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Title: The History of England
       A Study in Political Evolution

Author: A. F. Pollard

Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6358]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on December 1, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND ***




Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND
A STUDY IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION

BY A. F. POLLARD, M.A., LITT.D.




CONTENTS

CHAP.
   I THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND, 55 B.C.-A.D. 1066
  II THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND, 1066-1272
 III EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 1272-1485
  IV THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM, 1485-1603
   V THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT, 1603-1815
  VI THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND, 1603-1815
 VII THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
VIII A CENTURY OF EMPIRE, 1815-1911
  IX ENGLISH DEMOCRACY

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX




CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND

55 B.C.--A.D. 1066


"Ah, well," an American visitor is said to have soliloquized on the
site of the battle of Hastings, "it is but a little island, and it has
often been conquered." We have in these few pages to trace the
evolution of a great empire, which has often conquered others, out of
the little island which was often conquered itself. The mere incidents
of this growth, which satisfied the childlike curiosity of earlier
generations, hardly appeal to a public which is learning to look upon
historical narrative not as a simple story, but as an interpretation of
human development, and upon historical fact as the complex resultant of
character and conditions; and introspective readers will look less for
a list of facts and dates marking the milestones on this national march
than for suggestions to explain the formation of the army, the spirit
of its leaders and its men, the progress made, and the obstacles
overcome. No solution of the problems presented by history will be
complete until the knowledge of man is perfect; but we cannot approach
the threshold of understanding without realizing that our national
achievement has been the outcome of singular powers of assimilation, of
adaptation to changing circumstances, and of elasticity of system.
Change has been, and is, the breath of our existence and the condition
of our growth.

Change began with the Creation, and ages of momentous development are
shrouded from our eyes. The land and the people are the two foundations
of English history; but before history began, the land had received the
insular configuration which has largely determined its fortune; and the
various peoples, who were to mould and be moulded by the land, had
differentiated from the other races of the world. Several of these
peoples had occupied the land before its conquest by the Anglo-Saxons,
some before it was even Britain. Whether neolithic man superseded
palaeolithic man in these islands by invasion or by domestic evolution,
we do not know; but centuries before the Christian era the Britons
overran the country and superimposed themselves upon its swarthy, squat
inhabitants. They mounted comparatively high in the scale of
civilization; they tilled the soil, worked mines, cultivated various
forms of art, and even built towns. But their loose tribal organization
left them at the mercy of the Romans; and though Julius Caesar's two
raids in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C. left no permanent results, the conquest
was soon completed when the Romans came in earnest in A.D. 43.

The extent to which the Romans during the three and a half centuries of
their rule in Britain civilized its inhabitants is a matter of doubtful
inference. The remains of Roman roads, Roman walls, and Roman villas
still bear witness to their material activity; and an occupation of the
land by Roman troops and Roman officials, spread over three hundred and
fifty years, must have impressed upon the upper classes of the Britons
at least some acquaintance with the language, religion, administration,
and social and economic arrangements of the conquerors. But, on the
whole, the evidence points rather to military occupation than to
colonization; and the Roman province resembled more nearly a German
than a British colony of to-day. Rome had then no surplus population
with which to fill new territory; the only emigrants were the soldiers,
the officials, and a few traders or prospectors; and of these most were
partially Romanized provincials from other parts of the empire, for a
Roman soldier of the third century A.D. was not generally a Roman or
even an Italian. The imperial government, moreover, considered the
interests of Britain not in themselves but only as subordinate to the
empire, which any sort of distinctive national organization would have
threatened. This distinguishes Roman rule in Britain from British rule
in India; and if the army in Britain gradually grew more British, it
was due to the weakness and not to the policy of the imperial
government. There was no attempt to form a British constitution, or
weld British tribes into a nation; for Rome brought to birth no
daughter states, lest she should dismember her all-embracing unity. So
the nascent nations warred within and rent her; and when, enfeebled and
distracted by the struggle, she relaxed her hold on Britain, she left
it more cultivated, perhaps, but more enervated and hardly stronger or
more united than before.

Hardier peoples were already hovering over the prey. The Romans had
themselves established a "count of the Saxon shore" to defend the
eastern coasts of Britain against the pirates of the German Ocean; and
it was not long after its revolt from Rome in 410, that the Angles and
Saxons and Jutes discovered a chance to meddle in Britain, torn as it
was by domestic anarchy, and threatened with inroads by the Picts and
Scots in the north. Neither this temptation nor the alleged invitation
from the British chief Vortigern to come over and help, supplied the
original impulse which drove the Angles and Saxons across the sea.
Whatever its origin--whether pressure from other tribes behind,
internal dissensions, or the economic necessities of a population
growing too fast for the produce of primitive farming--the restlessness
was general; but while the Goths and the Franks poured south over the
Roman frontiers on land, the Angles and Saxons obeyed a prophetic call
to the sea and the setting sun.

This migration by sea is a strange phenomenon. That nations should
wander by land was no new thing; but how in those days whole tribes
transported themselves, their wives and their chattels, from the mouths
of the Elbe and the Weser to those of the Thames and the Humber, we are
at a loss to understand. Yet come they did, and the name of the Angles
at least, which clung to the land they reached, was blotted out from
the home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as their
descendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; and
the process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conquered
Britain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years which
are said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and the
landing in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening sea
deterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey was as much
as these petrels of the storm could manage. The failure to dislodge
them, and the absence of centralized government and national
consciousness among the Britons encouraged further invaders; and Kent,
east of the Medway, and the Isle of Wight may have been the next
morsels they swallowed. These early comers were Jutes, but their easy
success led to imitation by their more numerous southern neighbours,
the Angles and Saxons; and the torrent of conquest grew in volume and
rapidity. Invaders by sea naturally sailed or rowed up the rivers, and
all conquerors master the plains before the hills, which are the home
of lost causes and the refuge of native states. Their progress may be
traced in the names of English kingdoms and shires: in the south the
Saxons founded the kingdoms of Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, and Wessex; in
the east the Anglians founded East Anglia, though in the north they
retained the Celtic names, Bernicia and Deira. The districts in which
they met and mingled have less distinctive names; Surrey was perhaps
disputed between all the Saxon kingdoms, Hampshire between West Saxons,
South Saxons, and Jutes; while in the centre Mercia was a mixed march
or borderland of Angles and Saxons against the retiring Britons or
Welsh.

It used to be almost a point of honour with champions of the
superiority of Anglo-Saxon virtues to maintain that the invaders, like
the Israelites of old, massacred their enemies to a man, if not also to
a woman and child. Massacre there certainly was at Anderida and other
places taken by storm, and no doubt whole British villages fled at the
approach of their bloodthirsty foes; but as the wave of conquest rolled
from east to west, and the concentration of the Britons grew while that
of the invader relaxed, there was less and less extermination. The
English hordes cannot have been as numerous in women as in men; and in
that case some of the British women would be spared. It no more
required wholesale slaughter of the Britons to establish English
language and institutions in Britain than it required wholesale
slaughter of the Irish to produce the same results in Ireland; and a
large admixture of Celtic blood in the English race can hardly be
denied.

Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons began to fight one another before they
ceased to fight their common enemy, who must have profited by this
internecine strife. Of the process by which the migrating clans and
families were blended into tribal kingdoms, we learn nothing; but the
blending favoured expansion, and expansion brought the tribal kingdoms
into hostile contact with tougher rivals than the Britons. The
expansion of Sussex and Kent was checked by Saxons who had landed in
Essex or advanced up the Thames and the Itchen; East Anglia was hemmed
in by tribes who had sailed up the Wash, the Humber, and their
tributaries; and the three great kingdoms which emerged out of the
anarchy--Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex--seem to have owed the
supremacy, which they wielded in turn, to the circumstance that each
possessed a British hinterland into which it could expand. For
Northumbria there was Strathclyde on the west and Scotland on the
north; for Mercia there was Wales; and for Wessex there were the
British remnants in Devon and in Cornwall.

But a kingdom may have too much hinterland. Scotland taxed for
centuries the assimilative capacity of united England; it was too much
for Northumbria to digest. Northumbria's supremacy was distinguished by
the religious labours of Aidan and Cuthbert and Wilfrid in England, by
the missions of Willibrord on the Continent, and by the revival of
literature and learning under Caedmon and Bede; but it spent its
substance in efforts to conquer Scotland, and then fell a victim to the
barbaric strength of Mercia and to civil strife between its component
parts, Bernicia and Deira. Mercia was even less homogeneous than
Northumbria; it had no frontiers worth mention; and in spite of its
military prowess it could not absorb a hinterland treble the size of
the Wales which troubled Edward I. Wessex, with serviceable frontiers
consisting of the Thames, the Cotswolds, the Severn, and the sea, and
with a hinterland narrowing down to the Cornish peninsula, developed a
slower but more lasting strength. Political organization seems to have
been its forte, and it had set its own house in some sort of order
before it was summoned by Ecgberht to assume the lead in English
politics. From that day to this the sceptre has remained in his house
without a permanent break.

Some slight semblance of political unity was thus achieved, but it was
already threatened by the Northmen and Danes, who were harrying England
in much the same way as the English, three centuries earlier, had
harried Britain. The invaders were invaded because they had forsaken
the sea to fight one another on land; and then Christianity had come to
tame their turbulent vigour. A wave of missionary zeal from Rome and a
backwash from unconquered Ireland had met at the synod of Whitby in
664, and Roman priests recovered what Roman soldiers had lost. But the
church had not yet armed itself with the weapons of the world, and
Christian England was no more a match than Christian Britain had been
for a heathen foe. Ecgberht's feeble successors in Wessex, and their
feebler rivals in the subordinate kingdoms, gave way step by step
before the Danes, until in 879 Ecgberht's grandson Alfred the Great
was, like a second King Arthur, a fugitive lurking in the recesses of
his disappearing realm.

Wessex, however, was more closely knit than any Celtic realm had been;
the Danes were fewer than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors; and Alfred
was made of sterner stuff than early British princes. He was typical of
Wessex; moral strength and all-round capacity rather than supreme
ability in any one direction are his title-deeds to greatness. After
hard fighting he imposed terms of peace upon the Danish leader Guthrum.
England south-west of Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester,
was to be Alfred's, the rest to be Danish; and Guthrum succumbed to the
pacifying influence of Christianity. Not the least of Alfred's gains
was the destruction of Mercia's unity; its royal house had disappeared
in the struggle, and the kingdom was now divided; while Alfred lost his
nominal suzerainty over north-east England, he gained a real
sovereignty over south-west Mercia. His children, Edward the Elder and
Ethelfleda, the Lady of the Mercians, and his grandson Athelstan,
pushed on the expansion of Wessex thus begun, dividing the land as they
won it into shires, each with a burh (borough) or fortified centre for
its military organization; and Anglo-Saxon monarchy reached its zenith
under Edgar, who ruled over the whole of England and asserted a
suzerainty over most of Britain.

It was transitory glory and superficial unity; for there was no real
possibility of a national state in Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Danish England,
and the whole meaning of English history is missed in antedating that
achievement by several hundred years. Edgar could do no more than evade
difficulties and temporize with problems which imperceptible growth
alone could solve; and the idealistic pictures of early England are not
drawn from life, but inspired by a belief in good old days and an
unconscious appreciation of the polemical value of such a theory in
political controversy. Tacitus, a splenetic Roman aristocrat, had
satirized the degeneracy of the empire under the guise of a description
of the primitive virtues of a Utopian Germany; and modern theorists
have found in his _Germania_ an armoury of democratic weapons
against aristocracy and despotism. From this golden age the Angles and
Saxons are supposed to have derived a political system in which most
men were free and equal, owning their land in common, debating and
deciding in folkmoots the issues of peace and war, electing their kings
(if any), and obeying them only so far as they inspired respect. These
idyllic arrangements, if they ever existed, did not survive the stress
of the migration and the struggle with the Celts. War begat the king,
and soon the church baptized him and confirmed his power with unction
and biblical precedents. The moot of the folk became the moot of the
Wise (Witan), and only those were wise whose wisdom was apparent to the
king. Community of goods and equality of property broke down in the
vast appropriation involved in the conquest of Britain; and when, after
their conversion to Christianity, the barbarians learnt to write and
left authentic records, they reveal a state of society which bears some
resemblance to that of medieval England but little to that of the
mythical golden age.

Upon a nation of freemen in arms had been superimposed a class of
military specialists, of whom the king was head. Specialization had
broken down the system by which all men did an equal amount of
everything. The few, who were called thegns, served the king, generally
by fighting his enemies, while the many worked for themselves and for
those who served the king. All holders of land, however, had to serve
in the national levy and to help in maintaining the bridges and
primitive fortifications. But there were endless degrees of inequality
in wealth; some now owned but a fraction of what had been the normal
share of a household in the land; others held many shares, and the
possession of five shares became the dividing line between the class
from which the servants of the king were chosen and the rest of the
community. While this inequality increased, the tenure of land grew
more and more important as the basis of social position and political
influence. Land has little value for nomads, but so soon as they settle
its worth begins to grow; and the more labour they put into the land,
the higher rises its value and the less they want to leave it; in a
purely agricultural community land is the great source of everything
worth having, and therefore the main object of desire.

But it became increasingly difficult for the small man to retain his
holding. He needed protection, especially during the civil wars of the
Heptarchy and the Danish inroads which followed. There was, however, no
government strong enough to afford protection, and he had to seek it
from the nearest magnate, who might possess armed servants to defend
him, and perhaps a rudimentary stronghold within which he might shelter
himself and his belongings till the storm was past. The magnate
naturally wanted his price for these commodities, and the only price
that would satisfy him was the poor man's land. So many poor men
surrendered the ownership of their land, receiving it back to be held
by them as tenants on condition of rendering various services to the
landlord, such as ploughing his land, reaping his crops, and other
work. Generally, too, the tenant became the landlord's "man," and did
him homage; and, thirdly, he would be bound to attend the court in
which the lord or his steward exercised jurisdiction.

This growth of private jurisdiction was another sign of the times.
Justice had once been administered in the popular moots, though from
very early times there had been social distinctions. Each village had
its "best" men, generally four in number, who attended the moots of the
larger districts called the Hundreds; and the "best" were probably
those who had inherited or acquired the best homesteads. This
aristocracy sometimes shrank to one, and the magnate, to whom the poor
surrendered their land in return for protection, often acquired also
rights of jurisdiction, receiving the fines and forfeits imposed for
breaches of the law. He was made responsible, too, for the conduct of
his poorer neighbours. Originally the family had been made to answer
for the offences of its members; but the tie of blood-relationship
weakened as the bond of neighbourhood grew stronger with attachment to
the soil; and instead of the natural unit of the family, an artificial
unit was created for the purpose of responsibility to the law by
associating neighbours together in groups of ten, called peace-pledges
or frith-borhs. It is at least possible that the "Hundred" was a
further association of ten frith-borhs as a higher and more responsible
unit for the administration of justice. But the landless man was
worthless as a member of a frith-borh, for the law had little hold over
a man who had no land to forfeit and no fixed habitation. So the
landless man was compelled by law to submit to a lord, who was held
responsible for the behaviour of all his "men"; his estate became, so
to speak, a private frith-borh, consisting of dependents instead of the
freemen of the public frith-borhs. These two systems, with many
variations, existed side by side; but there was a general tendency for
the freemen to get fewer and for the lords to grow more powerful.

This growth of over-mighty subjects was due to the fact that a
government which could not protect the poorest could not restrain the
local magnates to whom the poor were forced to turn; and the weakness
of the government was due ultimately to the lack of political education
and of material resources. The mass of Englishmen were locally minded;
there was nothing to suggest national unity to their imagination. They
could not read, they had no maps, nor pictures of crowned sovereigns,
not even a flag to wave; none, indeed, of those symbols which bring
home to the peasant or artisan a consciousness that he belongs to a
national entity. Their interests centred round the village green; the
"best" men travelled further afield to the hundred and shire-moot, but
anything beyond these limits was distant and unreal, the affair of an
outside world with which they had no concern. Anglo-Saxon patriotism
never transcended provincial boundaries.

The government, on the other hand, possessed no proper roads, no
regular means of communication, none of those nerves which enable it to
feel what goes on in distant parts. The king, indeed, was beginning to
supply the deficiencies of local and popular organization: a special
royal peace or protection, which meant specially severe penalties to
the offender, was being thrown over special places like highways,
markets, boroughs, and churches; over special times like Sundays, holy
days, and the meeting-days of moots; and over special persons like
priests and royal officials. The church, too, strove to set an example
of centralized administration; but its organization was still monastic
rather than parochial and episcopal, and even Dunstan failed to cleanse
it of sloth and simony. With no regular system of taxation, little
government machinery, and no police, standing army, or royal judges, it
was impossible to enforce royal protection adequately, or to check the
centrifugal tendency of England to break up into its component parts.
The monarchy was a man rather than a machine; a vigorous ruler could
make some impression, but whenever the crown passed to a feeble king,
the reign of anarchy recommenced.

Alfred's successors annexed the Danelaw which Alfred had left to
Guthrum, but their efforts to assimilate the Danes provoked in the
first place a reaction against West Saxon influence which threatened
more than once to separate England north of the Thames from Wessex,
and, secondly, a determination on the part of Danes across the sea to
save their fellow-countrymen in England from absorption. Other causes
no doubt assisted to bring about a renewal of Danish invasion; but the
Danes who came at the end of the tenth century, if they began as
haphazard bands of rovers, greedy of spoil and ransom, developed into
the emissaries of an organized government bent on political conquest.
Ethelred, who had to suffer from evils that were incurable as well as
for his predecessors' neglect, bought off the raiders with ever-
increasing bribes which tempted them to return; and by levying Danegeld
to stop invasion, set a precedent for direct taxation which the
invaders eventually used as the financial basis of efficient
government. At length a foolish massacre of the Danish "uitlanders" in
England precipitated the ruin of Anglo-Saxon monarchy; and after heroic
resistance by Edmund Ironside, England was absorbed in the empire of
Canute.

Canute tried to put himself into the position, while avoiding the
mistakes, of his English predecessors. He adopted the Christian
religion and set up a force of hus-earls to terrify local magnates and
enforce obedience to the English laws which he re-enacted. His division
of England into four great earldoms seems to have been merely a casual
arrangement, but he does not appear to have checked the dangerous
practice by which under Edgar and Ethelred the ealdormen had begun to
concentrate in their hands the control of various shires. The greater
the sphere of a subject's jurisdiction, the more it menaced the
monarchy and national unity; and after Canute's empire had fallen to
pieces under his worthless sons, the restoration of Ecgberht's line in
the person of Edward the Confessor merely provided a figurehead under
whose nominal rule the great earls of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and
East Anglia fought at first for control of the monarchy and at length
for the crown itself. The strife resolved itself into a faction fight
between the Mercian house of Leofric and the West Saxon house of
Godwine, whose dynastic policy has been magnified into patriotism by a
great West Saxon historian. The prize fell for the moment on Edward's
death to Godwine's son, Harold, whose ambition to sit on a throne cost
him his life and the glory, which otherwise might have been his, of
saving his country from William the Norman. As regent for one of the
scions of Ecgberht's house, he might have relied on the co-operation of
his rivals; as an upstart on the throne he could only count on the
veiled or open enmity of Mercians and Northumbrians, who regarded him,
and were regarded by him, as hardly less foreign than the invader from
France.

The battle of Hastings sums up a series and clinches an argument.
Anglo-Saxondom had only been saved from Danish marauders by the
personal greatness of Alfred; it had utterly failed to respond to
Edmund's call to arms against Canute, and the respite under Edward the
Confessor had been frittered away. Angles and Saxons invited foreign
conquest by a civil war; and when Harold beat back Tostig and his
Norwegian ally, the sullen north left him alone to do the same by
William. William's was the third and decisive Danish conquest of a
house divided against itself; for his Normans were Northmen with a
French polish, and they conquered a country in which the soundest
elements were already Danish. The stoutest resistance, not only in the
military but in the constitutional and social sense, to the Norman
Conquest was offered not by Wessex but by the Danelaw, where personal
freedom had outlived its hey-day elsewhere; and the reflection that,
had the English re-conquest of the Danelaw been more complete, so, too,
would have been the Norman Conquest of England, may modify the view
that everything great and good in England is Anglo-Saxon in origin.
England, indeed, was still in the crudest stages of its making; it had
as yet no law worth the name, no trial by jury, no parliament, no real
constitution, no effective army or navy, no universities, few schools,
hardly any literature, and little art. The disjointed and unruly
members of which it consisted in 1066 had to undergo a severe
discipline before they could form an organic national state.




CHAPTER II

THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND

1066-1272


For nearly two centuries after the Norman Conquest there is no history
of the English people. There is history enough of England, but it is
the history of a foreign government. We may now feel pride in the
strength of our conqueror or pretend claims to descent from William's
companions. We may boast of the empire of Henry II and the prowess of
Richard I, and we may celebrate the organized law and justice, the
scholarship and the architecture, of the early Plantagenet period; but
these things were no more English than the government of India to-day
is Hindu. With Waltheof and Hereward English names disappear from
English history, from the roll of sovereigns, ministers, bishops,
earls, and sheriffs; and their place is taken by names beginning with
"fitz" and distinguished by "de." No William, Thomas, Henry, Geoffrey,
Gilbert, John, Stephen, Richard, or Robert had played any part in
Anglo-Saxon affairs, but they fill the pages of England's history from
the days of Harold to those of Edward I. The English language went
underground, and became the patois of peasants; the thin trickle of
Anglo-Saxon literature dried up, for there was no demand for Anglo-
Saxon among an upper class which wrote Latin and spoke French.
Foreigners ruled and owned the land, and "native" became synonymous
with "serf."

Their common lot, however, gave birth to a common feeling. The Norman
was more alien to the Mercian than had been Northumbrian or West-Saxon,
and rival tribes at last discovered a bond of unity in the impartial
rigour of their masters. The Norman, coming from outside and exempt
from local prejudice, applied the same methods of government and
exploitation to all parts of England, just as Englishmen bring the same
ideas to bear upon all parts of India; and in both cases the steady
pressure of a superimposed civilization tended to obliterate local and
class divisions. Unwittingly Norman and Angevin despotism made an
English nation out of Anglo-Saxon tribes, as English despotism has made
a nation out of Irish septs, and will make another out of the hundred
races and religions of our Indian empire. The more efficient a
despotism, the sooner it makes itself impossible, and the greater the
problems it stores up for the future, unless it can divest itself of
its despotic attributes and make common cause with the nation it has
created.

The provision of this even-handed tyranny was the great contribution of
the Normans to the making of England. They had no written law of their
own, but to secure themselves they had to enforce order upon their
schismatic subjects; and they were able to enforce it because, as
military experts, they had no equals in that age. They could not have
stood against a nation in arms; but the increasing cost of equipment
and the growth of poor and landless classes among the Anglo-Saxons had
transferred the military business of the nation into the hands of large
landowning specialists; and the Anglo-Saxon warrior was no match for
his Norman rival, either individually or collectively. His burh was
inferior to the Norman castle, his shield and battle-axe to the weapons
of the mailed and mounted knight; and he had none of the coherence that
was forced upon the conquerors by the iron hand of William and by their
situation amid a hostile people.

The problem for William and his companions was how to organize this
military superiority as a means of orderly government, and this problem
wore a twofold aspect. William had to control his barons, and his
barons had to control their vassals. Their methods have been summed up
in the phrase, the "feudal system," which William is still popularly
supposed to have introduced into England. On the other hand, it has
been humourously suggested that the feudal system was really introduced
into England by Sir Henry Spelman, a seventeenth-century scholar.
Others have maintained that, so far from feudalism being introduced
from Normandy into England, it would be truer to say that feudalism was
introduced from England into Normandy, and thence spread throughout
France. These speculations serve, at any rate, to show that feudalism
was a very vague and elusive system, consisting of generalizations from
a vast number of conflicting data. Spelman was the first to attempt to
reduce these data to a system, and his successors tended to forget more
and more the exceptions to his rules. It is now clear that much that we
call feudal existed in England before the Norman Conquest; that much of
it was not developed until after the Norman period; and that at no time
did feudalism exist as a completely rounded and logical system outside
historical and legal text-books.

The political and social arrangements summed up in the phrase related
primarily to the land and the conditions of service upon which it was
held. Commerce and manufactures, and the organization of towns which
grew out of them, were always exceptions to the feudal system; the
monarchy saved itself, its sheriffs, and the shires to some extent from
feudal influence; and soon it set to work to redeem the administration
of justice from its clutches. In all parts of the country, moreover,
there was land, the tenure of which was never feudalized. Generally,
however, the theory was applied that all land was held directly or
indirectly from the king, who was the sole owner of it, that there was
no land without a lord, and that from every acre of land some sort of
service was due to some one or other. A great deal of it was held by
military service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be either
a layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this military service to the
king, while the sub-tenants had to render it to the tenants-in-chief.
When the tenant died his land reverted to the lord, who only granted it
to the heir after the payment of a year's revenue, and on condition of
the same service being rendered. If the heir were a minor, and thus
incapable of rendering military service, the land was retained by the
lord until the heir came of age; heiresses could only marry with the
lord's leave some one who could perform his services. The tenant had
further to attend the lord's court--whether the lord was his king or
not--submit to his jurisdiction, and pay aids to the lord whenever he
was captured and needed ransom, when his eldest son was made a knight,
and when his eldest daughter married.

Other land was held by churchmen on condition of praying or singing for
the soul of the lord, and the importance of this tenure was that it was
subject to the church courts and not to those of the king. Some was
held in what was called free socage, the terms of which varied; but its
distinguishing feature seems to have been that the service, which was
not military, was fixed, and that when it was performed the lord had no
further hold on the tenant. The great mass of the population were,
however, villeins, who were always at the beck and call of their lords,
and had to do as much ploughing, sowing, and reaping of his land as he
could make them. Theoretically they were his goods and chattels, who
could obtain no redress against any one except in the lord's court, and
none at all against him. They could not leave their land, nor marry,
nor enter the church, nor go to school without his leave. All these
forms of tenure and kinds of service, however, shaded off into one
another, so that it is impossible to draw hard and fast lines between
them. Any one, moreover, might hold different lands on different terms
of service, so that there was little of caste in the English system; it
was upon the land and not the person that the service was imposed; and
William's Domesday Book was not a record of the ranks and classes of
the people, but a survey of the land, detailing the rents and service
due from every part.

