherwise with the spirit of chivalry, of which Guizot[1028] gives such an attractive picture. It was with the Church-made code of chivalrous morals as with the Church's code of Christian virtue: the ideal and practice were far asunder. As a matter of fact, the rules of chivalry were in part but the rules of prize-fighters,[1029] without which the game could not continuously be played; and they in no way affected the relations of the prize-fighters with other classes, or even their moral relations with each other save in the matter of fighting. To the "common herd" they were not only brutal but base,[1030] recognising no moral obligations in that direction. So too the Crusades represent a maximum of strife yielding a minimum of intercourse, which (save for the spirit of religious hate which wrought the strife) could have been attained in peace in tenfold degree by the play of the energy spent in preliminary bloodshed.

It is, of course, idle to speak as if the age of warfare might have been different if somebody had anachronistically pointed out the possibilities; but it is worse than idle, on the other hand, to impute a laudable virtue to its impulses because other impulses followed on them. The task of the sociological historian is first to trace sequences, and then to reason from them to the problems of his own age, where most are praise and blame profitable exercises. The lesson of early English history is neither that chivalry is good nor that the feudal knights and kings were ruffians; but that certain things happened to retard civilisation because these had their way, and that similar results would tend to accrue if their ideals got uppermost among us now. Thus we have to note that during the long period of frequent dynastic and other civil war from the Conquest to the reign of Henry II there was almost no intellectual advance in England, the only traceable gain arising when the king was fighting abroad with his foreign forces. There was no such cause at stake as thrilled into fierce song the desperately battling Welsh; and though in the reign of Edward III we have the great poetic florescence of which Chaucer is the crown, the inspiration of that literature had come from or through France; and with the depression of France there came the Nemesis of depression in English culture.

The triumph of Edward over France was, broadly speaking, a result of financial rascality, inasmuch as he succeeded by means of the money which he had borrowed from the Florentine bankers, and which he never repaid.[1031] He was thus well equipped and financed when the French were not; and he was able to buy off the princes of the Empire on the north and east of the French frontier. But though the enterprise thus begun was continued by means of a home revenue raised mainly on the wool trade, the English attempt to dominate France ended in the inevitable way of imperialism, the humiliation of the victors duly following on the misery and humiliation of the vanquished. Only the depopulation of the Black Death prevented extreme misery among the English population; and the conquering king ends his life, as William had done before him, in isolation and ignominy.

It may or may not have been a gain that Edward's victories over France practically determined the adoption of the middle-class, gallicised English speech[1032] by the upper classes, who had hitherto been French-speaking, like the kings themselves. An Anglicising process, such as had been interrupted at the advent of Henry II, had set in when Normandy was lost (1204), to be again interrupted on the accession of Henry III, and resumed in the civil wars of his reign. But Edward I habitually spoke French, and so did his nobles. They had hitherto looked with true aristocratic scorn on the pretensions of the bourgeoisie—"rustici Londonienses qui se barones vocant ad nauseam," in the fashion satirised in all ages, down to our own; but in their new relation of hostility and superiority to Normandy and to France, they insensibly adopted the language that had been framed by that very bourgeoisie out of Saxon, and French and French idioms translated into Saxon.

Though, however, Chaucer's own new-English work is part of the result, the intellectual gain stops there for the time being. No nation, from Rome to Napoleonic France, ever helped its own higher culture by destroying other States.[1033] The French wars of Henry V were not less injurious to English civilisation[1034] than the desperate civil wars which followed them, when English medieval culture reached, relatively to the rest of Europe, its lowest point.[1035] And these wars, it is always important to remember, were the result of the young king's acting on the doctrine (doubtfully ascribed to his father, but in any case all too easily acquired by kings) that whereas peace gave headway to domestic sedition, foreign war unified the mass of the people and fixed them to their leader. The shameless aggression on France did so unify them for the moment, as imperialism among an unmoralised public may always be trusted to do; and it left them more demoralised and divided than ever, in due sequence. In all likelihood it was the new bribe of foreign plunder that first drew men away from Lollardism, considered as an outcome of economic discontent, thus preparing the collapse of the movement on its moral side.[1036] One man's egoism could thus sway the whole nation's evolution for evil,[1037] setting up for it the ideal which haloed him, and which survived him in virtue of the accident that the Nemesis of his course fell upon his successors rather than on him.

