The Evolution of States Part 48
[Footnote 1067: In his _Introduction to the Study of English History_ (1881) Prof. Gardiner, through a dozen pages, discusses the action of Elizabeth's government solely in terms of her personality, never once mentioning her advisers. On this line he reaches the proposition that "the homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of the consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness and vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from the queen and secondarily from the Church." One is moved to suggest that the nonsense in question was not so bottomless as it is here virtually made out.]
[Footnote 1068: "There was no truth nor honesty in anything she said"
(Bishop Creighton, _Queen Elizabeth_, p. 60; cp. pp. 76, 91, 112, 181, 216, 228-31).]
[Footnote 1069: Her practice of leaving her truest servants to bear their own outlays in her service, begun with Cecil (Creighton, p. 63), was copied from Charles V and Philip II, but was carried farther by her than ever by them. All the while she heaped gifts on her favourites.]
[Footnote 1070: _E.g._, Mr. Gibbins's _Industrial History of England_, pp. 84-89, 105. The point of view seems to have been set up by Cobbett's _History of the Reformation_.]
[Footnote 1071: Cp. Ashley, _Introd. to Economic History_, ii, 312-15.]
[Footnote 1072: Cp. More's _Utopia_, bk. i (Arber's ed. p. 41; Morley's, p. 64); and Bacon's _History of Henry VII_, Bohn ed. p. 369. More expressly charges certain Abbots with a share in the process of eviction.]
[Footnote 1073: Cp. Green, ch. vi, -- 3. Green goes on to speak of the earlier Statutes of Labourers as setting up the "terrible heritage of a pauper cla.s.s" (p. 286, also p. 250). This is a fresh error of the same sort as that above dealt with. A pauper cla.s.s was inevitable, whatever laws were made.]
[Footnote 1074: Bishop Stubbs puts it (iii, 283) that the increase of commerce during the Wars of the Roses was "to some extent a refuge for exhausted families, and a safety-valve for energies shut out of their proper sphere." The proposition in this form is obscure.]
[Footnote 1075: On this see Stubbs, ch. xxi, ---- 470, 471.]
[Footnote 1076: Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 12, preamble, and c. 19.]
[Footnote 1077: Cp. Moreton on _Civilisation_, 1836, p. 106; Cunningham, _English Industry_, i, 392.]
[Footnote 1078: Cp. Cliffe Leslie, _Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy_, p. 267; Toynbee, _The Industrial Revolution_, pp. 63, 66; Gibbon's _Memoirs_, beginning.]
[Footnote 1079: Gardiner, _Introd. to Eng. Hist._ 1881, p. 118; Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i, 434.]
[Footnote 1080: Rogers, _Story of Holland_, p. 217, and _Six Centuries_, p. 184; W.T. McCullagh's _Industrial History of the Free Nations_, 1846, ii, 42, 272; Gibbins, pp. 104, 109.]
[Footnote 1081: Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, iv, 106, 108, citing Acts 6 Hen. VIII, c. 6, and 32 Hen. VIII, cc. 18, 19.]
[Footnote 1082: It is in the prologue to Act v, 11. 30-34. I affirm without hesitation that the prologues to all five Acts are non-Shakespearean, and plainly by one other hand. Compare the chorus prologues to Dekker's _Old Fortunatus_, which are in exactly the same style. In the latest biography, however (Lee's, p. 174), there is no recognition of any such possibility. It is surprising that Steevens and Ritson, who p.r.o.nounced the prologue to _Troilus and Cressida_ non-Shakespearean, should not have suspected those to _Henry V_, which are so signally similar in style. Dekker's connection with _Troilus and Cressida_ is indicated by Henslowe's Diary. The style is a nearly decisive clue to his authorship of the _Henry V_ prologues.]
[Footnote 1083: Lee's _Life_, pp. 175, 176.]
[Footnote 1084: A theory of this is suggested in the author's _Montaigne and Shakespeare_.]
[Footnote 1085: Cp. Froude, _History of England_, ed. 1875, x, 500, 507, 508, 512, xi, 197; Spenser's _View of the Present State of Ireland_, Globe ed. of Works, p. 654; Lecky's _History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century_, i, 8; Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed.
1893, i, 363, 427, 429, 430; J.A. Fox, _Key to the Irish Question_, 1890, ch. xxix; and the author's _The Saxon and the Celt_, pp. 148-54.]
[Footnote 1086: Compare the very just appreciation of Green, ch. vi, -- 4, p. 311.]
[Footnote 1087: See Isaac Disraeli's study, "The Psychological Character of Sir Thomas More," in the _Amenities of Literature_.]