The local agency by which the Normans enforced these arrangements was
the manor. The Anglo-Saxons had organized shires and hundreds, but the
lowest unit, township or vill seems to have had no organization except,
perhaps, for agricultural purposes. The Danegeld, which William imposed
after the Domesday survey, was assessed on the hundreds, as though
there were no smaller units from which it could be levied. But the
hundred was found too cumbrous for the efficient control of local
details; it was divided into manors, the Normans using for this purpose
the germs of dependent townships which had long been growing up in
England; and the agricultural organization of the township was
dovetailed into the jurisdictional organization of the manor. The lord
became the lord of all the land on the manor, the owner of a court
which tried local disputes; but he rarely possessed that criminal
jurisdiction in matters of life and death which was common in
continental feudalism; and if he did, it was only by special royal
grant, and he was gradually deprived of it by the development of royal
courts of justice, which drew to themselves large parts of manorial
jurisdiction.

These and other matters were reserved for the old courts of the shire
and hundred, which the Norman kings found it advisable to encourage as
a check upon their barons; for the more completely the natives and
villagers were subjected to their lords, the more necessary was it for
the king to maintain his hold upon their masters. For this reason
William imposed the famous Salisbury oath. In France the sub-tenant was
bound to follow and obey his immediate lord rather than the king.
William was determined that every man's duty to the king should come
first. Similarly, he separated church courts from the secular courts,
in order that the former might be saved from the feudal influence of
the latter; and he enforced the ecclesiastical reforms of Hildebrand,
especially the prohibition of the marriage of the clergy, lest they
should convert their benefices into hereditary fiefs for the benefit of
their children.

For the principles of heredity and primogeniture were among the
strongest of feudal tendencies. Primogeniture had proved politically
advantageous; and one of the best things in the Anglo-Saxon monarchy
had been its avoidance of the practice, prevalent on the Continent, of
kings dividing their dominions among their sons, instead of leaving all
united to the eldest. But the principle of heredity, sound enough in
national monarchy, was to prove very dangerous in the other spheres of
politics. Office tended to become hereditary, and to be regarded as the
private property of the family rather than a position of national
trust, thus escaping national control and being prostituted for
personal ends. The earldoms in England were so perverted; originally
they were offices like the modern lords-lieutenancies of the shires;
gradually they became hereditary titles. The only remedy the king had
was to deprive the earls of their power, and entrust it to a nominal
deputy, the sheriff. In France, the sheriff  (_vice-comes_, _vicomte_)
became hereditary in his turn, and a prolonged struggle over the same
tendency was fought in England. Fortunately, the crown and country
triumphed over the hereditary principle in this respect; the sheriff
remained an official, and when viscounts were created later, in
imitation of the French nobility, they received only a meaningless and
comparatively innocuous title.

Some slight check, too, was retained upon the crown owing to a series
of disputed successions to the throne. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy had
always been in theory elective, and William had been careful to observe
the form. His son, William II, had to obtain election in order to
secure the throne against the claims of his elder brother Robert, and
Henry I followed his example for similar reasons. Each had to make
election promises in the form of a charter; and election promises,
although they were seldom kept, had some value as reminders to kings of
their duties and theoretical dependence upon the electors. Gradually,
too, the kings began to look for support outside their Norman baronage,
and to realize that even the submerged English might serve as a
makeweight in a balance of opposing forces. Henry I bid for London's
support by the grant of a notable charter; for, assisted by the order
and communications with the Continent fostered by Norman rule, commerce
was beginning to flourish and towns to grow. London was already
distancing Winchester in their common ambition to be the capital of the
kingdom, and the support of it and of other towns began to be worth
buying by grants of local government, more especially as their
encouragement provided another check on feudal magnates. Henry, too,
made a great appeal to English sentiment by marrying Matilda, the
granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, and by revenging the battle of
Hastings through a conquest of Normandy from his brother Robert,
effected partly by English troops.

But the order, which the three Norman sovereigns evolved out of chaos,
was still due more to their personal vigour than to the strength of the
administrative machinery which they sought to develop; and though that
machinery continued to work during the anarchy which followed, it could
not restrain the feudal barons, when the crown was disputed between
Henry's daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen. The barons, indeed,
had been more successful in riveting their baronial yoke on the people
than the kings had been in riveting a monarchical yoke on the barons;
and nothing more vividly illustrates the utter subjection of Anglo-
Saxons than the fact that the conquerors could afford to tear each
other to pieces for nineteen years (1135-1154) without the least
attempt on the part of their subjects to throw off their tyranny. There
was no English nation yet; each feudal magnate did what he pleased with
his own without fear of royal or popular vengeance, and for once in
English history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence.
The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; within
its portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace and
refuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity to
broaden its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, and
assert that to it belonged principally the right to elect and to depose
sovereigns. Greater still would have been its services to civilization,
had it been able to assert a power of putting down the barons from
their castles and raising the peasantry from their bondage.

Deliverance could only come by royal power, and in Henry II, Matilda's
son, Anjou gave England a greater king than Normandy had done in
William the Bastard. Although a foreigner, who ruled a vast continental
empire and spent but a fraction of his days on this side of the
Channel, he stands second to none of England's makers. He fashioned the
government which hammered together the framework of a national state.
First, he gathered up such fragments of royal authority as survived the
anarchy; then, with the conservative instincts and pretences of a
radical, he looked about for precedents in the customs of his
grandfather, proclaiming his intention of restoring good old laws. This
reaction brought him up against the encroachments of the church, and
the untoward incident of Becket's murder impaired the success of
Henry's efforts to establish royal supremacy. But this supremacy must
not be exaggerated. Henry did not usurp ecclesiastical jurisdiction; he
wanted to see that the clerical courts did their duty; he claimed the
power of moving them in this direction; and he hoped to make the crown
the arbiter of disputes between the rival spiritual and temporal
jurisdictions, realizing that the only alternative to this supreme
authority was the arbitrament of war. He also contended that clergy who
had been unfrocked in the clerical courts for murder or other crimes
should be handed over as laymen to be further punished according to the
law of the land, while Becket maintained that unfrocking was a
sufficient penalty for the first offence, and that it required a second
murder to hang a former priest.

Next, he sought to curb the barons. He instituted scutage, by which the
great feudatories granted a money payment instead of bringing with them
to the army hordes of their sub-tenants who might obey them rather than
the king; this enabled the king to hire mercenaries who respected him
but not the feudatories. He cashiered all the sheriffs at once, to
explode their pretensions to hereditary tenure of their office. By the
assize of arms he called the mass of Englishmen to redress the military
balance between the barons and the crown. By other assizes he enabled
the owners and possessors of property to appeal to the protection of
the royal court of justice: instead of trial by battle they could
submit their case to a jury of neighbours; and the weapons of the
military expert were thus superseded by the verdicts of peaceful
citizens.

This method, which was extended to criminal as well as civil cases, of
ascertaining the truth and deciding disputes by means of juratores, men
sworn to tell the truth impartially, involved a vast educational
process. Hitherto men had regarded the ascertainment of truth as a
supernatural task, and they had abandoned it to Providence or the
priests. Each party to a dispute had been required to produce oath-
helpers or compurgators and each compurgator's oath was valued
according to his property, just as the number of a man's votes is still
proportioned to some extent to his possessions. But if, as commonly
happened, both parties produced the requisite oath-helpers, there was
nothing for it but the ordeal by fire or water; the man who sank was
innocent, he who floated guilty; and the only rational element in the
ritual was its supervision by the priests, who knew something of their
parishioners' character. Military tenants, however, preferred their
privilege of trial by battle. Now Henry began to teach men to rely upon
their judgment; and by degrees a distinction was even made between
murder and homicide, which had hitherto been confounded because "the
thought of man shall not be tried, for the devil himself knoweth not
the thought of man."

In order to carry out his judicial reforms, Henry developed the
_curia regis_, or royal court of justice. That court had simply
been the court of the king's barons corresponding to the court of his
tenants which every feudal lord possessed. Its financial aspect had
already been specialized as the exchequer by the Norman kings, who had
realized that finance is the first essential of efficient government.
From finance Henry I had gone on to the administration of justice,
because _justitia magnum emolumentum_, the administration of
justice is a great source of profit. Henry II's zeal for justice sprang
from similar motives: the more justice he could draw from the feudal
courts to his own, the greater the revenue he would divert from his
unruly barons into the royal exchequer. From the central stores of the
_curia regis_ he dispensed a justice that was cheaper, more
expeditious, and more expert, than that provided by the local courts.
He threw open its doors to all except villeins, he transformed it from
an occasional assembly of warlike barons into a regular court of
trained lawyers--mere servants of the royal household, the barons
called them; and by means of justices in eyre he brought it into touch
with all localities in the kingdom, and convinced his people that there
was a king who meant to govern with their help.

These experts had a free hand as regards the law they administered. The
old Anglo-Saxon customs which had done duty for law had degenerated
into antiquated formalities, varying in almost every shire and hundred,
which were perforce ignored by Henry's judges because they were
incomprehensible. So much as they understood and approved they blended
with principles drawn from the revived study of Roman law and with
Frankish and Norman customs. The legal rules thus elaborated by the
king's court were applied by the justices in eyre where-ever their
circuits took them, and became in time the common law of England,
common because it admitted no local bars and no provincial prejudices.
One great stride had been taken in the making of the English nation,
when the king's court, trespassing upon local popular and feudal
jurisdiction, dumped upon the Anglo-Saxon market the following among
other foreign legal concepts--assize, circuit, suit, plaintiff,
defendant, maintenance, livery, possession, property, probate,
recovery, trespass, treason, felony, fine, coroner, court, inquest,
judge, jury, justice, verdict, taxation, charter, liberty,
representation, parliament, and constitution. It is difficult to over-
estimate the debt the English people owe to their powers of absorbing
imports. The very watchwords of progress and catchwords of liberty,
from the trial by jury which was ascribed to Alfred the Great to the
charter extorted from John, were alien immigrants. We call them alien
because they were alien to the Anglo-Saxons; but they are the warp and
woof of English institutions, which are too great and too complex to
have sprung from purely insular sources.

In spite of the fierce opposition of the barons, who rebelled in 1173,
and of disputes with his fractious children which embittered his
closing years, Henry II had laid the foundations of national monarchy.
But in completing one part of the Norman Conquest, namely, the
establishment of royal supremacy over disorderly feudatories, he had
modified the other, the arbitrary rule of the barons over the subject
people. William had only conquered the people by the help of his
barons; Henry II only crushed the barons with the help of lower orders
and of ministers raised from the ranks. It was left for his sons to
alienate the support which he had enlisted, and to show that, if the
first condition of progress was the restraint of the barons, the second
was the curbing of the crown. Their reigns illustrate the ineradicable
defect of arbitrary rule: a monarch of genius creates an efficient
despotism, and is allowed to create it, to deal with evils that yield
to no milder treatment. His successors proceed to use that machinery
for personal ends. Richard I gilded his abuse of his father's power
with the glory of his crusade, and the end afforded a plausible
justification for the means he adopted. But John cloaked his tyranny
with no specious pretences; his greed and violence spared no section of
the community, and forced all into a coalition which extorted from him
the Great Charter.

This famous document betrays its composite authorship; no section of
the community entered the coalition without something to gain, and none
went entirely unrewarded from Runnymede. But if Sir Henry Spelman
introduced feudalism into England, his contemporary, Chief-justice
Coke, invented Magna Carta: and in view of the profound misconceptions
which prevail with regard to its character, it is necessary to insist
rather upon its reactionary than upon its reforming elements. The great
source of error lies in the change which is always insensibly, but
sometimes completely, transforming the meaning of words. Generally the
change has been from the concrete to the abstract, because in their
earlier stages of education men find it very difficult to grasp
anything which is not concrete. The word "liberty" affords a good
illustration: in 1215 a "liberty" was the possession by a definite
person or group of persons of very definite and tangible privileges,
such as having a court of your own with its perquisites, or exemption
from the duties of attending the public courts of the shire or hundred,
of rendering the services or of paying the dues to which the majority
were liable. The value of a "liberty" was that through its enjoyment
you were not as other men; the barons would have eared little for
liberties which they had to share with the common herd. To them liberty
meant privilege and monopoly; it was not a general right to be enjoyed
in common. Now Magna Carta is a charter not of "liberty," but of
"liberties"; it guaranteed to each section of the coalition those
special privileges which Henry II and his sons had threatened or taken
away. Some of these liberties were dangerous obstacles to the common
welfare--for instance the "liberty" of every lord of the manor to try
all suits relating to property and possession in his own manorial
court, or to be punished by his fellow-barons instead of by the judges
of the king's court. This was what the barons meant by their famous
demand in Magna Carta that every man should be judged by his peers;
they insisted that the royal judges were not their peers, but only
servants of the crown, and their demands in these respects were
reactionary proposals which might have been fatal to liberty as we
conceive it.

Nor is there anything about trial by jury or "no taxation without
representation" in Magna Carta. What we mean by "trial by jury" was not
developed till long after 1215; there was still no national, but only
class taxation; and the great council, which was to give its assent to
royal demands for money, represented nobody but the tenants-in-chief of
whom it was composed. All that the barons meant by this clause was that
they, as feudal tenants-in-chief, were not to pay more than the
ordinary feudal dues. But they left to the king, and they reserved to
themselves, the right to tallage their villeins as arbitrarily as they
pleased; and even where they seem to be protecting the villeins, they
are only preventing the king from levying such judicial fines from
their villeins as would make it impossible for those villeins to render
their services to the lords. It was to be no affair of the king or
nation if a lord exacted the uttermost farthing from his own chattels;
legally, the villeins, who were the bulk of the nation, remained after
Magna Carta, as before, in the position of a man's ox or horse to-day,
except that there was no law for the prevention of cruelty to animals.
Finally, the provision that no one was to be arrested until he had been
convicted would, if carried out, have made impossible the
administration of justice.

On the other hand, the provisions for the fixing of the court of common
pleas at Westminster, for standard weights and measures, for the
administration of law by men acquainted with English customs, and some
others were wholesome reforms. The first clause, guaranteeing that the
church should be free from royal (not papal) encroachments, was sound
enough when John was king, and the general restraint of his authority,
even in the interests of the barons, was not an unmixed evil. But it is
as absurd to think that John conceded modern liberty when he granted
the charter of medieval liberties, as to think that he permitted some
one to found a new religion when he licensed him to endow a new
religious house (_novam religionem_); and to regard Magna Carta as
a great popular achievement, when no vernacular version of it is known
to have existed before the sixteenth century, and when it contains
hardly a word or an idea of popular English origin, involves complete
misunderstanding of its meaning and a serious antedating of English
nationality.

At no time, indeed, did foreign influence appear more dominant in
English politics than during the generation which saw Richard I
surrender his kingdom to be held as a fief of the empire, and John
surrender it to be held as a temporal fief of the papacy; or when, in
the reign of Henry III, a papal legate, Gualo, administered England as
a province of the Papal States; when a foreign freebooter was sheriff
of six English shires; and when aliens held in their hands the castles
and keys of the kingdom. It was a dark hour which preceded the dawn of
English nationality, and so far there was no sign of English
indignation at the bartering of England's independence. Resistance
there was, but it came from men who were only a degree less alien than
those whose domination they resented.

Yet a governing class, planted by Henry II, was striking root in
English soil and drawing nourishment and inspiration from English
feelings. It was reinforced by John's loss of Normandy, which compelled
bi-national barons who held lands in both countries to choose between
their French and English sovereigns; and those who preferred England
became more English than they had been before. The French invasion of
England, which followed John's repudiation of the charter, widened the
cleavage; and there was something national, if little that was English,
in the government of Hubert de Burgh, and still more in the naval
victory which Hubert and the men of the Cinque Ports won over the
French in the Straits of Dover in 1217. But not a vestige of national
feeling animated Henry III; and for twenty-five wearisome years after
he had attained his majority he strove to govern England by means of
alien relatives and dependents.

The opposition offered by the great council was baronial rather than
national; the revolt in which it ended was a revolt of the half-breeds
rather than a revolt of the English; and the government they
established in 1258 was merely a legalized form of baronial anarchy.
But there was this difference between the anarchy of Stephen's reign
and that of Henry III's: now, when the foreigners fell out, the English
began to come by their own. A sort of "young England" party fell foul
of both the barons and the king; Simon de Montfort detached himself
from the baronial brethren with whom he had acted, and boldly placed
himself at the head of a movement for securing England for the English.
He summoned representatives from cities and boroughs to sit side by
side with greater and lesser barons in the great council of the realm,
which now became an English parliament; and for the first time since
the Norman Conquest men of the subject race were called up to
deliberate on national affairs. It does not matter whether this was the
stroke of a statesman's genius or the lucky improvisation of a party-
leader. Simon fell, but his work remained; Prince Edward, who copied
his tactics at Evesham, copied his politics in 1275 and afterwards at
Westminster; and under the first sovereign since the Norman Conquest
who bore an English name, the English people received their national
livery and the seisin of their inheritance.




CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

1272-1485


In 1265, simultaneously with the appearance of English townsfolk in
parliament, an official document couched in the English tongue appeared
like a first peak above the subsiding flood of foreign language. When,
three generations back, Abbot Samson had preached English sermons, they
were noted as exceptions; but now the vernacular language of the
subject race was forcing its way into higher circles, and even into
literary use. The upper classes were learning English, and those whose
normal tongue was English were thrusting themselves into, or at any
rate upon the notice of, the higher strata of society.

The two normal ranks of feudal society had in England naturally been
French lords and English tillers of the soil; but commerce had never
accommodated itself to this agricultural system, and the growth of
trade, of towns, of other forms of wealth than land, tended
concurrently to break down French and feudal domination. A large number
of towns had been granted, or rather sold, charters by Richard I and
John, not because those monarchs were interested in municipal
development, but because they wanted money, and in their rights of
jurisdiction over towns on the royal domain they possessed a ready
marketable commodity. The body which had the means to pay the king's
price was generally the local merchant guild; and while these
transactions developed local government, they did not necessarily
promote popular self-government, because the merchant guild was a
wealthy oligarchical body, and it might exercise the jurisdiction it
had bought from the king in quite as narrow and harsh a spirit as he
had done. The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and town
democracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that there
had once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way to
oligarchy and corruption. Nevertheless, these local bodies were
English, and legally their members had been villeins; and their
experience in local government prepared them for admittance to that
share in national government which the development of taxation made
almost necessary.

Henry II's scheme of active and comprehensive administration, indeed,
led by a natural sequence to the parliament of Edward I and further.
The more a government tries to do, the more taxation it must impose;
and the broadening of the basis of taxation led gradually to the
broadening of the basis of representation, for taxation is the mother
of representation. So long as real property only--that is to say, the
ownership of land--was taxed, the great council contained only the
great landowners. But Henry II had found it necessary to tax personalty
as well, both clerical and lay, and so by slow steps his successors in
the thirteenth century were driven to admit payers of taxes on
personalty to the great council. This representative system must not be
regarded as a concession to a popular demand for national self-
government. When in 1791 a beneficent British parliament granted a
popular assembly to the French Canadians, they looked askance and
muttered, "_C'est une machine anglaise pour nous taxer_"; and
Edward I's people would have been justified in entertaining the
suspicion that it was their money he wanted, not their advice, and
still less their control. He wished taxes to be voted in the royal
palace at Westminster, just as Henry I had insisted upon bishops being
elected in the royal chapel. In the royal presence burgesses and
knights of the shire would be more liberal with their constituents'
money than those constituents would be with their own when there were
neighbours to encourage resistance to a merely distant terror.

The representation people had enjoyed in the shire and hundred moots
had been a boon, not because it enabled a few privileged persons to
attend, but because by their attendance the mass were enabled to stay
away. If the lord or his steward would go in person, his attendance
exempted all his tenants; if he would not, the reeve and four "best"
men from each township had to go. The "best," moreover, were not chosen
by election; the duty and burden was attached to the "best" holdings in
the township, and in the thirteenth century the sheriff was hard put to
it to secure an adequate representation. This "suit of court" was, in
fact, an obligatory service, and membership of parliament was long
regarded in a similar light. Parliament did not clamour to be created;
it was forced by an enlightened monarchy on a less enlightened people.
A parliamentary "summons" had the imperative, minatory sound which now
only attaches to its police court use; and centuries later members were
occasionally "bound over" to attend at Westminster, and prosecuted if
they failed. On one occasion the two knights for Oxfordshire fled the
country on hearing of their election, and were proclaimed outlaws.
Members of parliament were, in fact, the scapegoats for the people, who
were all "intended" or understood to be present in parliament, but
enjoyed the privilege of absence through representation. The greater
barons never secured this privilege; they had to come in person when
summoned, just as they had to serve in person when the king went to the
wars. Gradually, of course, this attitude towards representation
changed as parliament grasped control of the public purse, and with it
the power of taxing its foes and sparing its friends. In other than
financial matters it began to pay to be a member; and then it suited
magnates not only to come in person but to represent the people in the
Lower House, the social quality of which developed with the growth of
its power. Only in very recent times has the House of Commons again
included such representatives as these whose names are taken from the
official returns for the parliaments of Edward I: John the Baker,
William the Tailor, Thomas the Summoner, Andrew the Piper, Walter the
Spicer, Roger the Draper, Richard the Dyer, Henry the Butcher, Durant
the Cordwainer, John the Taverner, William the Red of Bideford, Citizen
Richard (Ricardus Civis), and William the priest's son.

The appearance of emancipated villeins side by side with earls and
prelates in the great council of the realm is the most significant fact
of thirteenth-century English history. The people of England were
beginning to have a history which was not merely that of an alien
government; and their emergence is traceable not only in language,
literature, and local and national politics, but also in the art of
war. Edward I discovered in his Welsh wars that the long-bow was more
efficient than the weapons of the knight; and his grandson won English
victories at Crecy and Poitiers with a weapon which was within the
reach of the simple yeoman. The discovery of gunpowder and development
of artillery soon proved as fatal to the feudal castle as the long-bow
had to the mailed knight; and when the feudal classes had lost their
predominance in the art of war, and with it their monopoly of the power
of protection, both the reasons for their existence and their capacity
to maintain it were undermined. They took to trade, or, at least, to
money-making out of land, like ordinary citizens, and thus entered into
a competition in which they had not the same assurance of success.

Edward I's greatness consists mainly in his practical appreciation of
these tendencies. He was less original, but more fortunate in his
opportunity, than Henry II. The time had come to set limits to the
encroachments of feudalism and of the church, and Edward was able to
impose them because, unlike Henry II, he had the elements of a nation
at his back. He was not able to sweep back these inroads, but he placed
high-water marks along the frontiers of the state, and saw that they
were not transgressed. He inquired into the titles by which the great
lords held those portions of sovereign authority which they called
their liberties; but he could take no further action when Earl Warenne
produced a rusty sword as his effective title-deeds. He prohibited
further subinfeudation by enacting that when an estate was sold, the
purchaser should become the vassal of the vendor's lord and not of the
vendor himself; and the social pyramid was thus rendered more stable,
because its base was broadened instead of its height being increased.
He expelled the Jews as aliens, in spite of their usefulness to the
crown; he encouraged commerce by making profits from land liable to
seizure for debt; and he defined the jurisdiction of the church, though
he had to leave it authority over all matters relating to marriage,
wills, perjury, tithes, offences against the clergy, and ecclesiastical
buildings. He succeeded, however, in defiance of its opposition, in
making church property liable to temporal taxation, and in passing a
Mortmain Act which prohibited the giving of land to monasteries or
other corporations without the royal licence.

By thus increasing the national control over the church in England, he
made the church itself more national. It is sometimes implied that the
church was equally national throughout the Middle Ages; but it is
difficult to speak of a national church before there was a nation, or
to see that there was anything really English in a church ruled by
Lanfranc or Anselm, when there was not an Englishman on the bishops'
bench, when the vast majority of Englishmen were legally incapable as
villeins of even taking orders in the church, and when the vernacular
language had been ousted from its services. But with the English nation
grew an English church; Grosseteste denounced the dominance of aliens
in the church, while Simon de Montfort denounced it in the state. It
was, however, by secular authority that the English church was
differentiated from the church abroad. It was the barons and not the
bishops who had resisted the assimilation of English to Roman canon
law, and it was Edward I, and not Archbishops Peckham and Winchilsey,
who defied Pope Boniface VIII. Archbishops, indeed, still placed their
allegiance to the pope above that to their king.

The same sense of national and insular solidarity which led Edward to
defy the papacy also inspired his efforts to conquer Wales and
Scotland. Indeed, it was the refusal of the church to pay taxes in the
crisis of the Scottish war that provoked the quarrel with Boniface.
But, while Edward was successful in Wales, he encountered in Scotland a
growing national spirit not altogether unlike that upon which Edward
himself relied in England. Nor was English patriotism sufficiently
developed to counteract the sectional feelings which took advantage of
the king's embarrassments. The king's necessity was his subjects'
opportunity, and the Confirmation of Charters extorted from him in 1297
stands, it is said, to the Great Charter of 1215 in the relation of
substance to shadow, of achievement to promise. Edward, however, gave
away much less than has often been imagined; he certainly did not
abandon his right to tallage the towns, and the lustre of his motto,
"Keep troth," is tarnished by his application to the pope for
absolution from his promises. Still, he was a great king who served
England well by his efforts to eliminate feudalism from the sphere of
government, and by his insistence on the doctrine that what touches all
should be approved by all. If to some catholic medievalists his reign
seems a climax in the ascent of the English people, a climax to be
followed by a prolonged recessional, it is because the national forces
which he fostered were soon to make irreparable breaches in the
superficial unity of Christendom.

