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lEDIEYAL A.m MODEEN HISTOEY 
 
 STUBBS 
 
aonOon 
 HENRY FROWDE 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
SEYEISTTEEN LECTUEES 
 
 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 MEDIEVAL AND MODERN fflSTORY 
 
 JiNB KINDEED SUBJECTS 
 
 DELIVEEED AT OXFORD, UNDER STATUTORY OBLIGATION 
 IN THE YEARS 1867—1884 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM JTUBBS, D.D. 
 
 BISHOP o:p chestee akd hokoeaex stttdeni op cheist chttech 
 
 LATE EEUinS rEOPESSOE OP MOrEEH HI8T0EX 
 
 LL.B. OP CAMBEIDGE AND EDIHBUEGH: 
 
 A MEMBEE OP THE COUET OP THE TICTOEIA UNIVEESIIT, AND AN 
 
 HONOEAET MEMBEE OF THE IMPEEIAL UNITEESITT OE S. TLADIMIE OP KIEEP 
 
 AND OP THE EOTAl EAVAEIAN, PE0BSIAN, lEISH AND DANISH ACADEIIIE3 
 
 AT THE CLAEENDON PKESS 
 
 M DCCC LXXSVI 
 
 [All rights reserved ] 
 
 i;: n Y 
 

PEEFACE. 
 
 If I were asked what is my reason for printing these 
 lectures, I might be at a loss for an answer. They are not 
 printed by request, or because they seem to me worthy to 
 be preserved, or because they are likely to be useful read- 
 ing, or because they supply a want. It may be that they 
 owe their present form to the fact that the love of correct- 
 ing proof-sheets has become a leading passion with the 
 author. 
 
 Some part of the volume may be readable, some part 
 useful : it may be that the useful part is hard reading, and 
 the readable part trifling, but I will give myself, unphilo- 
 sophic as it may be, the benefit of a doubt. The lectures 
 were written under the pressure of statutory compulsion, 
 and against the grain. I know, by sad experience, how 
 often the best lecture, the best sermon on which I have 
 most prided myself — eloquent, lucid, learned, logical, — has 
 gone the way of all fireworks. There is a chance that 
 something may be said for work elicited by forcible pres- 
 sure, under weariness and vexation, against stress of time, 
 under statutory obligation and a conscientious sense of 
 duty. 
 
 The statute under which these lectures were delivered was 
 a burdensome statute to me ; it would not be so to every 
 professor, but the discomforts of working under it could 
 only be explained by experience: and the statute 'itself is 
 now a thing of the past. The feeling of compulsion, the 
 compulsion to produce something twice a year which might 
 attract an idle audience, without seeming to trifle with a 
 deeply loved and honoured study, was so irksome that 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 never once, in the course of my seventeen years of omce, 
 did I think that there would come a time when I could 
 look back on this part of my work with pleasure or grateful 
 regret. And I fear that this will be only too obvious to 
 any one who tries to read this book. But I have said 
 more than enough about it; and I will content myself 
 with adding that the following are only a selection from 
 a larger number of exercises delivered under the same 
 conditions. Most of the omitted lectures have seen the 
 light in other places. The second lecture of 1867 was 
 made part of the Introduction to the second volume of 
 Eoger Hoveden, in the Eolls Series. The lectures of 1868 
 and 1874, on Anglo-Saxon literature and monastic history, 
 formed part of a plan which I finally discarded after the 
 restoration of Professor Earle to the Anglo-Saxon Chair, 
 and, by themselves, do not seem to justify publication. 
 Those for 1869 on Comparative Constitutional History, 
 and for 1871 on Scottish Constitutional History, would 
 have required a larger apparatus of notes, and more 
 labour of revision, than I could at present afibrd, to qualify 
 them for a permanent form, and are as a matter of neces- 
 sity excluded. The lectures for 1870 form the Introduction 
 to my Select Charters; those for 1873 were utilized as the 
 seventh chapter of the Constitutional History; those for 
 1875 as the fourteenth chapter; and those for 187a in the 
 preface to the second volume of the Memoriale of Walter 
 of Coventry. 
 
 W. CESTR. 
 
 Dee Side, Chestek : 
 iK"ay 17, i886. 
 
 P.S. — The last line on page 1 1 4 seems obscure. The reference 
 is to the division taken in the House of Commons, during the 
 debate on the Universities Bill, April 30, 1877, o^ the amend- 
 ment ' to omit the virord and! 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOE 
 
 I. Inaugural. (February 7, 1867.) i 
 
 II. On the Present State and Prospects of Histoeioal Stddt. 
 
 (May 17, 1876.) 26 
 
 III. On the Present State and Prospects of Historical Study. 
 
 (May 20, 1876.) 49 
 
 IV. On the Purposes and Methods of Historical Study. (May 
 
 15,1877.) . . ... . .71 
 
 "!<, V. Methods of Historical Study. (May 18, 1877.) ... 93 
 
 VI. Learning and Literature at the Court op Henry II. (June 
 
 ", 1878.) 115 
 
 VII. Learning and Literature at the Court op Henry II. (June 
 
 13,1878.) ... 136 
 
 .1=::^ VIII. The Medieval Kingdoms op Cyprus and Armenia. (October 
 
 36 and 29, 1878.) 156 
 
 ' IX. On the Charaoteristio Differences between Medieval and 
 
 Modern History. (April 15, 1880.) 208 
 
 — — X. - On the Charaoteristio Differences between Medieval and 
 
 Modern History. (April 17, 1880.) . . . 224 
 
 V XI. The Keiqn of Henry VIII. (June 7, 1881.) . . . .241 
 
 XII. Parliament uSder Henry VIII. (June 9, 1881.) . . . 266 
 
 XIII. The History of the Canon Law in England. (April 19, 1882.) 292 
 XrV. The History op the Canon Law in England. (April 20, 1882.) 313 
 
 XV. The Reign OF Henry VII. (April 24, 1883.) .... 334 
 
 XVI. The Beign OP Henry VII. (April 25, 1883.) . . . .353 
 
 XVII. A Last Statutory Public Lecture. (May 8, 1884.) . . 372 
 Index 389 
 
INAUGURAL. 
 
 CPeb. 7, 1867.) 
 
 PT^HE giving of an Inaugural Lecture is an occasion which 
 J- compels and may well excuse a little trepidation. The 
 speaker, although he is wisely restrained by academic decorum 
 from courting or fearing the thunder, propitious or otherwise, 
 of right or left, cannot divest himself of the feeling that he is 
 really about to take the omens of his future success, and can- 
 not but be anxious to make, if he possibly can, a promising 
 beginning. This is especially the case when he is called upon, 
 as I am now, for the first time in his life, to address an 
 academic, I may even say an educated, audience. He has 
 not learned the tone of authority which befits the pro- 
 fessorial character : it is no mere matter of form for him to 
 deprecate adverse criticism ; he feels that he must introduce 
 himself, in a way that is of necessity painful both to his self- 
 respect and to his modesty, to an audience from whom he has at 
 least as much to learn as he can ever hope to teach them. 
 I can indeed hardly use the word teach without reservation. I . 
 am so sensible of the greatness of the field, the variety of the 
 instruments, the infinite multitude of the workers employed 
 on the subject to which my labours in this place are to be de- 
 voted, that I am afraid even to advertise myself as a teacher, 
 and would rather be looked on as a helper and trainer in a 
 school in which every man has to learn his own lessons. 
 
 For I am thoroughly convinced that the purpose which is 
 answered by the study of Modern and Medieval History is 
 twofold ; it is at once the process of acquisition of a stock of 
 facts, an ignorance of which unfits a man from playing the 
 very humblest part as a citizen, or even watching the politics 
 ■^ B 
 
2 Inaugural Lecture. \}- 
 
 of his own age with an intelligent apprehension ; and it 
 is an educational discipline directed to the cultivation of 
 powers for whose development, as it seems to me, no other 
 training is equally efficacious. It is but natural that I should 
 speak thus of a study which has been to me the pleasure, rest, 
 and comfort of a somewhat busy and anxious life, to whose 
 teachings I feel myself indebted for whatever power of judg- 
 ment, critical experience, or speculative equity, if I may be 
 allowed to use such a form of words, I am conscious of possess- 
 ing. I wish to undervalue no other system of training, no 
 other field of inquiry, but I speak of this as I love it, and as, 
 if a sound purpose of doing with my might what my hand has 
 found to do can be any pledge of honest and effectual work, I 
 trust those who will apply themselves to it with my assistance 
 will come to love it and profit by it as well. But as I shall 
 have, no doubt, to say more than enough about myself before 
 I finish this lecture, I will proceed now, in that desultory way 
 which the nature of an inaugm-al lecture necessitates, to say 
 something about my founder and my predecessors ; and, having 
 done that, to enlarge somewhat on the place which our study 
 has among the pursuits of this University, the method of 
 training, and the end which I propose to myself in the work 
 that lies before me. I have pleaded gniilty to a natural trepi- 
 dation, I have acknowledged that what I have to say will be 
 desultory. I think that the circumstances account for both, 
 and trust to you for an equitable consideration. 
 
 The Professorship of Modern Histoiy was founded in the 
 year 1724 by King George I; a prince of whom those who 
 would say the worst must allow that he was an honest and 
 harmless sovereign, whilst a professed panegyrist would most 
 wisely content himself with saying that his reign is the com- 
 mencement of an era during which the happiness of the 
 kingdoms he ruled, their progress in knowledge, political in- 
 telligence, wealth, domestic and social comfort, have increased 
 in a ratio unprecedented and unparalleled : during which the 
 exertion of English influence in the councils and contests of the 
 world has been effective beyond precedent and parallel, and has 
 been used, if not always in the most enlightened way, always 
 
I.] The Founder. 3 
 
 for the end and for the cause that seemed to be just and right. 
 The process of events, and the action of various systems of 
 politics, have in a great measure served to alter the views 
 which at the time were taken of the wars of the last century 
 and of the early years of the present. We have learned some 
 of us to approve, and more perhaps to acquiesce in, proceedings 
 which our fathers looked on as in the last degree unrighteous 
 and intolerable. The days in which men go to war for an 
 idea, and accept subjugation because they cannot afford to be 
 sentimental, can safely smile at the errors of statesmen and 
 the short-sightedness of kings, to whom justice and honesty 
 were still justice and honesty, although disguised in the mock 
 solemnities of dynastic shadows. But we will not deny either 
 to kings or to peoples the credit of zeal for what they believed 
 to be right, and the glory they had, so far as it was real, of 
 counting no cost too great to be incurred for what they saw to 
 be the cause of order and of society. They fought, as they 
 believed, for their own existence and ours. 
 
 George I, whatever may have been his personal faults, and, 
 however little adapted he may have seemed in his own days, or 
 may seem now, to fulfil the ideal character of kingship in a 
 free and enlightened people, comes on the stage of English 
 History as the representative of a principle which has been 
 found to answer, and as the inaugurator of a period of national 
 prosperity. So far at least we have no cause to blush for our 
 founder. But as our founder, I think we may look at him 
 more closely. The house of Brunswick has always had the 
 reputation for the good sense to patronise literature, and 
 especially historical literature. Not to seek for precedents so 
 far back as Henry the Lion, who superintended the writing 
 of the annals of his country in the twelfth century, it will 
 perhaps suffice to give a general reference to the enormous 
 number of historical books which, during the sixteenth, seven- 
 teenth, and eighteenth centuries, issued under ducal patronage 
 from the presses of Helmstadt, Hanover, and Gottingen. 
 George himself had been the patron of Leibnitz, of Jo. George 
 Eceard, Burckhard Gotthilf Struve, and Johann Lorenz von 
 Mosheim, whom I name rather as familiar to English ears 
 
 B 3 
 
4 Inaugural Lecture. \}- 
 
 than as standing alone in their peculiar studies. One of bis 
 first measures, when his accession to the crown of Great Britain 
 had increased his influence in Em-ope, was to interest himseli 
 in behalf of Leibnitz and Muratori in their attempts to draw 
 . from the archives of the jealous republic of Venice, materials 
 for their gigantic undertakings in the same line. At Cam- 
 bridge, again, he appears as purchasing and bestowing on the 
 Universitj the invaluable MS. CoUeetions of Bishop More, 
 which have helped to make the Public Library there one of 
 the most useful and famous historical libraries in Europe. 
 Whatever may have been the king's purpose in these several 
 measures, we may safely, I think, affirm that it was not a mere 
 political or official object which determined him when, in 1724, 
 he wished to confer a mark of favour on Cambridge and to 
 hold out an olive-branch to Oxford, to give to his sister 
 foundations the same character of professorships of Modem 
 History. Leibnitz was the most learned man he had ever 
 seen, and perhaps Leibnitz's learning was most intelligible to 
 George I in the shape of the Annates rerum Brunsvicensium. 
 Nor should I omit to mention what, in the ' opinion of their 
 most adverse critics, ought to be a redeeming point in the later 
 Hanoverian princes. George II refounded and reformed the 
 Chair which I have the honour to fill ; under George III 
 began those long and at last successful investigations into the 
 archives of the kingdom and the treasures of our great public 
 libraries, which are now but beginning to bear a promise of 
 abimdant interest : under George IV, as king of Great Britain 
 and Hanover, was begun the great series of Monuments of 
 German History, the editor of which was once wont to call 
 himself Historiographer of the Most Serene Guelfie house, 
 and of which the king of Hanover was a patron to an extent 
 double of that of Prussia, and nearly equal to the patronage of 
 all the rest of the German Courts ; a great work which has 
 made Hanover its home, and for the possession of which our 
 Library here is indebted to the munificence of king George V. 
 It is hardly, I think, necessary to look further than the king 
 himself for the influence under which the foundation was first 
 projected ; the exact time and the declared purpose of the 
 
i.j Purpose of the Foundation. 5 
 
 completion of the design may have been determined by others. 
 It is possible that Walpole or Stanhope may have been the 
 adviser ; it is by no means improbable that bishop Robinson, 
 who has been looked upon as the founder of the eighteenth 
 century school of English diplomacy, may have been consulted 
 as to those details of the plan which were intended to afford to 
 the students of the Universities the means of a diplomatic 
 education. I am sorry to say that I have been unable to find 
 any satisfactory evidence on the subject. I have indeed heard it 
 positively ajQBrmed that bishop Robinson drew up the scheme 
 which took effect the year after his- death ; and I should have 
 been glad to believe it was so, for bishop Robinson was a bene- 
 factor of the Chui'ch to which I owe my own education, and 
 the College which has munificently contributed a large portion 
 of the endowment of the professorship. But until more evi- 
 dence is attainable, I cannot speak with confidence. The 
 influence of either Stanhope or Robinson Would account for 
 the particular intention with which the foundation was com- 
 pleted ; whilst that of Walpole, if it were used, would hardly 
 have taken any other than a utilitarian direction. It is to 
 the prominence vrith which this pai'ticular intention is put 
 forward that, in conjunction I think with a general distaste 
 to accept a benefaction from the duke of Brunswick, the 
 ungracious reception which the new foundation met with 
 at Oxford is to be ascribed. For the University not only 
 acknowledged the receipt of the king's letter in a most con- 
 temptuous way, forwarding their letter of thanks by a bedell, 
 but when, by due pressui-e and by the example of Cambridge, 
 compelled to send a formal answer by a deputation to the 
 king, clothed it in such words as showed that the introduction 
 of the new study was looked on as an unwarranted interference 
 with the educational government of the place ; clearly it was 
 no part of the intention of Oxford in 1724 to educate able 
 servants for the house of Hanover. 
 
 For the study of History Oxford had hitherto been no un- 
 kindly school. The period of literary activity which had suc- 
 ceeded the Restoration had been greatly indebted to Oxford 
 scholars. The names of Bishops Nicholson, Tanner, and 
 
6 Inaugural Lecture. \}- 
 
 Kennett, of Atterbury, Wake, and Gibson, although in these 
 days they are chiefly known, if known at all, as antiquaries or 
 controversialists, mark a period of historical exertion second to 
 none either in the importance of its researches or in the value 
 of their results. Cambridge began the modem study of 
 English History with Parker, Oxford followed up briskly with 
 Savile and Camden, Selden, Gale, Fulman, and Fell; men, 
 who, if they did not pretend to shine as Historians, are en- 
 titled to the eternal gratitude of all students, and appreciated 
 at least that true and fundamental canon of composition that 
 the materials for History must be provided before History can 
 be written. From Oxford, or from the studies of Oxford men, 
 proceeded nearly all the great collections of English Historians ; 
 and the old school of students was now well represented by 
 Thomas Hearne. But at the time when this professorship 
 was founded this class of men were either withdrawn, like 
 Tanner and Kennett, to other work, or relegated by their own 
 political sympathies and Whig liberality, like Hearne and 
 Baker, to the comparative uselessness of literary retirement. 
 Nor, I think, were the ministers of the crown very careful as to 
 the hands in which they placed the engine of education, from 
 which so much might have been hoped. To speak with the 
 utmost respect of my early predecessors, I do not find that 
 they were men to whom the study of History, either English 
 or foreign, is in any way indebted, until we come down to 
 Dr. Nares at the beginning of the present century. They 
 probably owed their position to their political connexions or 
 to literary eminence of other kinds. It is no wonder that 
 under the circumstances the place of History among the 
 studies of the University became worse rather than better, or, 
 like that of Moral Philosophy, was lost altogether. 
 
 Passing on from Dr. Nares, of whom I speak with all gratitude, 
 remembering well, as many of the elders amongst my hearers 
 can doubtless remember likewise, the days when his weighty 
 volumes were almost the only available sources of information 
 for later history: we come to the great name, never to be 
 pronounced without reverence even by his opponents, of the 
 man whose sincerity, energy, and power of training, made 
 
I.] The Professors. 7 
 
 him the prime mover of this generation. What Arnold 
 might have done for the study of History in this place, had 
 his time been given to it or been prolonged suiRciently to 
 produce any appreciable effect on it, may be estimated by the 
 effect of his work on other branches and in other places of 
 education. I say it with diffidence, rather because I fear your 
 criticism than because I have any doubt of the truth of the 
 assertion, I believe that the one thing vehich Arnold wanted 
 to perfect the balance of his admirable judgment, and to direct 
 the current of his overflowing sympathies, was that experi- 
 ence of critical difficulties and moral incompatibilities which 
 becomes practically, to the devoted student of History, a 
 training in itself. Of Dr. Cramer I can say little. He was 
 well furnished as a scholar and a most accomplished man : his 
 contributions to literary history are exceedingly valuable : but 
 his time here was short ; he was not a young man when he 
 undertook the office : he had other cares which took him away 
 from Oxford. Most of all perhaps during the time of his 
 holding this office all the thinking men of the University 
 were engrossed in controversies on matters interesting, most 
 interesting to all, in which, however much a historical train- 
 ing might have profited them, it was too late to forge their 
 weapons when they were in the midst of battle. Of the two 
 professors who preceded me, I must not, need not, say much : 
 you are far better able than I am to appreciate their work 
 here : but I may say that none of you can more sincerely than 
 I do admire the learning, acuteness, earnestness^ and eloquence 
 of Professor Goldwin Smith : learning, acuteness, earnestness, 
 and eloquence never more signally admirable than when em- 
 ployed, as we have so often rejoiced to see them employed, on 
 the behalf of Christian Truth against philosophic sciolism. 
 
 The circumstances under which I return to Oxford and 
 begin my work here are, for many reasons, most encouraging ; 
 so encouraging as to afford, I think, some grounds of appre- 
 hension that the responsibility is heavier than I ought to have 
 undertaken. In no respect does the Oxford I find on my re- 
 turn contrast more favourably with the Oxford I left sixteen 
 years ago. At that time the professorship of Church History 
 
8 Inaugural Lecture. L^' 
 
 had been founded, and was filled by one [Robert Hus^ey] who 
 was undoubtedly the founder of the modern study of that sub- 
 ject in Oxford. I mean the study of the history of the ChurcU 
 as a whole, not from points of controversy to supply weapons 
 for the discomfiture of opposing theologians, but as the life ot 
 the Christian Church itself, the whole history of the body ol 
 which the modern nations claim in their spiritual character 
 to be members. But the theological exigencies of the time 
 had so far narrowed the field of inquiry that it was practically 
 restricted to the first three centuries, or at the outside to the 
 period embraced under the topics of the general councils. The 
 attempt which he made to extend the range by introducing 
 the study of the Venerable Bede as a text-book was, as you 
 are aware, foiled by the impossibility of getting together a 
 lecture on a matter that was neither connected with the con- 
 troversies of the day, nor required to be known by candidates 
 for holy orders. The College libraries then as now afforded 
 abundant resources for any student who would take up the 
 subject for himself, but my grateful recollection of the first 
 acquaintance made with Hearne, Dugdale, and Prynn, in 
 Christ Church Library, is inseparably connected with the 
 reminiscence of the amused, and I am glad to remember ap- 
 proving, surprise, with which Dean Gaisford took me unawares 
 at my note-book. It is possible that the rooms of the Archi- 
 tectural Society in Holywell were the school in which a taste 
 for medieval history, at least, was insensibly acquired. 
 
