The Evolution of States Part 45

The Wars of the Roses, by destroying in large part the n.o.bility, relatively advantaged the middle cla.s.s,[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 compa.s.s. The fourth Edward's situation and his force of will together made his power. Not only was the n.o.bility half exterminated, but the trading and middle cla.s.ses alike desired a strong ruler who should maintain order, by whatever straining of const.i.tutional 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.bles, the erection of the regal power on the collapse of the old cla.s.s cohesion gave a new scope for the strife of cla.s.ses 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 inst.i.tutions, aiming at keeping down the number of compet.i.tors 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.

Cp. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i, 395-96, 413, 425; Stubbs, _Const.i.tutional History_, ---- 486-92 (iii, 586-616). "In every great town there was, every few years, something of a struggle, something of a crisis ... between trade and craft, or craft and craft, or magistracy and commons" (Stubbs, iii, 616). Prof. Ashley (_Introd. to Econ. Hist._ i, 79) disputes that there was "any such contest in this country between burghers and artisans" as took place on the continent; and cites another pa.s.sage from Bishop Stubbs (-- 131; i, 453) partly suggesting such a view. But Prof. Ashley goes on (pp. 79-84) to show that there _was_ a good deal of struggling even in England between burghers and artisans. Cp. his conclusions, pp. 6-10, 42, as to the process of evolution towards at least formal unity. It is to be noted that the gilds dispensed charity (Stubbs, iii, 616, 619).

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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 superst.i.tion which had always counted for much, and which was in England to become a main factor in politics. Henry VII wrought a.s.siduously and astutely to build up his power, seeking no less to increase the merchant cla.s.s 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 superst.i.tion 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.bles and landowners,[1057] and for the mult.i.tude 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-cla.s.s England, heavily taxed for war, beginning to stand on its rights as upper-cla.s.s England had done in earlier times; and in the new England as in the old the weakest cla.s.s went to the wall.

The ever-increasing ma.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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-cla.s.s ministers, who served it zealously and with increasing power, Thomas Cromwell far outgoing Wolsey. The pa.s.sing coalition of n.o.bles and yeomen in the north in the cause of the old religion was followed by the crus.h.i.+ng of the remains of the old n.o.bility, 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 n.o.bility 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.

As against Mr. Lecky's indiscriminate panegyric of the English n.o.bility, it is instructive to note Hallam's judgment on the peerage under Henry VIII: "They yielded to every mandate of his imperious will ... they are responsible for the illegal trial, for the iniquitous attainder, for the sanguinary statute, for the tyranny which they sanctioned by law, and for that which they permitted to subsist without law. Nor was this selfish and pusillanimous subserviency more characteristic of the minions of Henry's favour than of the representatives of ancient and honourable houses, the Norfolks, the Arundels, and the Shrewsburys.

We trace the n.o.ble statesmen of these reigns concurring in all the inconsistencies of the revolutions; supporting all the religions of Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth; adjudging the death of Somerset to gratify Northumberland, and of Northumberland to redeem their partic.i.p.ation in his fault; setting up the usurpation of Lady Jane, and abandoning her on the first doubt of success, constant only in the rapacious acquisition of estates and honours from whatever source, and in adherence to the present power" (_Const.i.tutional History_, 10th ed. i, 48).

-- 6

And now effectively arose the new political force of Protestant and Bible-wors.h.i.+pping fanaticism, turning the democratic instinct into its channel, and complicating afresh the old issues of cla.s.ses. It is not to be forgotten that this was a beginning of popular culture, inasmuch as the desire to read the wors.h.i.+pped 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s distinctions, and so helped the slaves' cult to absorb superst.i.tious 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.s of the well-to-do cla.s.ses, 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.

"Crown lands to the value of five millions of our modern money had been granted away to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The royal expenditure had mounted in seventy years to more than four times its previous total" (Green, ch. vii, -- 1, and p. 353). A system of wholesale corruption and waste had grown up under Henry VIII, who, after all his confiscations, was fain to seek funds by adulterating his coin. So Edward VI, the church and college plunder being gone, had to be granted taxes on manufactures which tended to stop them.