§ 3

In the matter of plebeian subjection, the second half of the fourteenth century supplies the proof of the tendency of the period of war. The great gain to the serfs in that period was the result of the depopulation caused by the Black Death (1348-50)—a relation of cause and effect which is still ignored by some writers, in their concern to insist that English labour was once better off than at present. But it was later in the same half-century that the rising of the "Jacquerie," which appears to have been in its origin strictly a revolt against taxation,[1038] was so bloodily repressed. The manner of the revolt sufficiently proves that the peasantry had gained new heart with the improvement in their lot which followed on the pestilence, in spite of laws to keep down wages;[1039] but even this improvement could not strengthen them sufficiently to make them hold their own politically in 1381 against the aristocracy, gentry, and middle class, now hardened in class insolence. It would seem as if those who rose to the status of tenants[1040] after the depopulation sought in their turn to keep down those who remained landless servitors. After the southern and eastern risings had been crushed, the men of Essex were told by Richard, who had given them charters of freedom and immediately afterwards revoked them, inclined as he was to protect the serfs in a measure against their masters, that "bondsmen they had been and bondsmen they should remain, in worse bondage than before"; and the following Parliament declared that the landowners would never consent to the freeing of the serfs, "were they all to die for it in a day." It is noteworthy, on the side of economics, that despite this temper serfage did gradually die out, the people being for long unable to multiply up to the old level, by reason of restraint, ill-usage, civil war, the decline of tillage and the grouping of holdings, and the high death-rate. Jack Cade's rebellion, in 1450, indicated the persistence of the democratic spirit, contending as it did for the suppression of the system under which the nobles plundered the kingdom while the king was imbecile.

It is important to note, finally, that it was in the age of raised standard of comfort that there occurred the first wide diffusion of critical heresy in England. Wiclif's popular Lollardry was one phase of a movement that went deeper in thought and further afield in social reform than his, since he himself felt driven to confute certain opponents of belief in the Scriptures, and at the same time to repudiate the doctrine that vassals might resist tyrant lords.[1041] Had he not done so, he might have had a less peaceful end; but it is clear that many men were in the temper to apply to lay matters the demand for reform which he restricted to matters ecclesiastical.[1042] John Ball's rising, however, promptly elicited the much superior strength of the feudal military class; and though in 1395 there were still Lollards to petition to Parliament for the abolition of "unnecessary trades," as well as war and capital punishment and the Catholic practices afterwards rejected by Protestantism, their Utopia was as hopeless as that of the insurgent peasants. Even had the invasion of France not come about to bribe and demoralise the nation at large, turning it from domestic criticism to the plunder of a neighbouring State, the nobility of the period were utterly incapable of an intellectual ideal; and any sympathy shown by any section of them for Lollardry was the merest opportunism, proceeding on resentment of Papal exactions or on a premature hope of plundering the Church.[1043] The moment Lollardry openly leant towards criticism of nobility as well as clergy, they were ready to give it up to destruction; and the determining cause of the fall of Richard II was that, besides alienating the nobles at once by maintaining a peace policy, and by refusing to let them go to all lengths in oppressing the labourers, he alienated the clergy by sheltering the Lollards.[1044] It was the clergy who turned the balance, embracing the cause of Henry IV, who in turn systematically supported them,[1045] as did his son after him. Henry V, the national hero-king, and his father were the first burners of "Protestant" heretics; and it was under Henry IV, in 1401, that there was passed the Act suppressing the voluntary schools of the Lollards.[1046] Doubtless it was a push of the Lollards that carried the later Act of 1406, permitting all men and women to send their sons and daughters "to any school that pleaseth them in the realm;"[1047] but the limitation of school-keeping to the Church was an effective means of limiting the education given; and "by 1430 the Church had recovered from the Lollard revolt against her universal authority."

