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+Project Gutenberg Etext Froude's History of England, by Kingsley
+#10 in our series by Charles Kingsley
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+Title: Froude's History of England
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+Release Date: March, 2002  [Etext #3144]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 01/02/01]
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+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext Froude's History of England, by Kingsley
+******This file should be named frdhe10.txt or frdhe10.zip******
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+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, frdhe11.txt
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+
+
+FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND {1}
+
+by Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+
+There appeared a few years since a 'Comic History of England,' duly
+caricaturing and falsifying all our great national events, and
+representing the English people, for many centuries back, as a mob of
+fools and knaves, led by the nose in each generation by a few arch-
+fools and arch-knaves.  Some thoughtful persons regarded the book
+with utter contempt and indignation; it seemed to them a crime to
+have written it; a proof of 'banausia,' as Aristotle would have
+called it, only to be outdone by the writing a 'Comic Bible.'  After
+a while, however, their indignation began to subside; their second
+thoughts, as usual, were more charitable than their first; they were
+not surprised to hear that the author was an honest, just, and able
+magistrate; they saw that the publication of such a book involved no
+moral turpitude; that it was merely meant as a jest on a subject on
+which jesting was permissible, and as a money speculation in a field
+of which men had a right to make money; while all which seemed
+offensive in it was merely the outcome, and as it were apotheosis, of
+that method of writing English history which has been popular for
+nearly a hundred years.  'Which of our modern historians,' they asked
+themselves, 'has had any real feeling of the importance, the
+sacredness, of his subject?--any real trust in, or respect for, the
+characters with whom he dealt?  Has not the belief of each and all of
+them been the same--that on the whole, the many always have been
+fools and knaves; foolish and knavish enough, at least, to become the
+puppets of a few fools and knaves who held the reins of power?  Have
+they not held that, on the whole, the problems of human nature and
+human history have been sufficiently solved by Gibbon and Voltaire,
+Gil Blas and Figaro; that our forefathers were silly barbarians; that
+this glorious nineteenth century is the one region of light, and that
+all before was outer darkness, peopled by 'foreign devils,'
+Englishmen, no doubt, according to the flesh, but in spirit, in
+knowledge, in creed, in customs, so utterly different from ourselves
+that we shall merely show our sentimentalism by doing aught but
+laughing at them?
+
+On what other principle have our English histories as yet been
+constructed, even down to the children's books, which taught us in
+childhood that the history of this country was nothing but a string
+of foolish wars, carried on by wicked kings, for reasons hitherto
+unexplained, save on that great historic law of Goldsmith's by which
+Sir Archibald Alison would still explain the French Revolution -
+
+
+'The dog, to serve his private ends,
+Went mad, and bit the man?'
+
+
+It will be answered by some, and perhaps rather angrily, that these
+strictures are too sweeping; that there is arising, in a certain
+quarter, a school of history books for young people of a far more
+reverent tone, which tries to do full honour to the Church and her
+work in the world.  Those books of this school which we have seen, we
+must reply, seem just as much wanting in real reverence for the past
+as the school of Gibbon and Voltaire.  It is not the past which they
+reverence, but a few characters or facts eclectically picked out of
+the past, and, for the most part, made to look beautiful by ignoring
+all the features which will not suit their preconceived pseudo-ideal.
+There is in these books a scarcely concealed dissatisfaction with the
+whole course of the British mind since the Reformation, and (though
+they are not inclined to confess the fact) with its whole course
+before the Reformation, because that course was one of steady
+struggle against the Papacy and its anti-national pretensions.  They
+are the outcome of an utterly un-English tone of thought; and the so-
+called 'ages of faith' are pleasant and useful to them, principally
+because they are distant and unknown enough to enable them to conceal
+from their readers that in the ages on which they look back as
+ideally perfect a Bernard and a Francis of Assisi were crying all day
+long--'O that my head were a fountain of tears, that I might weep for
+the sins of my people!'  Dante was cursing popes and prelates in the
+name of the God of Righteousness; Boccaccio and Chaucer were lifting
+the veil from priestly abominations of which we now are ashamed even
+to read; and Wolsey, seeing the rottenness of the whole system, spent
+his mighty talents, and at last poured out his soul unto death, in
+one long useless effort to make the crooked straight, and number that
+which had been weighed in the balances of God, and found for ever
+wanting.  To ignore wilfully facts like these, which were patent all
+along to the British nation, facts on which the British laity acted,
+till they finally conquered at the Reformation, and on which they are
+acting still, and will, probably, act for ever, is not to have any
+real reverence for the opinions or virtues of our forefathers; and we
+are not astonished to find repeated, in such books, the old stock
+calumnies against our lay and Protestant worthies, taken at second-
+hand from the pages of Lingard.  In copying from Lingard, however,
+this party has done no more than those writers have who would
+repudiate any party--almost any Christian--purpose.  Lingard is known
+to have been a learned man, and to have examined many manuscripts
+which few else had taken the trouble to look at; so his word is to be
+taken, no one thinking it worth while to ask whether he has either
+honestly read or honestly quoted the documents.  It suited the
+sentimental and lazy liberality of the last generation to make a show
+of fairness by letting the Popish historian tell his side of the
+story, and to sneer at the illiberal old notion that gentlemen of his
+class were given to be rather careless about historic truth when they
+had a purpose to serve thereby; and Lingard is now actually
+recommended as a standard authority for the young by educated
+Protestants, who seem utterly unable to see that, whether the man be
+honest or not, his whole view of the course of British events since
+Becket first quarrelled with his king must be antipodal to their own;
+and that his account of all which has passed for three hundred years
+since the fall of Wolsey is most likely to be (and, indeed, may be
+proved to be) one huge libel on the whole nation, and the destiny
+which God has marked out for it.
+
+There is, indeed, no intrinsic cause why the ecclesiastical, or
+pseudo-Catholic, view of history should, in any wise, conduce to a
+just appreciation of our forefathers.  For not only did our
+forefathers rebel against that conception again and again, till they
+finally trampled it under their feet, and so appear, prima facie, as
+offenders to be judged at its bar; but the conception itself is one
+which takes the very same view of nature as that cynic conception of
+which we spoke above.  Man, with the Romish divines, is, ipso facto,
+the same being as the man of Voltaire, Le Sage, or Beaumarchais; he
+is an insane and degraded being, who is to be kept in order, and, as
+far as may be, cured and set to work by an ecclesiastical system; and
+the only threads of light in the dark web of his history are clerical
+and theurgic, not lay and human.  Voltaire is the very experimentum
+crucis of this ugly fact.  European history looks to him what it
+would have looked to his Jesuit preceptors, had the sacerdotal
+element in it been wanting; what heathen history actually did look to
+them.  He eliminates the sacerdotal element, and nothing remains but
+the chaos of apes and wolves which the Jesuits had taught him to
+believe was the original substratum of society.  The humanity of his
+history--even of his 'Pucelle d'Orleans,--is simply the humanity of
+Sanchez and the rest of those vingtquatre Peres who hang gibbeted for
+ever in the pages of Pascal.  He is superior to his teachers,
+certainly, in this, that he has hope for humanity on earth; dreams of
+a new and nobler life for society, by means of a true and scientific
+knowledge of the laws of the moral and material universe; in a word,
+he has, in the midst of all his filth and his atheism, a faith in a
+righteous and truth-revealing God, which the priests who brought him
+up had not.  Let the truth be spoken, even though in favour of such a
+destroying Azrael as Voltaire.  And what if his primary conception of
+humanity be utterly base?  Is that of our modern historians so much
+higher?  Do Christian men seem to them, on the whole, in all ages, to
+have had the spirit of God with them, leading them into truth,
+however imperfectly and confusedly they may have learnt his lessons?
+
+Have they ever heard with their ears, or listened when their fathers
+have declared unto them, the noble works which God did in their days,
+and in the old time before them?  Do they believe that the path of
+Christendom has been, on the whole, the path of life and the right
+way, and that the living God is leading her therein?  Are they proud
+of the old British worthies?  Are they jealous and tender of the
+reputation of their ancestors?  Do they believe that there were any
+worthies at all in England before the steam-engine and political
+economy were discovered?  Do their conceptions of past society and
+the past generations retain anything of that great thought which is
+common to all the Aryan races--that is, to all races who have left
+aught behind them better than mere mounds of earth--to Hindoo and
+Persian, Greek and Roman, Teuton and Scandinavian, that men are the
+sons of the heroes, who were the sons of God?  Or do they believe
+that for civilised people of the nineteenth century it is as well to
+say as little as possible about ancestors who possessed our vices
+without our amenities, our ignorance without our science; who were
+bred, no matter how, like flies by summer heat, out of that
+everlasting midden which men call the world, to buzz and sting their
+foolish day, and leave behind them a fresh race which knows them not,
+and could win no honour by owning them, and which owes them no more
+than if it had been produced, as midden-flies were said to be of old,
+by some spontaneous generation?
+
+It is not probable that this writer will be likely to undervalue
+political economy, or the steam-engine, or any other solid and
+practical good which God has unveiled to this generation.  All that
+he does demand (for he has a right to demand it) is that rational men
+should believe that our forefathers were at least as good as we are;
+that whatsoever their measure of light was, they acted up to what
+they knew as faithfully as we do; and that, on the whole, it was not
+their fault if they did not know more.  Even now the real discoveries
+of the age are made, as of old, by a very few men; and, when made,
+have to struggle, as of old, against all manner of superstitions,
+lazinesses, scepticisms.  Is the history of the Minie rifle one so
+very complimentary to our age's quickness of perception that we can
+afford to throw many stones at the prejudices of our ancestors?  The
+truth is that, as of old, 'many men talk of Robin Hood who never shot
+in his bow'; and many talk of Bacon who never discovered a law by
+induction since they were born.  As far as our experience goes, those
+who are loudest in their jubilations over the wonderful progress of
+the age are those who have never helped that progress forward one
+inch, but find it a great deal easier and more profitable to use the
+results which humbler men have painfully worked out as second-hand
+capital for hustings-speeches and railway books, and flatter a
+mechanics' institute of self-satisfied youths by telling them that
+the least instructed of them is wiser than Erigena or Roger Bacon.