"Yet I cannot find," says Sir Roger Twysden, "all this made the crown rich. Hayward observes Edward's debts were 251,000--at least said to be so. Camden, that Queen Elizabeth received the crown _afflictissima_ ... _aere alieno quod Henricus VIII et Edwardus VI contraxerant oppressa_.... I cannot but reckon the treasure spent in fifteen years, more than half the kingdom to be sold"

(_Historical Vindication of the Church of England_, ed. 1847, pp.

4, 5). So obviously had the treasure gone into the pockets of courtiers and their hangers-on, that the fact gives some excuse for the habitual miserliness of Elizabeth.

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 a.n.a.logous 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 "G.o.d's silly [= weak] va.s.sal," 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 n.o.bles, who carried through the Reformation simply in order to get them. But even in its poverty, with an indifferent n.o.bility[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.

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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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 superst.i.tion, 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 s.e.x. Thus could monarchic politics be swayed by the prevailing psychology of a period, as well as by its cla.s.s 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 cla.s.ses 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tles to our grat.i.tude, 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 s.h.i.+pping 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.

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While such changes were being wrought at one end of the political organism, others no less momentous, and partly causative of those, had taken place at the other. By economic writers the period of the Reformation in England is now not uncommonly marked as that of a great alteration for the worse in the lot of the ma.s.s of the peasantry.[1070]

The connection between the overthrow of the Catholic Church and the agrarian trouble, however, is not of the primary character that is thus supposed: it might be rather called accidental than causal. Suppression of the monasteries could at most only throw into prominence the poverty which the monasteries relieved, but which monasteries always tend to develop.[1071] Wholesale eviction of husbandmen to make way for sheep-farms had taken place, the Church helping, before Henry VIII began to meddle with the Church; and vagabondage and beggary were common in consequence.[1072] The distress was there to begin with, and was increasing, from what period onward it were hard to say.

The early fifteenth-century riots against "enclosures," above mentioned, arose out of the policy of systematically extending pasture, and point to a distress set up by the gradual growth of gain-seeking methods among landowners as against the common people,[1073] whose normal tendency to multiply was a constant force making for poverty, though it was met half-way by the aggression of landlords who found it more profitable to raise and export wool than to farm.[1074] A fresh source of dislocation was the enforcement of laws against the keeping of bands of retainers, a process to which Henry VII specially devoted himself,[1075] thus securing his throne on the one hand while intensifying the evil of depopulation and decreasing tillage, for which on the other hand he tried remedial measures,[1076] of the customary description. Laws were pa.s.sed forbidding the peasantry to seek industrial employment in the cities--this course being taken as well in the interests of the trades as with the hope of restoring agriculture. One outcome of the circ.u.mstances was that sheep-farming, like the cloth manufacture, began to be carried on by capitalists;[1077] the moneyed cla.s.ses beginning to reach out to the country, while the gentry began to draw towards the towns.[1078] Thus we find in existence long before the Reformation all the economic troubles which some writers attribute to the methods of the Reformation; though the Protestant n.o.bles who scrambled for the plunder of the Church in the reigns of Henry and of Edward VI seem to have done more sheep-farming and depopulating than any others, thereby disposing the people the more to welcome Mary.[1079]

Even Prof. Thorold Rogers, who (overlooking the Act 4 Henry VII) seems to hold that the enclosures in the fifteenth century were not made at the expense of tillage, and that the earliest complaints are in the sixteenth century (_History of Agriculture and Prices_, iv, 63, 64 note, 109: cp. Cunningham, _English Industry_, i, 393 _note_), still shows that there were heavy complaints as early as 1515 (6 Hen. VIII, cc. 5, 6) of a general decay of towns and growth of pastures--long before Henry had meddled with the Church. Bishop Stubbs is explicit on the subject as regards the period of York and Lancaster:--"The price of wool enhanced the value of pasturage; the increased value of pasturage withdrew field after field from tillage; the decline of tillage, the depression of the markets, and the monopoly of the wool trade by the staple towns, reduced those country towns which had not encouraged manufacture to such poverty that they were unable to pay their contingent to the revenue, and the regular sum of tenths and fifteenths was reduced by more than a fifth in consequence. The same causes which in the sixteenth century made the enclosure of the commons a most important popular grievance, had begun to set cla.s.s against cla.s.s as early as the fourteenth century, although the thinning of the population by the Plague acted to some extent as a corrective" (_Const.i.tutional History_, iii, 630; cp. Green, ch. v, -- 5, p. 251; ch. vi, -- 3, p.