§ 4

The Wars of the Roses, by destroying in large part the nobility, relatively advantaged the middle class,[1048] as well as the king whose reign followed. Already under Edward IV the powers of Parliament were much curtailed, and indeed paralysed;[1049] this, which is charged as a sin upon the monarch, being the natural result of his gain of power on the ruin of the baronage. Edward IV only did what Edward I and III would have done if in their situation it had been possible, and what Edward II and Richard II sought to do, but were too weak to compass. The fourth Edward's situation and his force of will together made his power. Not only was the nobility half exterminated, but the trading and middle classes alike desired a strong ruler who should maintain order, by whatever straining of constitutional forms—the invariable sequel of anarchy—at least up to the point of intolerable taxation.[1050] The actual increase of commerce during the wars[1051] is a good proof of the separateness of class interests, and of the decline of the military ideal. Much of it would seem to have been due to the example set by the Hansa merchants, who had factories at London,[1052] Boston, and Lynn, and whose famous League was then powerful enough to force from Edward IV a renewal of its English privileges in return for a concession of a share in the Baltic trade.[1053] In any case, the new development was on the old lines of energetic self-seeking; and already in the reign of Edward IV the cloth manufacture was carried on by capitalists in the modern spirit.[1054] And as the tyrannies of the king were less general and oppressive than the tyrannies of the nobles, the erection of the regal power on the collapse of the old class cohesion gave a new scope for the strife of classes among and for themselves. No national ideal existed (as apart from the readiness to unite in hate of a foreign nation) in monarchic England any more than in old republican Greece or modern republican Italy. The trade gilds were strictly self-seeking institutions, aiming at keeping down the number of competitors in each trade, without providing in any way for the aspirants. Unitary egoism was the universal mainspring. The Church sought above all things to be protected against heresy; the town and trade corporations sought protection for their privileges; and the landowners sought to be supported against the labourers, who from the time of Henry VI are found revolting against enclosures of public land, and were temporarily reinforced by the disbanded retainers of the barons. Every modern force of social disintegration was already nascent.

§ 5

Under Henry VII the same conditions subsisted. There was no sufficiently strong body of aristocracy left to rebel effectually against his exactions, though exactions had always been the great cause of discontent; and, all rivals collapsing, there grew up round the new dynasty that hedging superstition which had always counted for much, and which was in England to become a main factor in politics. Henry VII wrought assiduously and astutely to build up his power, seeking no less to increase the merchant class than to depress the aristocracy. From both he thus drew his revenue; from the latter by exaction; from the former by customs duties on the trade he carefully encouraged (as Richard had done before him), finding in such revenue his surest income.[1055] Gradually the monarchic system was made firm. Richard III owed his failure mainly to the sense of the illegality of his position; and the same inversion of the superstition troubled Henry VII in turn, as it had done Henry IV. It seems to have been his possession of the one train of artillery in the kingdom that mainly preserved his power against rebels.[1056] But with Henry VIII the dynasty was secure; and from this point onward the monarchic spell can be seen very clearly in English affairs. The instinct of "loyalty," a moral prepossession religiously sanctioned, becomes a social force as truly as the simpler instincts of self-seeking and class spirit. By virtue of it, and of his own force of brute will, Henry VIII could commit violences of almost every description, his own personality having some of the characteristics most likely to intensify the spell. Energy such as his hypnotised or terrorised all but the strongest. Even his crimes were not such as revolted average sympathy: the suppression of the Church, as in nearly all the "Teutonic" countries, was a direct bribe to many of the nobles and landowners,[1057] and for the multitude meant the overthrow of an alien jurisdiction; and his domestic procedure satisfied the popular ethic which demurs to mistresses but respects bigamy, and finds a wife's adultery more criminal than her husband's murder of her. For the rest, he had at the beginning of his reign executed his father's minions, and conciliated the scholars, who made opinion. Yet under Henry VIII we find middle-class England, heavily taxed for war, beginning to stand on its rights as upper-class England had done in earlier times; and in the new England as in the old the weakest class went to the wall. The ever-increasing mass of poor, thrown idle and hungry by the continuous rise of sheep-farms in the place of tillage, were the natural enemies of the governing class as well as of the landowners; and in cruelly repressing them the monarchy strengthened the landowners' allegiance.