+Let them be.  They have their reward.  And so also has the patient
+and humble man of science, who, the more he knows, confesses the more
+how little he knows, and looks back with affectionate reverence on
+the great men of old time--on Archimedes and Ptolemy, Aristotle and
+Pliny, and many another honourable man who, walking in great
+darkness, sought a ray of light, and did not seek in vain,--as
+integral parts of that golden chain of which he is but one link more;
+as scientific forefathers, without whose aid his science could not
+have had a being.
+
+Meanwhile, this general tone of irreverence for our forefathers is no
+hopeful sign.  It is unwise to 'inquire why the former times were
+better than these'; to hang lazily and weakly over some eclectic
+dream of a past golden age; for to do so is to deny that God is
+working in this age, as well as in past ages; that His light is as
+near us now as it was to the worthies of old time.
+
+But it is more than unwise to boast and rejoice that the former times
+were worse than these; and to teach young people to say in their
+hearts, 'What clever fellows we are, compared with our stupid old
+fogies of fathers!'  More than unwise; for possibly it may be false
+in fact.  To look at the political and moral state of Europe at this
+moment, Christendom can hardly afford to look down on any preceding
+century, and seems to be in want of something which neither science
+nor constitutional government seems able to supply.  Whether our
+forefathers also lacked that something we will not inquire just now;
+but if they did, their want of scientific and political knowledge was
+evidently not the cause of the defect; or why is not Spain now
+infinitely better, instead of being infinitely worse off, than she
+was three hundred years ago?
+
+At home, too--But on the question whether we are so very much better
+off than our forefathers Mr. Froude, not we, must speak:  for he has
+deliberately, in his new history, set himself to the solution of this
+question, and we will not anticipate what he has to say; what we
+would rather insist on now are the moral effects produced on our
+young people by books which teach them to look with contempt on all
+generations but their own, and with suspicion on all public
+characters save a few contemporaries of their own especial party.
+
+There is an ancient Hebrew book, which contains a singular story
+concerning a grandson who was cursed because his father laughed at
+the frailty of the grandfather.  Whether the reader shall regard that
+story (as we do) as a literal fact recorded by inspired wisdom, as an
+instance of one of the great root-laws of family life, and therefore
+of that national life which (as the Hebrew book so cunningly shows)
+is the organic development of the family life; or whether he shall
+treat it (as we do not) as a mere apologue or myth, he must confess
+that it is equally grand in its simplicity and singular in its
+unexpected result.  The words of the story, taken literally and
+simply, no more justify the notion that Canaan's slavery was any
+magical consequence of the old patriarch's anger than they do the
+well-known theory that it was the cause of the Negro's blackness.
+Ham shows a low, foul, irreverent, unnatural temper towards his
+father.  The old man's shame is not a cause of shame to his son, but
+only of laughter.  Noah prophesies (in the fullest and deepest
+meaning of that word) that a curse will come upon that son's son;
+that he will be a slave of slaves; and reason and experience show
+that he spoke truth.  Let the young but see that their fathers have
+no reverence for the generation before them, then will they in turn
+have no reverence for their fathers.  Let them be taught that the
+sins of their ancestors involve their own honour so little that they
+need not take any trouble to clear the blot off the scutcheon, but
+may safely sit down and laugh over it, saying, 'Very likely it is
+true.  If so, it is very amusing; and if not--what matter?'--Then
+those young people are being bred up in a habit of mind which
+contains in itself all the capabilities of degradation and slavery,
+in self-conceit, hasty assertion, disbelief in nobleness, and all the
+other 'credulities of scepticism':  parted from that past from which
+they take their common origin, they are parted also from each other,
+and become selfish, self-seeking, divided, and therefore weak:
+disbelieving in the nobleness of those who have gone before them,
+they learn more and more to disbelieve in the nobleness of those
+around them; and, by denying God's works of old, come, by a just and
+dreadful Nemesis, to be unable to see his works in the men of their
+own day; to suspect and impugn valour, righteousness,
+disinterestedness in their contemporaries; to attribute low motives;
+to pride themselves on looking at men and things as 'men who know the
+world,' so the young puppies style it; to be less and less chivalrous
+to women, less and less respectful to old men, less and less ashamed
+of boasting about their sensual appetites; in a word, to show all
+those symptoms which, when fully developed, leave a generation
+without fixed principles, without strong faith, without self-
+restraint, without moral cohesion, the sensual and divided prey of
+any race, however inferior in scientific knowledge, which has a clear
+and fixed notion of its work and destiny.  That many of these signs
+are themselves more and more ominously showing in our young men, from
+the fine gentleman who rides in Rotten Row to the boy-mechanic who
+listens enraptured to Mr. Holyoake's exposures of the absurdity of
+all human things save Mr. Holyoake's self, is a fact which presses
+itself most on those who have watched this age most carefully, and
+who (rightly or wrongly) attribute much of this miserable temper to
+the way in which history has been written among us for the last
+hundred years.
+
+Whether or not Mr. Froude would agree with these notions, he is more
+or less responsible for them; for they have been suggested by his
+'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of
+Elizabeth.'  It was impossible to read the book without feeling the
+contrast between its tone and that of every other account of the
+times which one had ever seen.  Mr. Froude seems to have set to work
+upon the principle, too much ignored in judging of the past, that the
+historian's success must depend on his dramatic faculty; and not
+merely on that constructive element of the faculty in which Mr.
+Macaulay shows such astonishing power, but on that higher and deeper
+critical element which ought to precede the constructive process, and
+without which the constructive element will merely enable a writer,
+as was once bitterly but truly said, 'to produce the greatest
+possible misrepresentation with the least possible distortion of
+fact.'  That deeper dramatic faculty, the critical, is not logical
+merely, but moral, and depends on the moral health, the wideness and
+heartiness of his moral sympathies, by which he can put himself--as
+Mr. Froude has attempted to do, and as we think successfully--into
+the place of each and every character, and not merely feel for them,
+but feel with them.  He does not merely describe their actions from
+the outside, attributing them arbitrarily to motives which are pretty
+sure to be the lowest possible, because it is easier to conceive a
+low motive than a lofty one, and to call a man a villain than to
+unravel patiently the tangled web of good and evil of which his
+thoughts are composed.  He has attempted to conceive of his
+characters as he would if they had been his own contemporaries and
+equals, acting, speaking in his company; and he has therefore thought
+himself bound to act toward them by those rules of charity and
+courtesy, common alike to Christian morals, English law, and decent
+society; namely, to hold every man innocent till he is proved guilty;
+where a doubt exists, to give the prisoner at the bar the benefit of
+it; not to excite the minds of the public against him by those
+insinuative or vituperative epithets, which are but adders and
+scorpions; and, on the whole, to believe that a man's death and
+burial is not the least reason for ceasing to behave to him like a
+gentleman and a Christian.  We are not inclined to play with solemn
+things, or to copy Lucian and Quevedo in writing dialogues of the
+dead; but what dialogues might some bold pen dash off between the old
+sons of Anak, at whose coming Hades has long ago been moved, and to
+receive whom all the kings of the nation have risen up, and the
+little scribblers who have fancied themselves able to fathom and
+describe characters to whom they were but pigmies!  Conceive a half-
+hour's interview between Queen Elizabeth and some popular lady-
+scribbler, who has been deluding herself into the fancy that
+gossiping inventories of millinery are history . . . 'You pretend to
+judge me, whose labours, whose cares, whose fiery trials were, beside
+yours, as the heaving volcano beside a boy's firework?  You condemn
+my weaknesses?  Know that they were stronger than your strength!  You
+impute motives for my sins?  Know that till you are as great as I
+have been, for evil and for good, you will be as little able to
+comprehend my sins as my righteousness!  Poor marsh-croaker, who
+wishest not merely to swell up to the bulk of the ox, but to embrace
+it in thy little paws, know thine own size, and leave me to be judged
+by Him who made me!' . . . How the poor soul would shrink back into
+nothing before that lion eye which saw and guided the destinies of
+the world, and all the flunkey-nature (if such a vice exist beyond
+the grave) come out in utter abjectness, as if the ass in the fable,
+on making his kick at the dead lion, had discovered to his horror
+that the lion was alive and well--Spirit of Quevedo! finish for us
+the picture which we cannot finish for ourselves.
+
+In a very different spirit from such has Mr. Froude approached these
+times.  Great and good deeds were done in them; and it has therefore
+seemed probable to him that there were great and good men there to do
+them.  Thoroughly awake to the fact that the Reformation was the new
+birth of the British nation, it has seemed to him a puzzling theory
+which attributes its success to the lust of a tyrant and the cupidity
+of his courtiers.  It has evidently seemed to him paradoxical that a
+king who was reputed to have been a satyr, instead of keeping as many
+concubines as seemed good to him, should have chosen to gratify his
+passions by entering six times into the strict bonds of matrimony,
+religiously observing those bonds.  It has seemed to him even more
+paradoxical that one reputed to have been the most sanguinary tyrant
+who ever disgraced the English throne should have been not only
+endured, but loved and regretted by a fierce and free-spoken people;
+and he, we suppose, could comprehend as little as we can the
+reasoning of such a passage as the following, especially when it
+proceeds from the pen of so wise and venerable a writer as Mr.
+Hallam.
+
+'A government administered with so frequent violations, not only of
+the chartered privileges of Englishmen, but of those still more
+sacred rights which natural law has established, must have been
+regarded, one would imagine, with just abhorrence and earnest
+longings for a change.  Yet contemporary authorities by no means
+answer this expectation.  Some mention Henry after his death in
+language of eulogy;' (not only Elizabeth, be it remembered, but
+Cromwell also, always spoke of him with deepest respect; and their
+language always found an echo in the English heart;) 'and if we
+except those whom attachment to the ancient religion had inspired
+with hatred to his memory, few seem to have been aware that his name
+would descend to posterity among those of the many tyrants and
+oppressors of innocence whom the wrath of Heaven has raised up, and
+the servility of man endured.'
+
+The names of even those few we should be glad to have; for it seems
+to us that, with the exception of a few ultra-Protestants, who could
+not forgive that persecution of the Reformers which he certainly
+permitted, if not encouraged, during one period of his reign, no one
+adopted the modern view of his character till more than a hundred
+years after his death, when belief in all nobleness and faith had
+died out among an ignoble and faithless generation, and the
+scandalous gossip of such a light rogue as Osborne was taken into the
+place of honest and respectful history.