The miserable reign of his worthless successor, Edward II, illustrated
the importance of the personal factor in the monarchy, and also showed
how incapable the barons were of supplying the place of the feeblest
king. Both parties failed because they took no account of the commons
of England or of national interests. The leading baron, Thomas of
Lancaster, was executed; Edward II was murdered; and his assassin,
Mortimer, was put to death by Edward III, who grasped some of the
significance of his grandfather's success and his father's failure. He
felt the national impulse, but he twisted it to serve a selfish and
dynastic end. It must not, however, be supposed that the Hundred Years'
War originated in Edward's claim to the French throne; that claim was
invented to provide a colourable pretext for French feudatories to
fight their sovereign in a war which was due to other causes. There was
Scotland, for instance, which France wished to save from Edward's
clutches; there were the English possessions in Gascony and Guienne,
from which the French king hoped to oust his rival; there were
bickerings about the lordship of the Narrow Seas which England claimed
under Edward II; and there was the wool-market in the Netherlands which
England wanted to control. The French nation, in fact, was feeling its
feet as well as the English; and a collision was only natural,
especially in Guienne and Gascony. Henry II had been as natural a
sovereign in France as in England, because he was quite as much a
Frenchman as an Englishman. But since then the kings of England had
grown English, and their dominion over soil which was growing French
became more and more unnatural. The claim to the throne, however, gave
the struggle a bitter and fruitless character; and the national means,
which Edward employed to maintain the war, only delayed its inevitably
futile end. It was supported by wealth derived from national commerce
with Flanders and Gascony; national armies were raised by enlistment to
replace the feudal levy; the national long-bow and not the feudal war-
horse won the battles of Crecy and Poitiers; and command of the sea
secured by a national navy enabled Edward to win the victory of Sluys
and complete the reduction of Calais. War, moreover, required extra
supplies in unprecedented amounts, and they took the form of national
taxes, voted by the House of Commons, which supplemented and then
supplanted the feudal aids as the mainstay of royal finance.

Control of these supplies brought the House of Commons into
constitutional prominence. It was no mere Third Estate after the
continental model, for knights of the shire sat side by side with
burgesses and citizens; and knights of the shire were the lesser
barons, who, receiving no special writ of summons, cast in their lot
with the Lower and not with the Upper House. Parliament had separated
into two Houses in the reign of Edward II--for Edward I's Model
Parliament had been a Single Chamber, though doubtless it voted by
classes--but the House of Commons represented the _communities_ of
the realm, and not its lower orders; or rather, it concentrated all
these communities--shires, cities, and boroughs--and welded them into a
single community of the realm. It thus created a nucleus for national
feeling, which gradually cured the localism of early England and the
sectionalism of feudal society; and it developed an _esprit de
corps_ which counteracted the influence of the court. The advantages
which the crown may have hoped to secure by bringing representatives up
to Westminster, and thus detaching them from their basis of local
resistance, were frustrated by the solidarity and consistency which
grew up among members of parliament; and this growing national
consciousness supplanted local consciousness as the safeguard of
constitutional liberty.

Most of the principles and expedients of representative government were
adumbrated during this first flush of English nationalism, which has
been called "the age of the Commons." The petitions, by which alone
parliament had been able to express its grievances, were turned into
bills which the crown had to answer, not evasively, but by a thinly
veiled "yes" or "no." The granting of taxes was made conditional upon
the redress of grievances; the crown finally lost its right to tallage;
and its powers of independent taxation were restricted to the levying
of the "ancient customs" upon dry goods and wines. If it required more
than these and than the proceeds from the royal domains, royal
jurisdiction, and diminishing feudal aids, it had to apply to
parliament. The expense of the Hundred Years' War rendered such
applications frequent; and they were used by the Commons to increase
their constitutional power. Attempts were made with varying success to
assert that the ministers of the crown, both local and national, were
responsible to parliament, and that money-grants could only originate
in the House of Commons, which might appropriate taxes to specific
objects and audit accounts so as to see that the appropriation was
carried out.

The growth of national feeling led also to limitations of papal power.
Early in Edward III's reign a claim was made that the king, in virtue
of his anointing at coronation, could exercise spiritual jurisdiction,
and the statutes of _Praemunire_ and _Provisors_ prohibited the
exercise in England of the pope's powers of judicature and appointment
to benefices without the royal licence, though royal connivance and
popular acquiescence enabled the papacy to enjoy these privileges for
nearly two centuries longer. National feeling was particularly inflamed
against the papacy because the "Babylonish captivity" of the pope at
Avignon made him appear an instrument in the hands of England's enemy,
the king of France; and that captivity was followed by the "Great
Schism," during which the quarrels of two, and then three, popes,
simultaneously claiming to be the only head of the church on earth,
undermined respect for their office. These circumstances combined with
the wealth and corruption of the church to provoke the Lollard
movement, which was the ecclesiastical aspect of the democratic
tendencies of the age.

One of the most striking illustrations of popular development was the
demand for vernacular versions of the Scriptures, which Wycliffe met by
his translation of the Bible. At the same time Langland made literature
for the common people out of their common lot, a fact that can hardly
be understood unless we remember that villeins, although they might be
fined by their lords for so doing, were sending their sons in
increasing numbers to schools, which were eventually thrown open to
them by the Statute of Labourers in 1406. The fact that Chaucer wrote
in English shows how the popular tongue was becoming the language of
the court and educated classes. Town chronicles and the records of
guilds and companies began to be written in English; legal proceedings
are taken in the same tongue, though the law-reports continued to be
written in French; and after a struggle between French and Latin, even
the laws are drawn up in English. That the church persisted, naturally
enough, in its usage of catholic Latin, tended to increase its
alienation from popular sympathies. Wycliffe represented this national
feeling when he appealed to national authority to reform a corrupt
Catholic church, and when he finally denied that power of miraculous
transubstantiation, upon which ultimately was based the claim of the
priesthood to special privileges and estimation. But his association
with the extreme forms of social agitation, which accompanied the
Lollard movement, is less clear.

Before the end of Edward III's reign the French war had produced a crop
of disgrace, disorder, and discontent. Heavy taxation had not availed
to retain the provinces ceded to England at the Treaty of Bretigny in
1360, and hordes of disbanded soldiery exploited the social
disorganization produced by the Black Death; a third of the population
was swept away, and many villeins deserted their land to take up the
more attractive labour provided in towns by growing crafts and
manufactures. The lords tried by drastic measures to exact the services
from villeins which there were not enough villeins to perform; and the
imposition of a poll-tax was the signal for a comprehensive revolt of
town artisans and agricultural labourers in 1381. Its failure did not
long impede their emancipation, and the process of commuting services
for rent seems to have gone on more rapidly in the first half of the
fifteenth than in the fourteenth century. But the passionate preaching
of social equality which inflamed the minds of the insurgents produced
no further results; in their existing condition of political education,
the peasant and artisan had perforce to be content with watching the
struggles of higher classes for power.

Richard II, who had succeeded his grandfather in 1377, reaped the
whirlwind of Edward's sowing, not so much in the consequences of the
war as in the fruits of his peerage policy. The fourteenth century
which nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronage
shrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, nor
has it any real English meaning. Its etymological meaning of "equal"
does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. But
the peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises,
earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of
parliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament nor
electors to the House of Commons, are not even equal to one another;
and certainly they would deny that other people were equal to them. The
use of the word in its modern sense was borrowed from France in the
fourteenth century; but in France it had a meaning which it could not
have in England. A peer in France claimed equality with the crown; that
is to say, he was the ruler of one of the great fiefs which had been
equal to the county of Paris when the count of Paris had been elected
by his equals king of France. If the king of Wessex had been elected
king of England by the other kings of the Heptarchy, and if those other
kings had left successors, those successors might have claimed to be
peers in a real sense. But they had no such pretensions; they were
simply greater barons, who had been the tenants-at-will of their king.

The barons, however, of William I or Henry II had been a large class of
comparatively small men, while the peers of Richard II were a small
class of big men. The mass of lesser barons had been separated from the
greater barons, and had been merged in the landed gentry who were
represented by the knights of the shire in the House of Commons. The
greater barons were summoned by special and individual writs to the
House of Lords; but there was nothing to fetter the crown in its issue
of these writs. The fact that a great baron was summoned once, did not
mean that he need be summoned again, and the summons of the father did
not involve the summons of his eldest son and successor. But gradually
the greater barons made this summons hereditary and robbed the crown of
all discretion in the matter, though it was not till the reign of
Charles I that the House of Lords decided in its own favour the
question whether the crown had the power to refuse a writ of summons to
a peer who had once received one.

With this narrowing of the baronage, the barons lost the position they
had held in the thirteenth century as leaders of constitutional reform,
and this part was played in the fourteenth century by the knights of
the shire. The greater barons devoted themselves rather to family than
to national politics; and a system of breeding-in amalgamated many
small houses into a few great ones. Thomas of Lancaster held five
earldoms; he was the rival of Edward II, and might well be called a
peer of the crown. Edward III, perceiving the menace of these great
houses to the crown, tried to capture them in its interests by means of
marriages between his sons and great heiresses. The Black Prince
married the daughter of the Earl of Kent; Lionel became Earl of Ulster
in the right of his wife; John of Gaunt married the heiress of
Lancaster and became Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock married the
heiress of the Bohuns, Earls of Essex and of Hereford; the descendants
of Edmund, Duke of York, absorbed the great rival house of Mortimer;
and other great houses were brought within the royal family circle. New
titles were imported from abroad to emphasize the new dignity of the
greater barons. Hitherto there had been barons only, and a few earls
whose dignity was an office; now by Edward III and Richard II there
were added dukes, marquises, and viscounts, and England might boast of
a peerage nearly, if not quite, as dangerous to the crown as that of
France. For Edward's policy failed: instead of securing the great
houses in the interests of the crown, it degraded the crown to the
arena of peerage rivalries, and ultimately made it the prize of noble
factions.

Richard II was not the man to deal with these over-mighty subjects. He
may perhaps be described as a "New" monarch born before his time. He
had some of the notions which the Tudors subsequently developed with
success; but he had none of their power and self-control, and he was
faced from his accession by a band of insubordinate uncles. Moreover,
it needed the Wars of the Roses finally to convince the country of the
meaning of the independence of the peerage. Richard fell a victim to
his own impatience and their turbulence. Henry IV came to the throne as
the king of the peers, and hardly maintained his uneasy crown against
their rival ambitions. The Commons, by constitutional reform, reduced
almost to insignificance a sovereignty which the Lords could not
overthrow by rebellion; and by insisting that the king should "live of
his own," without taxing the country, deprived him of the means of
orderly government. Their ideal constitution approached so nearly to
anarchy that it is impossible not to suspect collusion between them and
the Lords. The church alone could Henry placate by passing his statute
for burning heretics.

Henry V took refuge from this domestic imbroglio in a spirited foreign
policy, and put forward a claim more hollow than Edward III's to the
throne of France. There were temptations in the hopeless condition of
French affairs which no one but a statesman could have resisted; Henry,
a brilliant soldier and a bigoted churchman, was anything but a
statesman; and the value of his churchmanship may be gauged from the
fact that he assumed the insolence of a crusader against a nation more
catholic than his own. He won a deplorably splendid victory at
Agincourt, married the French king's daughter, and was crowned king of
France. Then he died in 1422, leaving a son nine months old, with
nothing but success in the impossible task of subduing France to save
the Lancastrian dynasty from the nemesis of vaulting ambition abroad
and problems shelved at home.

Step by step the curse of war came home to roost. Henry V's abler but
less brilliant brother, Bedford, stemmed till his death the rising tide
of English faction and French patriotism. Then the expulsion of the
English from France began, and a long tale of failure discredited the
government. The nation had spirit enough to resent defeat, but not the
means to avoid it; and strife between the peace party and the war party
in the government resolved itself into a faction fight between
Lancastrians and Yorkists. The consequent impotence of the government
provoked a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hirelings instead of
liegemen. Local factions fought with no respect for the law, which was
administered, if at all, in the interests of one or other of the great
factions at court; and these two great factions fostered and organized
local parties till the strife between them grew into the Wars of the
Roses.

Those wars are perhaps the most puzzling episode in English history.
The action of an organized government is comparatively easy to follow,
but it is impossible to analyze the politics of anarchy. The Yorkist
claim to the throne was not the cause of the war; it was, like Edward
III's claim to the throne of France, merely a matter of tactics, and
was only played as a trump card. No political, constitutional, or
religious principle was at stake; and the more peaceable, organized
parts of the community took little share in the struggle. No great
battle was fought south of the Thames, and no town stood a siege. It
looks as though the great military and feudal specialists, whose power
lay principally on the Borders, were engaged in a final internecine
struggle for the control of England, in somewhat the same way as the
Ostmark or East Border of the Empire became Austria, and the Nordmark
or North Border became Prussia, and in turn dominated Germany.
Certainly the defeat of these forces was a victory for southern and
eastern England, and for the commercial and maritime interests on which
its growing wealth and prosperity hung; and the most important point in
the wars was not the triumph of Edward IV over the Lancastrians in
1461, but his triumph over Warwick, the kingmaker, ten years later. The
New Monarchy has been plausibly dated from 1471; but Edward IV had not
the political genius to work out in detailed administration the results
of the victory which he owed to his military skill, and Richard III,
who possessed the ability, made himself impossible as a king by the
crimes he had to commit in order to reach the throne. The
reconstruction of English government on a broader and firmer national
basis was therefore left to Henry VII and the House of Tudor.




CHAPTER IV

THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM

1485-1603


England had passed through the Middle Ages without giving any sign of
the greatness which awaited its future development. Edward III and
Henry V had won temporary renown in France, but English sovereigns had
failed to subjugate the smaller countries of Scotland and Ireland,
which were more immediately their concern. Wycliffe and Chaucer, with
perhaps Roger Bacon, are the only English names of first importance in
the realms of medieval thought and literature, unless we put Bede (673-
735) in the Middle Ages; for insular genius does not seem to have
flourished under ecumenical inspiration; and even Wycliffe and Chaucer
may be claimed as products of the national rather than of the catholic
spirit. But with the transition from medieval to modern history, the
conditions were altered in England's favour. The geographical expansion
of Europe made the outposts of the Old World the _entrepôts_ for
the New; the development of navigation and sea-power changed the ocean
from the limit into the link of empires; and the growth of industry and
commerce revolutionized the social and financial foundations of power.
National states were forming; the state which could best adapt itself
to these changed and changing conditions would outdistance its rivals;
and its capacity to adapt itself to them would largely depend on the
strength and flexibility of its national organization. It was the
achievement of the New Monarchy to fashion this organization, and to
rescue the country from an anarchy which had already given other powers
the start in the race and promised little success for England.

Henry VII had to begin in a quiet, unostentatious way with very scanty
materials. With a bad title and many pretenders, with an evil heritage
of social disorder, he must have been sorely tempted to indulge in the
heroics of Henry V. He followed a sounder business policy, and his
reign is dull, because he gave peace and prosperity at home without
fighting a battle abroad. His foreign policy was dictated by insular
interests regardless of personal glory; and the security of his kingdom
and the trade of his people were the aims of all his treaties with
other powers. At home he carefully depressed the over-mighty subjects
who had made the Wars of the Roses; he kept down their number with such
success that he left behind him only one English duke and one English
marquis; he limited their retainers, and restrained by means of the
Star Chamber their habits of maintaining lawbreakers, packing juries,
and intimidating judges. By a careful distribution of fines and
benevolences he filled his exchequer without taxing the mass of his
people; and by giving office to ecclesiastics and men of humble origin
he both secured cheaper and more efficient administration, and
established a check upon feudal influence. He was determined that no
Englishman should build any castle walls over which the English king
could not look, and that, as far as possible, no private person should
possess a franchise in which the king's writ did not run. He left to
his son, Henry VIII, a stable throne and a united kingdom.

The first half of Henry VIII's reign left little mark on English
history. Wolsey played a brilliant but essentially futile part on the
diplomatic stage, where the rivalry and balance of forces between the
Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France helped him to pose as the
arbiter of Christendom. But he obtained no permanent national gains;
and the final result of his foreign policy was to make the emperor
master of the papacy at the moment when Henry wanted the pope to annul
his marriage with the emperor's aunt, Catherine of Aragon. Henry
desired a son to succeed him and to prevent the recurrence of dynastic
wars; he had only a daughter, Mary, and no woman had yet ruled or
reigned in England. The death of all his male children by Catherine
convinced him that his marriage with his deceased brother Arthur's
widow was invalid; and his passion for Anne Boleyn added zest to his
suit for a divorce. The pope could not afford to quarrel with Charles
V, who cared little, indeed, for the cause of his aunt, but much for
his cousin Mary's claim to the English throne; and in 1529 Henry began
the process, completed in the acts of Annates, Appeals, and Supremacy,
by which England severed its connexion with Rome, and the king became
head of an English church.

It is irrational to pretend that so durable an achievement was due to
so transient a cause as Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn or desire for a
son; vaster, older, and more deeply seated forces were at work. In one
sense the breach was simply the ecclesiastical consummation of the
forces which had long been making for national independence, and the
religious complement of the changes which had emancipated the English
state, language, and literature from foreign control.

The Catholic church naturally resisted its disintegration, and the
severance was effected by the secular arms of parliament and the crown.
The nationalism of the English church was the result rather than the
cause of the breach with Rome, and its national characteristics--
supreme governance by the king, the disappearance of cosmopolitan
religious orders, the parliamentary authorization of services in the
vernacular, of English books of Common Prayer, of English versions of
the Bible, and of the Thirty-nine Articles--were all imposed by
parliament after, and not adopted by the church before, the separation.
There were, indeed, no legal means by which the church in England could
have accomplished these things for itself; there were the convocations
of Canterbury and York, but these were two subordinate provinces of the
Catholic church; and, whatever may be said for provincial autonomy in
the medieval church, the only marks of national autonomy were stamped
upon it by the state. York was more independent of Canterbury than
Canterbury was of Rome; and the unity as well as the independence of
the national church depends upon the common subjection of both its
provinces to the crown.  This predominance of state over church was a
consequence of its nationalization; for where the boundaries of the two
coincide, the state generally has the upper hand. The papacy was only
made possible by the fall of the Western Empire; in the Eastern Empire
the state, so long as it survived, controlled the church; and the
independence of the medieval church was due to its catholicity, while
the state at best was only national. It was in defence of the
catholicity, as opposed to the nationalism, of the church that More and
Fisher went to the scaffold in 1535, and nearly the whole bench of
bishops was deprived in 1559. Henry VIII and Elizabeth were bent on
destroying the medieval discord between the Catholic church and the
national state. Catholicity had broken down in the state with the
decline of the empire, and was fast breaking down in the church;
nationalism had triumphed in the state, and was now to triumph in the
church.

In this respect the Reformation was the greatest achievement of the
national state, which emerged from the struggle with no rival for its
omnicompetent authority. Its despotism was the predominant
characteristic of the century, for the national state successfully rid
itself of the checks imposed, on the one hand by the Catholic church,
and on the other by the feudal franchises. But the supremacy was not
exclusively royal; parliament was the partner and accomplice of the
crown. It was the weapon which the Tudors employed to pass Acts of
Attainder against feudal magnates and Acts of Supremacy against the
church; and men complained that despotic authority had merely been
transferred from the pope to the king, and infallibility from the
church to parliament. "Parliament," wrote an Elizabethan statesman,
"establisheth forms of religion...."

But while Englishmen on the whole were pretty well agreed that foreign
jurisdiction was to be eliminated, and that Englishmen were to be
organized in one body, secular and spiritual, which might be called
indifferently a state-church or a church-state, there was much more
difference of opinion with regard to its theological complexion. It
might be Catholic or it might be Protestant in doctrine; and it was far
more difficult to solve this religious problem than to effect the
severance from Rome. There were, indeed, many currents in the stream,
some of them cross-currents, some political, some religious, but all
mingling imperceptibly with one another. The revolt of the nation
against a foreign authority is the most easily distinguished of these
tendencies; another is the revolt of the laity against the clerical
specialist. The church, it must be remembered, was often regarded as
consisting not of the whole body of the faithful, but simply of the
clergy, who continued to claim a monopoly of its privileges after they
had ceased to enjoy a monopoly of its intelligence and virtue. The
Renaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival of
clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write
and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles,
secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealth
and intelligence grew also as impatient of clerical as it had done of
military specialists. The essential feature of the reformed services
was that they were compiled in the common tongue and not in the Latin
of ecclesiastical experts, that a Book of _Common_ Prayer was used,
that congregational psalm-singing replaced the sacerdotal solo,
and a communion was substituted for a priestly miracle. Religious
service was to be something rendered by the people themselves, and not
performed for their benefit by the priest.

Individual participation and private judgment in religion were indeed
the essence of Protestantism, which was largely the religious aspect of
the revolt of the individual against the collectivism of the Middle
Ages. The control exercised by the church had, however, been less the
expression of the general will than the discipline by authority of
masses too illiterate to think for themselves. Attendance at public
worship would necessarily be their only form of devotion. But the
general emancipation of servile classes and spread of intelligence by
the Renaissance had led to a demand for vernacular versions of the
Scriptures and to a great deal of private and family religious
exercise, without which there could have been no Protestant
Reformation. Lollardy, which was a violent outburst of this domestic
piety, was never completely suppressed; and it flamed out afresh when
once political reasons, which had led the Lancastrians to support the
church, induced the Tudors to attack it.

Most spiritual of all the factors in the Reformation was the slow and
partial emancipation of men's minds from the materialism of the Middle
Ages. It may seem bold, in face of the vast secularization of church
property and other things in the sixteenth century, to speak of
emancipation from materialism. Nevertheless, there was a distinct step
in the progress of men's minds from that primitive condition of
intelligence in which they can only grasp material symbols of the real
conception. Rudimentary jurisprudence had confessed its inability to
penetrate men's thoughts and differentiate their actions according to
their motives; there had been a time when possession had seemed more
real than property, and when the transference of a right was
incomprehensible without the transference of its concrete symbols.
There could be no gift without its manual conveyance, no marriage
without a ring, no king without a coronation. Many of these material
swaddling-clothes remain and have their value. A national flag
stimulates loyalty, gold lace helps the cause of discipline. Bishop
Gardiner, in the sixteenth century, defended images on the ground that
they were documents all could read, while few could read the
Scriptures. To unimaginative men there could be no priest without
vestments, no worship without ritual, no communion of the Spirit
without the presence of the Body, no temple not made with hands, no God
without an image. To break the image, to abolish the vestments and the
ritual, to deny the transubstantiation, was to destroy the religion and
reverence of the masses, who could only grasp matter and worship with
their senses.

Protestantism was, therefore, not a popular religion, and to thousands
of educated men it did not appeal. Few people are so immaterialistic
that they can dispense with symbols; many can idealize symbols in which
others see nothing but matter; and only those devoid of artistic
perception deny the religious value of sculpture, painting, and music.
Protestantism might be an ideal religion if men were compounded of pure
reason; being what they were, many adopted it because they were
impervious to artistic influence or impatient of spiritual discipline.
It will hardly do to divide the nation into intelligent Protestants and
illiterate Catholics: the point is that the somewhat crude symbolism
which had satisfied the cravings of the average man had ceased to be
sufficient for his newer intelligent needs; he demanded either a higher
symbolism or else as little as possible. Some felt the symbol a help,
others felt it a hindrance to the realization of the ideal; so some men
can see better with, others without, spectacles, but that fact would
hardly justify their abolition.

Henry VIII confined his sympathies to the revolt of the nation against
Rome and the revolt of the laity against the priests. The former he
used to make himself Supreme Head of the church, the latter to subdue
convocation and despoil the monasteries. All civilized countries have
found it expedient sooner or later to follow his example with regard to
monastic wealth; and there can be little doubt that the withholding of
so much land and so many men and women from productive purposes impeded
the material prosperity of the nation. But the devotion of the proceeds
to the foundation of private families, instead of to educational
endowment, can only be explained and not excused by the exigencies of
political tactics. His real services were political, not religious. He
taught England a good deal of her insular confidence; he proclaimed the
indivisible and indisputable sovereignty of the crown in parliament; he
not only incorporated Wales and the county palatine of Chester with
England, and began the English re-organization of Ireland, but he
united England north with England south of the Humber, and consolidated
the Borders, those frayed edges of the national state. He carried on
the work of Henry II and Edward I, and by subduing rival jurisdictions
stamped a final unity on the framework of the government.

The advisers of Edward VI embarked on the more difficult task of making
this organization Protestant; and the haste with which they, and
especially Northumberland, pressed on the change provoked first
rebellion in 1549 and then reaction under Mary. They were also
confronted with social discontent arising out of the general
substitution of competition for custom as the ruling economic
principle. Capital amassed in trade was applied to land, which began to
be treated as a source of money, not a source of men. Land held in
severalty was found more profitable than land held in common, large
estates than small holdings, and wool-growing than corn-growing. Small
tenants were evicted, small holdings consolidated, commons enclosed,
and arable land converted to pasture. The mass of the agricultural
population became mere labourers without rights of property on the soil
they tilled; thousands lost employment and swelled the ranks of sturdy
beggars; and sporadic disorder came to a head in Kett's rebellion in
Norfolk in 1549, which was with difficulty suppressed. But even this
highhanded expropriation of peasants by their landlords stimulated
national development. It created a vagrant mobile mass of labour, which
helped to meet the demands of new industrial markets and to feed
English oversea enterprise. A race that sticks like a limpet to the
soil may be happy but cannot be great; and the ejection of English
peasants from their homesteads saved them from the reproach of home-
keeping youths that they have ever homely wits.

Mary's reign, however, checked the national impulse towards expansion,
and thrust England for the moment back into the Middle Ages. First she
put herself and her kingdom under the aegis of Spain, to which in heart
and mind she belonged, by marrying Philip II. Then with his assistance
she restored the papal jurisdiction, and England surrendered its
national independence. Those who repudiated their foreign jurisdiction
were naturally treated as contumacious by the papal courts in England
and sent to the stake; and English adventurers were prohibited, in the
interests of Spain and Portugal, from trespassing in the New World.
Finally England was plunged into war with France in order to help
Philip, and lost Calais for its pains. Mary's reign showed that in a
sovereign good intentions and upright conversation exaggerate rather
than redeem the evil effects of bigotry and blindness. She had,
however, made it impossible for any successor to perpetuate in England
the Roman jurisdiction and the patronage of Spain.