 The introduction of new studies into the course of University 
 training was viewed with apprehension by many : some perhaps' 
 of us who are now here were inclined to waver between a mis- 
 trust of innovations which seemed likely to break down the tra- 
 ditionary character of our education and the desire of welcoming 
 a study of all others the most germane to the true and perpetual 
 genius of Oxford. I may now, I suppose, say it without offence, 
 I think that the distrust of the new studies, at all events of the 
 study of Modem History, was owing quite as much to the 
 management of their advocates as to the conservative habits of 
 the opponents. I am not sure that either party would have 
 admitted, or indeed would now admit, what, to adopt a proper 
 
I.] The New School. g 
 
 professorial tone, I may say is certain, that whilst of aU studies 
 in the whole range of knowledge, the study of law affords the 
 most conservative training, so the study of Modern History is, 
 next to Theology itself, and only next in so far as Theology 
 rests on a divine revelation, the most thoroughly religious 
 training that the mind can receive. It is no paradox to say 
 that Modern History, including Medieval History in the term, 
 is co-extensive in its field of view, in its habits of criticism, 
 in the persons of its most famous students, with Ecclesiastical 
 History. We may call them sister studies, but, if they are 
 not really one and the same, they are twin sisters, so much 
 alike that there is no distinguishing between them. Men who 
 are bent on seeing only differences and ignoring points of 
 agreement refused to see that in 1850, and I dare say refuse 
 to see it still. 
 
 So much, however, has changed and changed rapidly in 
 sixteen years ; so many old friends have sought new fields of 
 work, so great changes have passed over the moral and 
 intellectual atmosphere of Oxford, that one is prone to forget 
 that in truth the precedent era from 1830 to 1850 was itself 
 only a transient phase, and not to be looked on as stamping 
 for ever the character of the University. I for one can rejoice 
 in looking back on those days, and I can look forward with 
 hope and sympathy to what is before lis in these respects. 
 If I regret the absence of some things that were pleasant in 
 the old life, at least I can appreciate much of that which 
 promises to be the charm of the new. Happily removed for 
 aU these years from Oxford controversies, and I am glad to 
 say that in the humblest way I have not had a finger in them, 
 I can still clothe the old life with that gladness which for 
 most men gilds the recollection of undergraduate days. But 
 the world did not stop with me when I left Oxford, and I trust, 
 if God shall spare me, to work with a good heart as long as 
 it is called to-day. 
 
 I rejoice then to find on my return the School of Law and 
 Modem History occupying a well-defined and still improving 
 position, and bestovsdng honours which the men most honoured 
 in the other contests of the academic arena are glad not only 
 
lo Inaugural Lecture. \}- 
 
 to win but to work for. The Modern History School has 
 thriven with very little nursing ; and it needs but a glance 
 at the class lists to show that there has been and continues to 
 be, I will not say abundant promise, but actual work done m 
 the cause of historical study by those who have distinguished 
 themselves in our examinations. It is not invidious to 
 mention the names of some who have challenged public criti- 
 cism by their books, and have not merely shown in them the 
 usefulness of historical training, but conferred lasting benefits 
 on the students that follow them. The Law and Modern 
 History School helped at least to train my excellent col- 
 league, the Chichele Professor, for his labours ; and it has 
 helped to give us from Mr. Kington an English life of 
 Frederick II, from Mr. Bryce a monograph on the Western 
 Empire, which have already taken their place as standard 
 books on our shelves. But far more than this has been done 
 by the direction into the same channel of a considerable part 
 of the more industrious teaching power of the Colleges, so 
 that there is now a strong and, I hope, an increasing, staff of 
 College tutors, whose time and mind are devoted primarily to 
 the cultivation of this study. With these my occasional visits 
 here as examiner have put me into communication, and the 
 association with them in their work is to my mind one of the 
 happiest incidents of my present position. I would, indeed, 
 that this thought had been without the drawback that, at the 
 very moment of my return, I in common with the whole of 
 the rest of the University should have to lament the loss of 
 one [Dr. Shirley], noble, good, and wise far beyond his years, 
 who had watched and worked for the development of this 
 study from the day of its introduction to Oxford, whose 
 labours and influence were ever used for good and for every 
 thing that was good, whose early promotion and effective char- 
 acter had marked him out as the man who was to do great 
 things for the University and the Church of God in this age. 
 Seldom has so much promise, seldom have so great earnests 
 of great work been so sadly or so fatally bHghted : we cannot 
 look that his place can ever in all respects be so filled that 
 there wUl not still be much, very much, to desiderate ; for it 
 
1.] New Materials for History. ii 
 
 is not Oxford alone that laments him, nor the cause of 
 Historical study only with which he had identified himself 
 both here and throughout the literary world. But I will 
 not touch on questions beyond the scope of my present con- 
 sideration. 
 
 Besides the very advantageous position which, without 
 nursing, I repeat, our study has attained here, in men, books, 
 and honours, the immense treasures of historical lore which 
 are now being poured liberally from the great storehouses of 
 record throughout Europe, but most especially in England, 
 form, a feature of the present time that promises to renew the 
 youth of the Historic Muse. The great Continental collections 
 of Historians are growing slowly but substantially ; the German 
 collection, begun in 1826, nearly rivals the French one a 
 century its senior ; the Sardinian Government had one of its 
 own, which we may hope will not be smothered for the sake 
 of more ambitious plans ; the Vatican itself, under the kindly 
 influence of a German Oratorian, has begun to thaw from its 
 old reserve. Last and greatest, our own national work under 
 the direction of Lord Romilly has in eight years proved itself 
 more than a worthy rival both in bulk and workmanship of 
 the older repositories. And not to speak of the collection of 
 Historians, of which from my own connexion with it I am 
 obliged to speak with modesty and reserve, the extracts and 
 abstracts of public and private documents found in our Record 
 offices and in those of Spain and Venice are rapidly filling our 
 libraries with eases of stout green volumes from which the 
 history of the most eventful of our years is being rewritten, 
 and which will soon involve the necessity of a new Macaulay 
 as they have already brought into being a new Burnet and 
 a new Robertson. 
 
 From this sudden breaking up of the fountains of historical 
 refreshment I dare not augur what results may follow, or what 
 new worlds may be opening for other generations to exercise 
 their logical acuteness and their historical perspicacity upon. 
 We have our work set, in a literary point of view, in arranging, 
 and bringing into bearing on one another, the masses of informa- 
 tion that are threatening to overwhelm us. Happily, there is 
 
12 Inaugural Lecture. v-- 
 
 no lack of helpers ; the great German hive of historical workers 
 is busy as we are on our archives : such and so close are the 
 ties which now, owing to the faciHties of travelling and com- 
 munication, the abundance of libraries and the accessibility of 
 records, the extension of literary and investigative sympathies, 
 and, I am happy to think, the extinction of literary jealousies, 
 are now binding the historical scholars of Em-ope, that I think 
 and hope that the day is coming when, although we may not 
 cease to quarrel with and criticise one another, there will be a 
 great republic of workers able and willing to assist one another ; 
 not working for party pm-poses, unfettered by political preju- 
 dices, and although as strong pai-tizans and politicians as ever, 
 anxious above all to find the truth, and to pmify the cause 
 that each loves best from every taint of falsehood, every inclin- 
 ation to calumny or concealment. I confess that it is towards 
 this consummation that my dearest wishes as a student of 
 History are directed ; and that I anticipate with the gi-eatesfc 
 pleasure the prospect of being instrumental and able to assist 
 in the founding of an historical school in England, which 
 shall join with the other workers of Europe in a common 
 task ; which shall build, not upon Hallam and Palgrave and 
 Kemble and Froude and Macaulay, but on the abundant 
 collected and arranged materials on which those writers tried 
 to build whilst they were scanty and scattered and in disorder. 
 The time cannot be far off when all the records of the medieval 
 world which are in existence wiU be in print either in fuU or 
 in such abundant abstracts as will be thoroughly trustworthy 
 representations of their contents ; when every great Library will 
 contain copies of them all, and when every town will contain 
 a great Library. The seed sown by the old Record Commission, 
 by presenting copies of their publications to the municipal 
 corporations and principal provincial libraries, marks an era, 
 as antiquaries well know, in the development of antiquarian 
 study and the preservation of archaeological treasures. We 
 may hope to see the same principle extended now, and al- 
 though the chief labom-s of the historian must continue to find 
 their place in his own study, as no library can supersede iihe 
 need of books at home, still no man may be obliged to keep 
 
I.] Our Purpose and Hopes. 13 
 
 all his ideas in chronic effervescence and all his hopeful dis- 
 coveries in a state of tantalising suspension, in the hope that 
 once a year he can visit the Bodleian or the British Museum. 
 For that day of many students, many books, many libraiies, 
 and many readers, I look vrith confidence ; in the meantime I 
 do hope and trust that my work here, although this may not 
 be its primary aim or its most successful use, may help in a 
 humble way to educate workers for the good time coming. 
 
 For I desire to introduce myself to you, not as a philosopher 
 nor as a politician, but as a worker at history. Not that 
 I have not strong views on polities, nor short and concise 
 opinions on philosophy, but because this is my work, and I 
 have taken it up in all sincerity and desire of truth, and wish 
 to keep to my work and to the sort of truth that I can help 
 on in the inquiry ; because you have plenty of politicians and 
 plenty of scholars to whom, if they wish to have it, I certainly 
 win not begrudge the name of philosophers. I suppose that it 
 is truth we are all seeking, and that though the sorts of truth 
 are distinct and the ways that we work in are very different, 
 when we have found what we seek for we shall find aU our 
 discoveries combine in harmony ; and I trust and believe that 
 the more sincerely, the more single-heartedly we work each of 
 us, the nearer we consciously come to the state where we shall 
 see the oneness and glory and beauty of the truth itself. So 
 that the theologian, the naturalist, the historian, the philo- 
 sopher, if he work honestly, is gaining each for his brother, 
 and being worked for each by his brother, in the pursuit of the 
 great end, the great consummation of all. We may all speak 
 humbly, the theologian because of the excellence of his subject, 
 the rest because of the vastness of our field of work, the 
 length of our art and the shortness of our life ; but we cannot 
 afford to speak contemptuously of any sort of knowledge, and 
 God forbid that we should speak contemptuously, or hyper- 
 critically of any honest worker. 
 
 The subject-matter of Modem Historical inquiry has peculiar 
 advantages for the training of the powers most constantly in 
 exercise in a practical generation. Compared with the study 
 of Ancient History it is like the study of life compared with 
 
14 Inaugural Lecture. ]}• 
 
 that of death, the view of the living body compared with that 
 of the skeleton. The student of Ancient History has his ad- 
 vantages ; he can speculate on his skeleton, he can penetrate 
 more deeply into the framework of ancient society, so far as 
 his materials allow him; he can handle the different parts and 
 form his political hypotheses as it pleases him, aeeording to the 
 vaiious ways in which his skeleton can be put together ; he is 
 little troubled by the fear of new facts, or new developments 
 making their appearance suddenly to put to flight his calcula- 
 tions ; he has all the existing materials for his investigation 
 before him, or within easy reach ; he has for the geographical 
 area of his work a portion of the earth and its peoples that 
 has had, since the roll of its own historians was closed, little to 
 do with the active work of the world. He can work out prin- 
 ciples at his will ; he can educate his taste and analyse and 
 experiment to the very ne plus ultra of critical subtilty. But 
 the principles he works out and the results of his criticism 
 are alike things that give the world no new knowledge, or 
 exercise no direct influence on the interests of real life. And 
 in this is one of the great incidental uses of classical training 
 as an engine of education. You have in its languages and 
 histories and philosophies, the most elegant, the most com- 
 pact, the most ingenious systems on which the mind of man 
 can be exercised ; and you have them in such isolation, so 
 set apart altogether from personal or pai-ty or national or 
 scholastic propensions, that the lessons to be drawn from 
 them are for the most part as safe, as unexciting, as far 
 removed from the heart and interests of life, as any proposi- 
 tion in mathematics. 
 
 In Modern History, on the contrary, you are deaKng with 
 the living subject : your field of examination is the liviag, 
 working, thinking, growing world of to-day ; as distinguished 
 from the dead world of Greece and Rome, by the life that is 
 in it, as it is in geographical area and in the embarrassing 
 abundance of the data from which only in their full integrity 
 it is safe, or ever will be safe, to attempt to philosophise. 
 England, France, Germany, the East, regions that have but 
 a shadowy existence in the background of the pictures in 
 
I.] Modern History, 15 
 
 which living Egypt, Rome, and Asia stand before us, after 
 thousands of years of death, in the bright colouring and life- 
 like grouping of yesterday ; these are the area in which the 
 modern historian seeks and finds the interests of his pursuit. 
 Italy, the common ground of the sister studies, the strange 
 borderland between light and darkness, in which alone the 
 past seems to live and the present for the most part to be 
 a living death, has a double existence that fits and unfits her 
 for the free handhng of either. 
 
 And in this new and modern and living world there has 
 been since the era began, such a continuity of life and de- 
 velopment that hardly one point iu its earliest life can be 
 touched without the awakening some chord in the present. 
 Scarcely a single movement now visible in the current of 
 modern affairs but can be traced back with some distinct- 
 ness to its origin in the early middle ages ; scarcely a move- 
 ment that has disturbed the world since the invasion of our 
 barbarian ancestors but has its representative in the chart 
 of law or thoughts or territory to this day. Not a dynasty 
 that is trembling out its little span of days now, but re- 
 presents in its shattered tottering throne some great hero, 
 some great heroic movement, that has won the gratitude 
 of the medieval world. Not a country revolutionised and 
 levelled until it hardly knew itself, until it scarcely remem- 
 bered the names of its rivers and mountains, has been able 
 utterly to obliterate the boundaries, or the customs, or the 
 afiinities of its old divisions. The dynastic traditions of 
 Europe are rooted and grounded in the distant past : the 
 principle of nationalities, new in its fashion of announcement 
 and most unlucky in its prophet, is rooted and grounded in 
 a past more distant still; the principle of freedom, in their 
 elFect on which only the dynastic and national ideas have their 
 true political value, rests on a yet more ancient foundation, but 
 on one that is peculiar to the modern field of study, for it was 
 brought into the world and proclaimed and made possible by 
 the Church. 
 
 It is Christianity that gives to the modern world its living 
 unity and at the same time cuts it ofi'from the death of the past. 
 
1 6 Inaugural Lecture. \}' 
 
 The Church in its spiritual work, the Church in its intellectual 
 work, the Church in its work with the sword, or with the 
 plough, or with the axe ; the soul and spirit of all true civilisa- 
 tion, of all true liberty, of all true knowledge ; the Church in its 
 work of evil, in the abasement of its divine energies, in the 
 vile fetters of priest-craft, in the blind paroxysms of popular 
 fanaticism, in the strange varying fortunes that allies Ireland 
 with Rome, Scotland with Geneva, setting father against son, 
 and husband against wife, the herald of peace with a sword ; 
 such an influence so wide in its extension, so deep in its pene- 
 tration, so ancient in the past, and in the future eternal, could 
 by itself account for the unity, the life of modem history : the 
 life, the soul of a body which thrills at every touch. The 
 student cannot handle his subject-matter as he can a skeleton ; 
 if he is a true student he knows himself to be at work among 
 living influences, some active, some slumbering, but all of 
 which are so vital and so entangled that he cannot move 
 without making someone feel, or without being himself afiected 
 in his process and in his judgment by the system of which he 
 is himself a part. Modern History is the history of ourselves, 
 of the way in which we came to be what we are, of the educa- 
 tion of our nation, of the development of our government, of 
 the fortunes of our fathers, that caused us to be taught and 
 governed and placed as we are, and formed our minds and 
 habits by that teaching, government, and position ; and as for 
 the soul, that other portion of us, — unchanged by education, 
 government or fortune, unchanged and untrained in the de- 
 velopment and education of the world, unchanged except by 
 the Spirit of God beginning at the beginning in every one 
 that is new born of Him, — that gift in which almost alone we 
 trace the unity of our nature with that of the ancient world, 
 in its waywardness, and short-sightedness, and self-will, what 
 can all history tell us other or more than this, how God sent 
 light into the world and men loved darkness rather than light, 
 how they have perverted, but not closed the way of eternal life? 
 But if the student of Modern History finding himself at 
 work among such subjects misses the facility with which 
 Ancient History may be handled, he has the advantage to 
 
I.] Training the yudgment. 17 
 
 begin with, that the interest of his own department is un- 
 flagging and inexhaustible: every day adds a new develop- 
 ment of the old elements, he feels that he is living in his 
 subject, it is living aU around him. And this being so, he is 
 conscious that he is working with a different set of mental 
 powers from those which he works with on the old world ; 1 
 speak under correction, for I do not pretend to look at the 
 subject as a question of psychology, simply for the moment as 
 one of education. It is in a manner analogous to a training 
 for association with men in the world ; the student must look 
 for Truth, and work for Justice, but he must work for such 
 truth and justice as is attainable. He must not, as in Ancient 
 History, amuse himself with principles however valuable or 
 however generally applicable, because he has to deal with 
 rights : his inquiry is more into laws than into principles, 
 more into facts than iato laws. He must act as a judge not 
 as a philosopher, all the better judge for being somewhat of a 
 philosopher, but never in the philosopher forgetting that he 
 is a judge. And as in practical matters we, ordinary men 
 that is, are seldom called upon to act as judges except in ques- 
 tions where their own sympathies or interests are concerned ; 
 the faculty to be trained is the judgment, the practical 
 judgment at work among matters in which its possessor 
 is deeply interested, not from the desire of Truth only, but 
 from his own involution in the matters of which he is to judge. 
 I think that there are few lessons more necessary for men 
 to learn, not merely who are going to take to public Hfe, 
 but who are going to live and move as men among their 
 fellows, than these : — that there are few questions on which as 
 much may not be said on one side as on the other : that there 
 are none at aU on which all the good are on one side, all the 
 bad on the other, or all the wise on one and all the fools on 
 the other ; that the amount of dead weight in human affairs, 
 call it stupidity or what you will, is pretty equally divided 
 between the advocates of order and the advocates of change, 
 giving to the one party much of its stability and to the other 
 much of its momentum : that intolerance is no prerogative of 
 heterodoxy, nor tolerance the inseparable accompaniment of 
 
 C 
 
1 8 Inaugural Lecture. [i- 
 
 the conscious possession of truth, a condition which, might oi 
 all others the best afford to be tolerant, the most merciful and 
 pitiful of error: that all generalisations, however sound m 
 logic, are in morals and practical matters ipso facto false ; 
 that there is no room for sweeping denunciations, or trenchant 
 criticisms in the dealings of a world whose falsehoods and 
 veracities are separated bj so very thin a barrier : to learn 
 that simple assertion however reiterated can never make 
 proof: that a multitude of half believers can never make 
 faith: that argument never convinces any man against his 
 will : that silence is not acquiescence : that the course of this 
 world is anything but even and uniform : that such by- words 
 as reaction and progress are but the political slang which each 
 side uses to express their aversions and their propensions ; 
 above all, that no material success, no energy of development, 
 no eventual progress or consolidation, can atone for the mis- 
 chief done by one act of falsehood, treachery or cruelty. Most 
 of these lessons are truisms. Yes, but there are no truisms 
 in facts : there are no truths which may not be stated as 
 truisms, but there are no truths which a sound judgment can 
 be warranted in despising. 
 
 When the student comes to apply these lessons to the judg- 
 ment of the characters and events of the history that he is 
 studying, and to carry his experience of the past into the 
 present, he finds, if his study has taught him facts as well as 
 maxims, that the great necessity of practical judgment is 
 patience and tolerance, and that the highest justice must rest 
 content for a time to see many things continue wi'ong that 
 cannot be righted without a greater wrong. 
 
 The stock of information from which the student draws 
 these practical lessons is itself the matter on which in the 
 further stages of present history he is called upon to exercise 
 them. He has a part to play in the politics of his own age : 
 he must have made himself acquainted with the national 
 identity of nations, the rights and claims, the sins and punish- 
 ments and probations of dynasties ; the origins and accretions 
 of parties ; the growth of the influences to which their owners 
 give the name of principles. The stock of information ac- 
 
I.] Uses of Study. 19 
 
 cumulated is only secondary in importance to the habits of 
 judgment formed by the study of it. For we want to 
 train not merely students but citizens ; and citizens of the 
 great communities — the church and the civilised world ; to 
 be fitted not for criticism or for authority in matters of 
 memory, but for action. And so it is not views of men and 
 states that are to be taught them, but the power of judging 
 that is to be cultivated, and the information on which that 
 power is to be exercised that is to be imparted, and the faculty 
 of accumulation to be directed to good and pure sources. It 
 is not to make proselytes to one system of politics or another 
 that the work of education is to be directed ; a university is 
 no political club or propaganda ; I desire to use my office as a 
 teacher of facts and of the right habit of using them. 
 
 And to do this we must begin at the right end, work from 
 the past forwards, not backwards from the present. Our 
 students ought not to go into the world a prey to newspaper 
 correspondents : they ought not to go into public life ready 
 to be moulded to the political views of the first clique that 
 may catch hold of them. So far as the fimdamental principles 
 of poUties go, that is indeed impossible, for men are born 
 most certainly with constitutional inclinations, some to order 
 and others to change ; and the power of the earliest education 
 is exerted to direct those inclinations into channels most in 
 accordance with the views of the educators : so by attraction 
 or repulsion, by reaction or by hereditary succession, not by 
 the lessons of books or views of philosophers, young men's 
 sides are taken in life before they know it. But there is still 
 far more in common between the wise and sound of opposing 
 parties than there is between the sound and the corrupt of 
 the same ; between the thinkers of opposite parties and the 
 thinkers and the fools of the same. We should teach both 
 sides to teach themselves. 
 