285).

The troubles, again, were fluctuating, the movement of depopulation and sheep-farming being followed in due course by a revival of tillage, while contrary movements might be seen in different parts of the country, according as commercial advantage lay for the moment. In one district it might pay best to rear sheep; in another, by reason of nearness to town markets, it might pay best to grow corn; but the compet.i.tion of corn imported from the Baltic in return for English exports would be a generally disturbing force. The very improvement of agricultural skill, too, in which Holland led the way,[1080] would tend to lessen employment in the rural districts. Peace and progress, in the absence of science, always thus provide new sources of distress, multiplying heads and hands without multiplying the employment which secures for the mult.i.tude a share in the fruits, but always aggrandising those who have contrived to become possessed of the prime monopolies.

What went on was a perpetual transference and displacement of well-being, one cla.s.s rising on another's distress; and after the apparently steady decay of the towns under Henry VIII,[1081] the new lead given to industry in the reign of Elizabeth, by the influx of Protestant refugees from the Netherlands, went to build up an urban middle cla.s.s which for the time had no political motives to discontent.

Sir Thomas More, in the very pa.s.sage of the _Utopia_ in which he speaks of the wholesale eviction of husbandmen, tells how "handicraft men, yea, and almost the ploughmen of the country, with all other sorts of people, use much strange and proud new fangleness in their apparel, and too much prodigal riot and sumptuous fare at their table" (bk. i, Robinson's trans.). New wealth and new poverty co-existed. "Cheapness and dearness, plenty and scarcity, of corn and other food, depopulation and rapidly increasing numbers, really co-existed in the kingdom. There were places from which the husbandman and labourer disappeared, and the beasts of the field grazed where their cottages had stood; and there were places where men were multiplying to the dismay of statesmen." Cliffe Leslie, essay on _The Distribution and Value of the Precious Metals_, vol. cited, p. 268. The whole of this essay is well worth study. Cp. Prof. Ashley, _Introduction to Economic History_, ii, 50-54.

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Hence there was no continuous pressure of agrarian or industrial politics, and the stress of the instinct of strife went in other directions. The modern reader, seeking for the cla.s.s politics of the later Tudor period, finds them as it were covered up, save for such an episode as the revolt of 1549, by the record of foreign policy and ecclesiastical strifes, and is apt to condemn the historian for leaving matters so. But in reality cla.s.s politics was for the most part superseded by sect politics. The new pseudo-culture of bibliolatry, virtually a sophisticated barbarism, had made new paths for feeling; and these being the more durable, the miseries of the evicted rural populations, which forced a Poor Law on the administration, never set up anything approaching to a persistent spirit of insurrection. By the suppression of the old feudal n.o.bility, as already noted, life in general had been made freer; and the monarch for the time being was become a relatively beneficent and wors.h.i.+pful power in the eyes of the ma.s.s of the people, while the landowners were grown weak for harm. The destructive pa.s.sions were running in other channels, and religious hate swallowed up cla.s.s hate. For the rest, the new aristocracy was thoroughly established; and in the life and work of Shakespeare himself we see the complete acceptance of the readjusted cla.s.s relation, though we can also see in his pages the possibilities of a new upper cla.s.s of rich merchants. In his impersonal way he flashes the light of Lear's tardy sympathy on the forlorn world of the homeless poor; and in many a phrase he condenses an intense criticism of the injustices of cla.s.s rule; but even if, as seems certain, he did not write the Jack Cade scenes in _Henry VI_, he has little of the purposive democrat in him: rather--though here it is hard indeed to get behind the great humanist's mask--some touch of the fastidious contempt of the n.o.ble, himself fickle enough, for the changing voice of the ignorant populace.

On one point of current psychology, however, as on the great issue of religion, Shakespeare's very silence is more significant than speech.