Elizabeth was a sovereign more purely British in blood than any other
since the Norman Conquest; and to her appropriately fell the task of
completing her country's national independence. Henry VIII's Act of
Supremacy and Edward VI's of Uniformity were restored with some
modifications, in spite of the opposition of the Catholic bishops, who
contended that a nation had no right to deal independently with
ecclesiastical matters, and suffered deprivation and imprisonment
rather than recognize a schismatic national church. Elizabeth rejected
Philip's offers of marriage and paid no heed to his counsels of state.
She scandalized Catholic Europe by assisting the revolted Scots to
expel the French from North Britain; and revenged the contempt, in
which England had been held in Mary's reign, by supporting with
impunity the Dutch against Philip II and the Huguenots against the king
of France. She concealed her aggressions with diplomatic artifice and
caution; but at heart she was with her people, who lost no opportunity,
in their new-found confidence, of plundering and insulting the Catholic
powers in their way.

The astonishing success of England amid the novel conditions of
national rivalry requires some attempt at explanation. It seems to have
been due to the singular flexibility of the English character and
national system, and to the consequent ease with which they adapted
themselves to changing environment. Indeed, whatever may be the case at
present, a survey of English history suggests that the conventional
stolidity ascribed to John Bull was the least obvious of his
characteristics; and even to-day the only people who never change their
mind at general elections are the mercurial Celts. Certainly England
has never suffered from that rigidity of social system which has
hampered in the past the adaptability of its rivals. Even in feudal
times there was little law about status; and when the customary
arrangement of society in two agricultural classes of landlord and
tenant was modified by commerce, capitalism, and competition, nobles
adapted themselves to the change with some facility. They took to
sheep-farming and commercial speculations, just as later on they took
to keeping dairy-shops. It is the smallness rather than the source of
his profits that excites social prejudice against the shopkeeper in
England. On the Continent, however, class feeling prevented the
governing classes from participating in the expansion of commerce.
German barons, for instance, often with only a few florins a year
income, could not supplement it by trade; all they could do was to rob
the traders, robbery being a thoroughly genteel occupation. Hence
foreign governments were, as a rule, less alive and less responsive to
the commercial interests of their subjects. Philip II trampled on
commercial opinion in a way no English sovereign could have done.
Indeed, complaints were raised in England at the extent to which the
commercial classes had the ear of parliament and the crown; since the
accession of Henry VIII, it was said in 1559, they had succeeded by
their secret influence in procuring the rejection of every bill they
thought injurious to their interests.

There was no feeling of caste to obstruct the efficiency of English
administration. The nobility were separated from the nation by no fixed
line; there never was in England a nobility of blood, for all the sons
of a noble except the eldest were commoners. And while they were
constantly sinking into the mass of the nation, commoners frequently
rose to the rank of nobility. Before the end of the fourteenth century
wealth derived from trade had become an avenue to the House of Lords.
The justices of the peace, on whom the Tudors relied for local
administration, were largely descended from successful city men who
had, like the Walsinghams, planted themselves out in the country; and
Elizabeth herself was great-great-granddaughter of a London mayor. This
social elasticity enabled the government to avail itself of able men of
all classes, and the efficiency of Tudor administration was mainly due
to these recruits, whose genius would have been elsewhere neglected.
Further, it provided the government with agents peculiarly fitted by
training and knowledge to deal with the commercial problems which were
beginning to fill so large a sphere in politics; and finally, it
rendered the government singularly responsive to the public opinion of
the classes upon whose welfare depended the expansion of England.

Englishmen likewise took to the sea, when the sea became all-important,
as readily as they took to trade. English command of the Narrow Seas
had laid France open to the invasions of Edward III and Henry V, and
had checked the tide of French reconquest before the walls of Calais.
English piracy in the Channel was notorious in the fifteenth century,
and in the sixteenth it attained patriotic proportions. Henry VII had
encouraged Cabot's voyage to Newfoundland, but the papal partition of
new-found lands between Spain and Portugal barred to England the door
of legitimate, peaceful expansion; and there can be little doubt that
this prohibition made many converts to Protestantism among English
seafaring folk. Even Mary could not prevent her subjects from preying
on Spanish and Portuguese commerce and colonies; and with Elizabeth's
accession preying grew into a national pastime. Hawkins broke into
Spanish monopoly in the West Indies, Drake burst into their Pacific
preserves, and circumvented their defences; and a host of followers
plundered nearly every Spanish and Portuguese colony.

At last Philip was provoked into a naval war for which the English were
and he was not prepared. Spanish rigidity embraced the Spanish marine
as well as Spanish theology. Clinging to Mediterranean and medieval
traditions, Spain had failed to realize the conditions of sea-power or
naval tactics. England, on the other hand, had, largely under the
inspiration of Henry VIII, adapted its navy to oceanic purposes. A type
of vessel had been evolved capable of crossing the ocean, of
manoeuvring and of fighting under sail; to Drake the ship had become
the fighting unit, to the Duke of Medina Sidonia a ship was simply a
vehicle for soldiers, and a sea-fight was simply a land-fight on sea.
The crowning illustration of Spain's incapacity to adapt itself to new
conditions is perhaps the fact that only a marquis or duke could be
made a Spanish admiral.

England had disposed of similar claims to political and military
authority in 1569, when medieval feudalism made its last bid for the
control of English policy. For ten years Elizabeth had been guided by
Sir William Cecil, a typical "new man" of Tudor making, who hoped to
wean the common people from dependence upon their lords, and to
complete the destruction of feudal privileges which still impeded the
action of national sovereignty. The flight of Mary Queen of Scots into
England in 1568 provided a focus for noble discontent with Cecil's
rule, and the northern earls rebelled in 1569. The rebellion was easily
suppressed, but its failure did not deter the Duke of Norfolk, the
earls' accomplice, from joining Ridolfi's plot with similar ends. He
was brought to the block in 1572, and in him perished the last
surviving English duke. For more than half a century England had to do
its best--defeat the Spanish Armada, conquer Ireland, circumnavigate
the globe, lay the foundations of empire, produce the literature of the
Elizabethan age--without any ducal assistance. It was left for James I,
who also created the rank of baronet in order to sell the title (1611),
to revive the glories of ducal dignity in the persons of Ludovic
Stuart, Duke of Richmond, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham
(1623).

Cecil's drastic methods of dealing with the opposition lords left the
door of government open to men like Walsingham, who were determined to
give full play to the new forces in English politics. Discontented
reactionaries were reduced to impotent silence, or driven abroad to
side openly with the enemy. Pius V's bull excommunicating and deposing
Elizabeth (1570) shattered in a similar way the old Catholic party. The
majority acquiesced in the national religion; the extremists fled to
become conspirators at foreign courts or Jesuit and missionary priests.
The antagonism between England and Spain in the New World did more,
perhaps, than Spanish Catholicism to make Philip the natural patron of
these exiles and of their plots against the English government; and as
Spain and England drew apart, England and France drew together. In 1572
a defensive alliance was formed between them, and there seemed a
prospect of their co-operation to drive the Spaniards out of the
Netherlands. But Catholic France resented this Huguenot policy, and the
massacre of St. Bartholomew put a violent end to the scheme, while
Elizabeth and Philip patched up a truce for some years. There could,
however, be no permanent compromise, on the one hand, between Spanish
exclusiveness and the determination of Englishmen to force open the
door of the New World and, on the other, between English nationalism
and the papal resolve to reconquer England for the Catholic church.
Philip made common cause with the papacy and with its British champion,
Mary Queen of Scots, while Englishmen made common cause with Philip's
revolted subjects in the Netherlands. The acquisition of Portugal, its
fleet, and its colonial empire by Philip in 1580, the assassination of
William of Orange in 1584, and the victories of Alexander of Parma in
the Netherlands forced Elizabeth into decisive action. The Dutch were
taken under her wing, a national expedition led by Drake paralyzed
Spanish dominion in the West Indies in 1585 and then destroyed Philip's
fleet at Cadiz in 1587, and the Queen of Scots was executed.

At last Philip attempted a tardy retaliation with the Spanish Armada.
Its naval inefficiency was matched by political miscalculations. Philip
never imagined that a united England could be conquered; but he
laboured under the delusion, spread by English Catholic exiles, that
the majority of the English people only awaited a signal to rise
against their queen. When this delusion was exploded and the naval
incompetence of Spain exposed, his dreams of conquest vanished, and he
continued the war merely in the hope of securing guarantees against
English interference in the New World, in the Netherlands, and in
France, where he was helping the Catholic League to keep Henry of
Navarre off the French throne. Ireland, however, was his most promising
sphere of operations. There religious and racial hostility to the
English was fusing discordant Irish septs into an Irish nation, and the
appearance of a Spanish expedition was the signal for something like a
national revolt. England had not been rich enough in men or money to
give Ireland a really efficient government, but the extent of the
danger in 1598-1602 stimulated an effort which resulted in the first
real conquest of Ireland; and Englishmen set themselves to do the same
work, with about the same amount of benevolence, for the Irish that the
Normans had done for the Anglo-Saxons.

So far Tudor monarchy had proved an adequate exponent of English
nationalism, because nationalism had been concerned mainly with the
external problems of defence against foreign powers and jurisdictions.
But with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the urgency of those
problems passed away; and during the last fifteen years of Elizabeth's
reign national feelings found increasing expression in parliament and
in popular literature. In all forms of literature, but especially in
the Shakespearean drama, the keynote of the age was the evolution of a
national spirit and technique, and their emancipation from the
influence of classical and foreign models. In domestic politics a rift
appeared between the monarchy and the nation. For one thing the
alliance, forged by Henry VIII between the crown and parliament,
against the church, was being changed into an alliance between the
crown and church against the parliament, because parliament was
beginning to give expression to democratic ideas of government in state
and church which threatened the principle of personal rule common to
monarchy and to episcopacy. "No Bishop, no King," was a shrewd aphorism
of James I, which was in the making before he reached the throne. In
other respects--such as monopolies, the power of the crown to levy
indirect taxation without consent of parliament, to imprison subjects
without cause shown, and to tamper with the privileges of the House of
Commons--the royal prerogative was called in question. Popular
acquiescence in strong personal monarchy was beginning to waver now
that the need for it was disappearing with the growing security of
national independence. People could afford the luxuries of liberty and
party strife when their national existence was placed beyond the reach
of danger; and a national demand for a greater share of self-
government, which was to wreck the House of Stuart, was making itself
heard before, on March 24, 1603, the last sovereign of the line which
had made England a really national state passed away.




CHAPTER V

THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT

1603-1815


National independence and popular self-government, although they were
intimately associated as the two cardinal dogmas of nineteenth-century
liberalism, are very different things; and the achievement of complete
national independence under the Tudors did not in the least involve any
solution of the question of popular self-government. Still, that
achievement had been largely the work of the nation itself, and a
nation which had braved the spiritual thunders of the papacy and the
temporal arms of Philip II would not be naturally submissive under
domestic tyranny. Perhaps the fact that James I was an alien hastened
the admonition, which parliament addressed to him in the first session
of the reign, to the effect that it was not prepared to tolerate in him
many things which, on account of her age and sex, it had overlooked in
Elizabeth.

Parliament began the constitutional conflict thus foreshadowed with no
clear constitutional theory; and its views only crystallized under
pressure of James I's pretensions. James possessed an aptitude for
political speculation, which was rendered all the more dangerous by the
facilities he enjoyed for putting his theories into practice. He tried
to reduce monarchy to a logical system, and to enforce that system as
practical politics. He had succeeded to the English throne in spite of
Henry VIII's will, which had been given the force of a parliamentary
statute, and in spite of the common law which disabled an alien from
inheriting English land. His only claim was by heredity, which had
never been legally recognized to the exclusion of other principles of
succession. James was not content to ascribe his accession to such
mundane circumstances as the personal unfitness of his rivals and the
obvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; and
he was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditary
principle which had overcome obstacles so tremendous. Hence his theory
of divine hereditary right. It must be distinguished from the divine
right which the Tudors claimed; that was a right which was not
necessarily hereditary, but might be varied by the God of battles, as
at Bosworth. It must also be distinguished from the Catholic theory,
which gave the church a voice in the election and deposition of kings.
According to James's view, Providence had not merely ordained the king
_de facto_, but had pre-ordained the kings that were to be, by
selecting heredity as the principle by which the succession was to be
determined for ever and ever. This ordinance, being divine, was beyond
the power of man to alter. The fitness of the king to rule, the justice
or efficiency of his government, were irrelevant details. Parliament
could no more alter the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit his
authority than it could amend the constitution of the universe. From
this premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power was
absolute; the king could do no wrong for which his subjects could call
him to account; he was responsible to God but not to man--a doctrine
which the Reformation had encouraged by proclaiming the Royal Supremacy
over the church. He might, if he chose, make concessions to his people,
and a wise sovereign like himself would respect the concessions of his
predecessors. But parliamentary and popular privileges existed by royal
grace; they could not be claimed as rights.

This dogmatic assurance, to which the Tudors had never resorted,
embittered parliamentary opposition and obscured the historical
justification for many of James's claims. Historically, there was much
more to be said for the contention that parliament existed by grace of
the monarchy than for the counterclaim that the monarchy existed by
grace of parliament; and for the plea that parliament only possessed
such powers as the crown had granted, than for the counter-assertion
that the crown only enjoyed such rights as parliament had conceded. Few
of James's arbitrary acts could not be justified by precedent, and not
a little of his unpopularity was due to his efforts to exact from local
gentry the performance of duties which had been imposed upon them by
earlier parliaments. The main cause of dissatisfaction was the growing
popular conviction that constitutional weapons, used by the Tudors for
national purposes, were now being used by the Stuarts in the interests
of the monarchy against those of the nation; and as the breach widened,
the more the Stuarts were led to rely on these weapons and on their
theory of the divine right of kings, and the more parliament was driven
to insist upon its privileges and upon an alternative theory to that of
James I.

This alternative theory was difficult to elaborate. There was no idea
of democracy. Complete popular self-government is, indeed, impossible;
for the mass of men cannot rule, and the actual administration must
always be in the hands of a comparatively few experts. The problem was
and is how to control them and where to limit their authority; and this
is a question of degree. In 1603 no one claimed that ministers were
responsible to any one but the king; administration was his exclusive
function. It was, however, claimed that parliamentary sanction must be
obtained for the general principles upon which the people were to be
governed--that is to say, for legislation. The crown might appoint what
bishops it pleased, but it could not repeal the Act of Uniformity; it
might make war or peace, but could not impose direct and general
taxation; it selected judges, but they could only condemn men to death
or imprisonment for offences recognized by the law. The subject was not
at the mercy of the king except when he placed himself outside the law.

The disadvantage, however, of an unwritten constitution is that there
are always a number of cases for which the law does not provide; and
there were many more in the seventeenth century than there are to-day.
These cases constituted the debatable land between the crown and
parliament. Parliament assumed that the crown could neither diminish
parliamentary privilege nor develop its own prerogative without
parliamentary sanction; and it read this assumption back into history.
Nothing was legal unless it had been sanctioned by parliament; unless
the crown could vouch a parliamentary statute for its claims they were
denounced as void. This theory would have disposed of much of the
constitution, including the crown itself; even parliament had grown by
precedent rather than by statute. There were, as always, precedents on
both sides. The question was, which were the precedents of growth and
which were those of decay? That could only be decided by the force of
circumstances, and the control of parliament over the national purse
was the decisive factor in the situation.

The Stuarts, indeed, were held in a cleft stick. Their revenue was
steadily decreasing because the direct taxes, instead of growing with
the nation's income, had remained fixed amounts since the fourteenth
century, and the real value of those amounts declined rapidly with the
influx of precious metals from the New World. Yet the expense of
government automatically and inevitably increased, and disputes over
foreign policy, over the treatment of Roman Catholics, over episcopal
jurisdiction, over parliamentary privileges, and a host of minor
matters made the Commons more and more reluctant to fill the empty
Treasury. The blunt truth is that people will not pay for what they do
not consider their concern; and Stuart government grew less and less a
popular affair. The more the Stuarts demanded, the greater the
obstacles they encountered in securing compliance.

James I levied additional customs which were called impositions, and
the judges in 1606 properly decided that these were legal. But they
increased James's unpopularity; and, as a precaution, parliament would
only grant Charles I tonnage and poundage (the normal customs duties)
for one year after his accession instead of for life. Charles contended
that parliament had, owing to non-user, lost the right of refusing
these supplies to the crown; he proceeded to levy them by his own
authority, and further demanded a general forced loan and benevolence.
For refusing to pay, five knights were sent to prison by order of the
privy council "without cause shewn," whereby the crown avoided a
judicial decision on the legality of the loan. This provoked the
Petition of Right in 1628; but in 1629 Charles finally quarrelled with
parliament over the question whether in assenting to the petition he
had abandoned his right to levy tonnage and poundage. For eleven years
he ruled without parliament, raising supplies by various obsolete
expedients culminating in ship money, on behalf of which many patriotic
arguments about the necessities of naval defence were used.

He was brought up sharply when he began to kick against the
Presbyterian pricks of Scotland; and the expenses of the Bishops' War
put an end to the hand-to-mouth existence of his unparliamentary
government in England. The Long parliament went to the root of the
matter by demanding triennial sessions and the choice of ministers who
had the confidence of parliament. It emphasized its insistence upon
ministerial responsibility to parliament by executing Strafford and
afterwards Laud. Charles, who laboured under the impression common to
reactionaries that they are defending the rights of the people,
contended that, in claiming an unfettered right to choose his own
advisers, he was championing one of the most obvious liberties of the
subject. Parliament, however, had realized that in politics principles
consist of details as a pound consists of pence; and that if it wanted
sound legislative principles, it must take care of the details of
administration. Charles had ruled eleven years without parliament; but
so had Wolsey, and Elizabeth had apologized when she called it together
oftener than about once in five years. If the state had had more
financial ballast, and the church had been less high and top-heavy,
Charles might seemingly have weathered the storm and let parliament
subside into impotence, as the Bourbons let the States-General of
France, without any overt breach of the constitution. After all, the
original design of the crown had been to get money out of parliament,
and the main object of parliament had once been to make the king live
of his own. A king content with parsimony might lawfully dispense with
parliament; and the eleven years had shown the precarious basis of
parliamentary institutions, given a thrifty king and an unambitious
country. Events were demonstrating the truth of Hobbes's maxim that
sovereignty is indivisible; peace could not be kept between a sovereign
legislature and a sovereign executive; parliament must control the
crown, or some day the eleven years would recur and become perpetual.
In France, unparliamentary government was prolonged by the victory of
the crown for a century and three-quarters. In England, Charles's was
the last experiment, because parliament defeated the claim of the crown
to rule by means of irresponsible ministers.

In such a contest for the control of the executive there could be no
final arbitrament save that of force; but Charles was only able to
fight at all because parliament destroyed its own unanimity by
attacking the church, and thus provided him with a party and an army.
More than a temporary importance, however, attaches to the fact that
the abeyance of monarchical power at once gave rise to permanent
English parties; and it was natural that those parties should begin by
fighting a civil war, for party is in the main an organ for the
expression of combative instincts, and the metaphors of party warfare
are still of a military character. Englishmen's combative instincts
were formerly curbed by the crown; but since the decline of monarchy
they have either been vented against other nations, or expressed in
party conflicts. The instinct does not commonly require two forms of
expression at once, and party strife subsides during a national war.
Its methods of expression, too, have been slowly and partially
civilized; and even a general election is more humane than a civil war.
But the first attack of an epidemic is usually the most virulent, and
party strife has not a second time attained the dimensions of civil
war.

One reason for this mitigation is that the questions at issue have been
gradually narrowed down until, although they bulk large to heated
imaginations, they really cover a very small area of political life,
and the main lines continue the same whichever party triumphs. Another
reason is that experience has proved the necessity of the submission of
the minority to the majority. This is one of the greatest achievements
of politics. In the thirteenth century Peter des Roches claimed
exemption from the payment of a scutage on the ground that he had voted
against it, and his claim was held to be valid. Such a contention means
anarchy, and considerable progress had been made before the seventeenth
century towards the constitutional doctrine that the vote of the
majority binds the whole community. But the process was incomplete, and
the causes of strife between Roundhead and Royalist were fundamental. A
victory of the Royalists would have been carried to extremes, as the
victory of the Roundheads was; and the result would almost certainly
have been despotic government until a still more violent outbreak
precipitated the country into a series of revolutions.

Liberty, like religious toleration, has been won through the
internecine warfare between various forms of despotism; and the
strength of the Royalists lay in the fact that parliament, in espousing
Presbyterianism, weighted its cause with an ecclesiastical system as
narrow and tyrannical as Laud's. New presbyter was but old priest writ
large, and the balance between the two gave the decision into the hands
of the Independents, whose numerical inferiority was redeemed by
Cromwell's military genius. When Presbyterians and Independents had
ground the Royalists to powder at Marston Moor and Naseby, Charles
sought to recover his authority through their quarrels. He fell between
two stools. His double dealings with both parties led to the second
civil war, to his own execution, and to the abolition of monarchy and
of the House of Lords in 1649. Having crushed Catholic Ireland and
Presbyterian Scotland, to which Charles and his son had in turn
appealed, Cromwell was faced with the problem of governing England.

The victorious party was in a hopeless minority, and some of the
fervour with which the Independents appealed to divine election may
have been due to a consciousness that they would not have passed the
test of a popular vote. In their view, God had determined the
fundamentals of the constitution by giving the victory to His elect;
these fundamentals were to be enshrined in a written rigid
constitution, and placed beyond the reach of parliament or the people.
Under the sovereignty of this inspired constitution (1653), which
provided, among other things, for the union of England, Ireland, and
Scotland, a drastic reform of the franchise and redistribution of
seats, the government was to be in the hands of a "single person," the
Protector, and a single chamber, the House of Commons. The single
person soon found the single chamber "horridly arbitrary," and
preferred the freedom of military despotism. But his major-generals
were even more arbitrary than the single chamber, and in 1657 a fresh
constitution was elaborated with a Second Chamber to make it popular.
The Restoration had, in fact, begun almost as soon as the war was over;
the single chamber republic of 1649-1653 had given place to a single-
chamber monarchy, called the Protectorate, and a further step was taken
when in 1657 the "other" House was added; Cromwell was within an ace of
making himself a king and his dynasty hereditary. Only his personal
genius, the strength of his army, and the success of his foreign policy
enabled him thus to restore the forms of the old constitution without
the support of the social forces on which it had been based. His death
in 1658 was necessarily followed by anarchy, and anarchy by the recall
of Charles II.

The Restoration was not so much a restoration of monarchy, which had
really been achieved in 1653, as a restoration of the church, of
parliament, and of the landed gentry; and each took its toll of profit
from the situation. The church secured the most sectarian of its
various settlements, and the narrowness of its re-establishment kept
nearly half the nation outside its pale. The landed gentry obtained the
predominant voice in parliament for a century and three-quarters, and,
as a consequence, the abolition of its feudal services to the crown,
the financial deficit being made up by an excise on beer instead of by
a land-tax. Parliament emancipated itself from the dictation of the
army, taking care never to run that risk again, and from the
restrictions of a written, rigid constitution. It also recovered its
rotten boroughs and antiquated franchise, but lost its union with the
parliaments of Ireland and Scotland. At first it seemed more royalist
than the king; but it soon appeared that its enthusiasm for the
monarchy was more evanescent than its attachment to the church and
landed interest. Even in the first flush it refrained from restoring
the Star Chamber and the other prerogative courts and councils which
had enabled the crown to dispense with parliamentary and common law
control; and Charles II was never able to repeat his father's
experiment of ruling for eleven years without a parliament.

The ablest, least scrupulous, and most popular of the Stuarts, he began
his reign with two objects: the emancipation of the crown from control
as far as possible, and the emancipation of the Roman Catholics from
their position of political inferiority; but the pursuit of both
objects was strictly conditioned by a determination not to embark on
his travels again. The two objects were really incompatible. Charles
could only make himself autocratic with the support of the Anglican
church, and the church was determined to tolerate no relaxation of the
penal code against other Catholics. At first Charles had to submit to
Clarendon and the church; but in 1667 he gladly replaced Clarendon by
the Cabal administration, among the members of which the only bond of
unity was that it did not contain a sound Anglican churchman. With its
assistance he published his Declarations of Indulgence for Roman
Catholics and Dissenters (1672), and sought to secure himself against
parliamentary recalcitrance by a secret treaty with Louis XIV (1670).
This policy failed against the stubborn opposition of the church. The
Cabal fell; Danby, a replica of Clarendon, came into office; and the
Test Act of 1673 made the position of the Roman Catholics worse than it
was before the Declaration.

This failure convinced Charles that one of his two designs must go by
the board. He threw over the less popular cause of his co-religionists;
and henceforth devoted himself to the task of emancipating the crown
from parliamentary interference. But popular suspicion had been aroused
by Charles's secret dealings and James's open professions; and Titus
Oates, who knew something about real plans for the reconversion of
England, inflated his knowledge into a monstrous tale of a popish plot.
The Whigs, as the opposition party came to be called, used it for more
than it was worth to damage the Tories under Danby. The panic produced
one useful measure, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, many judicial
murders, and a foolish attempt to exclude James from the succession, As
it subsided, Charles deftly turned the reaction to the ruin of the
Whigs (1681). Of their leaders, Shaftesbury fled to Holland, and Sidney
and Russell were brought to the block; their parliamentary strongholds
in the cities and towns were packed with Tories; and for the last four
years of his reign Charles ruled without a parliament, but with the
goodwill of the Tories and the church.

This half of the nation would probably have acquiesced in the growth of
despotism under James II, had not the new king ostentatiously ignored
the wisdom of Charles II. He began (1685) with everything in his
favour: a Tory parliament, a discredited opposition, which further
weakened its case by Argyll's and Monmouth's rebellions, and a great
reputation for honesty. Within a couple of years he had thrown away all
these advantages by his revival of Charles II's abandoned Roman
Catholic policy, and had alienated the Anglican church, by whose
support alone he could hope to rule as an English despot. He suspended
and dispensed with laws, introduced Roman Catholics into the army, the
universities, the privy council, raised a standing force of thirty
thousand men, and finally prosecuted seven bishops for seditious libel.
William III, the husband of James's daughter Mary, was invited by
representatives of all parties to come over as England's deliverer, and
James fled on his approach. He could not fight, like his father,
because no English party supported his cause.