 Am I to be understood as stating the purpose of the study 
 of History to be the production of scepticism in politics? 
 Surely not. Rather I maintain that there is so much of good 
 in both the opposing views that good men are pretty equally 
 divided between the two ; and that there is so much, I will 
 
 C 2 
 
20 Inaugural Lecture. \S- 
 
 not say evil, but questionable and debateable, that thoughtless 
 and interested men make their capital of, that thoughtless 
 and interested men are equally divided too ; and so much that 
 is obvious to the meanest sense, that stupidity and intolerance 
 are in much the same proportion. Wbat we want to see 
 is men applying to history and politics the same spirit m 
 which wise men act in their discipline of themselves : not 
 to cease to be partisans, not to cease to hold and utter strong 
 opinions, but to be as careful in their party behaviour and in 
 their support of their opinions, as they are in theii- behaviour 
 in social circles, their conversation in social life. The first 
 object of the true politician, as of the true patriot, is to keep 
 himself and his party true, and then to look for success : to 
 keep himself and his party pure, and then to secure victory : 
 to abolish meanness and corruption where he has influence, 
 rather than to make capital by denouncing it where his de- 
 nunciation can only provoke a retort. The sound politician, 
 on whichever side he may be and however thorough he may 
 be, believes that his scheme of politics is the one in which the 
 benefit of his country is most entirely involved, and he wishes 
 the position of his country to be impregnable ; to be im- 
 pregnable it must be sound : if his party represents to him his 
 country, his party must be sound, and it concerns him much 
 more closely to purify his own ranks than those of his enemy. 
 Success is certain to the pure and true : success to falsehood 
 and corruption, tyranny and aggression, is only the prelude to 
 a greatei" and an irremediable fall. 
 
 If our students go from us with the certainty of this lesson 
 impressed on them, with information to guide and cultivated 
 power enough to form judgment, we, whatever our private 
 convictions may be, may rest assui-ed both that our own 
 duty has been done, and that the best has been done for 
 the world in which they are to act. Politicians, happily, 
 seldom live to see the final outcome of their aspirations ; life 
 is too short to witness a constitutional struggle in all its 
 growth, and, as matters approach the compromise, the minds 
 of the actors modify, or new, more moderate, counseUors see in 
 the process of circumstances ^-ounds for receding somewhat 
 
I.] Begin at the Beginning. 21 
 
 from the rigorous line drawn by the less practical design of 
 their elders. So the world moves on in a line straighter 
 than the rules of either party would have made it ; and it is 
 well that it is so, the education of a political life is long, and 
 the time for active work in it, for the most part, extremely 
 short. A good deal of enthusiasm is worn out before the 
 action begins, or else the difference between the result and 
 the design would be intolerable to a sincere believer in his 
 own system. 
 
 We must, I repeat, if we are to qualify ourselves for form- 
 ing a sound judgment on these matters, begin at the beginning. 
 We must not work back from popular prejudices, or from 
 philosophic ideas, or from the prominent subject of to-day. 
 The history of Poland cannot be truly viewed by one who 
 starts from the Partition ; the history of Tm-key cannot be 
 truly read from the standing point of the balance of power ; 
 that of Germany does not begin, as politicians nowadays join 
 in insisting, from the ti'eaties of Vienna. There are rights 
 that are not turned into wrongs, and wrongs that cannot be 
 turned into rights, by any treaties. There are hopes that 
 cannot, ought not to, be dashed into despair by any paci- 
 fications. There are sentiments, if you please to caU. them 
 so, which depend on long ages of deeply implanted sympathies, 
 of long experience of common suffering and common success, 
 on a firm basis of right and popular love, that may be dis- 
 missed by an aggressive politician as emptiness and vanity, 
 but which are the only true basis of free government, the 
 only safe support of thrones, the only true tie of nationalities. 
 
 With these things and the deep wide range of facts from 
 which they spring, the student of history must make him- 
 self acquainted, and being acquainted he learns to sympathise. 
 Unlike the genealogist and the local antiquary, he does not 
 work back from the particular sympathy to the old foundation, 
 but begins with the beginning ^nd works up to the situation, 
 the sentiment, the sympathy, or the antipathy of the day. 
 Need I adduce the parallel from the sacred sister study? 
 Who ever became a theologian by working back fi-om the 
 doctrinal or ritual questions of yesterday? Nay, who is 
 
2 2 Inaugural Lecture. XS- 
 
 qualified to give an opinion above that of a newspaper 
 letter-writer on such subjects, who has not begun from the 
 Uppar Chamber at Jerusalem and worked his way from the 
 coming of the day-star, through the gloom and twilight of 
 the ages, towards the bright shining, such shining as it is, of 
 these days, before he ventures to apply the spectrum analysis 
 to the docti-inal light of the nineteenth century ? 
 
 There is a contrary eiTor ; the true student has learned that 
 the past is no more a whole without the present than the 
 present without the past ; that the past has no claim to in- 
 fallibility any more than the present, that the past has had 
 no power, no moral right to dispose of the present by a deed 
 in mortmain. To be a slave of old traditions is as great a 
 folly as to be a slave of new quackeries ; but the fault is in 
 the slavish use, not in the old traditions nor in the modern 
 nostrums ; and the former error is perhaps the less pardonable 
 as it is a sin against greater light. 
 
 I am aware that there are great difficulties ; if there were 
 not History would be no matter of study, politics would be no 
 ground of controversy. There is the great question, where does 
 fact end and opinion begin ? there is the great question, at 
 what point in the study of modern and medieval history does 
 the sympathy of his own day force itself into the judgment 
 of the student ? There is the question, can any length of 
 acquiescence turn a wrong thing into a right one ; any length 
 of prescription turn an abuse into a right ? How far are men 
 bound by the acts of their fathers, or by their own acts when 
 deceived or ill-informed ? Then there is the further question, 
 how far is the moralist — righteous, free, unprejudiced as he 
 may be — qualified to answer these questions off-hand ? Each 
 application of each question has its own modifying circum- 
 stances. I can only say that the man who knows the facts 
 and has formed the habit of judging on them, is better able 
 and more likely to answer them rightly than the man who 
 has not. Some people will call him dogmatic, but he 
 who has read and thought ought to be able to have an 
 opinion, and he who has one of his own will always be 
 deemed dogmatic by the many who take theirs from the 
 
I. j History for its own, Sake. 2 3 
 
 newspapers. He is dogmatic if he ventures to express a 
 doubt where the infallible of the time being has laid down 
 a certainty. 
 
 To turn for a moment to the general question. I should 
 not like to be thought to be advocating my study on the 
 mere grounds of utility ; although I believe that utility, both 
 as regards the training of the study and the information 
 attained in it, to be the highest, humanly speaking, of all 
 utilities ; it helps to qualify a man to act in his character of 
 a politician as a Christian man should. But this is not all ; 
 beyond the educational purpose, beyond the political purpose, 
 beyond the philosophical use of history and its training, it 
 has something of the preeiousness of everything that is clearly 
 true. In common with Natural Philosophy it has its value, 
 I win not say as Science, for that would be to use a term 
 which has now become equivocal, but it has a value analogous 
 to the value of science ; a value as something that is worth 
 knowing and retaining in the knowledge for its own and for 
 the truth's sake. And in this consists its especial attraction 
 for its own votaries. It is not the pleasure of knowing 
 something that the world does not know, — that doubtless is a 
 motive that weighs with many minds, a motive to be ac- 
 cepted as a fact, though it may not be worth analysis. It is 
 not the mere pleasure of investigating and finding with every 
 step of investigation new points of view open out, and new 
 fields of labour, new characters of interest ; — that investigating 
 instinct of human nature is not one to be ignored, and the 
 exercise of it on such inexhaustible materials as are before us 
 now is a most healthy exercise, one that cannot but strengthen 
 and develope the whole mind of the man who uses it, urging 
 him on to new studies, new languages, new discoveries in 
 geography and science. But even this is not all. There is, 
 I speak humbly, in common with Natural Science, in the 
 study of living History, a gradual approximation to a con- 
 sciousness that we are growing into a perception of the 
 workings of the Almighty Ruler of the world; that we are 
 growing able to justify the Eternal Wisdom, and by that 
 justification to approve ourselves His children ; that we are 
 
24 Inaugural Lecture. y- 
 
 coming to see, not only in His ruling of His Chuicli in her 
 spiritual character but in His overruling of the world to 
 which His act of redemption has given a new and all-interest- 
 ing character to His own people, a hand of justice and mercy, 
 a hand of progress and order, a kind and wise disposition ever 
 leading the world on to the better, but never forcing, and out 
 of the evil of man's working bringing continually that which 
 is good. I do not fear to put it before you in this shape ; 
 I state my own belief, and it is well that you should know it 
 from the first. 
 
 The study of History is in this respect, as Coleridge said 
 of Poetry, its own great rewai'd, a thing to be loved and 
 cultivated for its own sake. If there ai-e few who do really 
 love and care for history, and I remember with sorrow that 
 such was the remark of Dr. Shirley the last time that I 
 had any lengthened conversation with him, is it not the 
 result of a neglect of the principles which I have tried to 
 express to you as the ideal of the study to my mind ? It has 
 not been well used of late yeai-s ; it has been taught as a task 
 to children ; it has been valued only as an instrument to 
 strengthen the memory ; it has been under- valued in its true 
 character of mental training ; it has been learned to qualify 
 men to make effective speeches to ignorant hearers, and to 
 indite brilliant articles for people who only read periodicals ; 
 it has been begun from the standing point of popular in- 
 fatuation ; it has been begun from the advanced ground of 
 ecclesiastical or political partisanship ; it has been made an 
 embellishment for wordy eloquence, a source of subjects for 
 pictorial talent that has evolved grouping, features and cir- 
 cumstances, from its own consciousness ; it has been written 
 as a poem, but without the inspiration of poetiy, as philo- 
 sophy without the thoughtfulness or humility of the true 
 philosophic spirit; it has been written for readers afready 
 known, counted and pandered to. What wonder that there 
 are few who love it for its own sake, when there are so few 
 who know it as it is ! 
 
 In this respect, as I have said, I hope and trust that the 
 better time is coming, when the universality of the training 
 
I.J Conchcsion. 25 
 
 • and the outpouiing of the sources of knowledge will make 
 impostui'e futile, and adulteration unprofitable. I hope and 
 trust that in that good time our training here will he found 
 to be a part of the true higher training, and the jknow- 
 ledge acquired in it to lead up to the true and highest 
 Knowledge. 
 
II. 
 
 ON THE PRESENT STATE AND PROSPECTS 
 OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 (May 17, 1876.) 
 
 Some things may be said but not printed, some may be printed and not 
 published ; many that are published are not, and need not be, read. Many 
 more would be better left unsaid. The following pages contain a good deal 
 that falls within each of these descriptions. They were written with a full 
 determination that they should not be printed. Circumstances which need 
 not be detailed have led me to alter this resolution. Still there is much in 
 them that would have been said otherwise or omitted if they had been meant 
 for publication. Some things too are omitted that ought to have been said. 
 It is obvious that no attempt has been made at completeness or exhaustiveness 
 of detail. By what I have said or left unsaid, I trust that I have wounded 
 no one. Certainly all was meant in gratitude and kindness. 
 
 4 PEW days ago, in turning over the contents of my old 
 -^^ lecture drawer, I came upon two newspaper cuttings, 
 which a vanity, pardonable I hope after the lapse of ten 
 years, had conserved in company with even more perishable 
 matter. The slips contained the reviews, of the Pall Mall 
 Gazette and the Saturday Review, of my inaugural lecture as 
 Regius Professor of Modern History. The latter of the two 
 critiques was in itself worth preserving, for it was an early 
 effort of a dear friend who has since made himself a great 
 name in the region of historical study. It was an article full 
 of blessing and good omen, with a sufficient amount of dog- 
 matism to prove that the writer believed himself entitled to 
 criticise ; and it contained, with all its precious bahn, enough 
 of the element of blister to produce a wholesome irritation : 
 for the one or two points in the lecture on which I had 
 bestowed especial pains were described as praiseworthy but 
 illusory. The Pall Mall review, the authorship of which I 
 never learned, was a kindly article also, giving a fair resume 
 of what I had said, and ending with the remark that, 
 although it was clear from the tone of my lecture that I 
 should take a somewhat clerical view of history, still that 
 
ii.J Present State and Prospects of Historical Study. 2 7 
 
 was not to be deplored, as in the interests of truth it was 
 desirable that the clerical view should have its own exponent. 
 
 The incident suggested to me that I should once more look 
 at the inaugural lecture, and see for myself how the hopes and 
 anticipations of 1866 looked in 1876. I found myself reading 
 over the record of feelings and impressions of ten years ago 
 with as much freshness as if they had been another man's ; 
 and the happy thought struck me of tui'ning my reflexions to 
 account in the form of public lectures. It would relieve me 
 of the puzzling anxiety over which six weeks of spring are 
 wasted every year — what shall I take as the subject of the 
 two solemn statutable lectures imposed upon the unhappy 
 professor, who, without this annual mortification, might be in 
 danger of thinking more highly of himself than he ought to 
 think ? It might also seem that, after ten years' occupation of 
 this chair, I might have occasion to review the progress of the 
 study in which I have had so great an interest ; and it might 
 also perhaps help me to gauge the amount of interest which 
 the study itself is receiving in Oxford ; for a notice that I 
 have something to say about myself, and about those whom I 
 might fairly expect to be present to hear me, would perhaps 
 attract a larger audience than a much more elaborate vindi- 
 cation of S. Dunstan, or an inquiry into the merits of the 
 customs duties as a part of the budget of King Edward I. It 
 is true, I thought, I shall have to say some things about my- 
 self; I shall have to blush for my confessions of failure and 
 for my assertions of success ; I may, if I am fortunate in my 
 company, have to make some of them blush too. But what 
 is that among friends ? and here I know none but friends. 
 There may be some who have a vested interest in stupidity 
 and false criticism, but I am thankful to say that I do not 
 know even their names ; and all who take a real and genuine 
 interest in my studies, whether I know them or not, I am 
 proud to look upon as friends with whom I need practise no 
 reticence or concealment. So with your good leave I will 
 dismiss myself first. 
 
 The thought that ten of the best years of a man's life have 
 been given to work like this is a very serious one. What 
 
28 A Retrospect. ["■ 
 
 have I done? How have I done it? How far have I ful- 
 filled my own hopes? How far have I realised the good 
 wishes of my friends ? How have I justified the good opinion 
 of those who placed me where I am? Perhaps it would be 
 more modest if I left it to others to judge and to pass judg- 
 ment. But I would rather try to report what I have tried to 
 do, and how I have tried to do it, than leave it unsaid. No 
 man is so fit to review a book as the author himself, because 
 he both knows what he meant to say and will be the first to 
 hear and feel what his kind friends the critics would make the 
 world believe that he has said. In the first place, let me say 
 that I have tried to fulfil the promise which I made in my in- 
 augural lecture — ' I desire to introduce myself to you not as 
 a philosopher, not as a politician, but as a worker at history.' 
 That I have worked at history is, I think, proved by the bulk 
 of the results : for during the ten years I have completed ten 
 volumes, and nearly an eleventh volume, of the English His- 
 torians published by the Master of the Rolls ; I have edited 
 the whole of the third volume and assisted in the first and 
 second volumes of the Councils of the English Church ; I 
 have published the volume of Select Charters, which has now 
 passed into a third edition, and two volumes of the Constitu- 
 tional History of England, besides other work edited or passed 
 through the press for practical aid in historical study. I am 
 aware that it is not the bulk but the character of the work by 
 which it must ultimately be tried ; I can only say that I hope 
 my work has not been unworthy of Oxford, or of England. 
 Judging from the reception accorded to it, I think I should 
 say that it has met with more appreciative and intelligent 
 reception in Germany than in England ; and I may add that 
 I believe that I owe to this the honour, and a very great 
 honour I esteem it, of an invitation to take part as a feUow 
 editor in the great series of German Historical Monuments, 
 known for the last fifty years under the name of Pertz, which 
 has now passed into the hands of a commission of which Dr. 
 Waitz is the chief. I am proud indeed to be an instrument, 
 in the humblest way, in repaying the debt which Eno-lish 
 history owes to German scholai-ship. 
 
II.] Clerical Views. 29 
 
 Further than this I shall not speak of my books, except to 
 point out how, by giving a clerical complexion to my work, I 
 have fulfilled the auguries of the kindly critic in the Tall 
 Mall. A kindly critic in the New York Nation, reviewing 
 the first volume of the Constitutional History, has described 
 the writer as entirely free from political bias, and adds that, 
 ' what is more surprising, he appears to be scarcely influenced 
 by ecclesiastical sentiment or prejudice.' Well, I thought, when 
 I read that notice, here is at last a man who takes a right view 
 of the clerical character. Here am I, steeped, as I fondly 
 believe, in clerical and conservative principles, and yet able to 
 take such a view of matters as scarcely to betray ecclesiastical 
 prejudice or political bias. Seriously speaking, that is just 
 what I wish. I understand the clerical spitit and mind to be 
 that which regards truth and justice above all things, which 
 believes what it believes firmly and intelligently, but with a 
 belief that is folly convinced that truth and justice must in 
 the end confirm the doctrine that it uj)holds ; with a belief 
 that party statement, and highly coloured pictures of friend 
 and foe, are dangerous enemies of truth and justice, and 
 damage in the long run the cause that employs them ; that 
 all sides have everything to gain and nothing to lose by full 
 and fair knowledge of the truth. And a clerical view of pro- 
 fessional responsibility I take to be the knowledge that I am 
 working in God's sight and for His purposes. If such be a 
 right view, I rejoice to have evidence of my success in realis- 
 ing it. If it be a mistaken one, well, I will claim credit for 
 good intentions as well as steady work. 
 
 I wish that my conscience were equally clear as to the 
 other branch of professorial usefulness, oral teaching or lectur- 
 ing. On this topic I proposed in my inaugural lecture to set 
 before myself two leading principles : the first was to begin 
 at the beginning — ' We must begin at the right end, work 
 from the past forwards, not backwards from the present.' I 
 meant, of course, not merely that I did not intend to read 
 history backwards, which would be a difiicult process in 
 lecture, but that I should start from the beginning of the 
 modern period and treat the course of historical progress 
 
30 Limits of Work. \P- 
 
 generally and in natural order, rather than, by choosing topics 
 which owed their importance to the interests of the day, work 
 in the reverse order. I intended, in fact, to trace the gradual 
 development of the modern world rather than to trace back 
 particular points of development to their original germs.^ I 
 have on the whole followed out that idea, although from time 
 to time I have varied it with a course of analytical lectures. 
 The result has been that, during these ten years I have never 
 got beyond the year 1648. I have gone over the whole of the 
 political history of Em-ope generally, and over that of England 
 and Germany, with great minuteness, throughout the greater 
 part of that long series of years ; but beyond the Thirty Years' 
 War I have not gone. I may add that there were two 
 reasons for this ; one, because I found the later history already 
 in very good hands, a favourite subject with my colleague the 
 Chichele Professor, and very well represented by the College 
 Lecturers on History ; the other, that my own separate line of 
 study and work lay in the earlier portion mainly, and it would 
 have been somewhat distracting to be treating widely distant 
 periods of history at the same time. A third reason, I am free 
 to confess, was that I had some misgivings as to the use- 
 fulness of the later period as a topic of historical education, 
 until the foundation of the earlier knowledge had been well 
 and strongly laid. I have often questioned whether it were 
 indeed desirable to exercise the minds of young men, old 
 enough to have strong poKtieal feelings, not old enough to 
 exert a calm historical judgment, on periods of history teeming 
 with the very same influences as those which are at work at 
 this moment ; at least before they had had an adequate train- 
 ing in the earlier history and were able to account for the 
 origin and trace the earlier workings of those influences, so as 
 to be able at least to accord an equitable sufierance to those 
 who take a view contrary to their own. My apprehensions 
 have not been shared by other teachers here, and it is well 
 that no misgivings of mine should have acted so as to leave 
 the treatment of modem history in this respect inadequate. 
 I do not decide the matter, but simply state my own reason 
 for holding back. 
 
II.] Political use of Teaching. 31 
 
 And this leads me to reeux to the other principle upon which 
 I proposed to act, and which struck the imagination of my re- 
 viewer as illusoiy or useless. My idea was and is, that, as man- 
 kind is roughly divided between the advocates of order and the 
 advocates of change, and as both classes contain about an equal 
 number of good, bad, and indifferent, of the wise, of the sensi- 
 ble and of the stupid, it was a function of the historical teacher, 
 not to try to make them all think alike or to set himself up 
 as a judge, saying to the one side you are all wrong, or to the 
 other you are all right, but to present to both the facts and 
 courses of events, which are the stores out of which both sides 
 must draw their weapons, in such a fair and just view that 
 they might be safely used by either. Simply, it was not my 
 work to make men Whigs or Tories, but to do my best, having 
 Whigs and Tories by nature as the matter I was to work 
 upon, to make the Whigs good, wise, sensible Whigs, and the 
 Tories good, wise, sensible Tories ; to teach them to choose 
 their weapons and to use them fairly and honestly. Well, I 
 still adhere to that view, and every year what I see in public 
 life around me confirms my belief in the truth and value of 
 the principle. How far I have been successful in acting upon 
 it I cannot of course say ; but I feel sure that the growth of 
 sound historical teaching would have spared us such national 
 humiliation as we have undergone, during the last few years, 
 in the treatment of the Public Worship Act, the Judicature 
 Act, and the Royal Titles Act. I am quite sure that both the 
 speakers and writers on those subjects would have been very 
 much wiser and more modest men, if they had, I will not say 
 attended my lectures, but passed a stiff examination in the 
 History School : if we could not have made them wiser, we 
 would at all events have made them sadder. 
 