[Footnote 1088: Compared with Henry VIII, More might be p.r.o.nounced a specifically "Celtic" as opposed to an aggressively "Saxon" type. Henry seems a typical English beef-eater. Yet he too was of Welsh descent!]
CHAPTER II
THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH
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Nearly all the conceivable materials of disaffection, save personal misconduct on the king's part,[1089] went to prepare the Great Rebellion. Religious antipathies, indeed, no longer rested on the naked ground of lands taken and in danger of being re-taken;[1090] but there had been developed an intense animus of Protestant against Catholic, the instinct of strife running the more violently in that channel because so few others were open, relatively to the store of restless brute force in the country. Perhaps, indeed, Presbyterians hated Episcopalians and Arminians, at bottom, nearly as much as they did Catholics; but the chronic panics, from the time of Elizabeth onwards, the mythology of the Marian period, and the story of the ma.s.sacres of Alva and of St.
Bartholomew's Day, served to unite Protestants in this one point of anti-Papalism, and had set up as it were a new human pa.s.sion in the sphere of English politics. And to this pa.s.sion James and Charles in turn ran counter with an infatuated persistence. James, who was so much more annoyed by Puritans than by Papists, planned for his son, with an eye to a dowry, the Spanish marriage, which of all possible matches would most offend the English people; and when that fell through, another Catholic bride was found in the daughter of the King of France.
The pledges, so natural in the circ.u.mstances, to "tolerate" Catholics in England, were a standing ground of panic to the intolerant Protestants, even though unfulfilled; and the new king stood in the sinister position of sheltering in his household the religion for which he dared not claim freedom in the country. Such a ground of unpopularity could be balanced only by some signal grounds of favour; but James and Charles alike chose unpopular grounds of war, and failed badly to boot.
To crown all, they exhibited to the full the hereditary unwisdom of their dynasty in the choice of favourites;[1091] and the almost unexampled animosity incurred by Buckingham could not but reflect somewhat towards Charles, whose refined and artistic tastes, besides, made him the natural enemy of the text-worshipping and mostly art-hating Puritans.
Thus everything made for friction between king and subjects; and when Charles, to raise necessary funds, resorted to measures of no abnormal oppressiveness as compared with those of the Tudors, he was doggedly resisted by Parliaments professedly standing on law, but really actuated by a fixed suspicion of all his aims. Teeth were on edge all round. When a merchant, mulcted in a heavy customs duty, happened to be a Puritan, he resisted with a special zest; and one such declared before the Privy Council that "in no part of the world, not even in Turkey, were the merchants so screwed and wrung as in England."[1092] The King, unhappily for himself, conciliated n.o.body. Not content with alienating n.o.bles by imposing huge fines in revival of the forest laws, he incensed the Corporation of London by confiscating their estates in Ulster, conferred by his father, and levying a fine of 70,000 to boot, for alleged breaches of Charter.[1093] Besides selling many trade monopolies, he pa.s.sed vexatious sumptuary laws, fixing the prices of poultry, b.u.t.ter, and coals, and insisting on the incorporation of all tradesmen and artificers.[1094] The friction was well-nigh universal; and but for the remarkable prosperity built up by the long peace,[1095] the trouble might have come much sooner. But it is idle to keep up the pretence that what was at stake was the principle of freedom. The first demand of the Parliamentary Opposition was for the more thorough persecution of the Catholics. Parliamentarians such as Eliot were more oppressive in religious matters than Laud himself. He sought only uniformity of worship, they uniformity of doctrine; and they punished for heresy more unpardonably than did the Star Chamber for gross libel.
See Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-1642_, small ed. v, 191, as to Eliot's plans to fit out the fleet by means of "those penalties the Papists have already incurred"--a proposal which, says Dr.
Gardiner, "if it had been translated into figures, would have created a tyranny too monstrous to be contemplated with equanimity." And Eliot was all for a persecution of the Arminians (_id._ vii, 42-43). In 1645 the Corporation of London pet.i.tioned Parliament to suppress "all sects without toleration."
Nor were they less oppressive in their fiscal policy. After beginning a revolt against illegal taxation, Pym secured the imposition of taxes on beverages (1643), on flesh, salt, textile goods, and many other commodities, "at the sword's point," against the general resistance of the people.[1096] There were at work a hundred motives of strife; and it was only the preternatural ill-luck or unwisdom of Charles that united Parliament against him so long. It needed all the infatuation of an express training in the metaphysics of divine right to enable a king of England, even after James I, to blunder through the immense network of superst.i.tion that hedged him round; indeed, the very intensity of the royalist superst.i.tion best explains the royal infatuation. So fixed was the monarchic principle in the minds of the people, who, then as later, swore by monarchy but hated paying for it, that in the earlier years of the struggle not even the zealots could have dreamt of the end that was to be. Regicide entered no man's mind, even as a nightmare.