+
+To clear up such seeming paradoxes as these by carefully examining
+the facts of the sixteenth century has been Mr. Froude's work; and we
+have the results of his labour in two volumes, embracing only a
+period of eleven years; but giving promise that the mysteries of the
+succeeding time will be well cleared up for us in future volumes, and
+that we shall find our forefathers to have been, if no better, at
+least no worse men than ourselves.  He has brought to the task known
+talents and learning, a mastery over English prose almost unequalled
+in this generation, a spirit of most patient and good-tempered
+research, and that intimate knowledge of human motives and passions
+which his former books have shown, and which we have a right to
+expect from any scholar who has really profited by Aristotle's
+unrivalled Ethics.  He has fairly examined every contemporary
+document within his reach, and, as he informs us in the preface, he
+has been enabled, through the kindness of Sir Francis Palgrave, to
+consult a great number of MSS. relating to the Reformation, hitherto
+all but unknown to the public, and referred to in his work as MSS. in
+the Rolls' House, where the originals are easily accessible.  These,
+he states, he intends to publish, with additions from his own
+reading, as soon as he has brought his history down to the end of
+Henry the Eighth's reign.
+
+But Mr. Froude's chief text-book seems to have been State Papers and
+Acts of Parliament.  He has begun his work in the only temper in
+which a man can write accurately and well; in a temper of trust
+toward the generation whom he describes.  The only temper; for if a
+man has no affection for the characters of whom he reads, he will
+never understand them; if he has no respect for his subject, he will
+never take the trouble to exhaust it.  To such an author the Statutes
+at large, as the deliberate expression of the nation's will and
+conscience, will appear the most important of all sources of
+information; the first to be consulted, the last to be contradicted;
+the Canon which is not to be checked and corrected by private letters
+and flying pamphlets, but which is to check and correct them.  This
+seems Mr. Froude's theory; and we are at no pains to confess that if
+he be wrong we see no hope of arriving at truth.  If these public
+documents are not to be admitted in evidence before all others, we
+see no hope for the faithful and earnest historian; he must give
+himself up to swim as he may on the frothy stream of private letters,
+anecdotes, and pamphlets, the puppet of the ignorance, credulity,
+peevishness, spite, of any and every gossip and scribbler.
+
+Beginning his history with the fall of Wolsey, Mr. Froude enters, of
+course, at his first step into the vexed question of Henry's divorce:
+an introductory chapter, on the general state of England, we shall
+notice hereafter.
+
+A very short inspection of the method in which he handles the divorce
+question gives us at once confidence in his temper and judgment, and
+hope that we may at last come to some clearer understanding of it
+than the old law gives us, which we have already quoted, concerning
+the dog who went mad to serve his private ends.  In a few masterly
+pages he sketches for us the rotting and dying Church, which had
+recovered her power after the Wars of the Roses over an exhausted
+nation; but in form only, not in life.  Wolsey, with whom he has fair
+and understanding sympathy, he sketches as the transition minister,
+'loving England well, but loving Rome better,' who intends a reform
+of the Church, but who, as the Pope's commissioner for that very
+purpose, is liable to a praemunire, and therefore dare not appeal to
+Parliament to carry out his designs, even if he could have counted on
+the Parliament's assistance in any measures designed to invigorate
+the Church.  At last arises in the divorce question the accident
+which brings to an issue on its most vital point the question of
+Papal power in England, and which finally draws down ruin upon Wolsey
+himself.
+
+This appears to have begun in the winter of 1526-27.  It was proposed
+to marry the Princess Mary to a son of the French king.  The Bishop
+of Tarbes, who conducted the negotiations, advised himself,
+apparently by special instigation of the evil spirit, to raise a
+question as to her legitimacy.
+
+No more ingenious plan for convulsing England could have been
+devised.  The marriage from which Mary sprang only stood on a
+reluctant and doubtful dispensation of the Pope's.  Henry had entered
+into it at the entreaty of his ministers, contrary to a solemn
+promise given to his father, and in spite of the remonstrances of the
+Archbishop of Canterbury.  No blessing seemed to have rested on it.
+All his children had died young, save this one sickly girl:  a sure
+note of divine displeasure in the eyes of that coarse-minded Church
+which has always declared the chief, if not the only, purpose of
+marriage to be the procreation of children.
+
+But more:  to question Mary's legitimacy was to throw open the
+question of succession to half a dozen ambitious competitors.  It
+was, too probably, to involve England at Henry's death in another
+civil war of the Roses, and in all the internecine horrors which were
+still rankling in the memories of men; and probably, also, to bring
+down a French or Scotch invasion.  There was then too good reason, as
+Mr. Froude shows at length, for Wolsey's assertion to John Cassalis--
+'If his Holiness, which God forbid, shall show himself unwilling to
+listen to the King's demands, to me assuredly it will be but grief to
+live longer, for the innumerable evils which I foresee will follow .
+. . Nothing before us but universal and inevitable ruin.'  Too good
+reason there was for the confession of the Pope himself to Gardner,
+'What danger it was to the realm to have this thing hang in suspense
+. . . That without an heir-male, etc., the realm was like to come to
+dissolution.'  Too good reason for the bold assertion of the
+Cardinal-Governor of Bologna, that 'he knew the guise of England as
+few men did, and that if the King should die without heirs-male, he
+was sure that it would cost two hundred thousand men's lives; and
+that to avoid this mischief by a second marriage, he thought, would
+deserve heaven.'  Too good reason for the assertion of Hall, that
+'all indifferent and discreet persons judged it necessary for the
+Pope to grant Henry a divorce, and, by enabling him to marry again,
+give him the hope of an undisputed heir-male.'  The Pope had full
+power to do this; in fact, such cases had been for centuries integral
+parts of his jurisdiction as head of Christendom.  But he was at once
+too timid and too time-serving to exercise his acknowledged
+authority; and thus, just at the very moment when his spiritual power
+was being tried in the balance, he chose himself to expose his
+political power to the same test.  Both were equally found wanting.
+He had, it appeared, as little heart to do justice among kings and
+princes as he had to seek and to save the souls of men; and the
+Reformation followed as a matter of course.
+
+Through the tangled brakes of this divorce question Mr. Froude leads
+us with ease and grace, throwing light, and even beauty, into dark
+nooks where before all was mist, not merely by his intimate
+acquaintance with the facts, but still more by his deep knowledge of
+human character, and of woman's even more than of man's.  For the
+first time the actors in this long tragedy appear to us as no mere
+bodiless and soulless names, but as beings of like passions with
+ourselves, comprehensible, coherent, organic, even in their
+inconsistencies.  Catherine of Arragon is still the Catherine of
+Shakspeare; but Mr. Froude has given us the key to many parts of her
+story which Shakspeare left unexplained, and delicately enough has
+made us understand how Henry's affections, if he ever had any for
+her--faithfully as he had kept (with one exception) to that loveless
+mariage de convenance--may have been gradually replaced by
+indifference and even dislike, long before the divorce was forced on
+him as a question not only of duty to the nation, but of duty to
+Heaven.  And that he did see it in this latter light, Mr. Froude
+brings proof from his own words, from which we can escape only by
+believing that the confessedly honest 'Bluff King Hal' had suddenly
+become a consummate liar and a canting hypocrite.
+
+Delicately, too, as if speaking of a lady whom he had met in modern
+society (as a gentleman is bound to do), does Mr. Froude touch on the
+sins of that hapless woman, who played for Henry's crown, and paid
+for it with her life.  With all mercy and courtesy he gives us proof
+(for he thinks it his duty to do so) of the French mis-education, the
+petty cunning, the tendency to sensuality, the wilful indelicacy of
+her position in Henry's household as the rival of his queen, which
+made her last catastrophe at least possible.  Of the justice of her
+sentence he has no doubt, any more than of her pre-engagement to some
+one, as proved by a letter existing among Cromwell's papers.  Poor
+thing!  If she did that which was laid to her charge, and more, she
+did nothing, after all, but what she had been in the habit of seeing
+the queens and princesses of the French court do notoriously, and
+laugh over shamelessly; while, as Mr. Froude well says, 'If we are to
+hold her entirely free from guilt, we place not only the King, but
+the Privy Council, the Judges, the Lords and Commons, and the two
+Houses of Convocation, in a position fatal to their honour and
+degrading to ordinary humanity' (Mr. Froude should have added Anne
+Boleyn's own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and her father, who were on
+the commission appointed to try her lovers, and her cousin, Anthony
+St. Leger, a man of the very highest character and ability, who was
+on the jury which found a true bill against her).  'We can not,'
+continues Mr. Froude, 'acquiesce without inquiry in so painful a
+conclusion.  The English nation also, as well as she, deserves
+justice at our hands; and it cannot be thought uncharitable if we
+look with some scrutiny at the career of a person who, but for the
+catastrophe with which it closed, would not have so readily obtained
+forgiveness for having admitted the addresses of the King, or for
+having received the homage of the court as its future sovereign,
+while the King's wife, her mistress, as yet resided under the same
+roof.'  Mr. Froude's conclusion is, after examining the facts, the
+same with the whole nation of England in Henry's reign:  but no one
+can accuse him of want of sympathy with the unhappy woman, who reads
+the eloquent and affecting account of her trial and death, which ends
+his second volume.  Our only fear is, that by having thus told the
+truth he has, instead of justifying our ancestors, only added one
+more to the list of people who are to be 'given up' with a cynical
+shrug and smile.  We have heard already, and among young ladies too,
+who can be as cynical as other people in these times, such speeches
+as, 'Well, I suppose he has proved Anne Boleyn to be a bad creature;
+but that does not make that horrid Henry any more right in cutting
+off her head.'  Thus two people will be despised where only one was
+before, and the fact still ignored, that it is just as senseless to
+say that Henry cut off Anne Boleyn's head as that Queen Victoria
+hanged Palmer.  Death, and death of a far more horrible kind than
+that which Anne Boleyn suffered, was the established penalty of the
+offences of which she was convicted:  and which had in her case this
+fearful aggravation, that they were offences not against Henry
+merely, but against the whole English nation.  She had been married
+in order that there might be an undisputed heir to the throne, and a
+fearful war avoided.  To throw into dispute, by any conduct of hers,
+the legitimacy of her own offspring, argued a levity or a hard-
+heartedness which of itself deserved the severest punishment.
+
+We will pass from this disagreeable topic to Mr. Froude's lifelike
+sketch of Pope Clement, and the endless tracasseries into which his
+mingled weakness and cunning led him, and which, like most crooked
+dealings, ended by defeating their own object.  Pages 125 et sqq. of
+Vol. I. contain sketches of him, his thoughts and ways, as amusing as
+they are historically important; but we have no space to quote from
+them.  It will be well for those to whom the Reformation is still a
+matter of astonishment to read those pages, and consider what manner
+of man he was, in spite of all pretended divine authority, under
+whose rule the Romish system received its irrecoverable wound.