 Well, are these statements of principle made merely to 
 cover the sad fact that I have not been a successful lecturer 1 
 that I have to join in the professorial chorus of complaint 
 that the professorial and tutorial systems have not yet dove- 
 tailed into one another with all the completeness that could 
 be wished ? Perhaps it is so. I have sometimes felt a little 
 hurt that, after preparing and advertising a good course of 
 
32 Position of Professors. [n. 
 
 lectures,— and I feel no modesty in speaking thus, because 
 I beHeve that good and thoughtful work will make good 
 lectures,— I have had to deliver them to two or three listless 
 men; sometimes I have felt hurt that, in the combined 
 lecture list, when it appeared, I found the junior assistant 
 tutor advertising a course on the same subject, or at the very 
 same hours as my own. But I will allow gratefully that such 
 occasions have been few ; I am pleased to remember that my 
 classes, although they have never been very large, have as a 
 rule been very faithful ; that the combination system has 
 brought me far more men than, on the most sanguine com- 
 putation, it could have taken from me ; and that I believe the 
 real cause why professorial lectures are less useful than they 
 should be, is the perhaps unfortunate fact that nearly aU study 
 in Oxford is directed towards the securing of honours in the 
 Class Lists. Tutors, lecturers, and pupils are all working for 
 the Schools ; even the professorial statutes are drawn with a 
 view to usefulness mainly in that direction ; nor could any 
 professor, however eminent, expect to get a considerable class 
 to attend eighteen or even twelve lectures a term on any 
 subject that would not pay — if I may use the current language 
 on so solemn an occasion. The result is that, so far as lectures 
 go, the professor has to take his chance of a class among the 
 general run of college lecturers, without that power of com- 
 manding attendance which the college lecturers have. It is 
 scarcely surprising that the weaker goes to the wall, and that 
 the professor has to yield his place to younger men who per- 
 haps may themselves owe some portion of their success to 
 what they have learned from him. In saying this, I am not 
 speaking of myself, for it would not be exactly true of me, 
 but on the general question. For myself I am quite ready to 
 accept the consolation and to declare that it is really much 
 better, both for the growth of historical study, and for the 
 development of the educational instrument, that there should 
 be a dozen or fifteen college lecturers working away with 
 large classes when I have only a few stray men, than that I 
 should be lecturing to large assemblies of men who came to 
 me simply because they had nowhere else to go. And I am 
 
II. J History in Oxford. 33 
 
 quite willing' that my character as a professor should stand or 
 fall by my other work. 
 
 . And now let me cease to speak of myself. It will be best 
 perhaps that I should arrange what I have to say in circles ; 
 and, taking Oxford first, proceed to remark next on the 
 position of historical study in England generally, and then 
 outside England in Europe and America. Oxford first. There 
 can, I think, be no doubt that the growth of the study of 
 History at Oxford during the last ten years has been con- 
 tinuous and very rapid. I have no hesitation in saying this, 
 because no one will think that I claim any credit for myself in 
 it. The foundation work was done before I became professor, 
 and the principal teachers who helped in the laying that 
 foundation, are working vigorously now at the superstructure. 
 We have had great losses, I grieve to say, and great gains. I 
 think I will not mention names : your memories will advert 
 at once to the losses ; the gains are here to speak for them- 
 selves. It is no small ground of congratulation to be able to 
 say that, whilst our losses have not weakened us, our gains 
 have very greatly strengthened us ; our position is strong 
 enough not to be shaken by the loss ; our study is still in 
 siich a growing state as to be able to incorporate and amalga- 
 mate or assimilate all new helps. And that result speaks 
 well for us in several ways. In the first place, our corporate 
 strength is much greater. The History teaching in the 
 colleges is not left to the accidental supply of teachers who 
 have an aptitude for the subject in common with all the other 
 subjects of the University course, but every college has its 
 own recognised History Tutor or Lecturer ; and these, or most 
 of them, are acting together. Whether in the Board of 
 Studies or in the meetings of combined lecturers, they are 
 able to exert on the study itself a concentrated influence 
 which teUs very effectively on the students who are reading 
 for the Schools. The objection that might suggest itself to 
 those who do not know Oxford, that such a corporate union 
 may tend to cramp the freedom of study and, in preventing 
 desultory or straggling reading, may discourage independent 
 research, will not hold here, so long at least as the system of 
 
 D 
 
34 History in Schools. [n- 
 
 examinations remains what it is. There is no risk of the 
 History Lecturers ever forming a clique, or close school of 
 History, as a single glance at the list of them is sufficient to 
 prove. But in the second place, the multiplication and asso- 
 ciation of lecturers enables us to offer a systematic and con- 
 tinuous reading of History to the student. Each lecturer 
 will, as time advances, find out his own strongest period, or 
 his friends will find it for him ; and then the student, who 
 chooses to give his time to the work, will be able to obtain a 
 thorough guidance through the several stages of his subject ; 
 and the historical training will be both continuous and com- 
 plete. And, in the third place, the opportunity of reading 
 continuously, under a series of able teachers of different tones 
 of mind and different schools of thought, will most certainly 
 be a great advantage to the student who wishes to take His- 
 tory as a real part of his mental training. I hope and trust 
 that this will always be the case ; and that, although we may 
 be earnest and glad to work together, we may never be in 
 danger of thinking all alike, on those topics at least upon 
 which constitutional opinion and controversial criticism must 
 be content to permit difference of view. In this aspect the 
 training for the School of History may become a beneficial 
 training for public Hfe ; and although that is not the sole or 
 the primary object in my eyes of the study of History here, it 
 is a most important one ; we must try to furnish men who wiU 
 not be merely good historians, but good citizens, or, as I said 
 before, good Whigs and good Tories. And there is another 
 point in which great advantage may be hoped from the in- 
 crease and combination of teachers, which I can only just 
 indicate now — I mean the connexion which is to be looked 
 forward to between the University course and the teaching of 
 our great schools and local institutions of education. 
 
 Next to the strengthening of the historical staff, the 
 separation of the School of Jurisprudence from the School of 
 History is the most important point of our Oxford history. 
 And this change, although it was anxiously desired by many 
 teachers of both subjects, was not adopted without some 
 serious apprehensions. Whether the joint School, so young 
 
II. J The Honour Schools. 35 
 
 as it was, was sufficiently strong to bear the shock of division ; 
 whether the supply of teachers would be sufficient ; whether 
 each subject by itself was substantive enough to furnish the 
 training for a class examination of high character ; whether 
 the separation would not produce a tendency to eliminate 
 History from the Law teaching and Law from the Histoiy 
 teaching, were questions which might well cause misgiving. 
 Some of them have been solved in the process of experiment. 
 Both Schools have increased their numbers and raised their 
 standard since the division ; as to the supply of teachers, what 
 I have just said as to the increase and co-operation of the 
 History teachers is a sufficient answer for them ; the Law 
 professors can, I believe, give a like answer. As to the third 
 point, the substantive value of historical training, opinions 
 will still differ ; I for my part have no desire that, as an 
 educational instrument, the History training should take the 
 place of the classical and mathematical training, which must 
 always form the chief part of the school education, and the 
 strongest and favourite work of the University career. But 
 as a further stage of training, I maintain that the reading of 
 History may claim an equal place with aU the other studies 
 pursued here : I believe that a man who has taken a good 
 Class in Moderations would, so far as mental training is con- 
 cerned, do wisely in taking up a fresh subject, especially 
 Modern History. As a piece of professional training for the 
 work of a schoolmaster or a clergyman, it may not be so, at 
 all events during the present state of school education ; I 
 only allege it as a means of mental culture. There is however 
 a fourth question, which time will have to answer, and for 
 which time must supply a remedy, if the mischief comes. It 
 will be a fatal thing for the study of History here, if the study 
 of Law should ever be quite eliminated from the History 
 course ; and as fatal for the study of Law if it should ever 
 come to be read on its merely scientific or on its merely em- 
 piric sides. With our present Law teachers both of these are 
 alike impossible. The lectures of Sir Henry Maine, Dr. Bryce, 
 and Mr. Holland are to a great extent historical lectures, and 
 are as great an advantage to the History students as they are 
 
36 The History Prizes. [n. 
 
 to the Law students. I hope that in a humble sort of way 
 some work of the other School is found useful to the lawyers. 
 But this may not always be so. I think that it is a point 
 that wUl need watching. The great fault of the old combined 
 School was that there was no unity about the prescribed read- 
 ing. Much of the Law, that was superadded to the History, 
 had no more real connexion with it than a similar bulk of 
 entomological reading might have had ; and the really im- 
 portant historical side of Law was not brought in. I am not 
 sure that, even now, both Schools would not be benefited by 
 a more distinct method ; and, whilst I should be glad to have 
 a section of legal history more definitely and generally made 
 a part of the History examination, I should very greatly 
 regret to see the Law Board proceeding further than they 
 have done in shutting out History from their scheme. But 
 this is going beyond my last. It seems to me, however, in 
 connexion with my own study, that the growth of juris- 
 prudence, the history of foreign codes, ancient and modem, 
 and the connexion between legal and constitutional growth, 
 are, as well as international law, a common ground between 
 the two studies ; and I am not inclined to surrender the 
 rights of my School in them any more than I ahould wish the 
 lawyers to leave them wholly to us. To some extent the 
 relation of the studies is the same as that which subsists 
 between Ecclesiastical History and Theology ; each is a very 
 maimed afiair without the other. It will not be our fault if 
 the common ground is altogether lost. 
 
 Next, to descend from the higher regions to the lower, 
 I would say a word about the Historical Prizes. And in what 
 I have to say, I hope I shall not be understood to east any 
 slight on the very meritorious essays which have in the last 
 few years received the Arnold, Stanhope, and Lothian Prizes. 
 I have been on each occasion a judge, and have very carefully 
 and anxiously observed the character of the productions sent 
 in. The fact that in several instances the Prizes have not 
 been awarded is a proof that where they have been awarded 
 they have been, in the opinion of the judges, thoroughly well 
 merited. But the experience of these years has not, on the 
 
II,] Prize Essays. 37 
 
 whole, been encoiu-aging. Of the Stanhope I need say little : 
 it is intended to be an undergraduate prize ; the style of 
 writing is scarcely of less importance in the estimation of 
 the judges, as guided by the intention of the donor, than is 
 the matter of the essay. For the Stanhope, too, there have 
 always been plenty of competitors and no lack of creditable, 
 very creditable, essays. But for the Arnold, which is a 
 graduates' prize, and for the Lothian, which is common to 
 both bachelors and undergraduates, I am sorry to say that 
 there has not been lately good competition. I speak pri- 
 marily of the modern side of the Arnold Prize ; the ancient 
 side has been still more unproductive of good work. This 
 lack of competition is not, I am sure, a sign of flagging 
 interest in these studies. It is to be explained by a very 
 obvious circumstance — namely, that urgent desire which at 
 present prevails among the Honom- men to get speedy returns 
 for their accumulation of class knowledge. Quick returns are 
 generally associated with small profits ; and I cannot help 
 thinking that many men, who rush into tutorial work as soon 
 as they have got through the Schools, would do much better, 
 and make ultimately much greater profit, by continuing their 
 reading, or at all events by blending tutorial work with some 
 literary industry such as writing for the Prizes. It looks 
 rather as if they were afraid that the stores of knowledge 
 which have received the brand of the Examination School 
 might loose their freshness and applicability unless they were 
 immediately put to use in one particular way. I am aware 
 that this is no new snare ; and twenty-eight years ago, when 
 I myself was subjected to the temptation, it was hai-dly less 
 a snare than it is now. But then, as a rule, men went into 
 the Schools younger than they do now ; there were fewer 
 Schools and fewer first class men ; less ardent competition 
 perhaps among private tutors, and on the whole more leisure 
 for continued reading. There may be other reasons for the 
 result that I complain of. The ignorance with which the 
 Lothian Prize, a handsome prize of ^£'40, open to all graduates 
 and undergraduates up to their twenty-seventh term, has 
 been disregarded, is, to say the least, curious. The subjects 
 
38 Dissertations. [n- 
 
 proposed, for which I am in a measm-e responsible, have 
 perhaps not carried on their face the recommendations of 
 general or popular interest; and Foreign History does not 
 of course receive so much attention as English History. But 
 none of these is a satisfactory reason. The view which I 
 have every reason to believe that the founder of the Lothian 
 Prize had before him was not merely to stimulate historical 
 reading but really to help to increase the stores of historical 
 knowledge by the production of valuable monographs on 
 points of foreign history. My own idea of what we should 
 look for is something like the small but most valuable dis- 
 sertations which are produced in some of the German Univer- 
 sities as exercises for the doctorate. These are the work of 
 men of twenty-three or twenty-four, just the age at which 
 our high-class men graduate ; and they are the result of their 
 private reading, approved and authorised, so to speak, by 
 their professors. Within the last few weeks I have received 
 two such essays on subjects mainly of English interest, in 
 fact upon portions of our history which I myself have treated : 
 a tract on the ' Dialogus de Scaccario,' by Mr. Liebermann, 
 of Gottingen ; and one on the capture of Lisbon by the 
 English crusaders in 1 147, by Mr. Cosack, of the University 
 of Halle. I mention these not because I have any credit to 
 claim for them, for I am criticised quite as calmly and un- 
 sparingly as any other Englishman may expect to be in 
 German reviews, but because I take them to be a sign of a 
 sort of literary culture which we ought not to be ashamed to 
 imitate. Unlike most of our ordinary historic reviews, they 
 have a permanent value : they are not condemned, as some 
 very good English work of the kind is, to be the padding 
 of popular magazines,— the ever uncut leaves that interpose 
 between the two sensational stories by which the magazine 
 lives,— but they are put together and stored up for the days 
 when either the writers or some who have profited by the 
 reading of them can use them in more continuous, more con- 
 solidated, work. Now it is useless to argue that we cannot 
 do this. Mr. Dicey's Essay on the Privy Council, which took 
 the Ai-nold Prize m i860, is a proof that our prize system is 
 
II.] Free Choice of Subjects. 39 
 
 not incapable of such success, although it cannot ensure it. 
 Dr. Bryce's Essay on the Holy Roman Empire, in 1863, is 
 not exactly a case in point, for it is not a study of some 
 minute fact or institution, but a brilliant sketch of the whole 
 course of one of the great influences which make up modern 
 history ; but not to be invidious, there are other essays which 
 do more or less approach the standard of deep research and 
 sound criticism which I wish to see adopted. I have some- 
 times thought that it would be a good plan to give a number 
 of alternative theses for such a valuable prize ; but I will 
 content myself with a recommendation that, if any new bene- 
 factor wishes at once to encourage critical study and reward 
 research, he should establish a prize for which the competitors 
 should choose their own subject, to be approved by the judges 
 a year before the time fixed for sending in the essays. Such 
 an experiment might fairly be tried. There are, I believe, 
 quite sufficient inducements of a local and personal kind, con- 
 nected with History, which would draw the intelligent student 
 into much more earnest work than any thesis simply imposed 
 as a test of his powers. Local history, family history, the 
 possession of important documents such as may be found in 
 every country house, and almost every parish register or com-t 
 roll, open ways of access to historical interest of a varied kind, 
 in which the extent of research may be almost unbounded, 
 in which a critical spirit may be trained and discipHned, and 
 the results of which are sure to be valuable, certainly in- 
 valuable to the worker himself. WeU, I do not wish to see the 
 Lothian essays devoted to points of very minute history, and 
 it is of foreign history that they are, by the injunction of the 
 founder, to treat ; but I think that some latitude in the 
 choice of subjects for prize dissertations might be conveniently 
 adopted, say for college prizes ; and if any college wiU try the 
 experiment, I will gladly serve as a judge for the purpose. 
 
 What I have said about the Lothian Prize, its value, and 
 the really important work which, if it were taken up by 
 classmen after they have passed through the Schools, it 
 might be made to ensure, wiU, I hope, have fallen on some 
 ears that will attend to it. 
 
40 Scholarships and Exhibitions. [ii. 
 
 The mention of these prizes leads on to the further point, 
 the encouragement given to the study of History at this 
 moment by scholarships, exhibitions and fellowships bestowed 
 after a competitive examination in History. On this a very 
 few words will suffice, and those shall not be dogmatic or 
 even positive. I would not say a word to discoui-age the 
 idea, or a word that might seem to show that I wished to 
 determine my own way the result of the experiment that is 
 being at present tried. But, until public school education, 
 until school education generally, has much more completely 
 assiniilated, and found a more comfortable place for historical 
 teaching, I should deprecate any large increase of historical 
 exhibitions for boys coming up to the University. Holding, 
 as I do, that a sound classical training must be the founda- 
 tion of successful historical study, and sure as I am that 
 nothing but such training can prepare a man to be a good 
 historical teacher, I should not give a historical exhibition 
 to a boy who does not show some promise of taking good 
 Honom-s in Moderations. In most instances I think it 
 would be better not to give it until Moderations are over ; 
 of course, however, I am speaking with a view to the study 
 of History, and not to the pecuniary interests of candidates 
 for scholarships. Example has shown us that it is of little 
 use to hope to promote a study like this by over-nursing. 
 One reason, I think, that we have had such success as we 
 have had, is that we have had no such nursing ; that the 
 study itself, and such a modicum of honour as could be gained 
 in the Class Schools, has been the main incentive to historical 
 reading here. We are, I am quite willing to allow, — nay, 
 I am most anxious that we should remember, — but at the 
 beginning of our work ; we have very much to do still before 
 the History School of Oxford can take its stand besides the 
 historical schools of Pai-is, or Bonn, or Gdttingen, or Munich, 
 or Vienna ; but having well begun, we have half won our 
 place already. 
 
 "What I have said of scholarships is in its wa;^ true of com- 
 petitive examination for fellowships. If a college desires 
 simply to acquire a creditable Fellow, a mere historic ex- 
 
II.] Endowment of Research. 4 1 
 
 amination may be as good as any other ; if a college desires 
 a good History Tutor, I conceive that the best way to get | 
 him would be to subject the History candidates (selected in '' 
 the first instance on the ground of their Honours acquired in 
 the History Schools) to a sound examination in the work of 
 the Literee Humaniores School, in which teaching power is at 
 present most fully developed. If a college desires to have 
 what is called a man of research, I am not sure but the best 
 way to obtain him would be to choose him without examina- 
 tion. There are not, I believe, many men worthy of such 
 distinction who are not already marked out by work done. 
 
 The whole question of research is difficult, the direction as 
 well as the endowment of it. I confess that I do not like 
 the idea of giving a man an income which would by itself 
 be sufficient to make work unnecessary, and telling him to 
 devote himself to research as he pleases. Not to consider 
 cases in which the duty of research would, like other duties 
 heretofore, be eluded, — and idle professorships would take the 
 place of idle fellowships, — the temptation to desultory reseai-ch 
 must in every case be very great, and desultory research, 
 however it may amuse or benefit the investigator, seldom 
 adds much to the real stock of human knowledge. We have 
 had enough spent already on self-culture taken for granted. 
 If we would provide for research it must, so far as History is 
 concerned, be done by paying for results. Let me not be 
 misunderstood. For results I should rather say work done. 
 There are fields of work in History as well as in Natural 
 Science in which experiment is to be treated as result. If 
 a scientific man tries some new and costly combination of 
 chemicals, if a practical gunfounder or shipbuilder attempts 
 some grand and novel scheme of artillery or naval architecture, 
 and, after making careful calculations, fails, his failure is a 
 result for which he has a right to be paid ; it is an addition 
 to our knowledge to have learned that such and such combi- 
 nations do not produce the efiect which it was calculated 
 that they would produce. So in historical study I should 
 place among the lawful researches and results, the investi- 
 gation of foreign libraries, the exploration of unsearched 
 
42 Extraordinary Endowments. \P- 
 
 districts for the purpose of collecting inscriptions, the calen- 
 daring and cataloguing of manuscripts, — all sorts, in fact, of 
 investigations on which it was, a priori, reasonably probahle 
 that discoveries would he made ; provided such investigations 
 were carried out systematically, provided the work were well 
 done, even if, in that sense of result, there were no result but 
 the discovery that there was nothing to discover. I do not 
 mean to say that the successful researcher should be placed on 
 a level with the unsuccessful, although his success would 
 probably be in itself remunerative, and the element of good 
 fortune should not be left out of account. 
 