The Revolution of 1688 was singularly negative so far as its results
were expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. These
celebrated constitutional documents made little provision for national
self-government. One king, it is true, had been evicted from the
throne, and Roman Catholics were to be always excluded; and these
measures disposed of divine hereditary right. But that had been a
Stuart invention, and kings had been deposed before James II. Why
should self-government follow on the events of 1688 any more than on
those of 1399, 1461, or 1485? Future sovereigns were, indeed, to
refrain from doing much that James had done. They were not to keep a
standing army in time of peace, not to pardon ministers impeached by
the House of Commons, not to dismiss judges except on an address from
both Houses of Parliament, not to suspend laws at all nor to dispense
with them in the way James had done, not to keep a parliament nor do
without one longer than three years, and not to require excessive bail.
Religious toleration, too, was secured in some measure, and freedom of
the press to a limited extent. But all these enactments were safeguards
against the abuse of royal power and infringement of civil liberty
rather than provisions for self-government. No law was passed requiring
the king to be guided by ministers enjoying the confidence of
parliament; he was still the real and irresponsible executive, and
parliament was limited to legislation. The favourite Whig toast of
"civil and religious liberty" implied an Englishman's right to freedom
from molestation, but not a right to a voice in the government of the
country. Responsible self-government was not guaranteed by the laws,
but it was ensured by the facts, of the Revolution.

The truth is, that the methods of English constitutional progress have
been, down to this day, offensive strategy and defensive tactics.
Positions have been taken up which necessitate the retirement of the
forces of reaction, unless they are prepared to make attacks
predestined to defeat; and so, nearly every Liberal advance has been
made to appear the result of Tory aggression. The central position has
always been control of the purse by parliament. At first it only
embraced certain forms of direct taxation; gradually it was extended
and developed by careful spade-work until it covered every source of
revenue. Entrenched behind these formidable earthworks, parliament
proceeded to dictate to the early Stuarts the terms of national policy.
Charles I, provoked by its assumptions, made his attack on the central
position, was foiled, and in his retreat left large portions of the
crown's equipment in the hands of parliament. Rasher attacks by James
II resulted in a still more precipitate retreat and in the abandonment
of more of the royal prerogatives. The growth of the empire and of the
expenses of government riveted more firmly than ever the hold of
parliament over the crown; the greater the demands which it alone could
meet, the higher the conditions it could impose upon their grant, until
parliament determined absolutely the terms upon which the office of
monarchy should be held. In a similar way the Commons used their
control of the national purse to restrict the powers of the House of
Lords; provocation has led to attacks on the central position, and the
failure of these attacks has been followed by surrender. Prudent
leaders have preferred to retire without courting the preliminary of
defeat.

William III and his successors adopted this course when confronted with
the impregnable position of parliament after the Revolution; and hence
later constitutional gains, while no apparent part of the parliamentary
position, were its inevitable consequences. William, absorbed in a
life-and-death struggle with Louis XIV, required a constant stream of
supplies from parliament; and to secure its regularity he had to rely
on the good offices and advice of those who commanded most votes in the
House of Commons. In the Lords, who then numbered less than two
hundred, he could secure the balance of power through the appointment
of bishops. In the Commons his situation was more difficult. The
partial demise of personal monarchy in 1688 led to a scramble for its
effects, and the scramble to the organization of the two principal
competitors, the Whig and Tory parties. The Whigs formed a "junto," or
caucus, and the Tories followed their example. William preferred the
Whigs, because they sympathized with his wars; but the country
sometimes preferred the Tories, because it hated William's Dutchmen and
taxation. On William's death in 1702 the danger from Louis XIV was
considered so acute that a ministry was formed from all parties in
order to secure the united support of parliament; but gradually, in
Anne's reign, the Tories who wanted to make peace left the ministry,
until in 1708 it became purely Whig. In 1710 it fell, and the Tories
took its place. They wanted a Stuart restoration, even at the price of
undoing the Revolution, if only the Pretender would abandon his popery;
while the Whigs were determined to maintain the Revolution even at the
price of a Hanoverian dynasty. They returned to power in 1714 with the
accession of George I, and monopolized office for more than half a
century. As time went on, many Whigs became hardly distinguishable from
Tories who had relinquished Jacobitism; and from Lord North's accession
to office in 1770 down to 1830 the Tories enjoyed in their turn a half-
century of nearly unbroken power.

During this period the party system and cabinet government were
elaborated. Party supplanted the crown as the determining factor in
British government, and the cabinet became the executive committee of
the party possessing a majority in the House of Commons. Queen Anne had
not the intellect nor vigour to assert her independence of ministers,
and George I, who understood no English, ceased to attend cabinet
meetings. The royal veto disappeared, and even the king's choice of
ministers was severely limited, not by law but by practical
necessities. Ministers, instead of giving individual advice which the
sovereign might reject, met together without the king and tendered
collective advice, the rejection of which by the sovereign meant their
resignation, and if parliament agreed with them, its dissolution or
surrender on the part of the crown. For the purpose of tendering this
advice and maintaining order in the cabinet, a chief was needed;
Walpole, by eliminating all competitors during his long administration
(1721-1742), developed the office of prime minister, which, without any
law to establish it, became one of the most important of British
institutions. Similarly the cabinet itself grew and was not created by
any Act; indeed, while the cabinet and the prime minister were growing,
it would have been impossible to induce any parliament to create them,
for parliament was still jealous of royal influence, and even wanted to
exclude from its ranks all servants of the crown. But, fortunately, the
absence of a written constitution enabled the British constitution to
grow and adapt itself to circumstances without legal enactment.

The circumstance that the cabinet was the executive committee of the
majority in the House of Commons gave it the command of the Lower
House, and by means of the Commons' financial powers, of the crown.
This party system was deplored by many; Bolingbroke, a Tory leader out
of office, called for a national party, and urged the crown to
emancipate itself from Whig domination by choosing ministers from all
sections. Chatham thought that in the interests of national efficiency,
the ablest ministers should be selected, whatever their political
predilections. George III adapted these ideas to the purpose of making
himself a king in deed. But his success in breaking down the party and
cabinet system was partial and temporary; he only succeeded in humbling
the Whig houses by giving himself a master in the person of the younger
Pitt (1784), who was supported by the majority of the nation.

With the House of Lords the cabinet has had more prolonged and
complicated troubles. Ostensibly and constitutionally the disputes have
been between the two Houses of Parliament; and this was really the case
before the development of the close connexion between the cabinet and
the Commons. Both Houses had profited by the overthrow of the crown in
the seventeenth century, and the extremes to which they sometimes
pushed their claims suggest that they were as anxious as the crown had
been to place themselves above the law. The House of Lords did succeed
in making its judicial decisions law in spite of the crown and Commons,
although the Commons were part of the "High Court of Parliament," and
no law had granted the Lords supreme appellate jurisdiction; hence the
constitutional position of the House of Lords was made by its own
decisions and not by Act of Parliament or of the crown. This claim to
appellate jurisdiction, which was much disputed by the Commons during
the reign of Charles II, was only conceded in return for a similar
concession to the Commons in financial matters. Here the Commons
practically made their resolutions law, though the Lords insisted that
the privilege should not be abused by "tacking" extraneous provisions
on to financial measures.

There were some further disputes in the reigns of William III and Anne,
but the only occasion upon which peers were actually made in order to
carry a measure, was when the Tories created a dozen to pass the Peace
of Utrecht in 1712. It is, indeed, a singular fact that no serious
conflict between the two Houses occurred during the whole of the
Georgian period from 1714 to 1830. The explanation seems to be that
both Houses were simply the political agents of the same organized
aristocracy. The humble townsfolk who figured in the parliaments of
Edward I (see p. 65) disappeared when a seat in the House of Commons
became a position of power and privilege; and to the first parliament
(1547) for which journals of the Commons proved worth preserving, the
eldest son of a peer thought it worth while seeking election. Many
successors followed; towns were bribed or constrained to choose the
nominees of peers and country magnates; burgage tenements were bought
up by noble families to secure votes; and the Restoration parliament
had material reasons for treating Cromwell's reforms as void, and
restoring rotten boroughs and fancy franchises. By the time that
parliament had emancipated itself from the control of the crown, it had
also emancipated itself to a considerable extent from the control of
the constituencies.

This political system would not have developed nor lasted so long as it
did, had it not had some virtue and some relevance to its environment.
In every country's development there is a stage in which aristocracy is
the best form of government. England had outgrown monarchical
despotism, but it was not yet fit for democracy. Political power
depends upon education, and it would have been unreasonable to expect
intelligent votes from men who could not read or write, had small
knowledge of politics, little practical training in local
administration, and none of the will to exercise control. Politics were
still the affair of the few, because only the few could comprehend
them, or were conscious of the uses and limitations of political power.
The corrupt and misguided use of their votes by those who possessed
them was some reason for not extending the franchise to still more
ignorant masses; and it was not entirely irrational to leave the
control of national affairs in the hands of that section of the nation
which had received some sort of political education.

The defects, however, of a political system, which restricts power to a
limited class or classes, are that each class tends to exercise it in
its own interests and resents its extension to others, even when they
are qualified for its use. If all other historical records had
disappeared, land laws, game laws, inclosure acts, and corn laws--after
the Revolution a bounty was actually placed on the export of corn,
whereby the community was taxed in order to deprive itself of food or
make it dearer--alone would prove that political power in the Georgian
period was vested in a landed aristocracy, though England's commercial
policy, especially towards Ireland, would show that mercantile
interests had also to be consulted. Similarly, the journals of the
House of Commons would prove it to have been a close corporation less
anxious for the reign of law than for its own supremacy over the law.
It claimed authority to decide by its own resolutions who had the right
to vote for its members and who had the right to a seat. It expelled
members duly elected, and declared candidates elected who had been duly
rejected. It repudiated responsibility to public opinion as derogatory
to its liberties and independence; it excluded strangers, and punished
the publication of debates and division-lists as high misdemeanours. It
was a law unto itself, and its notions of liberty sometimes sank to the
level of those of a feudal baron.

Hence the comparative ease and success with which George III filled its
sacred precincts with his paid battalions of "king's friends." He would
have been powerless against a really representative House; but he could
buy boroughs and votes as effectively as Whig or Tory dukes, and it was
his intervention that raised a doubt in the mind of the House whether
it might not need some measure of reform. The influence of the crown,
it resolved in 1780, had increased, was increasing, and ought to be
diminished. But it could only be diminished by destroying that basis of
corruption which supported the power of the oligarchs no less than that
of the crown. Reform would be a self-denying ordinance, if not an act
of political suicide, as well as a blow at George III. Privileged
bodies do not reform themselves; proposals by Burke and by Pitt and by
others were rejected one after another; and then the French Revolution
came to stiffen the wavering ranks of reaction. Not till the Industrial
Revolution had changed the face of England did the old political forces
acknowledge their defeat and surrender their claim to govern the nation
against its will.




CHAPTER VI

THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND

1603-1815


In the reign of Elizabeth Englishmen had made themselves acquainted
with the world. They had surveyed it from Greenland's icy mountains to
India's coral strand, and from the Orinoco to Japan, where William
Adams built the first Japanese navy; they had interfered in the
politics of the Moluccas and had sold English woollens in Bokhara; they
had sailed through the Golden Gate of California and up the Golden Horn
of the Bosphorus; they had crossed the Pacific Ocean and the deserts of
Central Asia; they had made their country known alike to the Great Turk
and to the Grand Moghul. National unity and the fertile mingling of
classes had generated this expansive energy, for the explorers included
earls as well as humble mariners and traders; and all ranks, from the
queen downwards, took shares in their "adventures." They had thus
acquired a body of knowledge and experience which makes it misleading
to speak of their blundering into empire. They soon learnt to
concentrate their energies upon those quarters of the globe in which
expansion was easiest and most profitable. The East India Company had
received its charter in 1600, and the naval defeat of Spain had opened
the sea to all men; but, with the doubtful exception of Newfoundland,
England secured no permanent footing outside the British Isles until
after the crowns of England and Scotland had been united.

This personal union can hardly be called part of the expansion of
England, but it had been prepared by some assimilation and cooperation
between the two peoples, and it was followed by a great deal more. The
plantation of Ulster by English and Scots after the flight of the Irish
earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in 1607 is one illustration, and Nova
Scotia is another; but Virginia, the first colony of the empire, was a
purely English enterprise, and it cradled the first-born child of the
Mother of Parliaments. To Virginia men went for profit; principle drove
them to New England. The Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed in the
_Mayflower_ in 1620, had separated from the church and meant to
separate from the state, and to set up a polity the antithesis of that
of Laud and the Stuarts. But there was something in common between
them; the Puritans, too, wanted uniformity, and believed in their right
to compel all to think, or at least to worship, alike. Schism, however,
appeals with ill grace and little success to authority; and
dissentients from the dissenters formed Independent offshoots from New
England. But all these Puritan communities in the north were different
in character from Virginia in the south; they consisted of democratic
townships, Virginia of plantations worked by slaves. Slave labour was
also the economic basis of the colonies established on various West
Indian islands during the first half of the seventeenth century; and
this distinction between colonies used for exploitation and colonies
used for settlement has led to important constitutional variations in
the empire. Only those colonies in which large white communities are
settled have received self-government; those in which a few whites
exploit a large coloured population remain subject to the control of
the home government. The same economic and social differences were
responsible for the great American civil war between North and South in
the nineteenth century.

There are three periods in British colonial expansion. The first, or
introductory period, was marked by England's rivalry with Spain and
Portugal; the second by its rivalry with the Dutch; and the third by
its rivalry with France; and in each the rivalry led to wars in which
Britain was victorious. The Elizabethan war with Spain was followed by
the Dutch wars of the Commonwealth and Charles II's reign, and then by
the French wars, which lasted, with longer or shorter intervals, from
1688 to 1815. The wars with the Dutch showed how completely, in the
latter half of the seventeenth century, commercial interests outweighed
those of religion and politics. Even when English and Dutch were both
living under Protestant republics, they fought one another rather than
the Catholic monarchies of France and Spain. Their antagonism arose
over rival claims to sovereignty in the Narrow Seas, which the herring
fisheries had made as valuable as gold mines, and out of competition
for the world's carrying trade and for commerce in the East Indies. The
last-named source of irritation had led to a "massacre" of Englishmen
at Amboyna in 1623, after which the English abandoned the East Indian
islands to the Dutch East India Company, concentrating their attention
upon India, where the acquisition of settlements at Calcutta, Madras,
and Bombay laid the foundations of the three great Presidencies of the
British Empire in India.

A fatal blow was struck at the Dutch carrying trade by the Navigation
Acts of 1650-1651, which provided that all goods imported into England
or any of its colonies must be brought either in English ships or in
those of the producing country. The Dutch contested these Acts in a
stubborn naval war. The great Admirals, Van Tromp and Blake, were not
unevenly matched; but the Dutch failed to carry their point. The
principle of the Navigation Acts was reaffirmed, with some
modifications, after the Restoration, which made no difference to
England's commercial and colonial policy. A second Dutch war
accordingly broke out in 1664, and this time the Dutch, besides failing
in their original design, lost the New Netherland colony they had
established in North America. Portions of it became New York, so named
after the future James II, who was Duke of York and Lord High Admiral,
and other parts were colonized as Pennsylvania by the Quaker, William
Penn. The great importance of this acquisition was that it drove out
the wedge dividing the New England colonies to the north from Virginia
and Maryland, which had been founded in Charles I's reign, mainly as a
refuge for Roman Catholics, to the south; and this continuous line of
British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard was soon continued
southwards by the settlement of the two Carolinas. The colonization of
Georgia, still further south, in the reign of George II, completed the
thirteen colonies which became the original United States.

France now overshadowed Holland as England's chief competitor. Canada,
originally colonized by the French, had been conquered by the English
in 1629, but speedily restored by Charles I; and towards the close of
the seventeenth century France began to think of uniting Canada with
another French colony, Louisiana, by a chain of posts along the
Mississippi. Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, had greatly developed
French commerce, navy, and navigation; and the Mississippi Company was
an important factor in French history early in the eighteenth century.
This design, if successful, would have neutralized the advantage
England had secured in the possession of the Atlantic seaboard of North
America, and have made the vast West a heritage of France.

Nevertheless, the wars of William III and Anne were not in the main
colonial. Louis' support of James II, and his recognition of the Old
Pretender, were blows at the heart of the empire. Moderate success on
James's part might have led to its dismemberment, to the separation of
Catholic Ireland and the Scottish Highlands from the remainder of the
British Isles; and dominion abroad would not long have survived
disruption at home. The battle of the Boyne (1690) disposed of Irish
independence, and the Act of Union with Scotland (1707) ensured Great
Britain against the revival of separate sovereignties north and south
of the Tweed. Scotland surrendered her independent parliament and
administration: it received instead the protection of the Navigation
laws, representation in both houses of the United Parliament, and the
privilege of free trade with England and its colonies--which put an end
to the tariff wars waged between the two countries in the seventeenth
century; and it retained its established Presbyterian church. Forty-
five Scottish members were to sit in the House of Commons, and sixteen
Scottish peers elected by their fellows for each parliament in the
House of Lords. Scottish peers who were not thus chosen could neither
sit in the House of Lords nor seek election to the House of Commons.

In time this union contributed materially to the expansive energy of
the British Empire, but it did not substantially help Marlborough to
win his brilliant victories in the war with France (1702-1713). Apart
from the general defeat of Louis XIV's ambition to dominate Europe, the
most important result, from the British point of view, was the definite
establishment of Great Britain as a Mediterranean power by the
acquisition of Gibraltar and Minorca. English expeditions against
Canada had not been very successful, but the Peace of Utrecht (1713)
finally secured for the empire the outworks of the Canadian citadel--
Hudson's Bay Territories, Newfoundland, and the future provinces of
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The trading privileges which Great
Britain also secured in Spanish America both assisted the vast growth
of British commerce under Walpole's pacific rule, and provoked the war
with Spain in 1739 which helped to bring about his fall. This war,
which soon merged in the war of the Austrian Succession (1741-1748),
was indecisive in its colonial aspects, and left the question of French
or English predominance in India and North America to be settled in the
Seven Years' War of 1756-1763.

War, however, decides little by itself, and three of the world's
greatest soldiers, Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, founded no
permanent empires. An excellent servant, but a bad master, the soldier
needs to be the instrument of other than military forces if his labours
are to last; and the permanence of the results of the Seven Years' War
is due less to the genius of Pitt, Wolfe, Clive, and Howe than to the
causes which laid the foundations of their achievements. The future of
North America was determined not so much by Wolfe's capture of Quebec--
which had fallen into British hands before--as by the fact that before
the Seven Years' War broke out there were a million and a quarter
British colonists against some eighty thousand French. If Canada had
not fallen in the Seven Years' War, it would have succumbed to British
arms in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The fate of
India seemed less certain, and the genius of Dupleix roused better
hopes for France; yet India, defenceless as it was against European
forces, was bound to fall a prize to the masters of the sea, unless
some European state could control its almost impassable overland
approaches. Clive, perhaps, was almost as much the brilliant adventurer
as Dupleix, but he was supported at need by an organized government
more susceptible than the French _ancien régime_ to the pressure
of commercial interests and of popular ambitions.

The conquest of Canada led to the loss of the thirteen American
colonies. Their original bias towards separation had never been
eradicated, and the recurrent quarrels between the various legislatures
and their governors had only been prevented from coming to a head by
fear of the Frenchmen at their gates and disunion among themselves.
Charles II and James II wanted to centralize the New England colonies
on a monarchical basis; and they began by attacking their charters in
much the same way as they dealt with the Puritan corporations of
English cities and boroughs. Those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and
Rhode Island were forfeited, and these colonies were thus provided with
a grievance common to themselves and to the mother-country. But, while
the Revolution supplied a remedy at home, it did not in the colonies.
Their charters, indeed, were restored; but when the Massachusetts
legislature passed a bill similar to the Bill of Rights, the royal
assent was not accorded, and the colonists remained liable to taxation
without their own consent. This theoretical right of Great Britain to
tax the American colonies was wisely left in abeyance until George
Grenville's righteous soul was vexed with the thought that colonists,
for whose benefit the Seven Years' War had largely been waged, should
escape contribution towards its expenses. Walpole had reduced the
duties on colonial produce and had winked at the systematic evasion of
the Navigation Acts by the colonists. Grenville was incapable of such
statesmanlike obliquity. He tried to stop smuggling; he asserted the
right of the home government to control the vast hinterland from which
the colonists thought that the French had been evicted for their
particular benefit; and he passed the Stamp Act, levying internal
taxation from the colonies without consulting their legislatures.

Security from the French made the colonists think they were independent
of the British, and, having an inordinate proportion of lawyers among
them, they did not lack plausible arguments. They admitted the right of
the British parliament to impose external taxes, such as customs
duties, on the colonies, but denied its right to levy internal
taxation. The distinction was well established in English
constitutional history, and kings had long enjoyed powers over the
customs which they had lost over direct taxation. But the English
forefathers of the Puritan colonists had seen to it that control over
direct, led to control over indirect, taxation; and it may be assumed
that the American demand for the one would, if granted, soon have been
followed by a demand for the other. In any case, reasons for separation
would not have been long in forthcoming. It was not that the old
colonial system was particularly harsh or oppressive; for the colonial
producer, if restricted (nominally) to the home market, was well
protected there. But the colonists wanted complete control over their
own domestic affairs. It was a natural and a thoroughly British desire,
the denial of which to-day would at once provoke the disruption of the
empire; and there was no reason to expect colonial content with a
government which was not giving much satisfaction in England. A
peaceful solution was out of the question, because the governing
classes, which steadily resisted English demands for reform, were not
likely to concede American demands for radical innovations. There were
no precedents for such a self-denying ordinance as the grant of
colonial self-government, and law was on the side of George III. But
things that are lawful are not always expedient, and legal
justification is no proof of wisdom or statesmanship.

The English people supported George III until he had failed; but there
was not much enthusiasm for the war, except at places like Birmingham,
which possessed a small-arms manufactory and other stimulants to
patriotic fervour. It was badly mismanaged by George, and Whigs did
their best to hamper his efforts, fearing, with some reason, that
success in North America would encourage despotic enterprise at home.
George would, however, in all probability have won but for the
intervention of France and Spain (1778-1779), who hoped to wipe off the
scores of the Seven Years' War, and for the armed neutrality of Russia
and Holland (1780), who resented the arrogant claims of the British to
right of search on the high seas. At the critical moment Britain lost
the command of the sea; and although Rodney's naval victory (1782) and
the successful defence of Gibraltar (1779-1783) enabled her to obtain
tolerable terms from her European enemies, American independence had to
be granted (1783). For Ireland was on the verge of revolt, and British
dominion in India was shaken to its foundations. So the two great
sections of the English people parted company, perhaps to their mutual
profit. Certainly each government has now enough to do without solving
the other's problems, and it is well-nigh impossible to conceive a
state maintaining its equilibrium or its equanimity with two such
partners as the British Empire and the United States struggling for
predominance within it.

Meanwhile, Warren Hastings saved the situation in India by means that
were above the Oriental but below the normal English standard of
morality. He was impeached for his pains later on by the Whigs, whose
moral indignation was sharpened by resentment at the use of Anglo-
Indian gold to defeat them at the general election of 1784. Ireland was
placated by the grant of legislative independence (1782), a concession
both too wide and too narrow to provide any real solution of her
difficulties. It was too wide because Grattan's parliament, as it is
called, was co-ordinate with, and not subordinate to, the imperial
parliament; and there was thus no supreme authority to settle
differences, which sooner or later were bound to arise between the two.
It was too narrow, because the Irish executive remained responsible to
Downing Street and not to the Irish parliament. The parliament,
moreover, did not represent the Irish people; Catholics were excluded
from it, and until 1793 were denied the vote; sixty seats were in the
hands of three families, and a majority of the members were returned by
pocket-boroughs. A more hopeless want of system can hardly be imagined:
a corrupt aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted government,
a divided people--such was the verdict of a contemporary politician. At
length, after a Protestant revolt in Ulster, a Catholic rising in the
south, and a French invasion, Pitt bribed and cajoled the borough-
mongers to consent to union with Great Britain (1800). Thirty-two Irish
peers, twenty-eight temporal and four spiritual, were to sit in the
House of Lords, and a hundred Irish members in the House of Commons.
The realization of the prospect of Roman Catholic Emancipation, which
had been held out as a further consideration, was postponed by the
prejudices of George III until its saving grace had been lost.
Grattan's prophecy of retribution for the destruction of Irish liberty
has often been quoted: "We will avenge ourselves," he said, "by sending
into the ranks of your parliament, and into the very heart of your
constitution, one hundred of the greatest scoundrels in the kingdom";
but it is generally forgotten that he had in mind the kind of members
nominated by peers and borough-mongers to represent them in an
unreformed House of Commons.

The loss of the American colonies threw a shadow over British colonial
enterprise which had some lasting effects on the colonial policy of the
mother-country. The severance did not, as is often supposed, convince
Great Britain that the grant of self-government to colonies was the
only means to retain them. But they had been esteemed mainly as markets
for British exports, and the discovery that British exports to America
increased, instead of diminishing, after the grant of independence,
raised doubts about the value of colonies which explain the comparative
indifference of public opinion towards them during the next half-
century. For the commercial conception of empire was still in the
ascendant; and if the landed interest controlled the domestic politics
of the eighteenth century, the commercial interest determined the
outlines of British expansion. Territory was acquired or strongholds
seized in order to provide markets and guard trade communications.

From this point of view India became, after the loss of the American
colonies, the dominant factor in British external policy. The monetary
value of India to the British far exceeded that of all their other
foreign possessions put together. The East India Company's servants
often amassed huge fortunes in a few years, and the influence of this
wealth upon British politics became very apparent in the last quarter
of the century. It put up the price of parliamentary pocket-boroughs,
and thus delayed reform; it enabled commercial men to force their way
into the House of Lords by the side of landed magnates, and the younger
Pitt doubled its numbers in his efforts to win the political support of
the moneyed classes; and finally, it affected consciously or
unconsciously men's views of the interests of the empire and of the
policy to be pursued to serve them.