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On Charles, as the greatest "architect of ruin" in English political history, psychological interest fastens with only less intensity than on his great antagonist. The astonishing triple portrait by Vand.y.k.e reveals, with an audacity that is positively startling when we think of the other effigies by the same artist, a character stamped at once with impotence and untruth. One slight suggestion of strength lies in the look of grave self-esteem--a quality which would in Charles be fostered from the first by his refined revolt from the undignified ways of his father; but it is withal the very countenance of duplicity. Puritan prejudice could not exaggerate the testimony of the daring artist. We seem to understand at once how he deceived and alienated Holland and Spain as well as the parties among his own subjects. And it was the very excess of duplicity, or rather the fatal combination of duplicity with infirmity of purpose,[1097] that destroyed the man. As the war wore on, and above all after it was closed, the discords of the Parliament and the army were such that the most ordinary practical sagacity could have turned them to the triumph of the king's cause. This is the most instructive phase of the Rebellion. The Presbyterian majority which had grown up in Parliament--a growth still imperfectly elucidated--represented only one of the great warring sects of the day; and if, after Independency, led by Cromwell, had come to daggers drawn with the despots of the Commons, Charles had only agreed to any working settlement whatever, he might with perfect confidence have left the conflicting forces to throttle each other afterwards. Any arrangement he might have made, whether with the Presbyterians or with Cromwell, would have broken down of itself, and he might have set up his own polity in the end. But he so enjoyed his intrigues, as it were indemnifying himself by them for his weakness of will, that he thought to triumph by them alone, and would not wait for the slower chemistry of normal political development; so that the Independents, driven desperate by his deceits, had to execute him in self-preservation.
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As it was, the history of the Rebellion remains none the less the tragi-comedy of the old const.i.tutionalism. Parliament, resisting as illegal the supremacy of the king, went from one illegality to another in resisting him, till his tyrannies became trivial in comparison. And Cromwell, who must have set out with convictions about the sanct.i.ty of law, although doubtless fundamentally moved by the all-pervading fear of Popery, was led by an ironical fate, step by step, into a series of political crimes which, if those of Charles deserved beheading, could be coped with only in the medieval h.e.l.l.
Cp. Hallam, ii, 252; and Cowley's _Essays_, ed. 1868, p. 139 _et seq._ To say nothing of Cromwell's illegal exactions, his selling of at least fifty Englishmen into slavery in the West Indies (on which see Cowley, p. 168; Hallam, ii, 271, _note_; and Carlyle, _Letters and Speeches_, ed. 1857, iii, 100--where the victims are put at "hundreds")--albeit no worse than the similar selling of Irish and Scotch prisoners--was an act which, if committed earlier by any king, would have covered his name with historical infamy.
Prof. Firth points out that the practice began under James I, but it was then applied only to felons and vagrants. Cromwell's example was followed under Charles II with regard to the Covenanting rebels in Scotland; and the plan was again followed in the cases of Monmouth's rebellion and that of 1715. (Cited in note on Lomas's ed. of Carlyle's _Cromwell_, ii, 438.) As regards Ireland, the selling of prisoners into slavery was not restricted to the case of the survivors of Drogheda (Carlyle's _Cromwell_, as cited, ii, 53; ed. Lomas, i, 469). It is proved that Cromwell's agents captured not only youths, but girls, for export to the West Indies (Prendergast, _The Cromwellian Settlement_, 2nd ed. p. 89); and that the slavery there was of the cruellest sort (Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, ii, 109), though it has to be kept in view that it was not perpetual; the victim being strictly an "indentured labourer," only for a certain number of years at the mercy of his owner (Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, small ed. iii, 309-10, _note_; iv, 111-13). Of course the limitation of the term made the servitude all the more severe (Lomas's note cited).
In the end, the Protector terrorised his own law courts as Charles had never dared to do. See Clarendon, bk. xv, ed. Oxford, 1843, p.
862, and Hallam, ii, 253, 271, 272, _note_. Cromwell's language, as recorded by Clarendon, would startle some of his admirers by its indecency if they took the trouble to read the pa.s.sage. Cp.
Vaughan, _Hist. of England under the Stuarts_, etc., p. 524 (citing Whitelocke and Ludlow), as to the law courts. Vaughan overlooks the selling of royalists as slaves.