+
+But of all these figures, not excepting Henry's own, Wolsey stands
+out as the most grand and tragical; and Mr. Froude has done good
+service to history, if only in making us understand at last the
+wondrous 'butcher's son.'  Shakspeare seems to have felt (though he
+could explain the reason neither to his auditors nor, perhaps, to
+himself) that Wolsey was, on the whole, an heroical man.  Mr. Froude
+shows at once his strength and his weakness; his deep sense of the
+rottenness of the Church; his purpose to purge her from those
+abominations which were as well known, it seems, to him as they were
+afterwards to the whole people of England; his vast schemes for
+education; his still vaster schemes for breaking the alliance with
+Spain, and uniting France and England as fellow-servants of the Pope,
+and twin-pillars of the sacred fabric of the Church, which helped so
+much toward his interest in Catherine's divorce, as a 'means' (these
+are his own words) 'to bind my most excellent sovereign and this
+glorious realm to the holy Roman See in faith and obedience for
+ever'; his hopes of deposing the Emperor, putting down the German
+heresies, and driving back the Turks beyond the pale of Christendom;
+his pathetic confession to the Bishop of Bayonne that 'if he could
+only see the divorce arranged, the King re-married, the succession
+settled, and the laws and the Church reformed, he would retire from
+the world, and would serve God the remainder of his days.'
+
+Peace be with him!  He was surely a noble soul; misled, it may be--as
+who is not when his turn comes?--by the pride of conscious power; and
+'though he loved England well, yet loving Rome better':  but still it
+is a comfort to see, either in past or in present, one more brother
+whom we need not despise, even though he may have wasted his energies
+on a dream.
+
+And on a dream he did waste them, in spite of all his cunning.  As
+Mr. Froude, in a noble passage, says:-
+
+
+ 'Extravagant as his hopes seem, the prospect of realising them was,
+humanly speaking, neither chimerical nor even improbable.  He had but
+made the common mistake of men of the world, who are the
+representatives of an old order of things, when that order is doomed
+and dying.  He could not read the signs of the times; and confounding
+the barrenness of death with the barrenness of winter, which might be
+followed by a new spring and summer, he believed that the old life-
+tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground,
+might bloom again in its old beauty.  The thing which he called
+heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of
+princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could
+trample out; and as, in the early years of Christianity, the meanest
+slave who was thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the
+forbidden mysteries of the Gospel saw deeper, in the divine power of
+his faith, into the future even of this earthly world, than the
+sagest of his imperial persecutors,--so a truer political prophet
+than Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those poor
+men for whom his police were searching in the purlieus of London, who
+were risking death and torture in disseminating the pernicious
+volumes of the English Testament.'
+
+
+It will be seen from this magnificent passage that Mr. Froude is
+distinctly a Protestant.  He is one, to judge from his book; and all
+the better one, because he can sympathise with whatsoever nobleness,
+even with whatsoever mere conservatism, existed in the Catholic
+party.  And therefore, because he has sympathies which are not merely
+party ones, but human ones, he has given the world, in these two
+volumes, a history of the early Reformation altogether unequalled.
+This human sympathy, while it has enabled him to embalm in most
+affecting prose the sad story of the noble though mistaken
+Carthusians, and to make even the Nun of Kent interesting, because
+truly womanly, in her very folly and deceit, has enabled him likewise
+to show us the hearts of the early martyrs as they never have been
+shown before.  His sketch of the Christian Brothers, and his little
+true romance of Anthony Dalaber, the Oxford student, are gems of
+writing; while his conception of Latimer, on whom he looks as the
+hero of the movement, and all but an English Luther, is as worthy of
+Latimer as it is of himself.  It is written as history should be,
+discriminatingly, patiently, and yet lovingly and genially; rejoicing
+not in evil, but in the truth; and rejoicing still more in goodness,
+where goodness can honestly be found.
+
+To the ecclesiastical and political elements in the English
+Reformation Mr. Froude devotes a large portion of his book.  We shall
+not enter into the questions which he discusses therein.  That aspect
+of the movement is a foreign and a delicate subject, from discussing
+which a Scotch periodical may be excused. {2}  North Britain had a
+somewhat different problem to solve from her southern sister, and
+solved it in an altogether different way:  but this we must say, that
+the facts and, still more, the State Papers (especially the petition
+of the Commons, as contrasted with the utterly benighted answer of
+the Bishops) which Mr. Froude gives are such as to raise our opinion
+of the method on which the English part of the Reformation was
+conducted, and make us believe that in this, as in other matters,
+both Henry and his Parliament, though still doctrinal Romanists, were
+sound-headed practical Englishmen.
+
+This result is of the same kind as most of those at which Mr. Froude
+arrives.  They form altogether a general justification of our
+ancestors in Henry the Eighth's time, if not of Henry the Eighth
+himself, which frees Mr. Froude from that charge of irreverence to
+the past generations against which we protested in the beginning of
+the article.  We hope honestly that he may be as successful in his
+next volumes as he has been in these, in vindicating the worthies of
+the sixteenth century.  Whether he shall fail or not, and whether or
+not he has altogether succeeded, in the volumes before us, his book
+marks a new epoch, and, we trust, a healthier and loftier one, in
+English history.  We trust that they inaugurate a time in which the
+deeds of our forefathers shall be looked on as sacred heirlooms;
+their sins as our shame, their victories as bequests to us; when men
+shall have sufficient confidence in those to whom they owe their
+existence to scrutinise faithfully and patiently every fact
+concerning them, with a proud trust that, search as they may, they
+will not find much of which to be ashamed.
+
+Lastly, Mr. Froude takes a view of Henry's character, not, indeed,
+new (for it is the original one), but obsolete for now two hundred
+years.  Let it be well understood that he makes no attempt (he has
+been accused thereof) to whitewash Henry:  all that he does is to
+remove as far as he can the modern layers of 'black-wash,' and to let
+the man himself, fair or foul, be seen.  For the result he is not
+responsible:  it depends on facts; and unless Mr. Froude has
+knowingly concealed facts to an amount of which even a Lingard might
+be ashamed, the result is that Henry the Eighth was actually very
+much the man which he appeared to be to the English nation in his own
+generation, and for two or three generations after his death--a
+result which need not astonish us, if we will only give our ancestors
+credit for having at least as much common sense as ourselves, and
+believe (why should we not?) that, on the whole, they understood
+their own business better than we are likely to do.
+
+'The bloated tyrant,' it is confessed, contrived somehow or other to
+be popular enough.  Mr. Froude tells us the reasons.  He was not born
+a bloated tyrant, any more than Queen Elizabeth (though the fact is
+not generally known) was born a wizened old woman.  He was from
+youth, till he was long past his grand climacteric, a very handsome,
+powerful, and active man, temperate in his habits, good-humoured,
+frank and honest in his speech (as even his enemies are forced to
+confess).  He seems to have been (as his portraits prove
+sufficiently), for good and for evil, a thorough John Bull; a
+thorough Englishman:  but one of the very highest type.
+
+
+'Had he died (says Mr. Froude) previous to the first agitation of the
+divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the heaviest
+misfortunes which had ever befallen this country, and he would have
+left a name which would have taken its place in history by the side
+of the Black Prince or the Conqueror of Agincourt.  Left at the most
+trying age, with his character unformed, with the means of gratifying
+every inclination, and married by his ministers, when a boy, to an
+unattractive woman far his senior, he had lived for thirty-six years
+almost without blame, and bore through England the reputation of an
+upright and virtuous king.  Nature had been prodigal to him of her
+rarest gifts . . . Of his intellectual ability we are not left to
+judge from the suspicious panegyrics of his contemporaries.  His
+State Papers and letters may be placed by the side of those of Wolsey
+or of Cromwell, and they lose nothing by the comparison.  Though they
+are broadly different, the perception is equally clear, the
+expression equally powerful; and they breathe throughout an
+irresistible vigour of purpose.  In addition to this, he had a fine
+musical taste, carefully cultivated; he spoke and wrote in four
+languages; and his knowledge of a multitude of subjects, with which
+his versatile ability made him conversant, would have formed the
+reputation of any ordinary man.  He was among the best physicians of
+his age.  He was his own engineer, inventing improvements in
+artillery and new constructions in shipbuilding; and this not with
+the condescending incapacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough
+workmanlike understanding.  His reading was vast, especially in
+theology.  He was 'attentive,' as it is called, 'to his religious
+duties,' being present at the services in chapel two or three times a
+day with unfailing regularity, and showing, to outward appearance, a
+real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his
+life.  In private he was good-humoured and good-natured.  His letters
+to his secretaries, though never undignified, are simple, easy, and
+unrestrained, and the letters written by them to him are similarly
+plain and business-like, as if the writers knew that the person whom
+they were addressing disliked compliments, and chose to be treated as
+a man.  He seems to have been always kind, always considerate;
+inquiring into their private concerns with genuine interest, and
+winning, as a consequence, their sincere and unaffected attachment.
+As a ruler he had been eminently popular.  All his wars had been
+successful.  He had the splendid tastes in which the English people
+most delighted; . . . he had more than once been tried with
+insurrection, which he had soothed down without bloodshed, and
+extinguished in forgiveness . . . And it is certain that if he had
+died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VIII., like the Roman
+emperor said by Tacitus to have been censensu omnium dignus imperii
+nisi imperasset, would have been considered by posterity as formed by
+Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would
+have been deplored as a perpetual calamity.'
+
+
+Mr. Froude has, of course, not written these words without having
+facts whereby to prove them.  One he gives in an important note
+containing an extract from a letter of the Venetian Ambassador in
+1515.  At least, if his conclusions be correct, we must think twice
+ere we deny his assertion that 'the man best able of all living
+Englishmen to govern England had been set to do it by the conditions
+of his birth.'
+
+'We are bound,' as Mr. Froude says, 'to allow him the benefit of his
+past career, and be careful to remember it in interpreting his later
+actions.'  'The true defect in his moral constitution, that "intense
+and imperious will" common to all princes of the Plantagenet blood,
+had not yet been tested.'  That he did, in his later years, act in
+many ways neither wisely nor well, no one denies; that his conduct
+did not alienate the hearts of his subjects is what needs
+explanation; and Mr. Froude's opinions on this matter, novel as they
+are, and utterly opposed to that of the standard modern historians,
+require careful examination.  Now I am not inclined to debate Henry
+the Eighth's character, or any other subject, as between Mr. Froude
+and an author of the obscurantist or pseudo-conservative school.  Mr.