After the pa.s.sionate outburst put in the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt, and the normal patriotism of _Henry V_, utterances of his early manhood, proceeding upon those of the older plays which he re-wrote, we find in his dramas a notable aloofness from current public pa.s.sion. This would of course be encouraged by the regulations for the stage; but no regulation need have hindered him from pandering habitually to popular self-righteousness in the matter of national animosities. In 1596 the mult.i.tude were all on the side of the fire-eating Ess.e.x and against the prudent Burghley in the matter of aggressive war upon Spain; hope of plunder and conquest playing as large a part in their outcry as any better sentiment. The production of _Henry V_ in 1599, with its laudatory allusion to Ess.e.x's doings in Ireland, whither he had been accompanied by Shakespeare's patron Southampton, would suggest, if the pa.s.sage were of his penning,[1082] that the dramatist was one of Ess.e.x's partisans. But whichever way he then leaned, no man can gather from his later plays any encouragement to natural pa.s.sion of any species. It is not merely that he avoids politics after having been compromised by contact with them:[1083] it is that he rises to a higher plane of thought and feeling.[1084] He, if any man, could see the fatuity with which Englishmen denounced cruelty in Spaniards while matching Spanish cruelty in Ireland, and cursed the Inquisition while mishandling Jesuit priests in the Inquisition's own temper. The story of English cruelty in Ireland in Elizabeth's and James's day is one of the most sickening in the history of the epoch.[1085] But no sense of guilt ever checked the blatant self-sufficiency with which the general run of Englishmen of the time inveighed against the misdeeds of the Spaniards: no twinge of self-criticism ever modified their righteous thanksgiving over the defeat of the Armada, which was manned partly to avenge their own ma.s.sacre and torture of Catholic priests. Their Drakes and Hawkinses, playing the pirate and the slave-stealer, and holding with no qualms the conviction that they were doing G.o.d service, made current the cant of Puritanism in the pre-Puritan generation. G.o.dly ruffianism could not later go further than it did in "the Elizabethan dawn"; for Milton's swelling phrase of "G.o.d and his Englishmen" did not outgo the self-satisfaction of the previous age, any more than of the later period of "Teutonic" self-glorification. To Shakespeare alone seems to have been possible the simple reflection that G.o.d's Spaniards, equating with G.o.d's Englishmen, left zero to the philosopher.

It seems clear that the ma.s.s of the people, and such leading men as Ess.e.x and Raleigh, desired a continuance of the state of war with Spain because of the opportunities it gave for piratical plunder.

The queen, who had shared in the loot of a good many such expeditions, might have acquiesced but for Burghley's dissuasion.

It was an early sign of predilection to the path of imperialism, on which Cromwell later put one foot, on which Chatham carried the nation far, and which it has in later days at times seemed bent on pursuing. In Elizabeth's day enterprises of plunder, as one writer has pointed out, "became the usual adventure of the times, by which the rich expected to increase their wealth and the prodigal to repair their fortunes"; and the general imagination was fired with similar hopes, till "the people were in danger of acquiring the habits and the calculations of pirates." (J. M'Diarmid, _Lives of British Statesmen_, 1820, i, 239, 240; cp. Furnivall and Simpson in the latter's _School of Shakespeare_, 1878, i, pp. x, 32-40; and see Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History_, p. 12, as to the contemporary lack of commercial enterprise.) Cecil, in his opposition to the war policy of Ess.e.x, remarkably antic.i.p.ates the view of rational historical science (see Camden's _Annales_, ed.

1717, iii, 770-71, as to the conflict.) Burghley had equally been the resisting force to the popular desire for an attack on France after the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew. His remarkable hostility to militarism is set forth in his _Advice_ to his son, on the head of the training to be given to his children: "Neither, by my consent, shalt thou train them up in wars; for he that sets up his rest to live by that profession can hardly be an honest man or a good Christian." Yet he planned well enough against the Armada. Cp.

Creighton, _Queen Elizabeth_, pp. 236, 237.