It was small wonder that posterity came to canonise the king; for in terms even of the Roundhead principles of impeachment he was a political saint in comparison with the "usurper." And royalists might well imagine Cromwell as haunted by remorse; for nothing short of the "besotted fanaticism" of which, as Hallam p.r.o.nounces, he had sucked the dregs, could keep him self-complacent over the retrospect of the Civil War when he was governing by the major-generals, after failing to govern with farcically packed Parliaments. His fanaticism was, of course, in the ratio of his will-power, but each supported the other. The modern exaltation of his character, as against the earlier and rather saner habit of crediting him with great powers, relatively high purposes, and great misdeeds,[1098] has tended to throw in the shade the blazing lesson of his career, which is that, like most of his colleagues, he had set out with no political insight or foresight whatever. His conscientious beginnings are so utterly at issue with his endings that it is indeed almost superfluous to condemn either--as superfluous as to denounce the infatuation of Charles. But it is of importance to remember that his very success as a Carlylean ruler only emphasises the failure of his original politics. He succeeded by way of repudiating nearly every principle on behalf of which he had taken up arms. Even apart from the invigorating spectacle of his executive genius,[1099] he may well stir our sympathy, which is more subtly and deeply exercised by his inner tragedy, by the deadliness of his success in the light of his aims, than by the simpler ill-fortune of Charles. But as politicians our business is not to divide our sympathies between the powerful pietist who was forced to give the lie to his life to save it, and the weak liar who lost his life because he was at bottom faithful to his life's creed.
The superiority of Cromwell in strength of will and in administrative faculty is too glaring to need acknowledging; and the lesson that a strong man can tyrannise grossly where a weak man cannot tyrannise trivially, is not one that particularly needs pressing. What it is essential to note is that the course of events which forced and led Cromwell into despotism was for the next generation a strong argument against free Parliamentary government.
Our generation, proceeding mainly on the work of Carlyle, who never really elucidates or even seeks to comprehend political and social developments, has in large part lost sight of the fact that Cromwell was more and more clearly becoming a military despot; and that with twenty more years of life he might have established a new military and naval empire. Yet at the time of his death his financial position was that of a military adventurer at his wits' end, and his unscrupulous attack on Spain was plainly planned by way of coming at money.[1100] Dr. Gardiner, who has been the first English[1101] historian to handle the case with comprehensive insight, rightly compares the position of Cromwell with that of Napoleon. He was in fact just another sample of the recurrent type of the military ruler establishing himself as despot on the ruins of faction. "Except for four months ... the whole of the Protectorate was a time either of war or of active preparation for war; and even during those months the Protector was hesitating, not whether he should keep the peace or not, but merely what enemy he should attack."[1102]
Finally he made war on Spain, by the admission of the friendly historian, "after the fashion of a midnight conspirator," deceiving the other side in order to gain a mean advantage.[1103] To such a policy there was no limit in national conscience, any more than in his. He had a standing army of 57,000 men, an immense force for the England of that day; his revenue stood at two millions and a quarter, nearly four times the figure of twenty years before; and still he was in desperate financial straits, his outlays being nearly half a million in excess of the income.[1104] The result was "a war for material gains"; and it consists with all we know of history to say that with continued success in such undertakings during a lengthened life he would have won the ma.s.s of his countrymen to his allegiance.
A few dates and details make the process dramatically clear. Admiral Blake won his first notable victory over Van Tromp in February, 1653; and in April Cromwell felt himself in a position to expel the recalcitrant Parliament, though that had always specially favoured the navy. In this act he had the general approval of the people;[1105] but he took care to change some of the naval commanders.[1106] The next Parliament was the nominated one called the "Barebones," wherein none were elected, and which went to pieces in the strife of its factions, since even nomination could not secure concord among Puritans. Then came the Parliament of 1654, elected from purged const.i.tuencies. From this were excluded a hundred members who refused to sign an engagement not to alter the system in force; and finally the remnant was angrily dissolved, and military rule established under the major-generals. Yet again, in 1656, driven by need of money, the Protector called another packed Parliament, from which he nevertheless lawlessly excluded 102 elected members; and on their protesting there was a distinct increase of the already obvious public displeasure at such repeated acts of tyranny. This was in September; but in October came the news of Stayner's capture of the Spanish treasure-ships; and in November the treasure arrived--what the naval officers had left of it. On this the Parliament promptly voted everything that its master asked for;[1107]
new taxes were laid to carry on the wanton war with Spain; and in January 1657 it was proposed to offer him the Crown. Yet when, after a six months' adjournment, that Parliament debated points on which he wanted submission, he furiously dissolved it as he had done its predecessors.
Such is the process of imperialism. With a few more years of ostensibly profitable conquest, Cromwell, acclaimed and urged on in the career of aggression by such different types of poet as Waller[1108] and Marvell,[1109] would as a matter of course have been made king, with the final consent of the army, and would have ruled as the crowned imperator. In that case his Puritanism, instead of putting any conscientious check on his egoism, would have fed it as Mohammed's faith did his.[1110] Thus his early death was one of the important "accidents"
of history.[1111]
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