+Froude is Liberal; and so am I.  I wish to look at the question as
+between Mr. Froude and other Liberals; and therefore, of course,
+first, as between Mr. Froude and Mr. Hallam.
+
+Mr. Hallam's name is so venerable and his work so Important, that to
+set ourselves up as judges in this or in any matter between him and
+Mr. Froude would be mere impertinence:  but speaking merely as
+learners, we have surely a right to inquire why Mr. Hallam has
+entered on the whole question of Henry's relations to his Parliament
+with a praejudicium against them; for which Mr. Froude finds no
+ground whatsoever in fact.  Why are all acts both of Henry and his
+Parliament to be taken in malam partem?  They were not Whigs,
+certainly:  neither were Socrates and Plato, nor even St. Paul and
+St. John.  They may have been honest men as men go, or they may not:
+but why is there to be a feeling against them rather than for them?
+Why is Henry always called a tyrant, and his Parliament servile?  The
+epithets have become so common and unquestioned that our
+interrogation may seem startling.  Still we make it.  Why was Henry a
+tyrant?  That may be true, but must be proved by facts.  Where are
+they?  Is the mere fact of a monarch's asking for money a crime in
+him and his ministers?  The question would rather seem to be, Were
+the moneys for which Henry asked needed or no; and, when granted,
+were they rightly or wrongly applied?  And on these subjects we want
+much more information than we obtain from any epithets.  The author
+of a constitutional history should rise above epithets:  or, if he
+uses them, should corroborate them by facts.  Why should not
+historians be as fair and as cautious in accusing Henry and Wolsey as
+they would be in accusing Queen Victoria and Lord Palmerston?  What
+right, allow us to ask, has a grave constitutional historian to say
+that 'We cannot, indeed, doubt that the unshackled and despotic
+condition of his friend, Francis I., afforded a mortifying contrast
+to Henry?  What document exists in which Henry is represented as
+regretting that he is the king of a free people?--for such Mr. Hallam
+confesses, just above, England was held to be, and was actually in
+comparison with France.  If the document does not exist, Mr. Hallam
+has surely stepped out of the field of the historian into that of the
+novelist, a la Scott or Dumas.  The Parliament sometimes grants
+Henry's demands:  sometimes it refuses them, and he has to help
+himself by other means.  Why are both cases to be interpreted in
+malam partem?  Why is the Parliament's granting to be always a proof
+of its servility?--its refusing always a proof of Henry's tyranny and
+rapacity?  Both views are mere praejudicia, reasonable perhaps, and
+possible:  but why is not a praejudicium of the opposite kind as
+rational and as possible?  Why has not a historian a right to start,
+as Mr. Froude does, by taking for granted that both parties may have
+been on the whole right; that the Parliament granted certain sums
+because Henry was right in asking for them; refused others because
+Henry was wrong; even that, in some cases, Henry may have been right
+in asking, the Parliament wrong in refusing; and that in such a case,
+under the pressure of critical times, Henry was forced to get as he
+could the money which he saw that the national cause required?  Let
+it be as folks will.  Let Henry be sometimes right, and the
+Parliament sometimes likewise; or the Parliament always right, or
+Henry always right; or anything else, save this strange diseased
+theory that both must have been always wrong, and that, evidence to
+that effect failing, motives must be insinuated, or openly asserted,
+from the writer's mere imagination.  This may be a dream:  but it is
+as easy to imagine as the other, and more pleasant also.  It will
+probably be answered (though not by Mr. Hallam himself) by a sneer:
+'You do not seem to know much of the world, sir.'  But so would
+Figaro and Gil Blas have said, and on exactly the same grounds.
+
+Let us examine a stock instance of Henry's 'rapacity' and his
+Parliament's servility, namely, the exactions in 1524 and 1525, and
+the subsequent 'release of the King's debts.'  What are the facts of
+the case?  France and Scotland had attacked England in 1514.  The
+Scotch were beaten at Flodden.  The French lost Tournay and
+Therouenne, and, when peace was made, agreed to pay the expenses of
+the war.  Times changed, and the expenses were not paid.
+
+A similar war arose in 1524, and cost England immense sums.  A large
+army was maintained on the Scotch Border, another army invaded
+France; and Wolsey, not venturing to call a Parliament,--because he
+was, as Pope's legate, liable to a praemunire,--raised money by
+contributions and benevolences, which were levied, it seems on the
+whole, uniformly and equally (save that they weighed more heavily on
+the rich than on the poor, if that be a fault), and differed from
+taxes only in not having received the consent of Parliament.
+Doubtless, this was not the best way of raising money:  but what if,
+under the circumstances, it were the only one?  What if, too, on the
+whole, the money so raised was really given willingly by the nation?
+The sequel alone could decide that.
+
+The first contribution for which Wolsey asked was paid.  The second
+was resisted, and was not paid; proving thereby that the nation need
+not pay unless it chose.  The court gave way; and the war became
+defensive only till 1525.
+
+Then the tide turned.  The danger, then, was not from Francis, but
+from the Emperor.  Francis was taken prisoner at Pavia; and shortly
+after Rome was sacked by Bourbon.
+
+The effect of all this in England is told at large in Mr. Froude's
+second chapter.  Henry became bond for Francis's ransom, to be paid
+to the Emperor.  He spent 500,000 crowns more in paying the French
+army; and in the terms of peace made with France, a sum-total was
+agreed on for the whole debt, old and new, to be paid as soon as
+possible; and an annual pension of 500,000 crowns besides.  The
+French exchequer, however, still remained bankrupt, and again the
+money was not paid.
+
+Parliament, when it met in 1529, reviewed the circumstances of the
+expenditure, and finding it all such as the nation on the whole
+approved, legalised the taxation by benevolences retrospectively:
+and this is the whole mare's nest of the first payment of Henry's
+debts; if, at least, any faith is to be put in the preamble of the
+Act for the release of the King's Debts, 21 Hen. VIII. c. 24.  'The
+King's loving subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and
+Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, calling to remembrance
+the inestimable costs, charges, and expenses which the King's
+Highness hath necessarily been compelled to support and sustain since
+his assumption to his crown, estate, and dignity royal, as well for
+the extinction of a right dangerous and damnable schism, sprung in
+the Church, as for the modifying the insatiable and inordinate
+ambition of them who, while aspiring to the monarchy of Christendom,
+did put universal troubles and divisions in the same, intending, if
+they might, not only to have subdued this realm, but also all the
+rest, unto their power and subjection--for resistance whereof the
+King's Highness was compelled to marvellous charges--both for the
+supportation of sundry armies by sea and land, and also for divers
+and manifold contribution on hand, to save and keep his own subjects
+at home in rest and repose--which hath been so politically handled
+that, when the most part of all Christian lands have been infested
+with cruel wars, the great Head and Prince of the world (the Pope)
+brought into captivity, cities and towns taken, spoiled, burnt, and
+sacked--the King's said subjects in all this time, by the high
+providence and politic means of his Grace, have been nevertheless
+preserved, defended, and maintained from all these inconvenients,
+etc.
+
+'Considering, furthermore, that his Highness, in and about the
+premises, hath been fain to employ not only all such sums of money as
+hath risen or grown by contributions made unto his Grace by his
+loving subjects--but also, over and above the same, sundry other
+notable and excellent sums of his own treasure and yearly revenues,
+among which manifold great sums so employed, his Highness also, as is
+notoriously known, and as doth evidently appear by the ACCOUNTS OF
+THE SAME, hath to that use, and none other, converted all such money
+as by any of his subjects hath been advanced to his Grace by way of
+prest or loan, either particularly, or by any taxation made of the
+same--being things so well collocate and bestowed, seeing the said
+high and great fruits and effects thereof insured to the surety and
+commodity and tranquillity of this realm--of our mind and consent, do
+freely, absolutely, give and grant to the King's Highness all and
+every sum or sums of money,' etc.
+
+The second release of the King's debts, in 1544, is very similar.
+The King's debts and necessities were really, when we come to examine
+them, those of the nation:  in 1538-40 England was put into a
+thorough state of defence from end to end.  Fortresses were built
+along the Scottish Border, and all along the coast opposite France
+and Flanders.  The people were drilled and armed, the fleet equipped;
+and the nation, for the time, became one great army.  And nothing but
+this, as may be proved by an overwhelming mass of evidence, saved the
+country from invasion.  Here were enormous necessary expenses which
+must be met.
+
+In 1543 a million crowns were to have been paid by Francis the First
+as part of his old debt.  It was not paid:  but, on the contrary,
+Henry had to go to war for it.  The nation again relinquished their
+claim, and allowed Henry to raise another benevolence in 1545,
+concerning which Mr. Hallam tells us a great deal, but not one word
+of the political circumstances which led to it or to the release,
+keeping his sympathies and his paper for the sorrows of refractory
+Alderman Reed, who, refusing (alone of all the citizens) to
+contribute to the support of troops on the Scotch Border or
+elsewhere, was sent down, by a sort of rough justice, to serve on the
+Scotch Border himself, and judge of the 'perils of the nation' with
+his own eyes; and being--one is pleased to hear--taken prisoner by
+the Scots, had to pay a great deal more as ransom than he would have
+paid as benevolence.
+
+But to return.  What proof is there, in all this, of that servility
+which most historians, and Mr. Hallam among the rest, are wont to
+attribute to Henry's Parliaments?  What feeling appears on the face
+of this document, which we have given and quoted, but one honourable
+to the nation?  Through the falsehood of a foreign nation the King is
+unable to perform his engagements to the people.  Is not the just and
+generous course in such a case to release him from those engagements?