 Well, I should like to see us send an occasional envoy to 
 the Vatican Library, or to the great libraries of the Roman 
 princes ; or to send a trained scholar, chosen not by com- 
 petition, but because his peculiar qualifications forced him 
 upon our notice, to watch the explorations at Olympia or at 
 Troy. More generally, however, I think that the endow- 
 ment of research should take the form of payment for actual 
 results. Find your man of research, and set him to the work 
 of research ; pay him something by way of retaining fee, 
 which you may safely do when you have caught him, but let 
 the liberal remuneration for work actually produced be the 
 real endowment, be it books written, books edited, coins or 
 manuscripts collected, as the case may be. The further 
 point, how to reward men of research when their day of 
 research is over, scarcely belongs to this subject ; for the rule 
 must be the same, I conceive, in all departments of knowledge : 
 it is a question of pensioning those who have deserved well 
 of us, not of securing any further addition to the sum of 
 knowledge. 
 
 The rule that we should first find the man of research and 
 then endow him, not found a chair of research and then find 
 the man to fill it, applies to another important matter which 
 is very much forced upon om- minds at this moment. And 
 I must request you to take what I have to say upon it not as 
 any final conclusion, but as the view which at this moment 
 presents itself to me as most feasible, but which circumstances 
 may at any time modify. If we are to look on the measures 
 
II.] Increase of Staff. 43 
 
 of change whicli are at present imminent, as likely to settle 
 tlie future of the University for any considerable number of 
 years, we must look about us and see whether oui staff of 
 historical teachers and searchers is sufficient for present 
 needs, if it is likely to be sufficient for future needs, how by 
 careful speculation and economic arrangement we can best 
 utilise the means which we have a right to expect under 
 any re-apportionment of academic resources. Now I am 
 not prepared to allow that our staff of historical teachers is 
 either sufficient in itself or organised in the best way at the 
 present moment. I am quite sure that, if our study advances 
 during the next ten years in anything like the same ratio in 
 which it has advanced during the last ten years, we shall 
 need more professors and an organisation of teaching, which, 
 like the present organisation of Natural Science professors, 
 may be not so much dependent as we now are on the tutorial 
 system in the colleges. It is most important to observe that, 
 if impending changes alter the collegiate system or affect its 
 available resources, the University will have to supply a large 
 part of the teaching power, now provided by the colleges, in 
 the shape of an increased professoriate or sub-professoriate. 
 I should not like to have to make even an estimate now of 
 the staff that we may require in ten or twenty years, and 
 I should very much deprecate any measure which, taking the 
 present as the standard of our needs, should prevent us from 
 securing such development as the occasion for it may arise. 
 At the present moment we want a Professor of Later Eccle- 
 siastical History, to take up the subject at the point at which 
 the department assigned to the Regius Professor comes to an 
 end. We want a permanent chair of Indian History. The 
 labours of our friend the present Indian Reader have shown 
 us how thoroughly that study, the importance of which can 
 scarcely be over-rated by Englishmen, falls in with the cur- 
 rent of our University work. I say a permanent chair, 
 because that is a subject of permanent necessity, not a subject 
 like palseography or numismatology, in which the labours of 
 one good professor may serve for two or three generations, 
 and the endowment of the man is of equal importance with 
 
44 Proposed Innovations. [li- 
 
 the endowment of the chair or study. It is the helief of a 
 large class of scholars that we require a professorship of 
 English History by itself ; and it is certainly desirable that 
 no chance should be allowed of English History being with- 
 out adequate representation. I think it is unlikely that that 
 should be the case, or that both the Regius and Chichele 
 Professors at the same time should devote themselves to 
 Foreign History ; but it might as well be made certain, and 
 English History is a subject which might well employ the 
 energies of three or four professors. I am not, however, an 
 'advocate for tying down the History professors to particular 
 branches of the subject ; I am sure that each will work best 
 if he is left to devote himself to his own specially chosen 
 department, and that, provided the whole field of teaching 
 be sufficiently well covered, the more freedom that can be 
 given, the better for both teacher and learner. 
 
 However, whilst with this limitation the permanent chairs 
 may be expected to represent the whole field of teaching, it 
 seems to me most important that for our greater extension 
 we should employ the means which the Board of Historical 
 Studies were among the first to suggest in their answer to 
 the questions of the late Viee-Chancellor, and avail ourselves 
 of the services of professors-extraordinary : that is, as I have 
 begun by saying, find a man who is making himself a great 
 authority and teacher in a special department, and bring him 
 here and make him a professor, not considering whether, when 
 he is gone, we can find another as good to fill his place, but 
 simply taking him as a very good godsend and making the 
 best of him. Of coui-se we should never choose the professor 
 of a worthless subject, but worthless subjects do not often 
 attract the men whose services would be otherwise worth 
 having. Historical teaching, method and criticism, may 
 however be exemplified in veiy many sections of the great 
 subject : and it might be very well indeed, the general balance 
 being otherwise preserved, to have a professor-extraordinary 
 who would exemplify them, for instance, in the minute 
 working out of the lessons of the reign of Edward III, or 
 of the age of the Reformation, or of the reign of Charles I 
 
II.] The Ptiblic Schools. 45 
 
 or Queen Anne. So research might be combined with teach- 
 ing, the discipline of research might be itself inculcated, and 
 the voice of research be made to attune itself to the work of 
 teaching. 
 
 But whether we want a present reinforcement, or content 
 ourselves with looking forward to a probable development, we 
 must not let the opportunity escape. We must not ask too 
 much, but we must ask the University to keep its eyes open 
 to what we believe to be our certain and noble future, and not 
 to make the modesty of our present petitions the limit of her 
 prospective liabilities in our behalf. We must ask her to 
 secure for us a competence for the moment and ample freedom 
 for growth and expansion. As to any definite finality, any 
 perfect and exhaustive division of periods and duties, any 
 theoretically complete staff of professors of History, I confess 
 that I am not disposed to be anxious. If the study flourishes 
 and is not cramped for means, the completeness and the neat- 
 ness of system will grow as it grows : and we may be content 
 to let it grow so. 
 
 In conclusion, that is, of this part of my subject, — the con- 
 dition and prospects of historical education, apart from the 
 general subject of the hona fide development of historical 
 study, — I should say a word or two about teaching in schools. 
 And this I do with great diffidence, because I have no ex- 
 perience in such work ; at the same time I trust that I shall 
 not make any impracticable suggestions. For the growth and 
 development of the study, as an instrument of education, we 
 must look for much help to the public schools and other great 
 feeders of University life. If they find it possible to in- 
 corporate it permanently with their course of work intro- 
 ductory to the University career, the men will come up better 
 prepared for such training as we can give them, and so more 
 and more ready to assist in the growth of the growing study. 
 Now although this seems simple enough to say, in reality it 
 involves a great deal. It means not only that the great 
 schools should have History masters who can keep themselves 
 abreast with the rising tide of knowledge, but a constant 
 revision or provision of improved text-books. It seems to me 
 
46 Improved Manuals. [n. 
 
 that the great schools are awake to the necessity, and that the 
 publishers of school books are vying with one another m the 
 production of manuals which will combine the conclusions of 
 the most advanced students with simplicity of plan, and, we 
 may hope, attractiveness in treatment. Only there is no 
 finality to be looked for. We must not expect manuals that, 
 like the old grammars, will keep their places for two or three 
 centuries. Every few years great discoveries are made ; the 
 use of the comparative method, long ago applied superficially 
 and partially to History, has now become, owing to its em- 
 ployment in other fields of work, far more valuable and 
 remunerative ; and more especially in regard to early periods 
 ■ with respect to which error and misapprehension are the 
 greatest among fairly educated people, and almost ineradicable 
 from otherwise fairly useful text-books. To take the simple 
 instance, which will perhaps have occurred to some of you : 
 the proved discovery of the forgery of Ingulfs History of 
 Crowland Abbey was a fact that necessitated the revision of 
 every standard book on early English History. It is more 
 than forty years since that discovery, long ago suspected, was 
 proved beyond the possibility of doubt. Yet to this day the 
 Ingulfine leaven remains in our elementary books, nay, in more 
 than elementary books, in standard works of History, from 
 which it is almost impossible to eliminate it ; it remains as a 
 warning light — a wandering marsh-fire — to caution the reader 
 not to accept too abjectly the conclusions of his authority. 
 Even the recently published list of landowners of England, 
 called somewhat fantastically by the leaders of public opinion 
 the new Domesday, contains in its introduction a quotation 
 from Ingulf, made apparently without any suspicion of false- 
 ness. But it is not only the name of the writer, but 
 the more subtle influence of conclusions drawn from his 
 fabrications that are to be guarded against : and these 
 lie at the very basis of om- popular histories. For school 
 books it is absolutely necessary that such primary errors 
 should be corrected at once ; for it is impossible, at least at 
 present, to suppose that the reading of original authorities 
 can be to any great extent introduced into the scholastic 
 
II. J Fiction as against Pictorial History. 47 
 
 course as is done in Germany. And this will necessitate con- 
 stant revision. 
 
 Another point to be watched is the not unnatural desire of 
 teachers to attract the minds of boys to the picturesque and 
 dramatic sides of the subject, to the neglect of the greater 
 lesson, the investigation of causes and effects and the connexion 
 of events. I would almost rather that boys were attracted by 
 the reading of Ivanhoe and the Talisman, books which do 
 not pretend to be true, and are full of strange misrepresenta- 
 tions of manners and thought, than by a serious history com- 
 posed with a view to the picturesque only or mainly. The ivy 
 may conceal the structure of the building far too much for 
 safety. We cannot safely content ourselves with fanciful 
 grouping or imaginary drawing of character and situation. 
 Let us trust the novelist so far. There are novels that may 
 well be trusted so far ; Miss Yonge's Chaplet of Pearls, and 
 Dove in the Eagle's Nest, for instance — beautiful and, I 
 think, perfect pictures of manners and reflexions of ideas. 
 We will attract but not educate by such books. Our real 
 education in History must not be less precise or severe than 
 the discipline of language or of natural science ; it cannot be 
 valuable if it be desultory. 
 
 One point more. If the study of periods of History is to 
 become part of a school education, I trust that due care will 
 be taken not to dwell unnecessarily on, or to choose for exag- 
 gerated illustration, those periods which are connected most 
 closely with the questions and controversies of to-day. Of all 
 things in the world except a controversial woman, a contro- 
 versial boy is the most disagreeable, the most pragmatic, the 
 most irrepressible, the most aggressive. Now even in the 
 training of children we want to train the judgment. That 
 training is the great educational or disciplinary object of 
 historic teaching, the formative as distinct from the material 
 acquisition that results or should result from it. The judg- 
 ment must be trained in cooler air and by milder methods 
 than are found in the battle-field of modern politics. Surely 
 boys and girls should be taught elementary history, should be 
 trained in the exercise of the powers that can trace cause and 
 
48 Avoidance of Controversy. [h- 
 
 effect in historical narrative, should be given credit for the 
 germs of a critical faculty and helped to cultivate it, before 
 they are plunged into the details of the struggles of pnritanism 
 and absolutism, or the deep religious divisions, that for three 
 centuries have separated Christendom into two camps and do 
 so still. Let them learn the history of early England and 
 early France before they are called to exert their tender judg- 
 ment on the Great Rebellion or the French Revolution. If 
 the teachers had been so taught the experiment would never 
 have been tried. 
 
III. 
 
 ON THE PRESENT STATE AND PROSPECTS 
 OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 (May 20, 1876.) 
 
 IN the remarks which I took upon myself to offer in the 
 last Lecture on the present prospects of Historical study, 
 I think that I managed to touch upon every point of special 
 interest to Oxford and the educational use of my subject : to 
 touch upon every pointy I say, because it was neither necessary 
 nor possible to treat exhaustively of any one. I may have to 
 recur in the present Lecture to some of the more general or 
 more prominent topics, but I propose now to take a view of 
 the broader side of the subject, Historic study and its position 
 in England and Europe, as affected by the work of the last 
 ten years ; not with any special view to the educational im- 
 portance of the work, but generally as a material and sub- 
 stantial branch of human knowledge. 
 
 Taking England first ; the first point I shall notice is the 
 great spread of the taste for history which has marked the 
 period. This may be tested in two ways. The great number 
 of new books and reprints of old ones, the large editions and 
 re-issues of standard books, school books, and volumes of 
 essays, and the number of reviews of historical books, or short 
 historical articles in magazines and newspapers, are one branch 
 of proof ; the more lively interest taken in the preservation of 
 historical monuments, whether in the shape of documents or in 
 that of architectural and antiquarian remains, is another. I 
 am not prepared to say that the last ten years have witnessed 
 the introduction of any entirely new elements in either branch, 
 or that we are not yet a long way ofi' from the state of things 
 
 E 
 
50 Increased Interest in History. \™^- 
 
 which we may wish for, when the publication of a great 
 historical discovery may be welcomed with as much ardour as 
 a new poem or a new book of travels, and when the preserva- 
 tion of public and private memorials will become the care of 
 every family and individual that possesses them, as well as of 
 the nation at large. But we have gone on steadily improving 
 ourselves ; not to speak yet of the important works which have 
 met appreciative readers, I would adduce such points as these : 
 the revival and extension of the work of the learned Societies, 
 especially the Camden and Surtees Societies ; the wide-spread 
 interest taken in the work of the Commission for examining 
 Historical Manuscripts in private hands ; and the Parliamentary 
 discussions on the preservation of Historic monuments. Each 
 of these three matters may claim an important bearing on the 
 growth of historic culture. In each we see those private and 
 personal influences combined and utilised for good purposes, 
 which too often have been wasted upon mere pomps and 
 vanities, or mere archseological trifling. 
 
 The expansion and extension of genealogical study is a very 
 remarkable feature of our own times. Men are apparently 
 awaking to the fact that there are other families besides those 
 described in the peerage, that those families have their 
 records, played their part in history, furnished the bone and 
 sinew of national action, and left traces behind them which it 
 behoves their descendants to search out and keep in remem- 
 brance. There is nothing in this that need be stigmatised as 
 vain and foolish ; it is a very natural instinct, and it appeai-s 
 to me to be one of the ways in which a general interest in 
 national history may be expected to grow. It is an increasing, 
 pursuit both in America and in England, and certainly helps, 
 by the promotion of careful investigation and by the publiea- 
 tion of recondite memorials, the more complete adjustment of 
 personal and local details. This has no doubt helped largely 
 the work of the Manuscripts Commission ; it has enabled the 
 learned societies to attempt larger and more costly works, and 
 has been the portal by which many, destined and qualified to 
 be valuable historical helpers, have entered the field of historic 
 study. 
 
III.] Local Studies. 5 1 
 
 Local history and minute archaeology have been of use in 
 the same way : the Harleian Society has published heraldic 
 visitations ; the local societies have printed subsidy rolls and 
 old legal memoranda ; old county histories have been repub- 
 lished ; little popular county histories are found in every 
 farm-house in the country, where the editors or compilers 
 have contrived, by mingling the utile of the directory with 
 the dnlce of historic memoranda, to stimulate the curiosity of 
 every class. 
 
 I have called this a revival, and so it is ; these pursuits do 
 not seem to admit of much development, one flourishes and 
 another languishes, as may be traced very clearly in the pages 
 of the Archaeologia ; twenty years ago architectural antiquities 
 were the great object of local study, now through a genea- 
 logical period we are perhaps working our way to a constitu- 
 tional one, which I shall be most happy to welcome. I think 
 that just now, when so many of our most ancient institutions, 
 the manorial system and the ecclesiastical and civil judicature 
 of old times, are either falling into desuetude or being ruth- 
 lessly abolished, it would be a good work for local zeal to pu.t 
 on record what memory and custom can still supply as to the 
 working of these old institutions. I wish to see a manorial 
 map of England as it exists now or as it existed twenty years 
 ago, reflecting as it must do the condition of territorial power 
 at the time when it became impossible to create new manors, 
 in the reign of Edward I ; reflecting, as it could easily be 
 made to do, the local and dynastic arrangements of parties 
 and families during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and seventeenth 
 centuries, arrangements which still survive but are destined, 
 by the operation of legal changes most of them intended to 
 facilitate the alienation of land and to amend the administra- 
 tion of justice, to speedy extinction. 
 
 Well, I only adduce these as feeders, so to speak, of the 
 stream of historic interest. Here and there they add a really- 
 precious contribution, but chiefly they are valuable as drawing 
 in students to the higher and nobler study. Without them I 
 doubt not we should have om- Macaulays and Froudes, our 
 Maines and our Freemans, but without them those writers 
 
 E a 
 
52 Waste of Power. [iii- 
 
 would have to dispense with nine-tenths of their intelligent 
 and interested readers ; and without their contributions the 
 historians of the grand school would have to content them- 
 selves with portrait painting ; they . would lose all minute 
 details of character, and background and foreground alike of 
 local colouring. The ' Worthies of All Souls ' have shown us 
 how even more directly and more personally the dry stores of 
 the College Treasury can bring us into relation with the great 
 men of old days, and the same plan followed out by the 
 Colleges generally would serve to fill up a great gap in our 
 national history. 
 
 But considering the magnitude of the subject, I have said 
 enough about local influences. They prove the increasing 
 interest, but they do not yet prove that interest to be of the 
 most refined and educated character. If we test it by the 
 character of the work it welcomes, we shall perhaps be in- 
 clined to put a drag on historic zeal. I cannot help thinking 
 that although soand historical books find a hearty welcome 
 for the most part, unsound and sensational books, which pre- 
 tend to the character of history, are too often welcomed quite 
 as heartily. High patronage as well as large circles of readers 
 seem now and then to waste themselves on trashy books which 
 owe their circulation to advertising skill or to pretentious 
 claptrap. I cannot of course mention names, but I do not 
 doubt that you can supply them. Now, although this is an 
 unfortunate waste of power and strength, it is not whoUy to 
 be deplored : a taste for history must exist before it can be 
 educated, and it will, until it is thoroughly educated, be 
 liable to be misled and waste itself on what is unprofitable. 
 But to whom does it belong to educate and refine it ? That 
 place is claimed by the reviewers. But I take leave to say 
 that it is with the reviewers that the improvement should 
 begin ; and it is a sad truth that the improvement in review- 
 ing has not yet gone far enough. By reviewing I mean what 
 strictly speaking reviewing should be, and I take leave to say 
 it because, having never been a reviewer, having in fact written 
 but one article of the kind in my whole life, I have been for 
 many years a steady reader of reviews. It is easier perhaps 
 
III.] Historic Reviewing. 53 
 
 to say, with regard to this point, what we do not want than 
 what we want. We do not want sledge-hammer articles, that 
 demolish an unhappy pretender without attempting to tell us 
 what he pretended or attempted to do ; or niggling articles, 
 which enumerate the mistakes and misstatements of a book, 
 ignoring the. fact that, with much carelessness of detail, the 
 author has shown a great grasp of knowledge of his subject, 
 skill in grouping and colouring, and power in investing the 
 subject with true and real interest ; we do not want reviews 
 in the grand style, which seem to be intended to prove that 
 the writer knows or believes himself to know more of the 
 subject than the author whom he is reviewing. All these 
 sorts of reviews are either injurious to knowledge or useful 
 only by way of advertisement. I need scarcely point out to 
 you that the reviewer, as a reviewer, is a man of many books 
 and many subjects, the author is generally a man of one book 
 or one subject. Ten to one the most indifferent author knows 
 more of his book (I speak of lona fide authors, not of book- 
 makers) than his reviewer does. In fairness he has a right to 
 demand that his critic should have tried to put himself in his 
 place and looked at the subject from his point ; but how very 
 seldom does he find himself so treated. What we want, I 
 take it, in historical reviewing is that the critic should first 
 give a fair account of the work ; that he should exhibit, in doing 
 this, just so much superior knowledge as will justify his claim 
 to sit in judgment upon it, and not put in a word for mere 
 display ; that he should discuss the subject-matter judicially 
 and as a whole, not confining himself to the portions in which 
 he is presumedly better informed, but gauging the work by 
 the author's standard as well as his own ; that he should 
 not dogmatise where the points of dififerenee are matters of 
 opinion — how many a sore heart would have been spared if 
 the critic would have said, ' Here we differ,' instead of saying, 
 ' This is a great mistake ; ' — and finally that, in recounting 
 blemishes, he should not confuse structural with incidental 
 error. I do not recommend German reviews as models for 
 English ones ; too often they seem to me to be written by 
 rival competitors in the same field with the author ; but as a 
 
54 A. History Review. [iH' 
 
 rule ttey give more real information as to the work criticised 
 than oiu's do ; and they are more moderate in denunciation. 
 