Thus arose the typical personal monarchy, employing middle-class ministers, who served it zealously and with increasing power, Thomas Cromwell far outgoing Wolsey. The passing coalition of nobles and yeomen in the north in the cause of the old religion was followed by the crushing of the remains of the old nobility, now being rapidly replaced by the new, established on the plunder of the Church. It is to be noted that in England, as in so many other countries, the virtual subjection of the old nobility to the crown was for a time followed by stirrings of new life in all directions, as if feudalism had everywhere meant a repression of possible energy. The process is seen in Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella;[1058] in France under Richelieu and Mazarin; in Sweden under Gustavus Vasa; and is thus plainly a product not of doctrinal Protestantism, as some suppose, but of the comparative social and political liberty that follows on the restriction of ubiquitous feudal tyranny, so much more searching and pervasive a force than the simpler tyranny of the feudal king. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the Tudor suppression of the power of the old aristocracy was not as vital a determination of the nation's course as the overthrow of the Catholic Church.

§ 6

And now effectively arose the new political force of Protestant and Bible-worshipping fanaticism, turning the democratic instinct into its channel, and complicating afresh the old issues of classes. It is not to be forgotten that this was a beginning of popular culture, inasmuch as the desire to read the worshipped book must have counted for more than anything else in making reading common.[1059]

Practically, however, the opposed causes of Lollardism and orthodoxy may at the outset be regarded as the democratic and the conservative instincts, taking these channels in the absence of political development and knowledge.[1060] In imperial Rome, the spread of Christianity was substantially a movement of class cohesion among the illiterate slaves, aliens, and workers, the instinct of attraction taking this form when political grounds of union were lacking. So it was in the England of the period under notice; but whereas in imperial Rome the autocracy went far to annul class distinctions, and so helped the slaves' cult to absorb superstitious patricians, especially women, whose wealth maintained the poor of the Church as the emperor's doles had maintained the poor of the State, in England the vigour of class distinctions fostered differences of sect. The phenomena of political Protestantism in the Reformation era in England, as in Germany, offer many parallels to those of the French Revolution. The revolt of many priests from the routine and restrictions of their office is notable in both epochs. On the other hand, the mass of the well-to-do classes, being unprepared for change by any educative process, were as ready to restore Catholic usages as were those of France later; and when the innovating forces, consisting in a little reasoning and much rapine, had run to seed and to corruption under the Protectorate and Edward VI, the reaction towards the old forms set in powerfully. Nothing, however, could carry it to the length of restoring the Catholic Church's property; and the failure of Mary was due not nearly so much to Protestant dislike of the ceremonial of Rome as to the grip of the new owners on the confiscated lands. In England as in Scotland, in Germany, in the Scandinavian States, and in Switzerland, though Henry stood for a special initiative, the driving forces of the Reformation were mainly those of wealth-seeking; and the financial records of the Protectorate show a conspiracy of plunder to which the annals of monarchy could offer no parallel. The Protestant aristocracy simply encouraged the new Lollardism by way of gaining their personal ends, as they had crushed the old because it menaced their property.