+Does this preamble, does a single fact of the case, justify
+historians in talking of these 'king's debts' in just the same tone
+as that in which they would have spoken if the King had squandered
+the money on private pleasures?  Perhaps most people who write small
+histories believe that this really was the case.  They certainly
+would gather no other impression from the pages of Mr. Hallam.  No
+doubt the act must have been burdensome on some people.  Many, we are
+told, had bequeathed their promissory notes to their children, used
+their reversionary interest in the loan in many ways; and these, of
+course, felt the change very heavily.  No doubt:  but why have we not
+a right to suppose that the Parliament were aware of that fact; but
+chose it as the less of the two evils?  The King had spent the money;
+he was unable to recover it from Francis; could only refund it by
+raising some fresh tax or benevolence:  and why may not the
+Parliament have considered the release of old taxes likely to offend
+fewer people than the imposition of new ones?  It is certainly an
+ugly thing to break public faith; but to prove that public faith was
+broken, we must prove that Henry compelled the Parliament to release
+him; if the act was of their own free will, no public faith was
+broken, for they were the representatives of the nation, and through
+them the nation forgave its own debt.  And what evidence have we that
+they did not represent the nation, and that, on the whole, we must
+suppose, as we should in the case of any other men, that they best
+knew their own business?  May we not apply to this case, and to
+others, mutatis mutandis, the argument which Mr. Froude uses so
+boldly and well in the case of Anne Boleyn's trial--'The English
+nation also, as well as . . . deserves justice at our hands?'
+
+Certainly it does:  but it is a disagreeable token of the method on
+which we have been accustomed to write the history of our own
+forefathers, that Mr. Froude should find it necessary to state
+formally so very simple a truth.
+
+What proof, we ask again, is there that this old Parliament was
+'servile'?  Had that been so, Wolsey would not have been afraid to
+summon it.  The specific reason for not summoning a Parliament for
+six years after that of 1524 was that they were not servile; that
+when (here we are quoting Mr. Hallam, and not Mr. Froude) Wolsey
+entered the House of Commons with a great train, seemingly for the
+purpose of intimidation, they 'made no other answer to his harangues
+than that it was their usage to debate only among themselves.'  The
+debates on this occasion lasted fifteen or sixteen days, during
+which, says an eye-witness, 'there has been the greatest and sorest
+hold in the Lower House,' 'the matter debated and beaten'; 'such hold
+that the House was like to have been dissevered'; in a word, hard
+fighting--and why not honest fighting?--between the court party and
+the Opposition, 'which ended,' says Mr. Hallam, 'in the court party
+obtaining, with the utmost difficulty, a grant much inferior to the
+Cardinal's original requisition.'  What token of servility is here?
+
+And is it reasonable to suppose that after Wolsey was conquered, and
+a comparatively popular ministry had succeeded, and that memorable
+Parliament of 1529 (which Mr. Froude, not unjustly, thinks more
+memorable than the Long Parliament itself) began its great work with
+a high hand, backed not merely by the King, but by the public opinion
+of the majority of England, their decisions are likely to have been
+more servile than before?  If they resisted the King when they
+disagreed with him, are they to be accused of servility because they
+worked with him when they agreed with him?  Is an Opposition always
+in the right; a ministerial party always in the wrong?  Is it an
+offence against the people to agree with the monarch, even when he
+agrees with the people himself?  Simple as these questions are, one
+must really stop to ask them.
+
+No doubt pains were often taken to secure elections favourable to the
+Government.  Are none taken now?  Are not more taken now?  Will any
+historian show us the documents which prove the existence, in the
+sixteenth century, of Reform Club, Carlton Club, whippers-in and
+nominees, governmental and opposition, and all the rest of the
+beautiful machinery which protects our Reformed Parliament from the
+evil influences of bribery and corruption?  Pah!--We have somewhat
+too much glass in our modern House to afford to throw stones at our
+forefathers' old St. Stephen's.  At the worst, what was done then but
+that without which it is said to be impossible to carry on a
+Government now?  Take an instance from the Parliament of 1539, one in
+which there is no doubt Government influence was used in order to
+prevent as much as possible the return of members favourable to the
+clergy--for the good reason that the clergy were no doubt, on their
+own side, intimidating voters by all those terrors of the unseen
+world which had so long been to them a source of boundless profit and
+power.
+
+Cromwell writes to the King to say that he has secured a seat for a
+certain Sir Richard Morrison; but for what purpose?  As one who no
+doubt 'should be ready to answer and take up such as should crack or
+face with literature of learning, if any such should be.'  There was,
+then, free discussion; they expected clever and learned speakers in
+the Opposition, and on subjects of the deepest import, not merely
+political, but spiritual; and the Government needed men to answer
+such.  What more natural than that so close on the 'Pilgrimage of
+Grace,' and in the midst of so great dangers at home and abroad, the
+Government should have done their best to secure a well-disposed
+House (one would like to know when they would not)?  But surely the
+very effort (confessedly exceptional) and the acknowledged difficulty
+prove that Parliament were no mere 'registrars of edicts.'
+
+But the strongest argument against the tyranny of the Tudors, and
+especially of Henry VIII. in his 'benevolences,' is derived from the
+state of the people themselves.  If these benevolences had been
+really unpopular, they would not have been paid.  In one case we have
+seen, a benevolence was not paid for that very reason.  For the
+method of the Tudor sovereigns, like that of their predecessors, was
+the very opposite to that of tyrants in every age and country.  The
+first act of a tyrant has always been to disarm the people, and to
+surround himself with a standing army.  The Tudor method was, as Mr.
+Froude shows us by many interesting facts, to keep the people armed
+and drilled, even to compel them to learn the use of weapons.
+Throughout England spread one vast military organisation, which made
+every adult a soldier, and enabled him to find, at a day's notice,
+his commanding officer, whether landlord, sheriff, or lieutenant of
+the county; so that, as a foreign ambassador of the time remarks with
+astonishment (we quote from memory), 'England is the strongest nation
+on earth, for though the King has not a single mercenary soldier, he
+can raise in three days an army of two hundred thousand men.'
+
+And of what temper those men were it is well known enough.  Mr.
+Froude calls them--and we beg leave to endorse, without exception,
+Mr. Froude's opinion--'A sturdy high-hearted race, sound in body and
+fierce in spirit, and furnished with thews and sinews which, under
+the stimulus of those "great shins of beef," their common diet, were
+the wonder of the age.'  'What comyn folke in all this world,' says a
+State Paper in 1515, 'may compare with the comyns of England in
+riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity?  What comyn
+folk is so mighty, so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?'
+In authentic stories of actions under Henry VIII.--and, we will add,
+under Elizabeth likewise--where the accuracy of the account is
+undeniable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies
+whenever they could meet them.  Again and again a few thousands of
+them carried dismay into the heart of France.  Four hundred
+adventurers, vagabond apprentices of London, who formed a volunteer
+corps in the Calais garrison, were for years, Hall says, the terror
+of Normandy.  In the very frolic of conscious power they fought and
+plundered without pay, without reward, save what they could win for
+themselves; and when they fell at last, they fell only when
+surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in
+careless desperation.  Invariably, by friend and foe alike, the
+English are described as the fiercest people in all Europe--English
+wild beasts Benvenuto Cellini calls them; and this great physical
+power they owed to the profuse abundance in which they lived, to the
+soldier's training in which every one of them was bred from
+childhood.
+
+Mr. Froude's novel assertion about profuse abundance must be weighed
+by those who have read his invaluable introductory chapter.  But we
+must ask at once how it was possible to levy on such an armed
+populace a tax which they were determined not to pay, and felt that
+they were not bound to pay, either in law or justice?  Conceive Lord
+Palmerston's sending down to demand a 'benevolence' from the army at
+Aldershot, beginning with the general in command and descending to
+the privates . . . What would be the consequences?  Ugly enough:  but
+gentle in comparison with those of any attempt to exact a really
+unpopular tax from a nation of well-armed Englishmen, unless they, on
+the whole, thought the tax fit to be paid.  They would grumble, of
+course, whether they intended to pay or not,--for were they not
+Englishmen, our own flesh and blood?--and grumble all the more in
+person, because they had no Press to grumble for them:  but what is
+there then in the M.P.'s letter to Lord Surrey, quoted by Mr. Hallam,
+p. 25, or in the more pointed letter of Warham's, two pages on, which
+we do not see lying on our breakfast tables in half the newspapers
+every week?  Poor, pedantic, obstructive old Warham, himself very
+angry at so much being asked of his brother clergymen, and at their
+being sworn as to the value of their goods (so like are old times to
+new ones); and being, on the whole, of opinion that the world (the
+Church included) is going to the devil, says that as he has been
+'showed in a secret manner of his friends, the people sore grudgeth
+and murmureth, and speaketh cursedly among themselves, as far as they
+dare, saying they shall never have rest of payments as long as some
+liveth, and that they had better die than thus be continually handed,
+reckoning themselves, their wives and children, as despoulit, and not
+greatly caring what they do, or what becomes of them.'
+
+Very dreadful--if true:  which last point depends very much upon who
+Warham was.  Now, on reading Mr. Froude's or any other good history,
+we shall find that Warham was one of the leaders of that despondent
+party which will always have its antitype in England.  Have we, too,
+not heard within the last seven years similar prophecies of
+desolation, mourning, and woe--of the Church tottering on the verge
+of ruin, the peasantry starving under the horrors of free trade,
+noble families reduced to the verge of beggary by double income-tax?
+Even such a prophet seems Warham to have been--of all people in that
+day, one of the last whom one would have asked for an opinion.
+
+Poor old Warham, however, was not so far wrong in this particular
+case; for the 'despoulit' slaves of Suffolk, not content with
+grumbling, rose up with sword and bow, and vowed that they would not
+pay.  Whereon the bloated tyrant sent his praetorians, and enforced
+payment by scourge and thumbscrew?  Not in the least.  They would not
+pay; and therefore, being free men, nobody could make them pay; and
+although in the neighbouring county of Norfolk, from twenty pounds
+(i.e. 200 pounds of our money) upward--for the tax was not levied on
+men of less substance--there were not twenty but what had consented;
+and though there was 'great likelihood that this grant should be much
+more than the loan was' (the 'salt tears' shed by the gentlemen of
+Norfolk proceeding, says expressly the Duke of Norfolk, 'only from
+doubt how to find money to content the King's Highness'); yet the
+King and Wolsey gave way frankly and at once, and the contribution
+was remitted, although the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, writing to
+Wolsey, treat the insurrection lightly, and seem to object to the
+remission as needless.
+
+From all which facts--they are Mr. Hallam's, not Mr. Froude's--we can
+deduce not tyranny, but lenity, good sense, and the frank withdrawal
+from a wrong position as soon as the unwillingness of the people
+proved it to be a wrong one.