 So much of our reviewing is done in newspapers and critical 
 notes in magazines and quarterlies that this sort of criticism 
 nearly engrosses the name ; and the great old reviews are 
 come to be collections of essays, the book supposed to be 
 criticised standing merely in the place of text or thesis to a 
 discourse in which neither book nor author may be mentioned. 
 But the historical value of this sort of essay might be very 
 great ; and, as history is of course only one of the subjects that 
 compete for a limited number of places in such periodicals, it 
 has frequently been suggested that we should have a historical 
 review of our own ; by ' we,' I mean the students of history 
 who are at work here or in London and elsewhere connected 
 with the two Universities. Such a design has much to recom- 
 mend it. It would be very becoming to the English school 
 of history to have an accredited organ ; it ought not to be 
 beyond our powers and resources to maintain such a journal as 
 is kept alive in many of the smaller universities of Germany ; 
 and it would be very useful indeed to have a record of the 
 incidental discoveries, and of the minor studies which every 
 historical scholar makes in the process of his work, many of 
 which are thrown away as soon as the immediate occasion for 
 their use is over, or, being employed as appendices to works 
 already too bulky, remain practically unread and unknown. 
 But there are objections or rather hindi-anees to such a scheme 
 which have hitherto been sufficient to prevent us from making 
 the attempt. It is very questionable whether we can as yet 
 appeal to a public sufficiently extended, and sufficiently edu- 
 cated, to make the design remunerative to either publishers 
 or contributors : the writers whose work would be most 
 valuable are all of them busy men to whom the writing of 
 two or three articles a year would, if made a matter of rigueur, 
 become exceedingly burdensome ; and the prospects of any 
 new review in England at this moment can hardly be called 
 encouraging. The older quarterlies have long ceased to pro- 
 vide us with such reading as was found in the Edinburgh and 
 (Quarterly of fifty years ago, when Hallam, Allen, and Palgrave 
 
III. J Possibilities. 5 5 
 
 were writing on History. Now and then we have contribu- 
 tions to contemporary history, either from the statesman of 
 the day or from the industrious collector of the gossip of the 
 last generation, which have a value, and will hereafter have a 
 greater. Now and then we have a sound critique on new 
 matter brought out in foreign countries, and careful, well- 
 considered judgments on the re-reading of re- written history. 
 Occasionally, very rarely, when a question of theological or 
 political interest touches upon the more recondite stores of 
 history, we have an industrious examination of ancient sources 
 made subservient to the advocacy of some particular theory. 
 But so far as reviews go, this age is one not of deep study ; 
 the articles are read by, and therefore written for, men who 
 care just enough about such matters to induce them to read 
 fifty pages of cleverly arranged not too exhausting argument. 
 They share the ephemeral character of the rest of our popular 
 literature, and, so long as that ephemeral character is a mark 
 of such productions, it is only courting failure if we attempt 
 to add to the list of competitors one which would find, in the 
 very points which recommend it to the student, characteristics 
 which would repel those whom, I think I may say, we ought 
 to try to attract. 
 
 Still I do not despair of the plan ; only it will require an 
 amount of devotion as well as an afiluence of means, which 
 are not, it seems to me, at present forthcoming. The confes- 
 sion is, when we look at what is done in Germany, or even 
 when we look at what is done by private societies in England, 
 not a thing to be proud of : but the conditions of publishing 
 and the estimation of literary labour in Germany are so diflfer- 
 ent from what they are here, that the comparison is hardly 
 fair, and the best English private and local societies have 
 always made their publications a labour of love to both writer 
 and editor, whilst by their subscriptions they are secured from 
 serious loss. On the whole I think that if we were to make 
 the effort, it might best be done at first by the agency of 
 a publishing society. Five hundred subscribers, such as sus- 
 tain the Camden and the Surtees Societies, would launch and 
 keep afloat even a larger plan than has yet been contemplated. 
 
56 The Paston Letters. [in- 
 
 If I were called on to farnisli an illustration of the increased 
 interest felt in historical matters at this day, I might, I 
 think, allege the curious phenomenon of the republication of 
 the Paston letters. Curious, invaluable, as these relics are, 
 they are really unintelligible to all but the innermost ring of 
 historic students. Their language, their localised details, their 
 minutise of family history and illustration of manners, are 
 without any meaning to nine people out of ten. Yet they 
 have just been reprinted with a most admirable apparatus of 
 notes and introductions, in a most useable and convenient 
 form, for the small sum of one guinea ; a price at which only 
 a very large circulation can repay the editor for his outlay, 
 to say nothing of his labour and the expenditure of stores of 
 carefully gathered knowledge. So far, you may say, so good ; 
 but when we remember that the demand for the republi- 
 cation was not the result of awakened historic interest, or 
 even of curiosity as to what the mueh-talked-of letters might 
 contain, but sprang directly from an ingenious and para- 
 doxical argument on their authenticity written by a well 
 known scholar, who was not, I believe, specially interested in 
 their contents so much as in their external history ; that it 
 was promoted by the rumour that our greatest judg« was 
 going to investigate their genuineness, and that in the third 
 place the curiosity so provoked was stimulated and encouraged 
 by the unexpected discovery of new stores of similar matter, 
 when, I say, we remember these things, we are bound to con- 
 fess that the sensational history of the Paston letters, rather 
 than the really valuable matter contained in them, has been 
 the chief element in the demand for their production. How- 
 ever this may be, we bless the accident and rejoice in the 
 result. However the zeal originated, that result is according 
 to knowledge. 
 
 It is time, however, that I should proceed to mention some 
 of the more important additions to our historical stores which 
 have marked the period which I have, desultorily I fear, tried 
 to embrace in the general scope of my remarks. I can but 
 mention a few out of many names, and most of those few are 
 above my unpretending criticism. The last ten years have 
 
in.J Recent Books. 57 
 
 seen tlie production of Mr. Pi-eeman's Norman Conquest, which 
 I believe is well known to us aU, and is a monument of 
 critical erudition and genius in the recreation of historical 
 life of which Oxford may well be proud. We have seen too 
 the conclusion, premature and abrupt, of Mr. Froude's great 
 work, a book to which even those who differ in principle from 
 the writer will not refuse the tribute of praise as a work of 
 great industry, power and importance : the conclusion scarcely 
 less abrupt, though not premature, of the great work of one of 
 the best and greatest men that Oxford has ever produced, the 
 Lives of the archbishops of Canterbury by Dr. Hook. Two 
 out of the three most valuable contributions of Mr. Samuel 
 Gardiner to the Jacobean and Caroline period, the earnests as 
 we hope of stiU. greater contributions yet to be looked for : 
 the studies of Mr. Brewer on the reign of Henry VIII in- 
 cluded in his volumes of Calendars of Public documents, but 
 rivalling in bulk and more than rivalling in interest the 
 documents themselves ; Mr. Poeock's labour's on the same age 
 in his edition of Burnet and of the early documentary history of 
 the Reformation ; Professor Rogers's great work, or beginning 
 of a great work, on medieval economy, the History of Prices ; 
 these ai'e but a portion of the history work done for England by 
 men trained in the old Liters Humaniores School of Oxford ; 
 how long will it be before the new school will have something 
 of the sort to show ? To the facile pen of an Oxford man we 
 owe the production of the most popular manual of our history 
 that has ever appeared, the Short History of the English 
 People. To the Oxford Press and the labom's self-denyingly 
 and generously tendered of hard-worked tutors we owe the 
 translation of Ranke's History of England. 
 
 Of this, as one of the original suggesters and promoters of ! 
 the undertaking, I may say a word more ; for, curiously enough, ; 
 the boon conferred by this translation has not been adequately 
 recognised. Leopold von Ranke is not only beyond all com- 
 parison the greatest historical scholar alive, but one of the very 
 greatest historians that ever lived. Unrivalled stores of know- 
 ledge, depth of research, intimate acquaintance with the most 
 recondite sources, have been, in his case, supplemented by 
 
58 Rankes History. [m- 
 
 everything which could be conferred by a long life, continuous 
 Istady, close association with the great political actors and 
 thinkers of the greatest part of the most eventful century of 
 the world's history. Scarcely less eminent as the founder of 
 the German School of History than as an historian himself, 
 he has had the singular felicity of living to gather up the 
 results of the labours of the men whom he himself started in 
 the career of study. It seemed to me, and it was the idea in 
 which the work was begun and carried out, that for English- 
 men in their own tongue to have from such a man a reading 
 of the most critical period of English history, would be a boon 
 of incalculable value. Not that we regarded him as infallible, 
 not that we looked for him to have the sympathies of an 
 Englishman, but that we did look to have for a period on which 
 no Englishman can look or speak without prejudice, the 
 evidence of a witness and critic who brought unparalleled 
 qualifications and entire impartiality to bear upon it. The 
 reception of the boon by scholars has been most grateful ; that 
 our literary guides have condescended to look on Ranke as 
 one of the ruck of German professors, to treat his work as on 
 the same plane with those of the ephemeral writers whose 
 reputation is so carefully nursed in what is called literary 
 society, does appear to me to be one of the discouraging 
 signs of the times to be set against our more sanguine 
 hopes. 
 
 To come down to smaller works of a more distinctly educa- 
 tional character ; whilst we may regret perhaps that the good 
 example set by Mr. Kitehin and myself in the Clarendon 
 Press Series has not yet been more widely followed, we cannot 
 but regard the competition among the great publishers in 
 producing manuals of history for schools as a most significant 
 mark of growth. Mr. Longmans' Epochs, Mr. Freeman's 
 Manuals, Mr. Green's Primers, Messrs. Rivington's Hand- 
 books, all have in common the mark of a purpose to secure 
 skilled labour of the best sort ; boys are not to be taught any 
 longer by book-makers. May the omen be fully borne out by 
 the result. 
 
 So far, however, I have mentioned no book except those 
 
III.] Molesworth and Kinglake. 59 
 
 in which we here have a direct and personal interest. We 
 should be ungrateful indeed to leave out of ever so general 
 review Mr. Kinglake's great work on the Crimean War, or 
 Mr. Molesworth's on the History of the Period of Parlia- 
 mentary Reform ; these stand at the head of a list of laborious 
 and able publications, the interest of which depends on the 
 incidents of our own time : to some extent they are attempts 
 to forestall the opinion of posterity, but they are books which, 
 if such books ever are to be written, if the contemporary 
 knowledge and opinion are to be applied to the record of the 
 events to which they are devoted, should be written now 
 before the actors are dead or the public sympathy chilled. 
 So rapid is the progress of political life and opinion that even 
 these great subjects are becoming quickly extinct or lost influ- 
 ences among the crowds of new ones. The Reform History has 
 come to be regarded no longer as a grand revolution, of which 
 its chief agents could predicate perfection and finality, but 
 merely as a single stage in a progress the present velocity of 
 which would have made the projectors dizzy. What shall we 
 say of the Crimean War itself? begun as it was by the wisest 
 men of the nation with the greatest rehictance, but begun 
 because they believed that they ought to keep national pro- 
 mises and to maintain treaties even at the risk of sustaining 
 weak and wicked governments. Why, for all the good that it 
 did, it might never have been fought at all. The treaties 
 that resulted from it are thrown to the winds ; the powers 
 that fought it have resumed that natural attitude which 
 treaties might attempt to modify but cannot alter : the crisis 
 that it tried to avert is approaching more quickly and more 
 certainly, and it is reverted to only because in it an experi- 
 ment which we thought fit to try was tried in vain. The 
 history of our own times does, whilst the events are in 
 progress, seem more important than any history that has 
 gone before ; greater interests are seen to be involved, greater 
 armaments brought into the field, more critical changes follow, 
 more startling principles are enunciated ; yet after all the 
 proportion of historic incident is scarcely changed. The tide 
 beean to roU with greater waves at the Reformation, with 
 
6o German and French History. [m. 
 
 higher still during the age of Lewis XIV, deep called unto 
 deep in the upheaval of the French Eevolution, and the 
 European wars of 1866 and 1870 have proved that the storms 
 grow wilder as the world gi-ows older. But the results are 
 not, so far as we can see, much more permanent, the rapidity 
 of action keeps pace with the growth of the contending 
 influences, and events which centuries ago would have been 
 regarded as striking the knell of Christendom, form the 
 subject of a hasty telegram which we read and say. It is no 
 more than we expected. But I am not going to philosophise ; 
 \>}i] ykvovTo. When I say that such books as these are not 
 history, but rather the materials of history, I do not mean to 
 undervalue them, but simply to point by them to the fact that 
 until events have come to be seen in due proportion and in 
 their relative bearing, their full history cannot be written ; 
 and the most perfect memoirs will need reduction and review. 
 But at the risk of seeming to pass over even more important 
 matters I must pass on. 
 
 , It is unfortunate, I think, that English writers confine their 
 attention too much to English and French History ; and that 
 the History of farther Europe, that of Italy being a partial ex- 
 ception only, is seldom made the subject of research. Carlyle's 
 Frederick II is really the only great work on German or 
 European History which has appeared in England, for nearly 
 half a century, on its merits as a work of History. It will 
 scarcely be claimed for Sir Ai-chibald Alison's valuable works 
 on the period immediately following that of Frederick, that 
 they owe theii- importance to their character as works of 
 historical research. They were read and are read as any other 
 very interesting book on a very interesting subject, but they 
 do not reach even to the stature of Von Sybel's French Revo- 
 lution or Lanfrey's work on Napoleon. Carlyle's Frederick 
 is primarily a work of a different sort ; although, in the pro- 
 phetic sight of the writer, that most remarkable book may, at 
 the moment it was written, have borne a conscious reference to 
 events which were stiU futm-e, but have since most wonderfully 
 illustrated its great theme, the world in general recognised 
 nothing of the sort in it. The author, if he knew himself to 
 
III.] Carlyles Frederick. 6i 
 
 be a vox clamantis at the time, must have been astonished at 
 the rapidity with which his Gospel of Force triumphed as soon 
 as it had its chance. Some of us shook our heads over it, one 
 great man amongst us, whose place I am proud to occupy, 
 I dare not say to fill, did not hesitate to speak words of 
 summary condemnation ; but the doctrine itself was esoteric, 
 the words, like much else of Carlyle's, were (paivavra avvirotcnv 
 but (TvvirouTiv only ; to the ears of the many they required 
 the sacred interpreter. Shall I be thought hard if I say that 
 the popularity of Carlyle's Frederick was not an intelligent 
 appreciation ; that it was Carlyle's reputation and manner 
 that made men read it ; and that it was for the Carlyle not 
 for the Frederick that they cared, whilst they wholly missed 
 the prophet's lesson. Such as it is, however, Carlyle's Frederick 
 stands alone in recent historic work. 
 
 There may be good reasons for this. The accumulation of 
 new material for German and Italian history is perplexing in 
 itself; the Germans and Italians have scarcely begun to sort 
 it. The materials for Spanish history are only a little more 
 accessible than before, and accessible only to workers who are 
 capable of great fatigue, as well as, what few can pretend to 
 be, already well qualified to make the very utmost of scanty 
 opportunities. But making allowance for everything that 
 can be allowed for, it is, I think, no credit to us that since the 
 republication of the old Universal History, a hundred years 
 ago, we have had nothing like a general book of historic 
 reference undertaken in England, and that, with the exception 
 of Carlyle, we have had no first-class work on German history 
 since Archdeacon Coxe wrote on the House of Austria. We 
 have had sketches and essays, and lectures, and articles in 
 encyelopsedias, — one of which at least, Lardner's Cyclopaedia, 
 furnishes incidentally some very valuable helps, — but nothing 
 like a comprehensive, well-considered design, such as for its 
 day the old Universal History was. This I hope is a lacuna 
 which will not exist much longer. Not that it can be filled 
 up in a day ; but that we have in Heeren and Uckert a model 
 which it will be no disgrace to us to copy, a great credit to 
 equal or to surpass. 
 
62 Our debt to Germany. [m- 
 
 And this leads me on to that farther circle of Em-opean 
 historic study towards which I have been looking at several 
 points in both these lectures. We ought to be taking 
 advantage of the great interest with which English history- 
 is now being read in Germany, and, more than that, we ought 
 to learn from that interest that German history might be 
 quite as remunerative to us as om-s is to the Germans. Such 
 has always been my contention. The study of French and 
 Italian history appeals to our fancy, to our ecclesiastical and 
 political tastes, but the history of Germany is bound up 
 with oui- national and natural identity. And you may depend 
 upon it, in our comparative history we have to receive as 
 much as we have to give. Consider the number of precious 
 contributions that we have received abeady. Immeasurably 
 the best edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws, by Sehmid ; the 
 work of Lappenberg and Komad Mauier on Anglo-Saxon 
 Constitutional Antiquities ; Pauli's exhaustive History of 
 Medieval England ; Ranke's History of England under the 
 Stewai-ts ; Pauli's History of the Present Centmy, of which 
 the third volume has just appeared, furnishing by far the 
 most accurate and well-proportioned view of recent history, 
 and anticipating, I do not question it, most of the conclusions 
 of the next generation, as to the great men and great events 
 on which we have looked too closely to see them in their due 
 proportion and relations. There is scarcely a nook of our 
 ancient and medieval history which the Germans are not now 
 exploring. To JafFe we owe the republication, from original 
 texts, of the waitings of Aldhelm and Boniface, the first 
 Englishmen who wrote at all. The letters of Alcuin, the 
 great scholar of York and light of leai-ning in the West, have 
 not only been most elaborately edited by Jaffe, Diimmler and 
 Wattenbaeh, but are being subjected to a minute historical 
 analysis by Professor Sickel at Vienna, an analysis which 
 brings out, and must bring out more and more as it proceeds, 
 the points of international and inter-ecclesiastical intercom-se 
 in the critical century of Anglo-Saxon growth. The Roman 
 and the early Christian inscriptions in Britain have found in 
 Dr. Hiibner a critic who not only can collect and record and 
 
III.] A good Exmnple. 63 
 
 arrange them, but bring tbem into comparison and connexion 
 with the like remains throughout Europe. Month after month 
 brings me essays and dissertations, as I said before, upon 
 minute points of English law, chronology, even geography 
 and personal history. "What does this mean ? Not surely 
 that those scholars are following an erratic fancy in trying to 
 perfect their knowledge of English history, or that they are 
 working without plan or leading idea. I do not indeed 
 suppose that the scholars and students of Gottingen and 
 Vienna are doing as Von Moltke and his agents are said to 
 have done before the war of 1870, collecting plans, and charts, 
 and itineraries, and models of fortresses, and raised maps of 
 provinces, whilst they were training men and officers both at 
 work and play for conquest. I do not believe that they want 
 to take from us anything, not even the pride of knowing more 
 of our own history than they do, or that they want to engross 
 to themselves by conquest the whole domain of historical 
 knowledge. But I am sure that they have a great object — to 
 increase human knowledge in minuteness of accuracy as well 
 as in breadth and firmness of grasp ; to perfect the instru- 
 ments of historic study ; to make, perhaps subordinately and 
 subsidiarily, their exploration of our history throw light on 
 the dark places, the obscure passages and flickering popular 
 institutions of their own land. I wish that we should do the 
 same, that we could and would so study not merely the 
 works of Waitz, Sohm, Brunner and the Mam'ers, but the 
 documentary evidence on which those writers have based their 
 conclusions. 
 
 There is very much both of matter and method to be learned 
 from them. A few months ago a young American professor 
 who called on me told me that he was lecturing in one of the 
 great universities of the United States on constitutional law ; 
 he had been in doubt where to begin, and was in fact lecturing 
 on the capitularies of the Frank emperors. I could not help 
 thinking that, if he was not really wasting his powder and shot 
 upon a class that could not appreciate him, he was doing 
 something that I should like to see done here. And, within 
 a veiy few weeks after, my aspirations were gratified by finding 
 
64 Original Materials. [m. 
 
 the Corpus professor lectui-ing on the Salian law, going further 
 back, and taking probably a more remunerative subject than 
 my American friend. 
 
 Well, perhaps I am prejudiced by my own especial line of 
 study in favour of such speculations, but I will go still further 
 and say that the devotion with which, since the days of 
 Grimm, the local and municipal institutions of Germany have 
 been studied sets us a fine example. The publication of 
 Grimm's collection of Weisthiimer has been followed by a 
 great and general exploration of local archives. Now in 
 England we do not possess one single complete and detailed 
 monograph on town life ; Drake's Eboracum, published a 
 century and a quarter ago, is perhaps the best, but in the 
 lapse of many years a vast amount of new matter has turned 
 up, by which Drake could be enlarged and improved. Medieval 
 London still waits for its constitutional historian. The history 
 of the Cinque Ports, and of the mercantile communities on 
 the coast, lie at the root of our naval history, and contain the 
 germs of our international jurisprudence. On them we have 
 a few law-books which are the peculiar domain of a few legal 
 oiSces in London ; but their history has yet to be explored. 
 Every year perhaps we are drawing nearer, for the discoveries 
 of the Historical MSS. Commission are richer in this than in 
 any other region ; but for the suecessfal investigation, for the 
 comparison of materials, and for the systematic use of them, 
 we must look to the association of such labourers as are now 
 in Germany employed on the history of the Hanse Towns. 
 Even the Scottish boroughs are in this particular ahead of us ; 
 there is a society for publishing the records of Scottish burgh 
 life. All the eflPorts as yet made in England in that direction 
 have been the result of local and personal interest excited by 
 merely antiquarian curiosity. 
 
 It is time that this went further. It is time too, as I said 
 before, not only that we had a feudal map of England before 
 the manorial boundaries are wiped away, but that we had a 
 careful collection of manorial customs : such a codification in 
 fact, as is possible, of the ancient unwritten popular law as it 
 is preserved in these most ancient shadows and skeletons of 
 
III.J France and Belgium.. 65 
 
 the early life of our fathers. And so I come round to the 
 point where I digressed. 
 
 We may take pattern by the Germans in collecting these 
 relics, but when we have done so we shall have to bring them 
 to comparison with the similar German collections before vre 
 can extract the whole lesson that they would convey. I would 
 not be too sanguine, but I honestly believe that such a com- 
 parison would reveal to us points of contact and divergency as 
 yet unsuspected even by the most careful investigators, and 
 would enable us to reproduce the ancient society of our com- 
 mon ancestiy in a way that would speedily set at rest some of 
 the most controverted questions of institutional history. In 
 such an investigation we might rely on the help of the great- 
 est foreign scholars ; and it is a task to the performance of 
 which every intelligent country gentleman could contribute an 
 appreciable share without stirring from his own muniment room. 
 