The half-century which followed the American War of Independence was
not, indeed, barren of results in other directions than those indicated
by the East India Company. Canada was saved from the seductions of
American independence by a wise recognition of its established customs
and religion (1774), and was strengthened by the influx of United
Empire Loyalists who would not bow the knee to republican separatism.
Provision was made for the government of these some what discordant
elements by dividing Canada into two provinces, one predominantly
French, the other British, and giving each a legislature for the
voicing of its grievances (1791). So, too, the impulse of the Seven
Years' War survived the War of Independence in other quarters of the
globe. Naval officers, released from war-like operations, were sent to
explore the Pacific; and, among them, Captain James Cook surveyed the
coasts of Australia and New Zealand (1770). The enthusiastic naturalist
of the expedition, Joseph Banks, persistently sang the praises of
Botany Bay; but the new acquisition was used as a convict settlement
(1788), which was hardly a happy method of extending British
civilization. The origin of Australia differed from that of New
England, in that the Pilgrim Fathers wanted to avoid the mother-
country; while the mother-country wanted to avoid the convicts; but in
neither case was there any imperialism in the aversion.

India was, in fact, the chief outlet at that period for British
imperial sentiment. It is true that Great Britain laid down in solemn
official language, in 1784, that the acquisition of territory was
repugnant to the principles of British government. But so had Frederick
the Great begun his career by writing a refutation of Machiavelli;
circumstances, and something within which made for empire, proved too
strong for liberal intentions, and the only British war waged between
the Peace of Versailles in 1783 and the rupture with Revolutionary
France in 1793 resulted in the dismemberment of Tippoo Sultan's kingdom
of Mysore (1792). The crusading truculence of the French republicans,
and Napoleon's ambition, made the security of the British Isles Pitt's
first consideration; but when that was confirmed by naval victories
over the French on the 1st of June, 1794, and at the battle of the Nile
in 1798, over the Dutch at Camperdown and over the Spaniards at Cape
St. Vincent in 1797, over the Danes at Copenhagen in 1801, and over the
French and Spaniards combined at Trafalgar in 1805, Great Britain
concentrated its energies mainly on extending its hold on India and the
Far East, and on strengthening its communications with them. The
purpose of the battle of the Nile was to evict Napoleon from Egypt,
which he had occupied as a stepping-stone to India, and Malta was
seized (1800) with a similar object. Mauritius, too, was taken (1810),
because it had formed a profitable basis of operations for French
privateers against the East India trade; and the Cape of Good Hope was
conquered from the Dutch, the reluctant allies of the French, in 1795,
as a better half-way house to India than St. Helena, which England had
acquired from the same colonial rivals in 1673. The Cape was restored
in 1802, but reconquered in 1806 and retained in 1815.

In the Far East, British dominion was rapidly extended under the
stimulus of the Marquess Wellesley, elder brother of the Duke of
Wellington, who endeavoured in redundantly eloquent despatches to
reconcile his deeds with the pacific tone of his instructions. Ceylon
was taken from the Dutch in 1796, and was not restored like Java, which
suffered a similar conquest; and British settlements were soon
afterwards founded at Singapore and on the Malay Peninsula. In India
itself Tippoo was defeated and slain in his capital at Seringapatam in
1799, the Mahrattas were crushed at Assye and Argaum in 1803, the nabob
was forced to surrender the Carnatic, and the vizier the province of
Oudh, until the whole coast-line of India and the valley of the Ganges
had passed directly or indirectly under British control. These regions
were conquered partly because they were more attractive and accessible
to the British, and partly to prevent their being accessible to the
French; the poorer and more difficult mountainous districts of the
Deccan, isolated from foreign infection, were left under native rulers.

The final overthrow of Napoleon, to which Great Britain had contributed
more by its efforts in the Spanish Peninsular War (1808-1814) than at
the crowning mercy of Waterloo, confirmed its conquests in India and
its control of the trade routes of the world. Its one permanent failure
during the war was Whitelocke's expedition to Buenos Ayres in 1807;
that attack was not repeated because the Spaniards having, by their
revolt against Napoleon, become England's allies, it was hardly fair to
appropriate their colonies; and so South America was left to work out
its destinies under Latin and not Teutonic influence. Most of the West
Indian islands, however, with British Honduras and British Guiana on
the mainland, had been acquired for the empire, which had now secured
footholds in all the continents of the world. The development of those
footholds into great self-governing communities, the unique and real
achievement of the British Empire, was the work of the nineteenth
century; and its accomplishment depended upon the effects of the
changes known to us as the Industrial Revolution.




CHAPTER VII

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION


The Industrial Revolution is a phrase invented by Arnold Toynbee, and
now generally used to indicate those economic changes which turned
England from an agricultural into an industrial community. The period
during which these changes took place cannot from the nature of things
be definitely fixed; but usually it is taken to extend from about the
middle of the eighteenth century to the close of the reign of George
III. Two points, however, must be remembered: first, that there was a
commercial as well as an agricultural and an industrial stage of
development; and secondly, that this period contains merely the central
and crucial years of a process of specialization and expansion which
occupied centuries of English economic history. There was also before
the agricultural stage a pastoral stage; but that lies beyond the scope
of English history, because both the English people and the Celts they
conquered had passed out of the pastoral stage before recorded English
history begins. Each of these stages corresponds to a different social
organization: the pastoral stage was patriarchal, the agricultural
stage was feudal, the commercial stage was plutocratic, and the
industrial stage leads towards democracy. The stages, of course,
overlap one another, and every national community to-day is partly
pastoral, partly agricultural, partly commercial, and partly
industrial. We can only call a nation any one of these things in the
sense that they denote its dominant characteristic.

This evolution has been the result of man's increasing control over
nature. In the pastoral stage he takes of the produce of nature,
providing little or nothing himself. In the agricultural stage he
manipulates the soil and subdues it, he harnesses the wind and the
streams to grind his corn, and to water his land; Providence may have
placed all things under his feet, but he takes long to discover their
use and the means to use them. In the commercial and industrial stages
he employs the wind and water, steam and electricity, for transport,
communications, and manufactures. But he can only develop this mastery
by the interdependent processes of specialization, co-operation, and
expansion. A lonely shepherd can live on his flocks without help; a
single family can provide for its own agricultural subsistence, and the
normal holding of the primitive English family, the "hide" as it was
called, was really a share in all the means of livelihood, corn-land,
pasture-land, rights of common and of cutting wood. This family
independence long survived, and home-brewing, home-baking, home-
washing, are not even now extinct. Each family in the primitive village
did everything for itself. When its needs and standard of comfort grew,
increased facilities beyond the reach of the individual household were
provided by the lord of the manor, as, for instance, a mill, a
bakehouse, a wine-press. Indeed, the possession of these things may
have helped him into the lordship of the manor. Certainly, some of them
are mentioned in early Anglo-Saxon days among the qualifications for
thegnhood, and when the lord possessed these things, he claimed a
monopoly; his tenants were bound to grind their corn at his mill, and
so forth. But there were things he did not care to do, and a villager
here and there began to specialize in such trades as the blacksmith's,
carpenter's, and mason's. This specialization involved co-operation and
the expansion of household economy into village economy. Others must do
the blacksmith's sowing and reaping, while he did the shoeing for the
whole village.

Thus village industries grew up, and in unprogressive countries, such
as India, where, owing to distance and lack of communications, villages
were isolated and self-sufficing, this village economy became
stereotyped, and the village trades hereditary. But in western Europe,
as order was slowly evolved after the chaos of the Dark Ages,
communications and trade-routes were opened up; and whole villages
began to specialize in certain industries, leaving other commodities to
be produced by other communities. For the exchange of these commodities
markets and fairs were established at various convenient centres; and
this in turn led to the specialization of traders and merchants, who
did not make, but only arranged for the barter of, manufactures.
Through the development of local industries and markets, villages grew
into towns, and towns expanded with the extent of the area they
supplied. A town which supplied a nation with cutlery, for instance,
was necessarily bigger than a town which only supplied a county. This
expansion of markets meant that towns and cities were more and more
specializing in some one or more industries, leaving the great majority
of their needs to be supplied from elsewhere; and the whole process was
based on the growing complexity of civilization, on the multiplying
number of implements required to do the work of the world.

The comparatively simple organization of feudal society broke down
under the stress of these changes; a middle class, consisting of
neither lords nor villeins, was needed to cope with industry and
commerce. Handworkers also were required, so that from the middle of
the fourteenth century we find a regular flight from the land to the
towns in progress. Another great change took place. No one had been
rich according to modern notions in the early Middle Ages, and no one
had been destitute; there was no need of a Poor Law. But with the
expansion of the sphere of men's operations, the differences between
the poor and the rich began to increase. There is little to choose
between a slow runner and a swift when the race covers only ten yards;
there is more when it covers a hundred, and a great deal when it covers
a mile. So, too, when operations are limited to the village market,
ability has a limited scope, and the able financier does not grow so
very much richer than his neighbour. But when his market comprises a
nation, his means for acquiring wealth are extended; the rich become
richer, and the poor, comparatively at any rate, poorer. Hence, when in
the fourteenth and following centuries the national market expands into
a world market, we find growing up side by side capitalism and
destitution; and the reason why there are so many millionaires and so
much destitution to-day, compared with earlier times, is that the world
is now one market, and the range of operations is only limited by the
globe.

The control of the world's supplies tends to get into the hands of a
few big producers or operators instead of being in the hands of a vast
number of small ones; and this has come about through ever-expanding
markets and ever-increasing specialization. Even whole nations
specialize more or less; some produce the corn-supply of the world,
some its coal, some its oil, and some do its carrying trade. It is now
a question whether there should not be some limits to this process, and
it is asked whether a nation or empire should not be self-supporting,
irrespective of the economic advantages of expansion and
specialization, and of the fact that the more self-supporting it is,
the less trade can it do with others; for it cannot export unless it
imports, and if each nation makes everything it wants itself it will
neither sell to, nor buy from, other nations.

There have been two periods in English history during which these
general tendencies have been especially marked. One was at the close of
the Middle Ages, and the other during the reign of George III. The
break-up of the manorial system, the growth of a body of mobile labour,
and of capital seeking investment, the discovery of new worlds and new
markets, heralded the advent of the middle class and of the commercial
age. Custom, which had regulated most things in the Middle Ages, gave
way to competition, which defied all regulation; and England became a
nation of privateers, despoiling the church, Spain, Ireland, and often
the commonwealth itself. Scores of acts against fraudulent
manufacturers and against inclosures were passed in vain, because they
ran counter to economic conditions. The products of the new factories,
like Jack of Newbury's kerseys, could not equal in quality the older
home-made article, because the home-made article was produced under
non-economic conditions. Spinsters today knit better garments than
those turned out in bulk, because neither time nor money is any
consideration with them; they knit for occupation, not for a living,
and they can afford to devote more labour to their produce than they
could possibly do if they depended upon it for subsistence. The case
was the same with the home-products of earlier times, and compared with
them the newer factory-product was shoddy; because, if the manufacturer
was to earn a living from his industry he must produce a certain
quantity within a limited time. These by-products of the home were
enabled to hold their own against the factory products until the
development of machinery in the eighteenth century; and until that time
the factory system, although factories existed on a rudimentary scale,
did not fully develop. So far as it did develop, it meant an increase
in the efficiency and in the total wealth of the nation, but a decrease
in the prosperity of thousands of individual households.

The effect of inclosures was very similar. The old system of the
villagers cultivating in turn strips of land in open fields was
undoubtedly unsound, if the amount of wealth produced is the sole
criterion; but it produced enough for the individual village-community,
and the increased production accruing from inclosures went to swell the
total wealth of the nation and of those who manipulated it at the cost
of the tillers of the soil. The cost to the community was potential
rather than actual; common lands which are now worth millions were
appropriated by landlords in defiance of the law. This illegality was
remedied in 1549, not by stopping the inclosures but by making them
legal, provided that "sufficient" commons were left; if the incloser
considered his leavings enough, the gainsaying of the tenants was to be
ignored, or punished as treason or felony in case of persistence.
England, however, was still fairly big for its three or four millions
of souls, and an Act of Queen Elizabeth provided that every new cottage
built should stand in four acres of its own. This anticipation of the
demand for three acres and a cow did something to check excessive
specialization; for the tenants of these cottages added a little
cultivation on their own account to their occupations as hired
labourers or village artisans. In the seventeenth century the land-
hunger of the landlords was generally sated by schemes for draining and
embanking; and vast tracts of fen and marsh, such as Hatfield Chase and
Bedford Level, were thus brought under cultivation.

Commerce rather than industrialism or agriculture is the distinctive
feature of English economy during the seventeenth and first half of the
eighteenth century. By means of newly developed trade-routes, the East
and the West were tapped for such products as tobacco, tea, coffee,
cocoa, sugar, rum, spices, oranges, lemons, raisins, currants, silks,
cotton, rice, and others with which England had previously somehow or
other dispensed; and the principal bone of contention was the carrying
trade of the world. Shipbuilding was the most famous English industry;
and when Peter the Great visited England, he spent most of his time in
the Deptford yards. For some of these imports England paid by her
services as carrier; and so far as India was concerned it was a case of
robbery rather than exchange. But exports were more and more required
to pay for the ever-increasing imports. It is impossible to state
categorically either that the imports provoked the exports or the
exports the imports; for the supply creates the demand as much as the
demand creates the supply. There can have been no conscious demand for
tobacco in England before any Englishman had smoked a pipe; and when an
English merchant in Elizabeth's reign took a thousand kerseys to
Bokhara, he did so without waiting for an order. Both exports and
imports, however, can only develop together; the dimensions to which
English commerce had attained by Walpole's time involved exports as
well as imports; and the exports could not have been provided without
developing English industries.

In particular, England had to export to the colonies because the
colonies had by the Navigation Acts to export to England; and Walpole's
abolition or reduction of duties on colonial produce illustrated and
encouraged the growth of this trade. In return for colonial tobacco,
rice, cotton, sugar, England sent chiefly woollen and afterwards cotton
manufactures. These woollens had long been manufactured on the domestic
system in the sheep-rearing districts of England, particularly
Yorkshire; many a cottage with its four acres for farming had also its
spinning-wheel, and many a village its loom; and the cloth when
finished was conveyed by pack-horses or waggons to the markets and
fairs to be sold for export or home consumption. But between 1764 and
1779 a series of inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton,
transformed the simple spinning-wheel into an elaborate machine capable
of doing the work of many spinners; and once more an advance in
national productivity was made at the expense of the individual workers
who took to breaking the machines to stop their loss of work.

Similar changes followed in cotton-spinning and other industries, and
the result was to alter the whole economic structure of England. The
cottager could not afford the new and expensive machinery, and his
spinning-wheels and hand-looms were hopelessly beaten in the
competition. Huge factories were required for the new inventions, where
the workers were all huddled together instead of working in their
scattered homes; and large populations grew up around these new and
artificial manufacturing centres. Their locality was, however,
determined by natural causes; at first water-power was the best
available force to drive the new machines, and consequently towns
sprang up along the banks of rivers. But Watt's application of steam-
power to machinery soon supplanted water; and for steam-power coal and
iron were the greatest necessities. Factories therefore tended to
congregate where coal and iron were found; and the need for these
materials created the coal and iron industries. Moreover, the pack-
horse, the waggon, and the old unmetalled roads soon proved inadequate
for the new requirements of transport. For a time canals became the
favourite substitute, and many were constructed. Then Macadam invented
his method of making roads; finally, Stephenson developed the steam
locomotive, and the railway system came into existence.

Closely connected with these changes was a renewal of the inclosure
movement. The introduction of turnips and other roots, and the
development of the rotation of crops increased the value of the soil
and revived the stimulus to inclosure; and hundreds of inclosure acts
were hurriedly passed by a parliament which contained no
representatives of those who suffered from the process. It was assisted
by the further specialization consequent upon the industrial
revolution; while the agricultural labourer gave up spinning under the
stress of factory competition, the spinner deserted his cottage and
four acres in the country, to seek a dwelling near the factory which
employed him; and the Elizabethan Act, insisting upon the allocation of
four acres to each new cottage built, was repealed. But for that
repeal, factory slums would be garden cities, unless the incubus of
this provision had stopped the factory development. The final result of
the inclosure movement upon the country was to deprive the public of
most of its commons and open spaces, to deprive the agricultural
labourer of all right in the soil he tilled, and to rob him of that
magic of property which, in Arthur Young's phrase, turned sand into
gold.

The inevitable adjustment of the population to these altered economic
conditions entirely changed its distribution. Hitherto the progressive
and predominant parts of England had been the south and east;
conservatism found its refuge in the north and west, which rebelled
against the Tudors and fought for Charles I. The south and east had
been the manufacturing centres because iron was smelted with wood and
not with coal. Now that coal was substituted for wood, the
juxtaposition of coal and iron mines in the north attracted thither the
industries of the nation, while the special features of its climate
made South Lancashire the home of cotton-spinning. The balance of
population and political power followed. To-day southern England, apart
from London and some other ports, hardly does more than subsist, and
its occupations are largely parasitic. The work and the wealth and the
trade which support the empire and its burdens have their origin and
being in the north.

The population not only shifted, but rapidly increased. The uprooting
of peasants from their little plots of land which acted in medieval
England and acts to-day in France as a check upon breeding, and their
herding in crowded tenements, weakened both moral and prudential
restraints in the towns; while in the country the well-meant but ill-
considered action of the justices of the peace in supplementing the
beggarly wages of the labourers by grants out of the rates proportioned
to the number of each man's children produced a similar effect. The
result was an increase in the population welcome to patriots who hoped
for hordes of soldiers and sailors to fight Napoleon, but startling to
economists like Malthus, who inferred therefrom a natural law
constraining population to outrun the earth's increase. Malthus did not
foresee the needs of the empire, nor realize that the rapid growth in
the population of his day was largely due to the absence from the
proletariate of a standard of comfort and decency. Without the
Industrial Revolution Great Britain would not have been able to people
the lands she had marked for her own.

This increase and shifting of the people put the finishing touch to the
incongruities of the old political system, in which vast centres of
population teeming with life and throbbing with industry were
unrepresented, while members sat in parliament for boroughs so decayed
that nothing was left of them but a green mound, a park, or a ruined
wall. The struggle with the French Revolution and then with Napoleon
gave the vested interests a respite from their doom; and for seventeen
years after its close the Tories sat, clothed in the departing glories
of the war, upon the safety-valve of constitutional reform. Then in
1832, after one general election fought on this issue, and after
further resistance by the House of Lords on behalf of the liberties of
borough-proprietors and faggot-voters, the threat to create peers
induced a number to abstain sufficient to ensure the passing of the
first Reform Bill. It was a moderate measure to have brought the
country to the verge of political revolution; roughly, it disfranchised
a number of poor voters, but enfranchised the mass of the middle and
lower middle-class. Absolutely rotten boroughs were abolished, but a
large number of very small ones were retained, and the representation
of the new towns was somewhat grudging and restricted. A more drastic
measure, giving the vote to most of the town artisans was--being
introduced by a Tory minister, Disraeli, in 1867--passed by the House
of Lords without difficulty. The last alteration of the franchise,
giving the vote to agricultural labourers was--being introduced by
Gladstone in 1884--only passed by the House of Lords at the second time
of asking and after an agitation.

Political emancipation was but one of the results of the Industrial
Revolution; commercial expansion was another. England had now
definitely and decisively specialized in certain industries; she could
only do so by relying upon external sources for her supply of other
wants. The more her new industries gave her to export, the more she
required to import from customers upon whose wealth her own prosperity
depended. In particular, England became dependent upon foreign
producers for her food supplies. During the war the foreign supply of
corn was so hampered that it was as dear to import as to grow at home;
but after the peace the price began to fall, and the farmers and
landlords, whose rents depended ultimately upon the price of corn,
demanded protection corresponding to that which extensive tariffs on
imported articles gave to the manufacturers. The manufacturers, on the
other hand, wanted cheap food for their workpeople in order to be able
to pay them low wages. As a compromise, the Corn Laws of 1814 and 1828
provided a sliding scale of duties which rose as prices fell, and fell
as prices rose, a preference being given to colonial wheat.

The Reform Act of 1832, however, and the rapid increase of
manufactures, transferred the balance of power in parliament from the
landed to the manufacturing classes; factory hands were persuaded that
the repeal of the duties would largely increase the value of their
wages; and the failure of the potato-crop in Ireland in 1845-46
rendered an increase of imported food-stuffs imperative. Sir Robert
Peel accordingly carried a measure in 1846 providing for the gradual
abolition of the corn-duties, saving only a registration duty of one
shilling, which was removed some twenty years later. This repeal of the
Corn Laws did not appreciably affect the price of corn, the great
reduction of which was subsequently effected by the vast expansion of
corn-growing areas in the colonies and abroad. But it enormously
increased the supply at once, and gradually gave England the full
benefit of growing areas and declining prices. It is obvious that the
retention of the duty, which had been fixed at 24_s_. 8_d_. in 1828
when the price was 62_s_. or less a quarter, would have prevented
prices falling as they subsequently did below the value of the duty;
and it is no less certain that it would have impeded the development of
corn-growing districts in the colonies and abroad, and of British
imports from, and exports to, them.

The enormous increase in the import of corn helped, in fact, to double
British exports within ten years. This was the result of the general
freeing of trade, of which the repeal of the Corn Laws was only a part.
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were hundreds of
Acts, covering thousands of pages, on the statute-book, imposing an
infinity of chaotic duties on every kind of import; they made the
customs costly to collect and easy to evade; and the industry they
stimulated most was smuggling. The younger Pitt, influenced by Adam
Smith, whose _Wealth of Nations_ appeared in 1776, reduced and
simplified these duties; but 443 Acts still survived when in 1825
Huskisson and other enlightened statesmen secured their consolidation
and reduction to eleven. This Tariff Reform, as its supporters called
it, was a step towards Free Trade. Peel gradually adopted its
principles, induced partly by the failure of his efforts to use
existing duties for purposes of retaliation; and between 1841 and 1846
he abolished the duties on 605 articles and reduced them on 1035 more,
imposing a direct income-tax to replace the indirect taxes thus
repealed. The process was completed by Gladstone, and what is called
Free Trade was established as the fundamental principle of English
financial policy.

This does not mean that no duties are imposed on exports or imports; it
simply means that such duties as are levied are imposed for the sake of
revenue, and to protect neither the consumer from the export of
commodities he desires to purchase, nor the manufacturer from the
import of those he wishes to make. The great interests connected with
land and manufactures had ceased to hang together, and fell separately.
Protection of manufactured goods did not long survive the successful
attack which manufacturers had levelled against the protected produce
of the landlords and the farmers. The repeal of the Navigation Acts
rounded off the system; British shipping, indeed, needed no protection,
but the admission of colonial goods free of duty and the removal of the
embargo on their trade with foreign countries may not have compensated
the colonies for the loss of their preference in the British market.
The whole trend of affairs, however, both conscious and unconscious,
was to make the world one vast hive of industry, instead of an infinite
number of self-sufficient, separate hives; the village market had
expanded into the provincial market, the provincial into the national,
the national into the imperial, and the imperial into the world market.

We have not by any means exhausted the results of the Industrial
Revolution, and most of our social problems may be traced directly or
indirectly to this source. Its most general effect was to emphasize and
exaggerate the tendency towards specialization. Not only have most
workers now but one kind of work; that work becomes a smaller and
smaller part of increasingly complex industrial processes; and
concentration thereon makes it more and more difficult for the worker
to turn to other labour, if his employment fails. The specialist's lack
of all-round capacity is natural and notorious. Hence most serious
results follow the slightest dislocation of national economy. This
specialization has also important psychological effects. A farmer, with
his varied outdoor occupations, feels little craving for relief and
relaxation. The factory hand, with his attention riveted for hours at a
stretch on the wearisome iteration of machinery, requires recreation
and distraction: naturally he is a prey to unwholesome stimulants, such
as drink, betting, or the yellow press. The more educated and morally
restrained, however, seek intellectual stimulus, and the modern popular
demand for culture arises largely from the need of something to relieve
the grey monotony of industrial labour.

So, too, the problems of poverty, local government, and sanitation have
been created or intensified by the Industrial Revolution. It made
capitalists of the few and wage-earners of the many; and the tendency
of wages towards a minimum and of hours of labour towards a maximum has
only been counteracted by painful organization among the workers, and
later on by legislation extorted by their votes. Neither the
Evangelical nor the Oxford movement proved any prophylactic against the
immorality of commercial and industrial creeds. While those two
religious movements were at their height, new centres of industrial
population were allowed to grow up without the least regard for health
or decency. Under the influence of _laissez-faire_ philosophy, each
wretched slum-dweller was supposed to be capable, after his ten or
twelve hours in the factory, of looking after his own and his
children's education, his main-drainage, his risks from infection, and
the purity of his food and his water-supply. The old system of local
government was utterly inadequate and ill adapted to the new
conditions; and the social and physical environment of the working
classes was a disgrace to civilization pending the reconstruction of
society, still incomplete, which the Industrial Revolution imposed upon
the country in the nineteenth century.




CHAPTER VIII

A CENTURY OF EMPIRE

1815-1911


The British realms beyond the seas have little history before the
battle of Waterloo, a date at which the Englishman's historical
education has commonly come to an end; and if by chance it has gone any
further, it has probably been confined to purely domestic events or to
foreign episodes of such ephemeral interest as the Crimean War. It may
be well, therefore, to pass lightly over these matters in order to
sketch in brief outline the development of the empire and the problems
which it involves. European affairs, in fact, played a very subordinate
part in English history after 1815; so far as England was concerned, it
was a period of excursions and alarms rather than actual hostilities;
and the fortunes of English-speaking communities were not greatly
affected by the revolutions and wars which made and marred continental
nations, a circumstance which explains, if it does not excuse, the
almost total ignorance of European history displayed in British
colonies.