+
+This instance is well brought forward (though only in a line or two,
+by Mr. Froude) as one among many proofs that the working classes in
+Henry the Eighth's time 'enjoyed an abundance far beyond that which
+in general falls to the lot of that order in long-settled countries,
+incomparably beyond what the same class were enjoying at that very
+time in Germany or France.  The laws secured them; and that the laws
+were put in force, we have the direct evidence of successive acts of
+the Legislature, justifying the general policy by its success:  and
+we have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the
+great body of the people, at a time when, if they had been
+discontented, they held in their own hands the means of asserting
+what the law acknowledged to be their right.  'The Government,' as we
+have just shown at length, 'had no power to compel injustice . . . If
+the peasantry had been suffering under any real grievances we should
+have heard of them when the religious rebellions furnished so fair an
+opportunity to press them forward.  Complaint was loud enough, when
+complaint was just, under the Somerset Protectorate.'
+
+Such broad facts as these--for facts they are--ought to make us pause
+ere we boast of the greater liberty enjoyed by Englishmen of the
+present day, as compared with the tyranny of Tudor times.  Thank God,
+there is no lack of that blessing now:  but was there any real lack
+of it then?  Certainly the outward notes of a tyranny exist now in
+far greater completeness than then.  A standing army, a Government
+police, ministries who bear no love to a militia, and would consider
+the compulsory arming and drilling of the people as a dangerous
+insanity, do not look at first sight as much like 'free institutions'
+as a Government which, though again and again in danger not merely of
+rebellion, but of internecine wars of succession, so trusted the
+people as to force weapons into their hands from boyhood.  Let us not
+be mistaken:  we are no hankerers after retrogression:  the present
+system works very well; let it be; all that we say is that the
+imputation of despotic institutions lies, prima facie, rather against
+the reign of Queen Victoria than against that of King Henry the
+Eighth.  Of course it is not so in fact.  Many modern methods, which
+are despotic in appearance, are not so in practice.  Let us believe
+that the same was the case in the sixteenth century.  Our governors
+now understand their own business best, and make a very fair
+compromise between discipline and freedom.  Let us believe that the
+men of the sixteenth century did so likewise.  All we ask is that our
+forefathers should be judged as we wish to be judged ourselves, 'not
+according to outward appearance, but with righteous judgment.'
+
+Mr. Froude finds the cause of this general contentment and loyalty of
+the masses in the extreme care which the Government took of their
+well-being.  The introductory chapter, in which he proves to his own
+satisfaction the correctness of his opinion, is well worth the study
+of our political economists.  The facts which he brings seem
+certainly overwhelming; of course, they can only be met by counter-
+facts; and our knowledge does not enable us either to corroborate or
+refute his statements.  The chief argument used against them seems to
+us, at least, to show that for some cause or other the working
+classes were prosperous enough.  It is said the Acts of Parliament
+regulating wages do not fix the minimum of wages, but the maximum.
+They are not intended to defend the employed against the employer,
+but the employer against the employed, in a defective state of the
+labour market, when the workmen, by the fewness of their numbers,
+were enabled to make extravagant demands.  Let this be the case--we
+do not say that it is so--what is it but a token of prosperity among
+the working classes?  A labour market so thin that workmen can demand
+their own price for their labour, till Parliament is compelled to
+bring them to reason, is surely a time of prosperity to the employed-
+-a time of full work and high wages; of full stomachs, inclined from
+very prosperity to 'wax fat and kick.'  If, however, any learned
+statistician should be able to advance, on the opposite side of the
+question, enough to weaken some of Mr. Froude's conclusions, he must
+still, if he be a just man, do honour to the noble morality of this
+most striking chapter, couched as it is in as perfect English as we
+have ever had the delight of reading.  We shall leave, then, the
+battle of facts to be fought out by statisticians, always asking Mr.
+Froude's readers to bear in mind that, though other facts may be
+true, yet his facts are no less true likewise; and we shall quote at
+length, both as a specimen of his manner and of his matter, the last
+three pages of this introductory chapter, in which, after speaking of
+the severity of the laws against vagrancy, and showing how they were
+excused by the organisation which found employment for every able-
+bodied man, he goes on to say:-
+
+
+'It was therefore the expressed conviction of the English nation that
+it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless
+and worthless life.  The vagabond was a sore spot upon the
+commonwealth, to be healed by wholesale discipline if the gangrene
+was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder
+treatment of the cart-whip failed to be of profit.
+
+'A measure so extreme in its severity was partly dictated by policy.
+The state of the country was critical; and the danger from
+questionable persons traversing it, unexamined and uncontrolled, was
+greater than at ordinary times.  But in point of justice as well as
+of prudence it harmonised with the iron temper of the age, and it
+answered well for the government of a fierce and powerful people, in
+whose hearts lay an intense hatred of rascality, and among whom no
+one could have lapsed into evil courses except by deliberate
+preference for them.  The moral sinew of the English must have been
+strong indeed when it admitted of such stringent bracing; but, on the
+whole, they were ruled as they preferred to be ruled; and if wisdom
+can be tested by success, the manner in which they passed the great
+crisis of the Reformation is the best justification of their princes.
+The era was great throughout Europe.  The Italians of the age of
+Michael Angelo, the Spaniards who were the contemporaries of Cortez,
+the Germans who shook off the Pope at the call of Luther, and the
+splendid chivalry of Francis I. of France, were no common men.  But
+they were all brought face to face with the same trials, and none met
+them as the English met them.  The English alone never lost their
+self-possession, and if they owed something to fortune in their
+escape from anarchy, they owed more to the strong hand and steady
+purpose of their rulers.
+
+'To conclude this chapter, then.
+
+'In the brief review of the system under which England was governed,
+we have seen a state of things in which the principles of political
+economy were, consciously or unconsciously, contradicted; where an
+attempt, more or less successful, was made to bring the production
+and distribution of wealth under the moral rule of right or wrong;
+and where those laws of supply and demand, which we are now taught to
+regard as immutable ordinances of nature, were absorbed or superseded
+by a higher code.  It is necessary for me to repeat that I am not
+holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth
+might safely follow.  The population has become too large, and
+employment too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of such control;
+while, in default of control, the relapse upon self-interest as the
+one motive principle is certain to ensue, and, when it ensues, is
+absolute in its operations.  But as, even with us, these so-called
+ordinances of nature in time of war consent to be suspended, and duty
+to his country becomes with every good citizen a higher motive of
+action than the advantages which he may gain in an enemy's market; so
+it is not uncheering to look back upon a time when the nation was in
+a normal condition of militancy against social injustice--when the
+Government was enabled, by happy circumstances, to pursue into detail
+a single and serious aim at the well-being--well-being in its widest
+sense--of all members of the commonwealth.  There were difficulties
+and drawbacks at that time as well as this.  Of Liberty, in the
+modern sense of the word--of the supposed right of every man "to do
+what he will with his own," or with himself--there was no idea.  To
+the question, if ever it was asked, "May I not do what I will with my
+own?" there was the brief answer, "No man may do what is wrong,
+either with what is his own or with what is another's."  Producers,
+too, who were not permitted to drive down their workmen's wages by
+competition, could not sell their goods as cheaply as they might have
+done, and the consumer paid for the law in an advance of price; but
+the burden, though it fell heavily on the rich, lightly touched the
+poor and the rich consented cheerfully to a tax which ensured the
+loyalty of the people.  The working man of modern times has bought
+the extension of his liberty at the price of his material comfort.
+The higher classes have gained in wealth what they have lost in
+power.  It is not for the historian to balance advantages.  His duty
+is with the facts.'
+
+
+Our forefathers, then, were not free, if we attach to that word the
+meaning which our Transatlantic brothers seem inclined to give to it.
+They had not learnt to deify self-will, and to claim for each member
+of the human race a right to the indulgence of every eccentricity.
+They called themselves free, and boasted of their freedom; but their
+conception of liberty was that of all old nations, a freedom which
+not only allowed of discipline, but which grew out of it.  No people
+had less wish to exalt the kingly power into that specious tyranny, a
+paternal Government; the king was with them, and always had been,
+both formally and really, subject to their choice; bound by many
+oaths to many duties; the minister, not the master of the people.
+But their whole conception of political life was, nevertheless,
+shaped by their conception of family life.  Strict obedience, stern
+discipline, compulsory education in practical duties, was the law of
+the latter; without such training they thought their sons could never
+become in any true sense men.  And when they grew up, their civic
+life was to be conducted on the same principles, for the very purpose
+of enabling them to live as members of a free nation.  If the self-
+will of the individual was curbed, now and then, needlessly--as it is
+the nature of all human methods to caricature themselves at times--
+the purpose was, not to weaken the man, but to strengthen him by
+strengthening the body to which he belonged.  The nation was to be
+free, self-helping, self-containing, unconquerable; to that great
+purpose the will, the fancy--even, if need be, the mortal life of the
+individual, must give way.  Men must be trained at all costs in self-
+restraint, because only so could they become heroes in the day of
+danger; in self-sacrifice for the common good, because only so would
+they remain united, while foreign nations and evil home influences
+were trying to tear them asunder.  In a word, their conception of
+life was as a warfare; their organisation that of a regiment.  It is
+a question whether the conception of corporate life embodied in a
+regiment or army be not, after all, the best working one for this
+world.  At least the problem of a perfect society, howsoever
+beautiful on paper, will always issue in a compromise, more or less
+perfect--let us hope more and more perfect as the centuries roll on--
+between the strictness of military discipline and the Irishman's
+laissez-faire ideal, wherein 'every man should do that which was
+right in the sight of his own eyes, and wrong too, if he liked.'  At
+least, such had England been for centuries; under such a system had
+she thriven; a fact which, duly considered, should silence somewhat
+those gentlemen who, not being of a military turn themselves, inform
+Europe so patriotically and so prudently that 'England is not a
+military nation.'