-- 10

The culture history of the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare is perhaps clearer than the political. It is in the first great lull of the Wars of the Roses, under Edward IV, that we find printing established in England. Original literature had virtually died out, as in northern Europe, in the long stress of physical strife; but the love of reading took a new growth when peace intervened, and a printer found a public for reproductions of the literatures of the past. This culture proceeded under Henry VII, till at the advent of Henry VIII there was a mature movement of scholars.h.i.+p, a product of cla.s.sical study and reflection, yielding for England the singular and memorable fruit of More's _Utopia_. That was truly a "Pallas of the brain," not "wild" as in the phrase of the conservative poet, but well-nigh pure of the blind pa.s.sion of normal life,[1086] and therefore no more than a radiant vision for an age in which blind pa.s.sion was still plenipotent. More's mind had ripened as it were independently of his temperament; and his life is the tragedy of an intelligence, more haunting and more profoundly instructive than any _Hamlet_. The serene spirit that dreamed and planned the _Utopia_ grew to be capable of a bitterness of dogmatic fanaticism on a level with the normal pa.s.sions of the time.[1087] It is matter for surprise that he has not ere now been studied or cited as an apparition of the "Celtic" mind on the arena of brutal English life,[1088] a prematurely penetrating intelligence thrust back upon and enveloped by a temperament kept pa.s.sionate by the shocks of an animal environment. From his eyes, limned by the great Holbein, there looks out the sadness of flawed and frustrate wisdom; even as blood and pa.s.sion and fleshly madness are written in the beastlike face of the king, whose little son, ruddy and hardy in his babyhood, pales and pines away through portrait after portrait to p.u.b.erty and death, the victim of some secret malady.

Neither on the psychological line of More nor on that of Henry could the national culture proceed. It went on navely, being for long neither Puritan nor anti-Puritan, though the loquacious and commonplace utterance of preachers already abounded before the accession of Elizabeth. The Protestantism of the Protectorate was too much a matter of mere plunder to admit of a great religious literature; and nothing is more remarkable in the great imaginative efflorescence under Elizabeth than its un-Puritan secularity. It drew, indeed, from a soil too rich to be yet overrun by fanaticism. The multiplying printing-presses showered forth a hundred translations; the new grammar-schools bore their fruit; the nation grew by domestic peace, even while tillers of the soil were being made beggars; the magic of discovery and travel thrilled men to new exercises of mind and speech; the swarming life of the capital raised the theatre to fecund energy in a generation; and transformed feudalism survived in the guise rather of a guardian to art and letters than of organised cla.s.s oppression. A new economic factor, conditioned by a new resource, was at work. In More's day there was no such thing as a professional writer, and there were few printed books. The great controversy between Protestants and Catholics gave a new and powerful stimulus to printing, and printing in turn invited literary effort, books finding multiplying purchasers. Then came the growth of the new theatre, an apparent means of livelihood to a crowd of poet-dramatists.

No such sudden outcrop of manifold literature had ever before occurred in human history; the mental distance between Elyot and Bacon, between the old interludes and Shakespeare, is as great as that between Hesiod and Euripides. But the secret of continuous progress had not yet been found: it lies, if anywhere, with the science of the future: and the development after the reign of Elizabeth necessarily began to take new lines.

The later profusion of the poetic drama was the profusion of decay.

Artistic abundance must mean artistic change or deterioration; but in the drama there was no recasting of the artistic formulas, no refining of the artistic sense, because there was no progress in general culture sufficient to force or educe it. Rather the extraordinary eloquence of the earlier and greater dramatists, and in particular of the greatest, bred a cultus of conventional rhetoric and declamation in which the power and pa.s.sion of the masters were lost. Powerful men could not go on attending to an infinity of such blank-verse dramas; powerful men could not go on producing dramas, because the mind of the time made no progress complementary to the great flowering of the Elizabethan peace.

That was essentially a late rebirth of the cla.s.sic or bookish culture of the Renaissance. New germinal ideas, apart from those of religion, were yet to come. Already the spell of Bibliolatry was conquering the average intelligence, unprepared to digest Hebraism as the _elite_ of the previous generation had digested cla.s.sicism; and the Protestant principle led the Protestant peoples in the ma.s.s into the very att.i.tude needed for a social hypnotism such as that of Jewry, the fatal exemplar.

Bibliolatry is the culture of the ignorant; church government, the politics of the unenfranchised and the impractical; their conditions exclude them from a truer culture and more vital political interests.