A new channel had thus been made for the forces of union and strife. An instructive part of the process was the movement towards a new sacerdotalism on the side of the new Calvinistic clergy—a movement much more clearly visible in Scotland than in England. Whether or not it be true that "it was by no means the intention of Knox and his fellow-labourers to erect a new hierarchy upon the ruins of the old,"[1061] it is clear that his immediate successors counted on wielding a power strictly analogous to that of the papacy. Andrew Melville, in haughty colloquy with King James and his councillors, threw down his Hebrew Bible on the table as his authority for his demands. Since all alike professed to accept it, the next step in the argument plainly was that it lay with the presbyter to interpret the sacred book;[1062] and Melville, who took the king by the sleeve and called him "God's silly [= weak] vassal," was quite ready to play Gregory to James's Henry had he been able. The effective check lay in the new Church's lack of revenue, the lands of the old Church having of course been retained by the nobles, who carried through the Reformation simply in order to get them. But even in its poverty, with an indifferent nobility[1063] in possession of the feudal power, the Scottish clergy were nearly as tyrannous socially as their teacher Calvin had been at Geneva; and for nearly two hundred years Scottish life was no freer and much more joyless, under the new presbyter, than under the old priest, though the democratic machinery of the Kirk obviated any need or opportunity for fiscal exaction.

§ 7

As it is with the Reformation period that the play of sheer opinion begins to appear distinctly in English politics, so it is in this period that the phenomena of reactions first begin to be in a manner traceable as distinct from military fluctuations. All faction, of course, is a form of the play of opinion; but after the fading away of feudalism the opinion is more easily to be contemplated as a force in itself, alongside of the simpler instincts; and the ebbing and flowing of causes suggests a certain consequence of action and reaction in human affairs. The gain-getting Protestant movement under the Protectorate was followed by the Catholic reaction under Mary; which again bred reaction by ferocity. Catholics grew cold in their allegiance when Romanism yielded such bloody fruits. Protestantism, besides, flourished on the continual poverty of the lower orders, and on the abeyance of international strife—conditions which necessarily set up new movements of combination and repulsion; and when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, she served to represent, however incongruously, the religious leanings of the democracy, as well as to unite them in the name of patriotism against Rome and Spain. She, again, profited by the monarchic superstition, while she was menaced by its inversion; and it is to be observed that as a woman she gained immunity with her subjects for flaws of character which in a man would have been odious and despicable, where her rival, Mary of Scotland, suffered deposition for actions of a kind which in a man would have been almost spontaneously forgiven. Mary's complicity in the assassination of a base and unfaithful husband was an unpardonable crime from the reigning ethical point of view, which was purely masculine; and the same ethic held in amused toleration the constant bad faith and personal absurdity of Elizabeth,[1064] which rather flattered than endangered the pride of sex. Thus could monarchic politics be swayed by the prevailing psychology of a period, as well as by its class preponderances and interests. The personality of the monarch always counted for much in the determination of his power.