 If we turn to Pi-ance and Belgium, we shall find work of 
 the same kind going on, which is only second, if it be indeed 
 second, to the historical industry of Germany. The re-issue 
 of the RecueU des Historiens de France, of the Gallia Chris- 
 tiana, and the Acta Sanctorum, proves that the revival is 
 begun at the right end, from the ecclesiastical side. The re- 
 production, in the great Patrologia of Migne, of the early 
 medieval historians, as well as the theologians, is an almost 
 portentous fact ; one wonders where the readers and students 
 of such collections are to be found, and fears that, after all, 
 such monuments must find their resting-places chiefly on the 
 shelves of the public libraries rather than on the desks of close 
 students. The intermission or retarded issue of the series of 
 Documents inedits is perhaps not to be wondered at, when we 
 consider the uncertain tenure of power and the enormous de- 
 mands made for other purposes on the resources of the recent 
 governments of France ; but private enterprise and scholastic 
 co-operation have done much to supply the void caused in this 
 way. The collection of the historians of the Crusade, pub- 
 lished under the direction of the Institute, increases and 
 flourishes. The publications of the ' ^ficole des Chartes ' and 
 of the ofiicers of the National Library, supply in their fine 
 
66 Historical work in France. [m. 
 
 criticism and deep research two elements tliat are somewhat 
 deficient in the other lines of historical work. Local anti- 
 quaries and local societies flourish in France as much as in 
 Germany, and the same spirit of restoration and conservation, 
 which is exhibited in the ease of historic buildings and other 
 monuments, is conspicuous in the minute reproduction of 
 chronicles and cartularies. At last constitutional history has 
 found a home again in the land of Montesquieu. The history 
 of !fitats Generaux and Parliaments is critically and impar- 
 tially investigated by men like M. Picot and M. Boutaric. 
 Ancient laws and customs also are found to have a value be- 
 sides their impoi-tance to the scientific lawyer. M. Fustel de 
 Coulanges brings to the study of institutions a philosophic 
 spirit, critical acuteness, and learning which seems not un- 
 likely to have the efl^ect of inducing some of the German 
 constitutionalists to revise or modify their conclusions. And 
 lastly, in the foundation of the Revue Mistorique, the best 
 scholars, in all of these departments, have stretched out the 
 right hand of fellowship to the workers in other lands, and 
 occupied their place in the alliance for international know- 
 ledge and help in history. It is perhaps true to say that in 
 the most essential and characteristic parts of our own national 
 history we have less interest in France than in Germany ; but 
 throughout many ages French and EngHsh history, both ex- 
 ternal and institutional, are bound together as closely as any 
 two national histories can be ; and that which illustrates the 
 one cannot but illustrate the other. English writers have 
 long ago learned that there are other histories worth studying 
 besides their own : German writers seem to have been late in 
 learning that the Fatherland has a united and continuous his- 
 tory. France is at last showing that she recognises the fact 
 that other lands have histories at all, and that the whole of 
 medieval history is not a mere preparation for the dramatic 
 glories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If she 
 has somewhat to learn from her neighbours, surely we cannot 
 afibrd to say that we have not much to learn from her ; much 
 to hope for, and much to be grateful for, in the co-operation 
 of her scholars. 
 
III.] Materials in Italy. 6'] 
 
 There are signs too of a harvest and promises of co-operation 
 in another field which for several centiuies has had little com- 
 munity or sympathy with English students. We have all 
 probably been sui'prised, pleased, — may I not say amused ? — 
 by the consequences of the inaugural lecture of the Professor 
 of International Law ; at the chorus of praise and harmony 
 between Italian and English lawyers which followed the note 
 struck by him in the mention of Albericus Gentilis. The 
 very feet that Albericus Gentilis was almost forgotten in 
 England and had scarcely been heard of before in Italy, only 
 proves that there was a latent desu-e of recognition among the 
 Italian literati with which we had scarcely credited them. 
 Now a very great deal may be hoped for from an awakened 
 spirit of this kind, more especially when we remember the 
 enormous mass of historical material which lies ready in Italy 
 for the researches of competent scholars. It would be a waste 
 of words if I were to attempt even to enumerate the treasures 
 which must exist in Rome itself, in the Papal archives, where 
 are, or should be found, the records of that great court of re- 
 view and international arbitration which the medieval see of 
 Rome claimed to hold. Much has no doubt perished, but 
 much must remain ; much does remain, as the labours of 
 Theiner have shown, to shed new light on the history of re- 
 moter Em'ope. The Church History of the extreme North, of 
 Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Britain, of the Slavonic lands also, 
 has been already illustrated. What could be more remote or 
 insignificant than the Manx Church ? Yet Dr. Munch suc- 
 ceeded in extracting from the Vatican archives matter which 
 settles the main question of her history, on which we had no 
 record. Throughout the middle ages every great event, nay, 
 every small event, that in the remotest way pretended to 
 public interest, was discussed at Rome ; every great power had 
 a diplomatic agency there ; every leading or aspiring states- 
 man had there an agent and probably a paid patron. It is 
 not only in the records of the great public offices of Rome, but 
 in the libraries of the princely families which famished so 
 long the cardinals and confidential ministers of the Papal See, 
 that new matter will be found. The researches of Dr. Brady^ 
 
 p a 
 
68 Roman Libraries. [m- 
 
 the printed results of which I have not seen, but some part of 
 which I saw in MS., broug'ht out of the note-books and diaries 
 of the cardinals of the Elizabethan period, not merely^ some 
 most important personal and chronological details relative to 
 the English episcopate, but revealed an almost unsuspected 
 web of papal intrigue underlying the better known public 
 action of the popes. Where Dr. Brady, who was working 
 with a definite purpose and not very impartial judgment, 
 stumbled on so much that was valuable, surely much more 
 would be found by a fully equipped investigator. The prizes 
 of this initial research have not fallen to English scholars. 
 Rome is a long way off; English scholars are looked on with 
 suspicion there ; even Dr. Todd was not left to work freely 
 and alone in the Vatican : English visitors on a holiday have 
 far too much else to do ; the endowment of research has not 
 yet advanced far enough to send searchers thither. So it was 
 left for Cardinal Mai to discover and edit the long-lost and 
 long-lamented Draco Normannicus, the poetical biography of 
 the Empress Matilda, which was printed by him apparently 
 without any knowledge of its history, bat was not published 
 until seventeen years after his death, and in 1871, owing 
 to a review by Dr. Pauli in the Academy, was introduced to 
 English scholars. It was a German that discovered, and it is 
 French scholars who are editing that early French poem on 
 the Crusade of Richard I which is said, I believe with cer- 
 tainty, to be the original upon which the Latin author of the 
 Itinerarium Regis Ricardi based his work. Just so it was the 
 labours of Dr. Pertz and his agents that unearthed the His- 
 toria Pontificalis of John of Salisbury among the MSS. of the 
 Bern Library, as he had espied the long-lost Encomium Emmae 
 in the library of the Duke of Hamilton. No doubt luck is an 
 element in these discoveries, but a far more powerful element 
 of success was the educated eye, the larger opportunity, the 
 knowledge how to look, and what sort of things to look for. 
 I should not despair of discovering even the lost Antiooheis, 
 the poem of Joseph of Exeter on the first Crusade, when the 
 Vatican has proved a safe refuge for a Latin poem on the pro- 
 phecies of Merlin and for the fragments of Giraldus Cambrensis. 
 
III.] The Icelandic Dictionary. 69 
 
 Let us, it may be said, ascertain our own stores first, cata- 
 logue our own collections, ascertain what really is contained 
 in tlie vast collections of Sir Thomas Phillipps and Lord Ash- 
 bumham, ransack the muniment rooms of Belvoir and Ripley, 
 and the records of the cathedi-als and church coui-ts, before we 
 go to Rome. It is by no means necessary that either should 
 take precedence of the other ; but the opportunities for Italian 
 research are enlarging daily, and it is of great importance to 
 catch the chances whilst they are yet new, and engage the co- 
 operation of willing agents before they weary of the work, or 
 fall back into the jealousies and obstructive ways which have 
 so long debarred English students from their treasures. 
 
 Whilst we rejoice in the prospect that Italian scholars and^i 
 scholarship, libraries and charter rooms, are likely to be open 
 to us more generally, we may, I think, congratulate ourselves 
 on having been able to do something for our Northern neigh- 
 bours. The Icelandic Dictionary and the new recension of 
 the Sturlunga Saga, which we have now in hand at the Press 
 under the editorship of our friend Mr. Vigfusson, is surely an 
 earnest of something yet to come. We are not so entirely 
 disinterested in making these offerings to our Scandinavian 
 kinsfolk : true we do not expect to make great discoveries of 
 MSS. treasures, although there are far more unlikely places 
 than Drontheim and Upsala ; but we hope to attract new 
 friends to the study of our own history and theirs, the common 
 points of external and internal development which the English 
 here have with their kinsmen and the neighbours of their 
 ancient home. 
 
 And whilst we look with hope and gratitude to these elder 
 kinsfolk, we look with hope and gratitude too to our more 
 modem cousins across the Atlantic. Why American his- 
 torians like Prescott, Ticknor and Motley have chosen Bel- 
 gian and Spanish History as their special field of work, it is 
 not for me to decide. Possibly it is for the best, and the con- 
 viction that it is for the best for them to work in fields in 
 which they are less liable to be entangled in the political 
 quarrels, and made obnoxious to the political feelings of their 
 own country and time, may have determined their choice. If 
 
70 English History in America. [m. 
 
 an Englishman cannot write without prejudice about the 
 Eebellion and the Commonwealth, much less can an American. 
 ] But it is, I take it, a misfortune that the earlier English His- 
 tory has not received its share of attention in the United 
 States. Very much of English life was ripe when it was 
 transplanted thither, and belongs as much almost to them as 
 to ourselves. Judging from the letters of friends and the 
 American reviews of English books, I conceive that this is 
 being amended, and that we may soon have reason to rejoice 
 that American acuteness and industry are applying themselves 
 to this region in which they will find so much to profit both 
 themselves and us. The wonderful and successful labours of 
 Colonel Chester in the minuter department of genealogical 
 research, which have produced so noble a book as his Register 
 of Westminster Abbey, may be another earnest of co-opera- 
 tion that will produce good fruits both here and there. We 
 know that we are kinsfolk, that we have thirteen centuries 
 of common Christian History and culture, and a remoter past 
 common to a much larger femily : we may hope that with a 
 fair acquaintance with one another we may diverge no more 
 widely, and never have to be ashamed of our connexion. 
 
 I must ask you to pardon me for making these remarks so 
 desultoiy and so discursive, on the solemn occasion of a public 
 lecture. I need hardly repeat that such solemn occasions are 
 not the most congenial portion of my work here. But I have 
 had somewhat to say, and you must take it as I could say it. 
 If another ten years should see me here, solemnly lecturing 
 from this desk, I shall have no doubt to look back on some 
 anticipations frustrated, and to welcome fuller new oppor- 
 tunities which will have presented themselves. But neither 
 occasional disappointment, nor distaste for peculiar parts of 
 my work, will, I may venture to say, damp the ardour of my 
 hopes for the future of historical study here, or my faith in 
 the permanence and development of a great historical school 
 in England, which will look to Oxford as an ' Alma Mater ' 
 and ' Fons Scientiarum.' 
 
IV. 
 
 ON THE PURPOSES AND METHODS OF 
 HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 (May 15, 1877.) 
 
 LAST year, in fulfilment of my statutable obligation to 
 deliver two solemn lectures annually on some subject of 
 modern history or political biography, I took occasion of the 
 fact that I was just completing my tenth year of service as 
 Professor, to discuss some of the more obvious phenomena 
 which had, during the preceding ten years, marked the progress 
 of Historical Study in Oxford first and in Europe generally. As 
 is invariably the case when one has written a book or made a 
 speech, subsequent reflexion, after no long time, brings home 
 to one the conviction that, besides saying much that were 
 better unsaid, one has left out very much that ought to have 
 been said if the intention were to be realised with which the 
 discussion was attempted. In this particular instance, I 
 confess, one whole region of my subject was left out of sight : 
 my object, indeed, was principally to view the extension and 
 advance of the study, and it was only incidentally that I felt 
 called upon to say a word here and there on the method and 
 purposes of it. But, judging from the utterances which have 
 recently, both before and after the delivery of those two lectures, 
 fallen from the mouths of some of the most clever and cultivated 
 men of this generation, it would appear that the method and 
 purpose of historical reading were points by no means second in 
 interest to the external development of the study of history. 
 
 These utterances are in themselves valuable as the mature 
 judgments of men who have at aU. events known how to draw 
 from history precious lessons on the subjects on which they 
 desired to be taught ; but they have an additional value in 
 
72 Popular views of History. [iv. 
 
 setting plainly before us, teachers of history, the views which 
 popular opinion and the men who lead popular opinion upon 
 educational matters formulate regarding the pursuit to which we 
 have devoted ourselves. To us a great many of the statements 
 as well as of the theories that find enthusiastic echoes in mixed 
 audiences, are apt to appear either truisms, or fallacies, or 
 both. In many of them there is an apologetic tone which 
 reminds us to some extent of what we used to hear in common 
 rooms when our History school was first started, as if the 
 study was one that needed some vindication as a bona fide 
 study, valuable in itself and in its results, before it could be 
 allowed to compete with other older and more organised 
 departments of learning. And, as usual, when that is defended 
 which needs no defence, the theories of the advocate produce 
 an effect diametrically opposite to that which he intended; 
 he seems to hazard on the strength of some occasional or 
 adventitious argument the claim which on its own merits is 
 indisputable. Now far be it from me to attempt even to 
 gather up or analyse, much less to review, the deliberate and 
 elaborate utterances to which I have referred. I am not 
 going to answer or to refute them where they need refuta- 
 tion, or to use them to strengthen my own theories where I 
 agree with them: it may be enough to say that many of 
 them contain good and sound suggestions which recommend 
 themselves as soon as they are heard ; that others are familiar 
 as lecture-room words to all who have any experience in teach- 
 ing ; and that the worst that can be justly said of any of them is 
 that they prescribe, for the general pursuit of the whole study 
 of History, directions which are valuable in their way in rela- 
 tion to particular portions of it, or for particular purposes for 
 which it may have been undertaken. Instead of reviewing 
 them, then, I shall simply accept them as furnishing sugges- 
 tions for a brief discussion on points on which it is my privi- 
 lege to speak, and yours to judge whether what I have to say 
 is worth saying. For I also will claim it as a professorial 
 right to be allowed to utter truisms, and will claim, moreover, 
 as one advantage accruing from our common heritage of 
 error, that, if I utter fellacies, I may have the sympathy of 
 
IV.] Objects of Study. 73 
 
 men who know how easy it is, in matters where head and 
 heart are alike engaged, to disparage truth by exaggeration. 
 
 Although I am not going to venture on any philosophical 
 arrangement of my topics, or to lay down anything pretend- 
 ing to be a complete theory of the method of historical study, 
 I will begin by saying that there are, as it seems to me, and 
 as I doubt not it seems to you, three diiferent sorts of object 
 or aim in reading History : it may be read for its_own sake, 
 it may be learned as a mental discipline, and it may be ■ 
 acquired as a piece of the furniture or apparatus of cultivated 
 life. I have used the words advisedly, for they imply, with 
 diversity of object, diversity of method also. In the first aspect 
 History assumes the dignity of a science, in the second it is a 
 great engine of education, in the third it is in its higher forms 
 a graceful and useful accomplishment, in its lower an indis- 
 pensable requisite for every-day existence in a civilised country. 
 
 The three aims are not by any means incompatible, and 
 the results are of course coincident so far as they go. He who 
 reads History for its own sake gains the educational result 
 in the process, and possesses in the fullest way the stock 
 of kno.wledge which enables him to read his newspaper, 
 to give his vote, or to pass his opiaion on any new book. 
 The man who has gone through the educational training 
 will likewise be able to do these things, besides benefiting 
 by that disciplinary and formative process that qualifies him 
 to give a sound historical judgment on passing events. And 
 it is no small advantage to be able to give an honest, really 
 intelligent vote and to take an interest in a really interest- 
 ing book. Only, the man who has only read History for the 
 purpose of education has not entered into the fulness of the 
 blessing of the man who reads it for its own sake, and the 
 man who has learned it as he learns French or German from 
 a travelling conversation book, does not gain either the for- 
 mative efl^ect on the judgment, or the great inheritance of 
 scientific study. These points need no insisting upon ; I 
 merely state them to set us clear at starting, and to point out 
 that the method which may be with advantage adopted for 
 one of these purposes will not be applicable for the other two ; 
 
74 Variety of Methods. [iv. 
 
 popular lectures may serve admirably to the thii-d object, but 
 be absolutely useless as regards the second ; cajvi'ul study of 
 isolated periods may suffice for the second, but will not satisfy 
 the instincts that axe ai-onsed in the pursuit of the firet. But 
 I will not anticipate what ought to come later on. 
 
 In the distinction that I have drawn you -will no doubt 
 recognise your old friends, the professorial, the tutorial, and the 
 popular view of history. I will so far admit the charge as to 
 arrogate to myself the professorial right to make the first the 
 largest half of my discussion, and devote this lecture to the 
 first point, leaving- the other two for the second. But there 
 is a prior question, prior even to the assumption that History 
 should be studied for its own sake, — Is it worth studying at all? 
 As I have said, the apologetic tone of many of its ad\ocates 
 renders it necessary that I should at once state why it needs 
 no vindication. If man is not, as we believe, the greatest 
 and most wonderful of God's works, he is at least the most 
 wonderful that comes within our contemplation ; if the human 
 will, which is the motive cause of all historical events, is not 
 the freest agent in the universe, it is at least the freest agency 
 of which we have any knowledge ; if its valuations are not 
 absolutely innumerable and ii-reducible to classification, on the 
 generalisations of which we may formulate laws and rules, and 
 maxims and prophecies, they are far more diversified and less 
 reducible than any other phenomena in those regions of the 
 universe that we have power to penetrate. For one great 
 insoluble problem of astronomy or geology there are a thousand 
 insoluble problems in the life, in the character, in the face of 
 every man that meets you in the street. Thus, whether we . 
 look at the dignity of the subject-matter, or at the nature of 
 the mental exercise which it requii-es, or at the inexhaustible 
 I field over which the pursuit ranges. History, the knowledge 
 of the adventures, the development, the changeful career, the 
 Waried growths, the ambitions, aspirations, and, if you like, 
 the approximating destinies of mankind, claims a place second 
 to none in the roll of sciences. Arising from one of the first 
 and most anciently cultivated instincts, the desire to know 
 how we come to be what we are, and how the world comes to 
 
IV.] The Dignity of the Study. 75 
 
 be what it is, the love of histoiy is certainly second in origin 
 to no other sort of love of knowledge. As a search for truth 
 it tries to investigate matters in which the truth may be more 
 diflScult to find than it is in mere matters of observation or 
 deduction, but surely its diiBeulty is not an argument for its 
 disparagement ; as a hoarding up of knowledge, it collects 
 facts and records, the results of which are less exact than 
 those of strict science, but are not less precious even in the 
 eyes of the man who would regard them as mere engines of 
 power. It is not true that written history is a mere tradition 
 of falsehoods, assumptions and illogical deductions, of what 
 the writers believed, rather than of what they knew, and of 
 what they wished to have believed rather than what was true ; 
 even if it were, it would be no reason why we should not do 
 our best to unmask the falsehood and detect the fallacies. 
 But we have all heard enough of that sort of thing before ; 
 there is, in the most exact science that has subject-matter at 
 all, a mixture of the phenomenal and the real : even the 
 falsehoods and misrepresentations of the record serve as a 
 guide to the discovery of the truth of fact, and certainly 
 serve to train the mind to distinguish historical truth. 
 
 Agreeing, then, that both for the great extent of its field 
 of view, the grandeur of its subject-matter, the difiiculty of 
 its problems, and the value of its results, the study of history 
 is worth pursuing ; and that, for its own sake, not merely for 
 its effects as an educational agent, or its usefalness in the 
 business of life, — we may allow that, even for its own sake, 
 it may be studied with some variety of aspect or approach. 
 We may work simply for the love of discovery, that is the 
 exercise of the investigative instinct and the pleasure of over- 
 coming difficulties ; or we may work with the beneficent idea 
 of increasing the sum of human knowledge, or of unravel- 
 ling the string which forms the clue to the history of human 
 progress, or of making such generalisations as may constitute 
 the laws of a new historic science. All these, and perhaps 
 some other purposes may be arranged under our first head, 
 because, although some of them may seem subsidiary to larger 
 and wider general designs, they all have in common the belief 
 
76 Original Research. [iv. 
 
 in the real value of history itself. Of these purposes, the 
 mere gratification of curiosity, even in its highest and most 
 dignified form, ranks first and lowest ; and yet without some 
 infusion of it the genuine love of history is out of the question ; 
 and the usefulness of it, even in the humble ofiice of providing 
 materials for men who work with a higher purpose and idea, 
 cannot be gainsaid. The mere archaeologist, the mere genea- 
 logist, the mere antiquary, are not the parasites of historical 
 study, as they are too often regarded by men who find it easier 
 to borrow than to estimate the results of their researches ; 
 they are working bees in the hive of historic knowledge. 
 