Already in Henry's time the newly-translated Scriptures were, to his wrath, "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse"; the very stress of his own personal rule being a main part of the cause. Under the Protectorate of Somerset the gross rapacity of the Protestant n.o.bles identified the new Church with upper-cla.s.s selfishness as completely as the old had ever been; and the Norfolk revolt of 1549 avowedly aimed at the overthrow of the gentry. When that was stamped out in ma.s.sacre, the spirit of popular independence was broken, save in so far as it could play in the new channel of personal religion and ecclesiastical polemic, always being dug by the disputation of the new clergy. And when in the reign of Mary crowds of Protestant refugees fled to Geneva, of which the polity had already been introduced to the students of Oxford by Peter Martyr, there was set up a fresh ferment of Presbyterian theory among the educated cla.s.s which the ecclesiastical conditions under Elizabeth could not but foster. The new dramatic literature and the new national life of anti-Spanish adventure kept it all substantially in the background for another generation; but the lack of progressive culture and the restriction of expansive enterprise at length gave the forces of pietism the predominance. Thus, in ways in which the historians of our literature and politics have but imperfectly traced, the balance of the nation's intellectual activity s.h.i.+fted towards the ground of religion and the ecclesiastical life. And only this change of mental drift can account for the new energy of resistance incurred by Charles when he took up with greater obstinacy the lines of policy of his father, meddling with church practice and normal government on the same autocratic principles. Religion and wors.h.i.+p were not the sole grounds of quarrel, but they commanded all the other grounds.

The decadence of English poetic drama after the death of Shakespeare is one of the themes which elicit ill.u.s.trations of the snares of empirical sociology. An able and original literary critic, Mr. G.C. Macaulay, at the close of a very competent study on Francis Beaumont, has formulated a theory of that decadence which calls for revision. He p.r.o.nounces that by 1615 "the impulse which had moved the older generation was ... almost exhausted. This, as we have already seen, came in the form of an enthusiastic patriotism, enn.o.bling human life, so far at least as Englishmen were concerned in it, and producing a united and national interest in the representation of its problems and destiny" (_Francis Beaumont_, 1883, p. 187).

Error here emerges at once. It was not national patriotism that evoked either the pre-Shakespearean or the Shakespearean drama. The rude foundations had been laid by many "interludes," by such homespun comedy as _Ralph Roister Doister_, and by the stilted tragedy of _Ferrex and Porrex_. The chronicle-plays of Greene and Peele and Marlowe, worked over by Shakespeare, are far from being the best of the pre-Shakespearean drama. Just after the Armada, Marlowe revealed his powers, not in patriotic plays, but in _Tamburlaine_, followed by _The Jew of Malta_, and _Faustus_. The best of the pre-Shakespearean plays on English history was Marlowe's _Edward II_, in which there was and could be no appeal to patriotic fervour. The best episode in _Edward III_ stands out entirely from the "patriotic" part, which is nearly worthless. The superior episode is probably the work of Greene, whose best complete play, _James IV_, turns on fict.i.tious Scottish history, and is only momentarily touched by patriotic feeling. Peele's _Edward I_ is inferior as a whole to his _David and Bethsabe_. Kyd made his successes, literary or theatrical, with _The Spanish Tragedy_, _Arden of Feversham_, and the original _Hamlet_. Shakespeare's best work, from the start, is done not in the chronicle-plays but in his comedies, in his Falstaff scenes, and in his tragedies, from _Romeo and Juliet_ onwards.

These had nothing to do with patriotism, enthusiastic or otherwise. And _Henry V_, which had, is not a great play.

The chief florescence of Elizabethan drama is to be understood in the light of economic causation; and the decline is to be understood similarly. The rise of the London theatres, a process of expansion following on the maintenance of separate companies of players by n.o.blemen and by the court, meant a means of livelihood for actors and playwrights, and of profit for _entrepreneurs_. Greene and Peele, and Kyd and Marlowe, and Jonson and Chapman, wrote not to evoke or respond to national patriotism, but to provide plays that would sell and "draw."

The original genius of Marlowe stimulated the others, who nearly all imitated him. _Orlando Furioso_, _Selimus_, _Alphonsus King of Arragon_, _David and Bethsabe_, and even _The Battle of Alcazar_, have nothing to do with patriotism; and the touches of that in _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_ are subsidiary to the story. There is no extant play on the Armada.