+
+From this dogma we beg leave to differ utterly.  Britain is at this
+moment, in our eyes, the only military nation in Europe.  All other
+nations seem to us to have military governments, but not to be
+military themselves.  As proof of the assertion, we appeal merely to
+the existence of our militia.  While other nations are employing
+conscription, we have raised in twelve months a noble army, every
+soul of which has volunteered as a free man; and yet, forsooth, we
+are not a military nation!  We are not ashamed to tell how, but the
+other day, standing in the rear of those militia regiments, no matter
+where, a flush of pride came over us at the sight of those lads, but
+a few months since helpless and awkward country boors, now full of
+sturdy intelligence, cheerful obedience, and the manhood which can
+afford to be respectful to others, because it respects itself, and
+knows that it is respected in turn.  True, they had not the
+lightness, the order, the practical ease, the cunning self-
+helpfulness of the splendid German legionaries who stood beside them,
+the breast of every other private decorated with clasps and medals
+for service in the wars of seven years since.  As an invading body,
+perhaps, one would have preferred the Germans; but only because
+experience had taught them already what it would teach in twelve
+months to the Berkshire or Cambridge 'clod.'  There, to us, was the
+true test of England's military qualities; her young men had come by
+tens of thousands, of their own free will, to be made soldiers of by
+her country gentlemen, and treated by them the while as men to be
+educated, not as things to be compelled; not driven like sheep to the
+slaughter, to be disciplined by men with whom they had no bond but
+the mere official one of military obedience; and 'What,' we ask
+ourselves, 'does England lack to make her a second Rome?'  Her people
+have physical strength, animal courage, that self-dependence of
+freemen which enabled at Inkerman the privates to fight on literally
+without officers, every man for his own hand.  She has inventive
+genius, enormous wealth; and if, as is said, her soldiers lack at
+present the self-helpfulness of the Zouave, it is ridiculous to
+suppose that that quality could long be wanting in the men of a
+nation which is at this moment the foremost in the work of emigration
+and colonisation.  If organising power and military system be, as is
+said, lacking in high quarters, surely there must be organising power
+enough somewhere in the greatest industrial nation upon earth, ready
+to come forward when there is a real demand for it; and whatever be
+the defects of our system, we are surely not as far behind Prussia or
+France as Rome was behind the Carthaginians and the Greeks whom she
+crushed.  A few years sufficed for them to learn all they needed from
+their enemies; fewer still would suffice us to learn from our
+friends.  Our working classes are not, like those of America, in a
+state of physical comfort too great to make it worth while for them
+to leave their home occupations; and whether that be a good or an
+evil, it at least ensures us, as our militia proves, an almost
+inexhaustible supply of volunteers.  What a new and awful scene for
+the world's drama, did such a nation as this once set before itself,
+steadily and ruthlessly, as Rome did of old, the idea of conquest.
+Even now, waging war as she has done, as it were, [Greek text which
+cannot be reproduced] thinking war too unimportant a part of her work
+to employ on it her highest intellects, her flag has advanced in the
+last fifty years over more vast and richer tracts than that of any
+European nation upon earth.  What keeps her from the dream which
+lured to their destruction Babylon, Macedonia, Rome?
+
+This:  that, thank God, she has a conscience still; that, feeling
+intensely the sacredness of her own national life, she has learned to
+look on that of other people's as sacred also; and since, in the
+fifteenth century, she finally repented of that wild and unrighteous
+dream of conquering France, she has discovered more and more that
+true military greatness lies in the power of defence, and not of
+attack; not in waging war, but being able to wage it; and has gone on
+her true mission of replenishing the earth more peacefully, on the
+whole, and more humanely, than did ever nation before her; conquering
+only when it was necessary to put down the lawlessness of the savage
+few for the well-being of the civilised many.  This has been her
+idea; she may have confused it and herself in Caffre or in Chinese
+wars; for who can always be true to the light within him?  But this
+has been her idea; and therefore she stands and grows and thrives, a
+virgin land for now eight hundred years.
+
+But a fancy has come over us during the last blessed forty years of
+unexampled peace, from which our ancestors of the sixteenth century
+were kept by stern and yet most wholesome lessons; the fancy that
+peace, and not war, is the normal condition of the world.  The fancy
+is so fair that we blame none who cherish it; after all they do good
+by cherishing it; they point us to an ideal which we should otherwise
+forget, as Babylon, Rome, France in the seventeenth century, forgot
+utterly.  Only they are in haste (and pardonable haste too) to
+realise that ideal, forgetting that to do so would be really to stop
+short of it, and to rest contented in some form of human society far
+lower than that which God has actually prepared for those who love
+Him.  Better to believe that all our conceptions of the height to
+which the human race might attain are poor and paltry compared with
+that toward which God is guiding it, and for which he is disciplining
+it by awful lessons:  and to fight on, if need be, ruthless, and yet
+full of pity--and many a noble soul has learnt within the last two
+years how easy it is to reconcile in practice that seeming paradox of
+words--smiting down stoutly evil wheresoever we shall find it, and
+saying, 'What ought to be, we know not; God alone can know:  but that
+this ought not to be, we do know, and here, in God's name, it shall
+not stay.'
+
+We repeat it:  war, in some shape or other, is the normal condition
+of the world.  It is a fearful fact:  but we shall not abolish it by
+ignoring it, and ignoring by the same method the teaching of our
+Bibles.  Not in mere metaphor does the gospel of Love describe the
+life of the individual good man as a perpetual warfare.  Not in mere
+metaphor does the apostle of Love see in his visions of the world's
+future no Arcadian shepherd paradises, not even a perfect
+civilisation, but an eternal war in heaven, wrath and woe, plague and
+earthquake; and amid the everlasting storm, the voices of the saints
+beneath the altar crying, 'Lord, how long?'  Shall we pretend to have
+more tender hearts than the old man of Ephesus, whose dying sermon,
+so old legends say, was nought but--'Little children, love one
+another'; and who yet could denounce the liar and the hater and the
+covetous man, and proclaim the vengeance of God against all
+evildoers, with all the fierceness of an Isaiah?  It was enough for
+him--let it be enough for us--that he should see, above the thunder-
+cloud, and the rain of blood, and the scorpion swarm, and the great
+angel calling all the fowl of heaven to the supper of the great God,
+that they might eat the flesh of kings and valiant men, a city of God
+eternal in the heavens, and yet eternally descending among men; a
+perfect order, justice, love, and peace, becoming actual more and
+more in every age, through all the fearful training needful for a
+fallen race.
+
+Let that be enough for us:  but do not let us fancy that what is true
+of the two extremes must not needs be true of the mean also; that
+while the life of the individual and of the universe is one of
+perpetual self-defence, the life of the nation can be aught else:  or
+that any appliances of scientific comforts, any intellectual
+cultivation, even any of the most direct and common-sense arguments
+of self-interest, can avail to quiet in man those outbursts of wrath,
+ambition, cupidity, wounded pride, which have periodically convulsed,
+and will convulse to the end, the human race.  The philosopher in his
+study may prove their absurdity, their suicidal folly, till, deluded
+by the strange lull of a forty years' peace, he may look on wars as
+in the same category with flagellantisms, witch-manias, and other
+'popular delusions,' as insanities of the past, impossible
+henceforth; and may prophesy, as really wise political economists
+were doing in 1847, that mankind had grown too sensible to go to war
+any more.  And behold, the peace proves only to be the lull before
+the thunderstorm; and one electric shock sets free forces
+unsuspected, transcendental, supernatural in the deepest sense;
+forces which we can no more stop, by shrieks at their absurdity, from
+incarnating themselves in actual blood, and misery, and horror, than
+we can control the madman in his paroxysm by telling him that he is a
+madman.  And so the fair vision of the student is buried once more in
+rack and hail and driving storm; and, like Daniel of old when
+rejoicing over the coming restoration of his people, he sees beyond
+the victory some darker struggle still, and lets his notes of triumph
+die away into a wail,--'And the end thereof shall be with a flood;
+and to the end of the war desolations are determined.'
+
+It is as impossible as it would be unwise to conceal from ourselves
+the fact that all the Continental nations look upon our present peace
+as but transitory, momentary; and on the Crimean war as but the
+prologue to a fearful drama--all the more fearful because none knows
+its purpose, its plot, which character will be assumed by any given
+actor, and, least of all, the denouement of the whole.  All that they
+feel and know is that everything which has happened since 1848 has
+exasperated, not calmed, the electric tension of the European
+atmosphere; that a rottenness, rapidly growing intolerable alike 'to
+God and the enemies of God,' has eaten into the vitals of Continental
+life; that their rulers know neither where they are nor whither they
+are going, and only pray that things may last out their time:  all
+notes which one would interpret as proving the Continent to be
+already ripe for subjection to some one devouring race of conquerors,
+were there not a ray of hope in an expectation, even more painful to
+our human pity, which is held by some of the wisest among the
+Germans; namely, that the coming war will fast resolve into no
+struggle between bankrupt monarchs and their respective armies, but a
+war between nations themselves, an internecine war of opinions and of
+creeds.  There are wise Germans now who prophesy, with sacred tears,
+a second 'Thirty Years' War,' with all its frantic horrors, for their
+hapless country, which has found two centuries too short a time
+wherein to recover from the exhaustion of that first fearful scourge.
+Let us trust, if that war shall beget its new Tillys and
+Wallensteins, it shall also beget its new Gustavus Adolphus, and many
+another child of Light:  but let us not hope that we can stand by in
+idle comfort, and that when the overflowing scourge passes by it
+shall not reach to us.  Shame to us, were that our destiny!  Shame to
+us, were we to refuse our share in the struggles of the human race,
+and to stand by in idle comfort while the Lord's battles are being
+fought.  Honour to us, if in that day we have chosen for our leaders,
+as our forefathers of the sixteenth century did, men who see the work
+which God would have them do, and have hearts and heads to do it.
+Honour to us, if we spend this transient lull, as our forefathers of
+the sixteenth century did, in setting our house in order, in
+redressing every grievance, reforming every abuse, knitting the
+hearts of the British nation together by practical care and help
+between class and class, man and man, governor and governed, that we
+may bequeath to our children, as Henry the Eighth's men did to
+theirs, a British national life, so united and whole-hearted, so
+clear in purpose and sturdy in execution, so trained to know the
+right side at the first glance and take it, that they shall look back
+with love and honour upon us, their fathers, determined to carry out,
+even to the death, the method which we have bequeathed to them.
+Then, if God will that the powers of evil, physical and spiritual,
+should combine against this land, as they did in the days of good
+Queen Bess, we shall not have lived in vain; for those who, as in
+Queen Bess's days, thought to yoke for their own use a labouring ox,
+will find, as then, that they have roused a lion from his den.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{1}  North British Review, No.  LI., November 1856.--'A History of
+England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth.'  By J.
+A. Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter college, Oxford.  London:  J.
+W. Parker and Son, West Strand.  2 vols.  1856.
+
+{2}  This article appeared in the North British Review.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext Froude's History of England, by Kingsley
+
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