Where Elizabeth gained, however, James lost. Her power was consolidated by the triumph over the Armada, which in the old fashion fused religious strifes in a common warlike exultation, and definitely made England Protestant by setting her in deadly enmity towards the great Catholic power;[1065] just as the state of aggressive hostility towards France under Edward I and Edward III drew Englishmen of all classes into the habit of speaking English and discarding the hitherto common use of French. At the same time the Queen's collisions with Parliament and people were always the less dangerous because she was a woman, and so could yield without indignity where a man would have been humiliated and discredited—an advantage overlooked by the historians who praise her sagacity. Such as it was, it was in large part the sagacity of unscrupulousness; and her success is much more the measure of popular infatuation than of her wisdom. All the while, she had wiser councillors than almost any English monarch before or since; and much of her sagacity was theirs, perhaps even down to some of the unscrupulousness; though on the other hand her fickleness often put them in an evil aspect. Burghley might say what he would, in the loyalist manner, about her inspired judgment; but he knew that she imposed Leicester on the Dutch expedition against his advice, then starved her troops, then upset everything because of the easily predictable disobedience of Leicester in accepting the title of Governor-General from the Dutch.[1066] To say in the face of such methods, as does Mr. Green, that while she had little or no political wisdom, "her political tact was unerring," is to frame a spurious paradox. The more than countervailing admission that "in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom" is perhaps overcharged: she could not lie more habitually and systematically than did Philip; but in both alike the constant resort to falsehoods for which their antagonists were more or less prepared, is a proof of want of political tact, no less than of want of wisdom.[1067] That she should have been idolised as she was is one of the best proofs of the power of the monarchic feeling; for there has rarely been a less trustworthy woman on a throne. In any circle of sound human beings she would have been disliked and distrusted; yet English tradition celebrates her as admirably English, in the act of blackening by comparison foreign rulers who were at least not conspicuously falser,[1068] meaner,[1069] or more egotistic. What is true is that many of the forces with and against which she intrigued were either unscrupulous or irrational, and that her home tyrannies were no worse than those which would have been committed by Puritans or Catholics or Churchmen had these been free to go at each other's throats as religion bade. Her trickeries on the whole kept things in equilibrium. But conscienceless trickeries they were, and, as such, singular grounds for historical enthusiasm. And it cannot have been any concern for her celibacy, or subtle intuition of its effects on her character, that endeared her to her subjects; for her often alleged virginity, despite the gross scandals to the contrary, was an element in the hallucination concerning her. "Loyalty" haloed her personality. When, however, she was succeeded by a man certainly not worse or more ungenerous, the spell was for the most part broken. James was a Scotchman—a member, albeit a king, of a hostile nation long evilly spoken of; a prince without personal dignity; a pedant without gravity; and the indulgence paid to falsehood and folly in the capriciously headstrong Elizabeth ceased to be accorded to the unmanly and unregal ways of her not unconscientious successor, whose plans for pacifying Europe were much more creditable to him than were her diplomacies to her. But the very preservation of peace served to undo the king's prestige, inasmuch as it furthered the growth of sects and the spirit of criticism. And there can be no doubt that the psychological shrinkage of the monarchy in public esteem in the person of James prepared the way for the resistance to it in the reign of his son.

As against the foregoing views of Henry's and Elizabeth's characters, note should be taken of the doctrine of Dr. Gardiner (History, as cited, i, 43) that "Henry VIII must be judged by" [i.e. in view of the merits of] "the great men who supported his daughter's throne, and who defended the land which he set free when 'he broke the bonds of Rome.' Elizabeth must be judged by the Pyms and Cromwells, who ... owed their strength to the vigour with which she headed the resistance of England against Spanish aggression. She had cleared the way for liberty, though she understood it not." It seems necessary to enter a demurrer to such moral philosophy, of which there is too much in recent English historiography. Considering that the action of Henry towards all who thwarted him was one of brutal terrorism, and that, save as regards his bribes, he cowed alike his peers and his people, the courage shown by their descendants might as rationally be credited to Philip of Spain as to him. And to credit Elizabeth personally with the defeat of the Armada, and consequently with the strength of the later Pyms and Cromwells, is not only to reiterate the same paralogism but to negate common sense as regards the facts of the Armada episode, in which the nation did one half of the work, and the storm the other. Dr. Gardiner, like Mr. Froude, who preaches a similar doctrine, overlooks the consequence that Catholicism on these principles must be credited with the production of Henry and Elizabeth, and therefore with their alleged services. As against such an unmeaning theory we may note another verdict of Dr. Gardiner's (p. 33): "Elizabeth has a thousand titles to our gratitude, but it should never be forgotten that she left, as a legacy to her successor, an ecclesiastical system which, unless its downward course were arrested by consummate wisdom, threatened to divide the nation into two hostile camps, and to leave England, even after necessity had compelled the rivals to accept conditions of peace, a prey to theological rancour and sectarian hatred." How then is the account to be balanced? Dr. Cunningham, we may note, sums up as to the preceding reigns that "the scandalous confiscations of Henry VIII and Edward VI were fatal to rural economy and disastrous to mercantile dealings. The disintegration of society became complete; ... with some exceptions in regard to shipping and possibly in regard to the repair of the towns, there is no improvement, no reconstruction which can be traced to the reign of the Tudor kings" (English Industry, i, 433). Cp. Prof. Rogers's Industrial and Commercial History, p. 12.