The interventions of Britain in continental politics were generally on
behalf of the principles of nationality and self-government. Under the
influence of Castlereagh and Canning the British government gradually
broke away from the Holy Alliance formed to suppress all protests
against the settlement reached after Napoleon's fall; and Britain
interposed with decisive effect at the battle of Navarino in 1827,
which secured the independence of Greece from Turkey. More diplomatic
intervention assisted the South American colonies to assert their
independence of the Spanish mother-country; and British volunteers
helped the Liberal cause in Spain and Portugal against reactionary
monarchs. Belgium was countenanced in its successful revolution against
the House of Orange, and Italian states in their revolts against native
and foreign despots; the expulsion of the Hapsburgs and Bourbons from
Italy, and its unification on a nationalist basis, owed something to
British diplomacy, which supported Cavour, and to British volunteers
who fought for Garibaldi. The attitude of Britain towards the Balkan
nationalities, which were endeavouring to throw off the Turkish yoke,
was more dubious; while Gladstone denounced Turkish atrocities,
Disraeli strengthened Turkey's hands. Yet England would have been as
enthusiastic for a liberated and united Balkan power as it had been for
a united Italy but for the claims of a rival liberator, Russia.

Russia was the bugbear of two generations of Englishmen; and classical
scholars, who interpreted modern politics by the light of ancient
Greece, saw in the absorption of Athens by Macedon a convincing
demonstration of the fate which the modern barbarian of the north was
to inflict upon the British heirs of Hellas. India was the real source
of this nervousness. British dominion, after further wars with the
Mahrattas, the Sikhs, and the Gurkhas, had extended up to the frontiers
of Afghanistan; but there was always the fear lest another sword should
take away dominion won by the British, and in British eyes it was an
offence that any other power should expand in Asia. The Russian and
British spheres of influence advanced till they met in Kabul; and for
fifty years the two powers contested, by more or less diplomatic
methods, the control of the Amir of Afghanistan. Turkey flanked the
overland route to India; and hence the protection of Turkey against
Russia became a cardinal point in British foreign policy. On behalf of
Turkey's integrity Great Britain fought, in alliance with France and
Sardinia, the futile Crimean War of 1854-1856, and nearly went to war
in 1877.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 introduced a fresh complication.
Relations between England and France had since Waterloo been friendly,
on the whole; but France had traditional interests in Egypt, which were
strengthened by the fact that a French engineer had constructed the
Suez Canal, and by French colonies in the Far East, to which the canal
was the shortest route. Rivalry with England for the control of Egypt
followed. The Dual Control, which was established in 1876, was
terminated by the refusal of France to assist in the suppression of
Egyptian revolts in 1882; and Great Britain was left in sole but
informal possession of power in Egypt, with the responsibility for its
defence against the Mahdi (1884-1885) and for the re-conquest of the
Sudan (1896-1898), which is now under the joint Egyptian and British
flags.

Meanwhile, British expansion to the east of India, the Burmese wars,
and annexation of Burma (1885) brought the empire into a contact with
French influence in Siam similar to its contact with Russian in
Afghanistan. Community of interests in the Far East, as well as the
need of protection against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and
Italy produced the _entente cordiale_ between France and Russia in
1890. Fortunately, the dangerous questions between them and Great
Britain were settled by diplomacy, assisted by the alliance between
Great Britain and Japan. The British and Russian spheres of action on
the north-west, and the British and French spheres to the east, of
India were delimited; southern Persia, the Persian Gulf, and the Malay
Peninsula were left to British vigilance and penetration, northern
Persia to Russian, and eastern Siam to French. Freed from these causes
of friction, Great Britain, Russia, and France exert a restraining
influence on the predominant partner in the Triple Alliance.

The development of a vast dominion in India has created for the British
government problems, of which the great Indian mutiny of 1857 was
merely one illustration. No power has succeeded in permanently
governing subject races by despotic authority; in North and South
America the natives have so dwindled in numbers as to leave the
conquerors indisputably supreme; in Europe and elsewhere in former
times the subject races fitted themselves for self-government, and then
absorbed their conquerors. The racial and religious gulf forbids a
similar solution of the Indian question, while the abandonment of her
task by Great Britain would leave India a prey to anarchy. The
difficulties of despotic rule were mitigated in the past by the utter
absence of any common sentiments and ideas among the many races,
religions, and castes which constituted India; and a Machiavellian
perpetuation of these divisions might have eased the labours of its
governors. But a government suffers for its virtues, and the steady
efforts of Great Britain to civilize and educate its Eastern subjects
have tended to destroy the divisions which made common action, common
aspirations, public opinion and self-government impossible in India.
The missionary, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, and the political
reformer have all helped to remove the bars of caste and race by
converting Brahmans, Mohammedans, Parsees to a common Christianity or
by undermining their attachment to their particular distinctions. They
have built railways and canals, which made communications and contact
unavoidable; they have imposed common measures of health, common legal
principles, and a common education in English culture and methods of
administration. The result has been to foster a consciousness of
nationality, the growth of a public opinion, and a demand for a greater
share in the management of affairs. The more efficient a despotism, the
more certain is its supersession; and the problem for the Indian
government is how to adjust and adapt the political emancipation of the
natives of India to the slow growth of their education and sense of
moral responsibility. At present, caste and racial and religious
differences, especially between Mohammedans and Hindus, though
weakening, are powerful disintegrants; not one per cent of the
population can read or write; and the existence of hundreds of native
states impedes the progress of national agitation.

A somewhat similar problem confronts British administration in Egypt,
where the difficulty of dealing with the agitation for national self-
government is complicated by the fact that technically the British
agent and consul-general is merely the informal adviser of the khedive,
who is himself the viceroy of the Sultan of Turkey. Ultimately the same
sort of dilemma will have to be faced in other parts of Africa under
British rule--British East Africa and Uganda, the Nigerian
protectorates and neighbouring districts, Rhodesia and British Central
Africa--as well as in the Malay States, Hong Kong, and the West Indies.
There are great differences of opinion among the white citizens of the
empire with regard to the treatment of their coloured fellow-subjects.
Australia and some provinces of the South African Union would exclude
Indian immigrants altogether; and white minorities have an invincible
repugnance to allowing black majorities to exercise a vote, except
under stringent precautions against its effect. We have, indeed,
improved upon the Greeks, who regarded all other races as outside the
scope of Greek morality; but we do not yet extend to coloured races the
same consideration that we do to white men.

So far as the white population of the empire is concerned, the problem
of self-government was solved in the nineteenth century by procedure
common to all the great dominions of the crown, though the
emancipation, which had cost the mother-country centuries of conflict,
was secured by many colonies in less than fifty years. Three normal
stages marked their progress, and Canada led the way in each. The first
was the acquisition of representative government--that is to say, of a
legislature consisting generally of two Houses, one of which was
popularly elected but had little control over the executive; the second
was the acquisition of responsible government--that is to say, of an
executive responsible to the popular local legislature instead of to
the home Colonial Office; and the third was federation. Canada had
possessed the first degree of self-government ever since 1791 (see p.
169), and was rapidly outgrowing it. Australia, however, did not pass
out of the crown colony stage, in which affairs are controlled by a
governor, with or without the assistance of a nominated legislative
council, until 1842, when elected members were added to the council of
New South Wales, and it was given the power of the purse. This
development was due to the exodus of the surplus population, created by
the Industrial Revolution, from Great Britain, which began soon after
1820, and affected Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Various companies and associations were founded under the influence of
Lord Durham, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and others, for the purpose of
settling labourers in these lands. Between 1820 and 1830 several
settlements were established in Western Australia, in 1836 South
Australia was colonized, and gradually Victoria, Queensland, and
Tasmania were organized as independent colonies out of offshoots from
the parent New South Wales. Each in turn received a representative
assembly, and developed individual characteristics.

Cape Colony followed on similar lines, variegated by the presence of a
rival European race, the Dutch. Slowly, in the generation which
succeeded the British conquest, they accumulated grievances against
their rulers. English was made the sole official language; Dutch
magistrates were superseded by English commissioners; slavery was
abolished, with inadequate compensation to the owners; little support
was given them in their wars with the natives, which the home
government and the missionaries, more interested in the woes of negroes
in South Africa than in those of children in British mines and
factories, attributed to Dutch brutality; and a Hottentot police was
actually established. In 1837 the more determined of the Dutch
"trekked" north and east to found republics in Natal, the Orange River
Free State, and the Transvaal. Purged of these discontented elements,
the Cape was given representative government in 1853, and Natal, which
had been annexed in 1844, received a similar constitution in 1856.

Meanwhile, Canada had advanced through constitutional struggles and
open rebellion to the second stage. It had received its baptism of fire
during the war (1812-1814) between Great Britain and the United States,
when French and British Canadians fought side by side against a common
enemy. But both provinces soon experienced difficulties similar to
those between the Stuarts and their parliaments; their legislative
assemblies had no control over their executive governments, and in 1837
Papineau's rebellion broke out in Lower, and Mackenzie's in Upper,
Canada. Lord Durham was sent out to investigate the causes of
discontent, and his report marks an epoch in colonial history. The idea
that the American War of Independence had taught the mother-country the
necessity of granting complete self-government to her colonies is a
persistent misconception; and hitherto no British colony had received a
fuller measure of self-government than had been enjoyed by the American
colonies before their Declaration of Independence. The grant of this
responsible self-government was one of the two principal
recommendations of Lord Durham's report. The other was the union of the
two provinces, which, it was hoped, would give the British a majority
over the French. This recommendation, which ultimately proved
unworkable, was carried out at once; the other, which has been the
saving of the empire, was left for Lord Elgin to elaborate. He made it
a principle to choose as ministers only those politicians who possessed
the confidence of the popular assembly, and his example, followed by
his successors, crystallized into a fundamental maxim of British
colonial government. It was extended to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick
in 1848, and to Newfoundland (which had in 1832 received a legislative
assembly) in 1855.

To Lord John Russell, who was prime minister from 1846 to 1851, to his
colonial secretary, the third Earl Grey, and to Lords Aberdeen and
Palmerston, who succeeded as premiers in 1852 and 1855, belongs the
credit of having conferred full rights of self-government on most of
the empire's oversea dominions. Australia, where the discovery of gold
in 1851 added enormously to her population, soon followed in Canada's
wake, and by 1856 every Australian colony, with the exception of
Western Australia, had, with the consent of the Imperial parliament,
worked out a constitution for itself, comprising two legislative
chambers and a responsible cabinet. New Zealand, which had begun to be
sparsely settled between 1820 and 1840, and had been annexed in the
latter year, received in 1852 from the Imperial parliament a
Constitution Act, which left it to Sir George Grey, the Governor, to
work out in practice the responsibility of ministers to the
legislature. Other colonies were slower in their constitutional
development; Cape Colony was not granted a responsible administration
till 1872; Western Australia, which had continued to receive convicts
after their transportation to other Australian colonies had been
successfully resisted, did not receive complete self-government till
1890, and Natal not until 1893.

The latest British colonies to receive this livery of the empire were
the Transvaal and the Orange River colonies. A chequered existence had
been their fate since their founders had trekked north in 1837. The
Orange River Free State had been annexed by Britain in 1848, had
rebelled, and been granted independence again in 1854. The Transvaal
had been annexed in 1877, had rebelled, and had been granted almost
complete independence again after Majuba in 1881. The Orange Free
State, relieved of the diamond fields which belonged to it in the
neighbourhood of Kimberley in 1870, pursued the even tenor of its way;
but the gold mines discovered in the Transvaal were not so near its
borders, and gave rise to more prolonged dissensions. Crowds of
cosmopolitan adventurers, as lawless as those who disturbed the peace
in Victoria or California, flocked to the Rand. They were not of the
stuff of which Dutch burghers were made, and the franchise was denied
them by a government which did not hesitate to profit from their
labours. The Jameson Raid, a hasty attempt to use their wrongs to
overthrow President Kruger's government in 1895, "upset the apple-cart"
of Cecil Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape, who had added Rhodesia
to the empire and was planning, with moderate Dutch support, to
federate South Africa. Kruger hardened his heart against the
Uitlanders, and armed himself to resist the arguments of the British
government on their behalf. Both sides underestimated the determination
and resources of the other. But Kruger was more ignorant, if not more
obstinate, than Mr. Chamberlain; and his ultimatum of October 1899
precipitated a war which lasted two years and a half, and cost the two
republics their independence. The Transvaal was given, and the Orange
River Colony was promised, representative government by the
Conservatives; but the Liberals, who came into power at the end of
1905, excused them this apprenticeship, and granted them full
responsible government in 1906-1907.

British colonies have tried a series of useful experiments with the
power thus allotted them of managing their own affairs, and have
contributed more to the science of politics than all the arm-chair
philosophers from Aristotle downwards; and an examination in their
results would be a valuable test for aspiring politicians and civil
servants. The Canadian provinces, with two exceptions, dispense with a
second chamber; elsewhere in the empire, second chambers are universal,
but nowhere outside the United Kingdom hereditary. Their members are
either nominated by the prime minister for life, as in the Dominion of
Canada, or for a term of years, which is fixed at seven in New Zealand;
or they are popularly elected, sometimes on a different property
qualification from the Lower House, sometimes for a different period,
sometimes by a different constituency. In the Commonwealth of Australia
they are chosen by each state voting as a whole, and this method, by
which a big majority in one locality outweighs several small majorities
in others, has sometimes resulted in making the Upper House more
radical and socialistic than the Lower; the system of nomination
occasionally has in Canada a result equally strange to English ideas,
for the present Conservative majority in the House of Commons is
confronted with a hostile Liberal majority in the Upper House, placed
there by Sir Wilfrid Laurier during his long tenure of office. The most
effective provision against deadlocks between the two Houses is one in
the constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, by which, if they
cannot agree, both are dissolved.

Other contrasts are more bewildering than instructive. In Canada the
movement for women's suffrage has made little headway, and even less in
South Africa; but at the Antipodes women share with men the privilege
of adult suffrage in New Zealand, in the Commonwealth of Australia, and
in every one of its component states; an advocate of the cause would
perhaps explain the contrast by the presence of unprogressive French in
Canada, and of unprogressive Dutch in South Africa. Certainly, the all-
British dominions have been more advanced in their political
experiments than those in which the flighty Anglo-Saxon has been
tempered by more stolid elements; and the pendulum swings little more
in French Canada than it does in Celtic Ireland. In New Zealand old age
pensions were in force long before they were introduced into the
mother-country; and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes,
payment of M.P.'s, and powers of local option and prohibition have been
for years in operation. Both the Dominion and the Commonwealth levy
taxes on land far exceeding those imposed by the British budget of
1909. Australia is, in addition, trying a socialistic labour ministry
and compulsory military training. It has also tried the more serious
experiment of developing a standard of comfort among its proletariate
before peopling the country; and is consequently forced to exclude by
legislation all sorts of cheap labour, which might develop its
industries but would certainly lower its level of wages. It believes in
high protection, but takes care by socialistic legislation that high
wages shall more than counterbalance high prices; protection is to it
merely the form of state socialism which primarily benefits the
employer. It has also nationalized its railways and denationalized all
churches and religious instruction in public schools. There is, indeed,
no state church in the empire outside Great Britain. But the most
significant, perhaps, of Antipodean notions is the doctrine, inculcated
in the Queensland elementary schools, of the sanctity of state
property.

Finally, the colonies have made momentous experiments in federation.
New Zealand's was the earliest and the briefest; after a few years'
experience of provincial governments between 1852 and 1870, it reduced
its provincial parliaments to the level of county councils, and adopted
a unitary constitution. In Canada, on the other hand, the union of the
Upper and Lower Provinces proved unworkable owing to racial
differences; and in 1867 the federation called the Dominion of Canada
was formed by agreement between Upper and Lower Canada (henceforth
called Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Prince
Edward Island and British Columbia joined soon afterwards; and fresh
provinces have since been created out of the Hudson Bay and North-west
Territories; Newfoundland alone has stood aloof. Considerable powers
are allotted to the provinces, including education; but the
distinguishing feature of this federation is that all powers not
definitely assigned by the Dominion Act to the provinces belong to the
Dominion. This is in sharp contrast to the United States, where each
individual state is the sovereign body, and the Federal government only
possesses such powers as the states have delegated to it by the
constitution.

In this respect the Australian federation called the Commonwealth,
which was formed in 1900, resembles the United States rather than
Canada. The circumstance that each Australian colony grew up round a
seaport, having little or no overland connexion with other Australian
colonies, kept them long apart; and the commercial interests centred in
these ports are still centrifugal rather than centripetal in sentiment.
Hence powers, not specifically assigned to the Federal government,
remain in the hands of the individual states; the Labour party,
however, inclines towards a centralizing policy, and the general trend
seems to be in that direction. It will probably be strengthened by the
construction of transcontinental railways and by a further growth of
the nationalist feeling of Australia, which is already marked.

The Union of South Africa, formed in 1909, soon after the Boer colonies
had received self-government, went almost as far towards unification as
New Zealand, and became a unitary state rather than a federation. The
greater expense of maintaining several local parliaments as well as a
central legislature, and the difficulty of apportioning their powers,
determined South African statesmen to sweep away the old legislatures
altogether, and to establish a united parliament which meets at Cape
Town, a single executive which has its offices at Pretoria, and a
judicature which is located at Bloemfontein. Thus almost every variety
of Union and Home Rule exists within the empire, and arguments from
analogy are provided for both the British political parties.

Two extremes have been, and must be, avoided. History has falsified the
impression prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century that the
colonies would sooner or later follow the example of the United States,
and sever their connexion with the mother-country. It has no less
clearly demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining a centralized
government of the empire in Downing Street. The union or federation of
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa has strengthened the
claims of each of those imperial realms to be considered a nation, with
full rights and powers of self-government; and it remains to be seen
whether the federating process can be carried to a higher level, and
imperial sentiment crystallized in Imperial Federation. Imperial
Conferences have become regular, but we may not call them councils; no
majority in them has power to bind a minority, and no conference can
bind the mother-country or a single dominion of the crown. As an
educational body the Imperial Conference is excellent; but no one would
venture to give powers of taxation or of making war and peace to a
conclave in which Great Britain, with its forty-four millions of people
and the navy and army it supports, has no more votes than Newfoundland,
with its quarter of a million of inhabitants and immunity from imperial
burdens.

Education is, however, at the root of all political systems. Where the
mass of the people know nothing of politics, a despotism is essential;
where only the few are politically educated, there needs must be an
aristocracy. Great Britain lost its American colonies largely through
ignorance; and no imperial organization could arise among a group of
states ignorant of each other's needs, resources, and aspirations. The
Imperial Conference is not to be judged by its meagre tangible results;
if it has led British politicians to appreciate the varying character
and depth of national feeling in the Dominions, and politicians oversea
to appreciate the delicacies of the European diplomatic situation, the
dependence of every part of the empire upon sea-power, and the
complexities of an Imperial government which has also to consider the
interests of hundreds of millions of subjects in India, in tropical
Africa, in the West Indies, and in the Pacific, the Conference will
have helped to foster the intellectual conditions which must underlie
any attempt at an imperial superstructure.

For the halcyon days of peace, prosperity, and progress can hardly be
assumed as yet, and not even the most distant and self-contained
Dominions can afford to ignore the menace of blood and iron. No power,
indeed, is likely to find the thousand millions or so which it would
cost to conquer and hold Canada, Australia, or South Africa; but a
lucky raid on their commerce or some undefended port might cost many
millions by way of ransom. A slackening birth-rate is, moreover, a
reminder that empires in the past, like that of Rome, have civilized
themselves out of existence in the competition with races which bred
with primitive vigour, and had no costly standards of comfort. There
are such races to-day; the slumbering East has wakened, and the tide
which flowed for four centuries from West to East is on the turn. The
victory of Japan over Russia was an event beside which the great Boer
War sinks into insignificance. Asiatics, relieved by the _Pax
Britannica_ from mutual destruction, are eating the whites out of
the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and threatening South
Africa, Australia, and the western shores of America. No armaments and
no treaties of arbitration can ward off their economic competition; and
it is not certain that their myriads, armed with Western morality and
methods of warfare, will be always content to refrain from turning
against Europe the means of expansion which Europe has used with so
much success against them. The British Empire will need all the wisdom
it can command, if it is to hold its own in the parliament of reason or
the arbitrament of war.




CHAPTER IX

ENGLISH DEMOCRACY


The modern national state is the most powerful political organism ever
known, because it is the conscious or unconscious agency of a people's
will. Government is no longer in England the instrument of a family or
a class; and the only real check upon its power is the circumstance
that in some matters it acts as the executive committee of one party
and is legitimately resisted by the other. Were there no parties, the
government would be a popular despotism absolutely uncontrolled.
Theoretically it is omnicompetent; parliament--or, to use more
technical phraseology, the Crown in Parliament--can make anything law
that it chooses; and no one has a legal right to resist, or authority
to pronounce what parliament has done to be unconstitutional. No Act of
Parliament can be illegal or unconstitutional, because there are no
fundamental laws and no written constitution in this country; and when
people loosely speak of an Act being unconstitutional, all that they
mean is that they do not agree with it. Other countries, like the
United States, have drawn up a written constitution and established a
Supreme Court of Judicature to guard it; and if the American
legislature violates this constitution by any Act, the Supreme Court
may declare that Act unconstitutional, in which case it is void. But
there is no such limitation in England upon the sovereignty of
parliament.

This sovereignty has been gradually evolved. At first it was royal and
personal, but not parliamentary or representative; and medieval kings
had to struggle with the rival claims of the barons and the church. By
calling in the assistance of the people assembled and represented in
parliament, the monarchy triumphed over both the barons and the church;
but when, in the seventeenth century, the two partners to this victory
quarrelled over the spoils, parliament and not the crown established
its claim to be the real representative of the state; and in the cases
of Strafford, Danby, and others it even asserted that loyalty to the
king might be treason to the state. The church, vanquished at the
Reformation, dropped more and more out of the struggle for sovereignty,
because, while the state grew more comprehensive, the church grew more
exclusive. It was not that, after 1662, it seriously narrowed its
formulas or doctrines, but it failed to enlarge them, and a larger and
larger proportion of Englishmen thus found themselves outside its pale.
The state, on the other hand, embraced an ever-widening circle of
dissent; and by degrees Protestant Nonconformists, Roman Catholics,
Quakers, Jews, Atheists, Mohammedans, believers, misbelievers, and
unbelievers of all sorts, were admitted to the fullest rights of
citizenship. State and church ceased to correspond; one became the
whole, the other only a part, and there could be no serious rivalry
between the two.

The state had to contend, however, with more subtle and serious
attacks. This great Leviathan, as Hobbes called it, was not at first a
popular institution; and it frightened many people. The American
colonists, for instance, thought that its absolute sovereignty was too
dangerous a thing to be left loose, and they put sovereignty under a
triple lock and key, giving one to the judicature, one to the
legislature, and a third to the executive. Only by the co-operation of
these three keepers can the American people loose their sovereignty and
use it to amend their constitution; and so jealously is sovereignty
confined that anarchy often seems to reign in its stead. There was,
indeed, some excuse for distrusting a sovereignty claimed by George III
and the unreformed British parliament; and it was natural enough that
people should deny its necessity and set up in its place Declarations
of the Rights of Man. Sovereignty of Hobbes's type was a somewhat novel
conception; men had not grasped its possibilities as an engine of
popular will, because they were only familiar with its exploitation by
kings and oligarchs; and so closely did they identify the thing with
its abuses that they preferred to do without it altogether, or at least
to confine it to the narrowest possible limits. Government and the
people were antagonistic: the less government there was, the less harm
would be done to the people, and so a general body of individualistic,
_laissez-faire_ theory developed, which was expressed in various
Declarations of the Rights of Man, and set up against the "paternal
despotism" of the eighteenth century.

These Rights of Man helped to produce alike the anarchy of the first
French Revolution and the remedial despotism of the Jacobins and their
successor Napoleon; and the oscillation between under-government and
over-government, between individualism and socialism has continued to
this day. Each coincides with obvious human interests: the blessed in
possession prefer a policy of _laissez faire_; they are all for
Liberty and Property, enjoying sufficient means for doing whatsoever
they like with what they are pleased to call their own. But those who
have little to call their own, and much that they would like, prefer
strong government if they can control it; and the strength of
government has steadily grown with popular control. This is due to more
than a predatory instinct; it is natural, and excusable enough, that
people should be reluctant to maintain what is no affair of theirs; but
even staunch Conservatives have been known to pay Radical taxes with
comparative cheerfulness when their party has returned to power.

Government was gradually made the affair of the people by the series of
Reform Acts extending from 1832 to 1885; and it is no mere accident
that this half-century also witnessed the political emancipation of the
British colonies. Nor must we forget the Acts beginning with the repeal
of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and Roman Catholic Emancipation
(1829), which extended political rights to men of all religious
persuasions. These and the Franchise Acts made the House of Commons
infinitely more representative than it had been before, and gave it its
conclusive superiority over the House of Lords. Not that the Peers
represent no one but themselves; had that been true, the House of Lords
would have disappeared long ago. In reality it came to embody a fairly
complete representation of the Conservative party; and as a party does
not need two legislative organs, the House of Lords retired whenever
the Conservatives controlled the House of Commons, and only resumed its
proper functions when the Liberals had a majority. Hence its most
indefensible characteristic as a Second Chamber became its strongest
practical bulwark; for it enlisted the support of many who had no
particular views about Second Chambers in the abstract, but were keenly
interested in the predominance of their party.

The restraint thus imposed by the House of Lords upon popular
government checked the development of its power and the extension of
its activity, which would naturally have followed upon the acquisition
by the people of control over the House of Commons and indirectly over
the Cabinet. Other causes co-operated to induce delay. The most
powerful was lack of popular education; constitutional privileges are
of no value to people who do not understand how they may be used, or
are so unimaginative and ill-disciplined as to prefer such immediate
and tangible rewards as a half-crown for their vote, a donation to
their football club or local charity, or a gracious word from an
interested lady, to their distant and infinitesimal share in the
direction of national government. This participation is, in fact, so
minute to the individual voter and so intangible in its operation, that
a high degree of education is required to appreciate its value; and the
Education Acts of 1870 and 1889 were indispensable preliminaries to
anything like a real democracy. A democracy really educated in politics
will express views strange to our ears with an emphasis of which even
yet we have little conception.

Other obstacles to the overthrow of the rule of _laissez faire_
were the vested interests of over-mighty manufacturers and landlords in
the maintenance of that anarchy which is the logical extreme of Liberty
and Property; and such elementary measures of humanity as the Factory
Acts were long resisted by men so humane as Cobden and John Bright as
arbitrary interventions with the natural liberty of man to drive
bargains with his fellows in search of a living wage. There seemed to
be no idea that economic warfare might be quite as degrading as that
primitive condition of natural war, in which Hobbes said that the life
of man was "nasty, short, brutish and mean," and that it might as
urgently require a similar sovereign remedy. The repugnance to such a
remedy was reinforced by crude analogies between a perverted Darwinism
and politics. Darwin's demonstration of evolution by means of the
struggle for existence in the natural world was used to support the
assumption that a similar struggle among civilized men was natural and
therefore inevitable; and that all attempts to interfere with the
conflict between the weak and the strong, the scrupulous and the
unscrupulous, were foredoomed to disastrous failure. It was forgotten
that civilization itself involves a more or less conscious repeal of
"Nature," and that the progress of man depends upon the conquest of
himself and of his surroundings. In a better sense of the word, the
evolution of man's self-control and conscience is just as "natural" as
the gratification of his animal instincts.

The view that each individual should be left without further help from
the state to cope with his environment might be acceptable to landlords
who had already obtained from parliament hundreds of Inclosure Acts,
and to manufacturers whose profits were inflated by laws making it
criminal for workmen to combine. They might rest from political
agitation and be thankful for their constitutional gains; at any rate
they had little to hope from a legislature in which working men had
votes. But the masses, who had just secured the franchise, were
reluctant to believe that the action of the state had lost its virtue
at the moment when the control of the state came within their grasp.
The vote seems to have been given them under the amiable delusion that
they would be happy when they got it, as if it had any value whatever
except as a means to an end. Nor is it adequate as a means: it is not
sufficient for a nation by adult suffrage to express its will; that
will has also to be carried into execution, and it requires a strong
executive to do so. Hence the reversal of the old Liberal attitude
towards the royal prerogative, which may be best dated from 1872, when
Gladstone abolished the purchase of commissions in the army by means of
the royal prerogative, after the proposed reform had been rejected as a
bill by the House of Lords. No Liberal is likely in the future to
suggest that "the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing,
and ought to be diminished"; because the prerogative of the crown has
become the privilege of the people.

The Franchise Acts had apparently provided a solution of the old
antithesis of Man _versus_ the State by comprehending all men
_in_ the state; and the great value of those reforms was that they
tended to eliminate force from the sphere of politics. When men could
vote, there was less reason in rebellion; and the antithesis of Man
_versus_ the State has almost been reduced to one of Woman _versus_ the
State. But representative government, which promised to be ideal when
every man, or every adult, had a vote, is threatened in various
quarters. Its operations are too deliberate and involved to satisfy
impatient spirits, and three alternative methods of procedure are
advocated as improvements upon it. One is the "direct action" of
working men, by which they can speedily obtain their objects through a
general or partial strike paralyzing the food supply or other national
necessities. This is obviously a dangerous and double-edged weapon, the
adoption of which by other sections of the community--the Army and
Navy, for instance, or the medical profession--might mean national
dissolution.

Another method is the Referendum, by which important decisions adopted
by parliament would be referred to a direct popular vote. This proposal
is only logical when coupled with the Initiative, by which a direct
popular vote could compel parliament to pass any measure desired by the
majority of voters; otherwise its object is merely obstructive. The
third method is the supersession of parliament by the action of the
executive. The difficulties which Liberal measures have experienced in
the House of Lords, and the impossibility of the House of Commons
dealing by debate with the increasing complexities of national
business, have encouraged a tendency in Liberal governments to entrust
to their departments decisions which trench upon the legislative
functions of parliament. The trend of hostile opinion is to regard
parliament as an unnecessary middleman, and to advocate in its stead a
sort of plebiscitary bureaucracy, a constitution under which
legislation drafted by officials would be demanded, sanctioned, or
rejected by direct popular vote, and would be discussed, like the
Insurance Bill, in informal conferences outside, rather than inside,
parliament; while administration by a vast army of experts would be
partially controlled by popularly elected ministers; for socialists
waver between their faith in human equality and their trust in the
superman. Others think that the milder method of Devolution, or "Home
Rule all round," would meet the evils caused by the congestion of
business, and restore to the Mother of Parliaments her time-honoured
function of governing by debate.

Parliament has already had to delegate legislative powers to other
bodies than colonial legislatures; and county councils, borough
councils, district councils, and parish councils share with it in
various degrees the task of legislating for the country. They can, of
course, only legislate, as they can only administer, within the limits
imposed by Act of Parliament; but their development, like the
multiplication of central administrative departments, indicates the
latest, but not the final, stages in the growth and specialization of
English government. A century and a half ago two Secretaries of State
were all that Great Britain required; now there are half-a-dozen, and a
dozen other departments have been added. Among them are the Local
Government Board, the Board of Education, the Board of Trade, the Board
of Agriculture, while many sub-departments such as the Public Health
Department of the Local Government Board, the Bankruptcy Department of
the Board of Trade, and the Factory Department of the Home Office, have
more work to do than originally had a Secretary of State. It is
probable, moreover, that departments will multiply and subdivide at an
ever-increasing rate.

All this, however, is merely machinery provided to give effect to
public opinion, which determines the use to which it shall be put. But
its very provision indicates that England expects the state to-day to
do more and more extensive duty for the individual. For one thing the
state has largely taken the place of the church as the organ of the
collective conscience of the community. It can hardly be said that the
Anglican church has an articulate conscience apart from questions of
canon law and ecclesiastical property; and other churches are, as
bodies, no better provided with creeds of social morality. The Eighth
Commandment is never applied to such genteel delinquencies as making a
false return of income, or defrauding a railway company or the customs;
but is reserved for the grosser offences which no member of the
congregation is likely to have committed; and it is left to the state
to provide by warning and penalty against neglect of one's duty to
one's neighbour when one's neighbour is not one individual but the sum
of all. It was not by any ecclesiastical agitation that some humanity
was introduced into the criminal code in the third decade of the
nineteenth century; and the protest against the blind cruelty of
economic _laissez faire_ was made by Sadler, Shaftesbury, Ruskin,
and Carlyle rather than by any church. Their writings and speeches
awoke a conscience in the state, which began to insist by means of
legislation upon humaner hours and conditions of labour, upon decent
sanitation, upon a standard of public education, and upon provision
being made against fraudulent dealings with more helpless fellow-men.

This public conscience has inevitably proved expensive, and the expense
has had to be borne either by the state or by the individual. Now, it
might have been possible, when the expense of these new standards of
public health and comfort began to be incurred, to provide by an heroic
effort of socialism for a perpetuation of the individualistic basis of
social duty. That is to say, if the state had guaranteed to every
individual an income which would enable him to bear his share of this
expense, it might also have imposed upon him the duty of meeting it, of
paying fees for the education of his children, for hospital treatment,
for medical inspection, and so forth. But that effort was not, and
perhaps could not, in the existing condition of public opinion, be
made; and the state has therefore got into the habit of providing and
paying for all these things itself. When the majority of male adults
earn twenty shillings or less a week, and possess a vote, there would
be no raising of standards at all, if they had to pay the cost. Hence
the state has been compelled step by step to meet the expense of
burdens imposed by its conscience. Free education has therefore
followed compulsory education; the demands of sanitary inspectors and
medical officers of health have led to free medical inspection, medical
treatment, the feeding of necessitous school children, and other
piecemeal socialism; and, ignoring the historical causes of this
development, we are embarked on a wordy warfare of socialists and
individualists as to the abstract merits of antagonistic theories.

It is mainly a battle of phrases, in which few pause to examine what
their opponents or they themselves mean by the epithets they employ. In
the sense in which the individualist uses the term socialist, there are
hardly any socialists, and in the sense in which the socialist uses the
term individualist, there are practically no individualists. In reality
we are all both individualists and socialists. It is a question of
degree and not of dogma; and most people are at heart agreed that some
economic socialism is required in order to promote a certain amount of
moral and intellectual individualism. The defect of so-called economic
individualism is that it reduces the mass of workers to one dead level
of common poverty, in which wages, instead of increasing like capital,
barely keep pace with the rise of rent and prices, in which men occupy
dwellings all alike in the same mean streets, pursuing the same routine
of labour and same trivial round of relaxation, and in which there
seems no possibility of securing for the individual adequate
opportunities for that development of his individuality by which alone
he can render his best service to the community.

That service is the common end and object towards which men of all
parties in English history have striven through the growth of conscious
and collective action. A communist has maintained that we are all
communists because we have developed a common army, a common navy, and
a common national government, in place of the individualistic forces
and jurisdictions of feudal barons. We have, indeed, nationalized these
things and many others as well, including the crown, the church, the
administration of justice, education, highways and byways, posts and
telegraphs, woods and forests. Even the House of Lords has been
constrained to abandon its independence by a process akin to that
medieval _peine forte et dure_, by which the obstinate individualist
was, when accused, compelled to surrender his ancient immunity and
submit to the common law; and this common control, which came into
being as the nation emerged out of its diverse elements in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and slowly gathered force as
it realized its strength under the Tudors, has attained fresh momentum
in the latest ages as the state step by step extended to all sorts and
conditions of men a share in the exercise of its power.

This is the real English conquest, and it forms the chief content of
English history. It is part of the triumph of man over the forces of
nature and over himself, and the two have gone hand in hand. An English
state could hardly exist before men had made roads, but it could no
more exist until they had achieved that great victory of civilized
government by which a minority agrees for the sake of peace to submit
to the greater number. Steam and railways and telegraphs have placed
further powers in the hands of men; they have conquered the land and
the sea and the air; and medical science has built up their physique
and paved the way for empire in tropical climes. But while he has
conquered nature, man has also conquered himself. He has tamed his
combative instincts; he has reduced civil strife to political combats,
restrained national conflicts by treaties of arbitration, and subdued
private wars to judicial proceedings; it is only in partially civilized
countries that gentlemen cannot rule their temper or bend their honour
to the base arbitrament of justice. He looks before and after, and
forgoes the gratification of the present to insure against the
accidents of the future, though the extent to which the community as a
whole can follow the example of individuals in this respect remains at
the moment a test of its self-control and sense of collective
responsibility.

Whether this growth of power in the individual and in the state is a
good or an evil thing depends on the conscience of those who wield it.
The power of the over-mighty subject has generally been a tyranny; and
all power is distrusted by old-fashioned Liberals and philosophic
Anarchists, because they have a traditional suspicion that it will fall
into hostile or unscrupulous hands. But the forces of evil cannot be
overcome by _laissez faire_, and power is an indispensable weapon
of progress. A powerless state means a helpless community; and anarchy
is the worst of all forms of tyranny, because it is irresponsible,
incorrigible, and capricious. Weakness, moreover, is the parent of
panic, and panic brings cruelty in its train. So long as the state was
weak, it was cruel; and the hideous treason-laws of Tudor times were
due to fear. The weak cannot afford to be tolerant any more than the
poor can afford to be generous. Cecil thought that the state could not
afford to tolerate two forms of religion; to-day it tolerates hundreds,
and it laughs at treason because it is strong. We are humanitarian, not
because we are so much better than our ancestors, but because we can
afford the luxury of dissent and conscientious objections so much
better than they could. Political liberty and religious freedom depend
upon the power of the state, inspired, controlled, and guided by the
mind of the community.

Last of all, through this power man has acquired faith, not in
miraculous intervention, but in his capacity to work out his own
destinies by means of the weapons placed in his hands and the dominion
put under his feet. He no longer believes that the weakest must go to
the wall, and the helpless be trampled under foot in the march of
civilization; nature is no longer a mass of inscrutable, iron decrees,
but a treasury of forces to be tamed and used in the redemption of
mankind by man; and mankind is no longer a mob of blind victims to
panic and passion, but a more or less orderly host marching on to more
or less definite goals. The individual, however, can do little by
himself; he needs the strength of union for his herculean tasks; and he
has found that union in the state. It is not an engine of tyranny, but
the lever of social morality; and the function of English government is
not merely to embody the organized might and the executive brain of
England, but also to enforce its collective and coordinating
conscience.




CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE


B.C. 55. Julius Caesar's first invasion of Britain.
A.D. 43-110. Roman occupation of Britain.
410-577. Period of Anglo-Saxon colonization and conquest.
597-664. Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.
617-685. Northumbrian supremacy.
685-825. Mercian supremacy.
8O2-839. Ecgberht establishes West Saxon supremacy.
855. Danes first winter in England.
878. Peace of Wedmore between Alfred and the Danes.
900 (?). Death of Alfred.
9OO (?)-975. Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and Edgar. Reconquest of the
      Danelaw.
978-1013. Ethelred the Unready. Return of the Danes.
1016. Edmund Ironside.
1016-1035. Canute.
1042.-1060. Edward the Confessor and the growth of Norman Influence.
1066. Harold and the Battle of Hastings. WILLIAM I.
1066-1071. The Norman Conquest. Submergence of the Anglo-Saxons.
1085-1086. Domesday Book. The Salisbury Oath.
1087-1100. WILLIAM II.
1100-1135. HENRY I and the beginnings of an administrative system. The
      Exchequer and _Curia Regis_.
1135-1154. STEPHEN and Matilda. The period of baronial independence,
     _i.e._ anarchy.
1154-1189. HENRY II restores order, curbs the military power of the
      barons by scutage (1159), the Assize of Arms (1181), and the
      substitution of sworn inquest for the ordeal and trial by battle,
      and their jurisdiction by the development of the royal court of
      justice through assizes of Clarendon, Northampton, etc. Teaches
      the people to rely on their judgment. Restrains the sheriffs, and
      attempts to limit ecclesiastical jurisdiction by the
      constitutions of Clarendon (1164). Quarrel with Becket.
1189-1199. RICHARD I. Crusade and wars In France.
1199-1210. JOHN'S tyranny. Loss of Normandy (1204). Quarrel with the
      church and baronage. Tries to retrieve his position by spirited
      foreign policy. Defeated at Bouvines (1214) and forced to sign
      Magna Carta (1215).
1216-1272. HENRY III. Beginnings of national government under De Burgh.
      Naval victory (1217). Alien domination of Henry's favourites
      provokes baronial resistance. Growth of native wealth and
      influence, and of an English party in the Barons' War (1258-
      1265). Simon De Montfort. Townsfolk summoned to Parliament.
1272-1307. EDWARD I, the first English king since the Norman Conquest.
      Emergence of the English people, their language, national
      weapons, towns, commerce. The Model Parliament(1275, 1295).
      Confirmation of the charters(1297). National resistance to the
      Papacy, and  national enterprises against Wales and Scotland.
1307-1327. EDWARD II. The relapse of Monarchy. Baronage becoming
      peerage. Thomas of Lancaster.
1327-1377. EDWARD III. Growth of nationalism in religion, politics,
      literature, trade, and war. The Commons take the constitutional
      lead abandoned by the peers. Lollardy and hostility to the
      Papacy. Decay of manorial system: emancipation of villeins:
      growth of  industry and towns.
1377-1399. RICHARD II, Revolt of the peasants and artisans (1381).
      Tries to emancipate himself from the control of the peers, and is
      deposed.
1399-1413. HENRY IV and the Lancastrian dynasty. Revolt of the Percies
      (1403). Henry's troubles with over-mighty subjects.
1413-1422. HENRY V seeks escape from domestic troubles in foreign war.
1415. Battle of Agincourt. Treaty of Troyes (1420).
1422. HENRY VI. Rivalry between Beaufort and Gloucester leads to growth
      of Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, and these with local anarchy
      produce the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485).
1461. EDWARD IV secures the throne, and in 1471 defeats both the
      Lancastrians and Warwick the King-maker.
1483. RICHARD III.
1485. HENRY VII and the House of Tudor.
1487. Organization of the Star Chamber to repress disorder and over-
      mighty subjects. Diaz doubles the Cape of Good Hope.
1492. Columbus discovers West Indies.
1496-1497. Cabot discovers Newfoundland and Labrador.
1509. HENRY VIII.
1512-1529. Wolsey.
1529-1536. The Reformation Parliament. The submission of the Clergy,
      Acts of Annates, Appeals (1532-1533) and Supremacy (1534).
1536. Suppression of the Monasteries and Pilgrimage for Grace.
1539. Act of Six Articles.
1547-1553. EDWARD VI and the Protestant Reformation.
1549. First Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer. Kett's
      rebellion.
1552. Second Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer.
1553-1558. MARY and the Roman Catholic reaction. Spanish control in
      England.
1558. ELIZABETH.
1559. The Elizabethan settlement of religion.
1560. Elizabeth assists the Scots to expel the French.
1568-1569. Flight of Mary Queen of Scots into England, and rebellion of
      the northern earls.
1570. Papal excommunication and deposition of Elizabeth.
1571. Ridolfi's plot.
1572. Execution of Norfolk and extinction of English dukedoms.
      Beginning of the Dutch Republic. Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
1577-1580. Drake sails round the world.
1587. Execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
1588. Spanish Armada.
1599-1601. Conquest of Ireland.
1600. Foundation of East India Company.
1603. JAMES VI of Scotland and I of England.
1607. Foundation of Virginia.
1608. Plantation of Ulster.
1620. Sailing of the Mayflower.
1623. Re-creation of dukedoms. Massacre of Amboyna.
1625. CHARLES I.
1628. Petition of Right.
1629. First British capture of Quebec.
1629-1640. The "Eleven Years' Tyranny."
1638-1639. National Covenant. Bishops' war in Scotland.
1640. The Long Parliament.
1642. First Civil War.
1648. Second Civil War.
1649. THE COMMONWEALTH. Abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords.
1650-1651. Navigation Acts and Dutch War.
1653. THE PROTECTORATE. First Cromwellian constitution.
1657. Second Cromwellian constitution.
1658. Cromwell's death.
1660. The Restoration. CHARLES II.
1662. The last Act of Uniformity.
1664. War with the Dutch: conquest of New Netherlands
1667. Fall of Clarendon. The Cabal administration.
1670. Treaty of Dover.
1672. Declaration of Indulgence.
1673. Danby. The Test Act.
1678. Titus Gates' Plot.
1679. Habeas Corpus Act.
1681. Charles II's triumph over the Whigs.
1685. JAMES II. Monmouth's and Argyll's rebellions.
1688. The Revolution. WILLIAM III and MARY.
1689. Bill of Rights. Toleration Act.
1690. Battle of the Boyne.
1694. Bank of England established.
1696. The Whig _Junto_.
1701. Act of Settlement.
1702. ANNE. War with France.
1704. Capture of Gibraltar. England becomes a Mediterranean power.
1707. Act of Union with Scotland.
1708. Capture of Minorca.
1708-1710. Whig ministry.
1710-1714. Tory ministry.
1713. Peace of Utrecht.
1714. GEORGE I and the Hanoverian dynasty.
1721-1742. Walpole's administration. Evolution of the Cabinet and Prime
      Minister. Growth of imports and exports,
1727. GEORGE II.
1739. War with Spain.
1741-1748. War of the Austrian Succession. Clive in India.
1756-1763. Seven Years' War.
1757. Battle of Plassey.
1759. Capture of Quebec.
1760. GEORGE III.
1764-1779. Inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton. Beginning
      of the Industrial Revolution.
1765. Grenville's Stamp Act.
1770. Lord North Prime Minister. Captain Cook surveys Australia and New
      Zealand.
1774. The Quebec Act.
1776. Declaration of American Independence. Adam Smith's _Wealth of
      Nations_.
1778-1779. France and Spain join the Americans.
1780. The "Armed Neutrality." Warren Hastings saves India.
1781. Fall of Yorktown.
1782. Volunteer movement In Ireland. Irish parliamentary independence.
1783. American Independence granted.
1784. Pitt Prime Minister: his India Bill.
1788. Convict settlement in Australia.
1789. French Revolution.
1791. The Canadian Constitutional Act.
1794. The "Glorious First of June."
1795-1796. Conquest of the Cape and of Ceylon.
1797. Battles of St. Vincent and Camperdown.
1798. Battle of the Nile. Irish rebellion.
1799. Wellesley in India. Capture of Seringapatam. Partition of Mysore
      and the Carnatic.
1800. Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Seizure of Malta.
1801. Battle of Copenhagen.
1802. Peace of Amiens.
1803. Battles of Assye and Argaum. Defeat of the Mahrattas.
1805. Battle of Trafalgar.
1806. Second capture of the Cape.
1808-1814. Peninsular War.
1810. Capture of Mauritius.
1812-1814. War with the United States.
1814. Corn Laws passed.
1815. Battle of Waterloo.
1820. GEORGE IV.
1825. Huskisson's Tariff Reform.
1827. Battle of Navarino.
1828. Corn Laws revised.
1828-1829. Repeal of Test Act. Roman Catholic Emancipation.
1830. WILLIAM IV. Whigs return to power.
1832. First Reform Act. Representative Government established in
      Newfoundland.
1834-1835. Reform of the Poor Law and Municipal corporations.
1837. QUEEN VICTORIA. Mackenzie and Papineau's rebellions in Canada.
      Great Boer "trek."
1840. Annexation of New Zealand.
1841-1846. Peel's Free Trade policy.
1842. Representative government in Australia.
1846. Corn Laws repealed.
1848. Responsible self-government In Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova
      Scotia.
1849. Repeal of the Navigation Acts.
1852. Responsible government developed In Australia and New Zealand.
1853. Representative government in Cape Colony.
1854-1856. Crimean War.
1855. Responsible government in Newfoundland. 1856. Representative
      government in Natal.
1857. Indian Mutiny.
1858. Transference of India to the Crown.
1867. Disraeli's Reform Act. Federation of the Dominion of Canada.
1869. Disestablishment of the Irish Church. Opening of the Suez Canal.
1870. Compulsory education.
1872. Abolition of purchase in the army by executive action.
      Responsible government in Cape Colony.
1876. Queen proclaimed Empress of India.
1876-1877. Russo-Turkish War. Dual control established in Egypt.
      Annexation of the Transvaal.
1881. Transvaal granted independence.
1882. British administration of Egypt begins.
1885. Fall of Khartoum. Gladstone's Reform Act. Annexation of Burma.
1887. Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy.
1889. Establishment of County Councils.
1890. Free Education. Franco-Russian _entente_. Responsible
      government in Western Australia.
1893. Responsible government in Natal.
1894. Establishment of district and parish councils.
1895. Jameson Raid.
1896-1898. Reconquest of the Sudan.
1899-1903. The Great Boer War.
1900. Establishment of the Australian Commonwealth.
1901. EDWARD VII.
1904. Russo-Japanese War.
1905. Anglo-Japanese alliance.
1906-1907. Responsible government granted to the Transvaal and Orange
      River Colonies.
1909. The Union of South Africa.
1910. GEORGE V.
1911. Asquith's Parliament Act. Capital of India transferred from
      Calcutta to Delhi. Beginnings of National Insurance.




BIBLIOGRAPHY


J. R. GREEN'S _Short History of the English People_ (Macmillan), and C.
R. L. FLETCHER'S _Introductory History of England_, 4 vols. (Murray),
both eminently readable in very different styles, illustrate the
diverse methods of treatment to which English history lends itself.
More elaborate surveys are provided by LONGMANS' _Political History of
England_, 12 vols. (edited by W. Hunt and R. L. Poole), and METHUEN'S
_History of England_, 7 vols. (edited by C. Oman).

The student of Constitutional History should begin with F. W.
MAITLAND'S _Lectures on Constitutional History_ (Cambridge University
Press), and for a compendium of facts may use Medley's _Constitutional
History of England_ (Blackwell).

Periods can be studied in greater detail in--J. R. GREEN: _The Making
of England_ and _The Conquest of England_ (Macmillan). FREEMAN: _Norman
Conquest,_ 6 vols., and _William Rufus_, 2 vols. (Oxford University
Press). NORGATE: _England under the Angevins_, 2 vols., and _John
Lackland_ (Macmillan). RAMSAY: _Lancaster and York_, 2 vols. FROUDE:
_History of England_, 1529-1588, 12 vols. (Longmans). GARDINER:
_History of England_, 1603-1642, 10 vols.; _Civil War_, 1642-1649, 4
vols.; _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, 1649-1656, 4 vols. (Longmans).
MACAULAY: _History of England_, 1685-1702 (Longmans). LECKY: _History
of England_, 1714-1793, 7 vols.; _Ireland_, 1714-1800, 5 vols.
(Longmans). SPENCER WALPOLE: _History of England_, 1815-1846, 6 vols.
HERBERT PAUL: _History of Modern England_, 1846-1895, 5 vols.
(Macmillan). MORLEY: _Life of Gladstone_, 2 vols. (Macmillan).

English Constitutional History is detailed in--STUBBS: _Constitutional
History to 1485_, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press). HALLAM:
_Constitutional History_, 1485-1760, 3 vols. (Murray). ERSKINE MAY:
_Constitutional History,_ 1760-1860, 3 vols. (Longmans). ANSON: _Law
and Custom of the Constitution,_ 3 vols. (Oxford University Press).
DICEY: _Custom of the Constitution_ (Macmillan).

For Ecclesiastical History see STEPHENS and HUNT'S _History of the
Church of England,_ 7 vols. (Macmillan); for Colonial History, SEELEY'S
_Expansion of England_ (Macmillan), and _The British Empire_ (ed.
Pollard; League of the Empire); for Economic and Industrial History,
CUNNINGHAM'S _Growth of Industry and Commerce_, 3 vols.; ASHLEY'S
_Economic History_, 2 vols. (Macmillan), and TOYNBEE'S _Industrial
Revolution_; for sketches of movements and biographies, see MACAULAY'S
_Essays_ (Longmans), STUBB'S _Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History_
(Oxford University Press), and POLLARD'S _Factors in Modern History_
(Constable).







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