 And the curious fact that the contemptuous toleration of 
 arehsBological research is very often found in the speeches 
 ■ and writings of men who profess to set a high value on the 
 study of original sources, a fact so curious as to lead to 
 the conclusion that the critic is dealing on both hands with 
 unknown quantities, may serve to lead on to the question — 
 What are, and what is the value of the study of, original 
 sources? We hear a great deal about them at the present 
 day ; not only are our bookshelves actually broken down with 
 the weight of them, but the exact study of them is becoming 
 a subordinate science vsith method and rules of its own, and 
 with a great apparatus of material appliances in the shape 
 of palseographical tests; a science of historical palmistry, if 
 that is the word, that attempts to refer, by distinctions of 
 penmanship, parchment, paper, ink, illumination and abbre- 
 viation, every manuscript to its own country, district, age, 
 school, and even individual writer. Truly we may say the 
 study of Gesehichtsquellen is not to be approached without 
 clean hands and an open mind. And after the initial investi- 
 gation comes the criticism ; first we have to identify, then we 
 have to value our historical inventory. Both these processes 
 are involved in the study of original sources ; it means not 
 merely the reading, or the restriction of reading to, the 
 primary authorities, but the weighing and critical analysis of 
 the primary authorities themselves. 
 
 Perhaps you think that I am misusing terms when I speak 
 of analysing primary authorities, but I will explain directly 
 
IV.] The Study of Sozirces. 7 7 . 
 
 what I mean ; only a word fii'st on the interest and value of the 
 processes I refer to. If I were drawing a comparison between 
 ancient and medieval and modern histoiy as remunerative 
 studies, this is probably the first point in which I should claim 
 superior interest for the latter. In ancient history we have 
 wonderful models of thoughtful writing, and ingenious record 
 of primitive tradition, tradition at least that is so far primitive 
 that to us no further analysis is possible. There are exceptional 
 departments even here ; recent discoveries in Assyriology and 
 Egyptology ai'e opening up regions of interest which appear to 
 me to be absolutely beyond parallel or comparison ; new records 
 of most ancient life which not only lie out of the scope within 
 which criticism, up to the last twenty or thirty years, confined 
 itself, but which must, if they be approached with due reverence 
 and delicacy of touch, reveal a strange and hitherto unread 
 age of the world's History, and in it the springs of an older 
 cultivation than we have been used to dwell upon, and the 
 links that bind the great civilisations of the Western world 
 with the earliest, but not perhaps less magnificent, civilisations 
 of the East. In these we may hope one day to read a new 
 and clear page of the fair record of human history, of which 
 we have bright but unconnected glimpses in the incidental 
 notices of Holy Scripture. But outside of these, and the 
 study of them is to most of us only in its beginning, the 
 study of ancient History is mainly the study of classical 
 History ; and in classical History, splendid as our materials 
 are, they have been in our hands for ages. Every bone of 
 the great skeleton has long been put into its place : criticism 
 upon it is becoming more and more every year the rearrange- 
 ment of the critical material collected long ago, or the recon- 
 struction of the History with all the charm which novel 
 treatment, without novel material, can supply. Unluckily 
 we can only, in a very fragmentary way, trace back, in com- 
 menting on Herodotus or Livy, the actual line of tradition 
 by which they received what they report to us ; as to Thucy- 
 dides and Tacitus the chain is less fragmentary, and, of com'se, 
 in the narrative of contemporary writers we look less for 
 traces of earlier authority than for traces of sympathy and 
 
78 Ecclesiastical Sources. [iv. 
 
 antipathy, personal knowledge and direct authenticity. But, 
 as a rule, we may say the study of ancient classical History 
 lies within a confined area, eveiy manuscript, every inscrip- 
 tion, every coin, and every map of which has long been known, 
 into which rash speculation never ventures without having 
 cause for bitter repentance, and in which anything like a 
 new discoveiy, such as the recent finds at Ti-oy and Mycenae, 
 is so very new, that when it does come to pass no one knows 
 what to make of it. The very definiteness of aU connected 
 with this study makes it, for educational purposes, an incom- 
 parable discipline. As a study of knowledge for its own 
 sake, as a field of discovery and profitable speculation, as a 
 department in which the sum of human knowledge is likely 
 to be largely increased, I confess I think that it promises 
 perhaps less than the study of later History. As a ground 
 for fresh and remunerative exploration, I am sure it is stUl 
 less promising. 
 
 To return, however, to the original sources. We aU know 
 how large a debt modem and medieval History owes to the 
 ecclesiastical writers. From the very beginning of the middle 
 ages. Annals, Chronicles, and Histories poured in comparative 
 abundance from the religious houses of England and the 
 Continent, records which serve to check and correct one 
 another at almost every turn, and which, for some of the more 
 dramatic incidents of History, enable us to reconstruct a 
 picture of the event, viewed by different minds from different 
 points and in different lights, in a perfection which has no 
 parallel at all in ancient history. Such, for instance, is the 
 pictm-e of the life and death of Beeket ; some great scenes in 
 the life of Simon de Montfort ; some portions of the history 
 of the Norman Conquest. I mention these, not only because 
 they are well known, but because they lie withia the region 
 for oar knowledge of which we are altogether indebted to 
 ecclesiastical writers. Now these ecclesiastical writers have 
 for the most part two great points of interest in the direction 
 of research. AU, or almost all, are members of rehgious 
 houses, and all are members of a great fraternity in close and 
 direct correspondence. The annalist is the annalist of his 
 
IV.] Monastic Writers. 79 
 
 monastery or his cathedral; his monastery or his cathedral 
 has had a history, has records, charters, a library, a scriptorium 
 for multiplying copies of record, perhaps a school of annalists 
 of which the representative man appropriates and assimilates 
 the labours. He is a member of a great fraternity of news- 
 mongers ; every visitor to the monastery, every pilgrim, every 
 journey of the abbot or bishop up to parliament, every letter 
 from abroad, contributes something to the multifarious store. 
 Such a chronicle as that of Matthew Paris contains every one 
 of those elements and perhaps more ; he was an antiquary, 
 zealous of the history and fame of his own monastery, skilled 
 in charters and in everything bearing on its origin and growth, 
 the position of its estates, and the character of its inmates : 
 he was a compiler who appropriated and digested the work of 
 a whole school of earlier annalists ; he was an eye-witness of 
 much that he records of contemporary history, acquainted 
 with the great men of the day ; he had travelled and learned 
 much, he had stayed at home and learned more, asking 
 questions of every one who came down that way. Matthew 
 Paris is an original authority ; but what a fine subject for 
 analysis ; what an admirable corpus for the Kritik der Quellen ! 
 Further back you have what is called the Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle ; one of the first set of books that was subjected to 
 the process of speculative analysis, now fifty years ago, by 
 a gentleman who dissected it out of his own consciousness. 
 Our Professor of Anglo-Saxon has shown us what may be 
 done in a part of the field of criticism on the Chronicle, by 
 study of a small number of MSS. and dialectic differences. 
 But there is still probably, in the region of Cartularies and 
 Acta Sanctorum, and in the more minute study of other MSS., 
 something to be done even for this. I may perhaps be allowed 
 to point to my own edition of the Dunstan Memorials as 
 showing, not any completeness of treatment, for I do not 
 pretend to have efiected that, but the singular variety and 
 peculiar interest of the fields of investigation in which new 
 discoveries may be expected. 
 
 This sort of study has two great charms, besides the value of 
 the results ; in common, to compare small things with great. 
 
8o Pleasures of Research. [iv. 
 
 with the discoveries of natural science — botany, for instance. 
 In one way we tate a historical series of events and work out 
 the known items of the series, and range the persons and places 
 of our action, until we know where to look for the missing 
 links, and go to look for them and find them. Such a success, 
 and every student of original sources working with zeal and 
 modesty may hope for such, is in a small way like that of the 
 astronomer who, when from calculating the perturbations and 
 so on of the heavenly bodies he has inferred the existence of a 
 hitherto unknown planet, some bright evening and with a 
 new improved glass discovers the real planet of which he has 
 been thinking, and sees in it, not only a great new fact of 
 science, but a proof of the correctness of his computations, a 
 substantial reward for his efforts. And the other is that in 
 every such search, be it successful or not, the inquirer, who is 
 wide awake, is sure to come upon material that is even more 
 valuable than what he looks for ; makes discoveries that are 
 not less delightful because they are accidental. 
 
 Of course it may be said that a great deal of useless know- 
 ledge is accumulated in this way ; what good can be done, it 
 may be said, by analysing Matthew Paris, and deterrtiining 
 how much of his narrative is drawn from ancient charters, or 
 foreign letters, lives of saints, or such stribUigines : it is his 
 historic power and authority that gives them value, not they 
 that give authority to him. Not quite so, I think, and even 
 if it were so, there might be a lesson in the mere proof of the 
 fact ; the analysis is necessary for the due estimate of his value 
 as a historian ; the writer who can pass such an ordeal where it 
 is possible to apply it, may be trusted where it is not possible 
 to apply it. But I take the higher ground and say, how fe,r 
 can any knowledge be said to be useless ? there may be much 
 useless learning, I allow ; accumulations of other men's 
 thoughts, and crude heaps of second-hand memories that are 
 alike useless to their owner and to the world. But not real 
 knowledge, not a substantiated fact, however remote it may 
 seem from the interests and uses of the day, or the object of 
 the day. It may serve to complete a chain of demonstration, 
 the necessity of which is not as yet apparent ; it may fiirnish, 
 
IV.] No Useless Knowledge. 8i 
 
 as an undesigned coincidence, an important element in a dis- 
 cussion yet in its elementary stages. How great is the debt 
 that Histoiy owes to the ant-like instincts of collectors of 
 memoranda, the recorders of births, deaths, and marriages, the 
 savers of old letters and old newspapers, of the very things 
 that seemed most useless. If there is any useless knowledge 
 in History, we may say, — as Dr. Maitland said, when people 
 talked of the Dark Ages, they meant the ages that were dark 
 to them, — the uselessness of the knowledge is generally the 
 fault of those who do not know how to use it. 
 
 It would be doing great injustice, ho'^srever, to my subject if 
 I were to lead you to suppose that I regard the great benefit 
 arising from the study of original materials to lie in the 
 gratification of our natural instinctive desire to get to the 
 bottom of a thing. I suppose that such an instinct is given 
 us for some good end, and that that which lies at the bottom 
 of the historical well is historical truth : Truth that defies the 
 all-dissolving processes of criticism, or at least such an ap- 
 proach to truth as may be credited to a record incapable of 
 ftirther analysis. The results of such minute study are the 
 little pebbles of the concrete in which the foundations of the 
 historic superstructure are laid. Every great historian) 
 has been his own Dry-as-dust, however much he may, as ) 
 Carlyle does, point the moral of the lesson of labour with 
 small type and inverted commas ; for, I take it, the prophet/ 
 does not adopt this plan as a means of disguise, but rather to 
 show that to a great extent historical genius consists in an 
 unlimited capacity for taking pains. The man who has, out 
 of independent study, produced such results, has made a con- 
 tribution, small or great as the case may be, to the great stock 
 of sound material which constitutes real knowledge. 
 
 This consciousness may be its own reward ; but, as I said 
 before, if the love of history for its own sake goes no fur- 
 ther, such ambition ranks among the lowest forms of the 
 historical spirit. We take a real pleasure not only in cutting 
 out our sound and perfect stone, but in fitting it into its 
 place in the building : we wish to increase the sum of human 
 knowledge not only by the accumulation of facts but by fol- 
 
 G 
 
82 Waste and Misapprehension. [iv. 
 
 lowing them up and making- them a part of history. The 
 botanist is charmed when he finds a new plant, and the 
 astronomer when he discovers a new star, but we scarcely 
 should call the one a botanist or the other an astronomer if 
 he did not straightway go and fit in his discovery into 
 the general system of his science, reunite the missing plant 
 to its kinsfolk in genus, and species and variety, or find 
 out the relation of his star to the rest, and assign it to its 
 group and class in the map of the heavens. And I think that 
 the somewhat compassionate condescension with which archseo- 
 logical inquiry is now and then spoken of, and the study of 
 original sources also, is owing to the fact that so many in- 
 quirers do stop at some such point: hence it is that people 
 are constantly discovering things which have often been 
 discovered before, and trumpeting as new results of research 
 points of fact that have long been ticketed and set in their 
 places in books where they could easily have found them. The 
 study of original sources is thus taken to mean the study of 
 nothing else ; a pursuit accordingly which has no other result 
 than the gratification, by a laborious process, of a curiosity 
 that might have been gratified by reference to a cyclopsedia, 
 or the amount of training, not itself to be despised if it be 
 regarded merely as training, which makes the fact that one 
 has worked out for himself infinitely more precious than one 
 that he has simply looked out in the dictionary. 
 
 But I am not speaking now of the educational aspect of the 
 subject. Let it sufiiee to say, that original sources to be studied 
 remuneratively must be approached with all the apparatus and 
 all the appliances that previous inquirershaveaccumulatedforthe 
 illustration of them. If that be not done, we shall share the fate 
 of the astronomer who searches for a new planet with the naked 
 eye, and the mathematician who discovers perpetual motion. 
 
 And so we may go on to another point. The student of 
 History, for its own sake, may approach his subject vrith 
 the desire of adding to the mass of human knowledge by 
 the ascertaining of truths hitherto imperfectly apprehended ; 
 the completing of series of developments, or delineations of 
 character, or the explanations of out-of-the-way regions, or 
 
IV.] What History is best worth Reading? 83 
 
 the rehabilitation and analysis of traditions. In these points 
 he has a wide field of interest, and a most remunerative sphere 
 of study in exercise and result. 
 
 But here we come upon another primary question, Is all 
 History equally valuable? You may say to me, we have 
 accepted your assertion that no knowledge is useless, except by 
 the fault of the person who possesses it ; but it does not follow 
 that aU is equally useful or equally valuable in itself. What 
 history is the best worth studying for its own sake ? Now 
 to answer that question fuUy would take a long time, and 
 involve a discussion, not only on the nature of History, but on 
 its co-ordination with other branches of human knowledge, 
 such as moral philosophy and theology, carrying us into 
 regions into which I cannot offer to guide you, and must 
 refer you to the philosophers. But if you wall be satisfied 
 with a simple answer, I will say that the true field of Historic 
 study is the history of those nations and institutions in which 
 the real growth of humanity is to be traced : in which we can 
 follow the developments, the retardations and perturbations, 
 "the ebb and flow of human progress, the education of the 
 world, the leading on by the divine light from the simplicity 
 of early forms and ideas where good and evil are distinctly 
 marked, to the complications of modem life, in which light 
 and darkness are mingled so intimately, and truth and false- 
 hood are so hard to distinguish, but in which we believe and 
 trust that the victory of light and truth is drawing nearer 
 every day. The most precious Histories are those in which we 
 read the successive stages of God's dispensations with man, 
 the growth of the highest natures, under the most favourable 
 circumstances, in the most fully developed institutions, in the 
 successive contributions which those natures, regions and in- 
 stitutions have furnished to the general welfare of the whole. 
 
 But I can hear at least one critic say, Is not this assuming 
 the truth of a doctrine that you are always practically deny- 
 ing, that the very designation of your professorship, yom- very 
 raison d'etre, forces you to deny — the Unity of History, the 
 Continuity of Historic growth, the Education of the world ? 
 Well, if the Unity of History means what I have said, I 
 
 G a 
 
84 The Unity of History. [iv. 
 
 certainly believe in it : but that is not tbe meaning wMch is 
 commonly attached to the term, and it is not the meaning- in 
 which I have so often had to do battle with the idea. The 
 false idea, or that which to me seems practically misleading in 
 the term the Unity of History, is the acceptance as a practical 
 rule or maxim that there are no new points of departure in 
 human history ; that modern life is a continuation of medieval, 
 of ancient and medieval, history, by a contiauity and unity that 
 is at all points equally important, of the same consistency in fact. 
 Now this idea has a truth only in the very highest regions of 
 speculation. Every human soul has an equal value in the eyes 
 of the Christian missionary and religious philosopher, but 
 every human life does not convey lessons of the same practical 
 value to the social investigator ; every national history does 
 not contribute equally valuable results towards the general 
 progress of mankind, and so neither does every chronological 
 epoch. That perhaps we all allow. Why then should not 
 cycles of history, two, three, or more cycles of history, be 
 allowed to exist, within which all the really important factors 
 have their origin and development, and, it may be, work out 
 their full destiny ; successive great dramas of ages, the interest 
 of which is self-contained, although there is enough of common 
 ground between them and those which precede and follow to 
 give them a simple continuity, and although there is doubtless 
 in the divine mind one great plan of cosmical action in which 
 each drama of the human ages serves as a single act or even a 
 single incident ? Let scripture history, classical and ecclesias- 
 tical history, medieval history and modem history, be read 
 successively and connectedly, so much the better ; but why 
 deny that classical history and medieval and modem can be 
 advantageously studied apart? why confine the thoughts to 
 the points on which they are conterminous, continuous and 
 agreed, to the exclusion of those in which they difier, when it 
 is on the points in which they differ that the great contribu- 
 tions to the real history of man are to be traced? In any 
 other sense than that in which I have attempted to limit it 
 and have accepted it, the Unity of History is either the 
 crotchet of a sciolist, or the dream of a universal philosopher. 
 
IV.] Unity of all Knowledge. 85 
 
 For just think how the field of view expands ; we can never 
 know one thing perfectly unless we know everything ; true, 
 but we can try to learn here and there a thing as perfectly 
 as it can be learned, without knowing everything. In the 
 same sense in which the careful study of ancient history 
 is absolutely necessary to the careful study of modern history, 
 the careful study of the latter is absolutely necessary to that 
 of the former. If you read the second alone, where do you 
 find your causes ? If you read the first alone, where do you 
 find your consequences ? Just in the same way, it may be said, 
 the external history of man cannot be read without an internal 
 reading of his history ; no man can approach History without 
 being a consummate moral philosopher ; yet is it so ? Then 
 most of the great historians of the world have been great [ 
 moral philosophers without knowing it. But how can a man 
 pretend to understand the moral conformation of his fellows 
 without knowing their physical conformation ? Then the 
 moral philosopher must be an anatomist, and the anatomist a 
 chemist, a botanist and geologist, and the geologist an as- 
 tronomer ; i. e. instead of borrowing, and being content to 
 borrow from the kindred and allied sciences what is necessary 
 for the consistent pursuit of our own. study, we must kaow the 
 principles of aU, like the sophists of old, and we all know what 
 that ends in, KaK&s rfilfTTaro iravra. But my friend says, 
 exaggeration is no argument, an answer which, by-the-by, 
 may tell either way : ancient, and modem and medieval history, 
 as you call them, have the same subject-matter, they are con- 
 nected by certain visible and tangible lines of recorded fact, 
 and they are, as yourself admit, acts of one great drama. 
 Granted : first then, ancient history has much that is common 
 with modern in the region of political thought ; second then, 
 the ancient Roman civilisation and literature constitute by 
 themselves, and they are but one of many, a sufficient line of 
 continuity to prove essential identity ; third, but it is enough 
 for you to admit the continuity of the world's progress. 
 
 Now, if I were arguing against the reading of ancient history 
 in connexion with modern, such an answer would be complete ; 
 but, as I am merely protesting against the idea that it is im- 
 
86 Nature of Continuity. [iv. 
 
 possible to read modem history from its own starting-point, I 
 will observe, and content myself with observing, first that 
 there are no doubt political thoughts common to ancient and 
 modem life ; nay more, that, as has been said, there is very 
 much that is modem in ancient history and much that is 
 ancient in modern history ; and yet that that very element of 
 continuity on which the whole discussion hangs is wanting. 
 There may be, I will not say there is, a certain similarity of 
 thought in a leading article of The Times and a chapter in 
 Thucydides : the similarity of the circumstances of two poli- 
 tical crises may bring out parallels and coincidences ; Constan- 
 tinople may be the Athens, Alexander II the Xerxes of the 
 day, and anyhow the Bosphorus must be pretty nearly where 
 it was. But the connexion of the political ideas is one of 
 coincidence and not of continuity ; there is not even the life 
 that germinates in the grains of wheat found in Egyptian 
 mummy-pits. Every factor is new, even the area, the nation- 
 ality of the actors, the whole idea in its origin and every stage 
 of growth is new. Or let the area be the same ; what has 
 modem Greece in continuity with ancient Greece, but the soil 
 and sky and the, to it, unintelligible wreck of ancient magni- 
 ficence, from which it fails apparently to draw even the 
 ordinary lessons of civilisation : what period and region of 
 the whole history of the world conveys a less important lesson 
 than Greece during the Middle Ages of European History ? It 
 is scarcely less so with Italy, except for the fact that during a 
 great part of those ages Italy was the centre and stage of 
 Ecclesiastical History, in which, as I shall point out directly, 
 and in which alone on any large or broad scale, the unity and 
 continuity are to be found. 
 
 The vital interest of Medieval and Modem History lies 
 in England, France and Germany, as certainly as that of 
 the ancient lies in the East, in Greece and Italy ; no small 
 part of that of the future lies in the further Western 
 world. The actors in the medieval and modern drama are 
 the new nations, nations that were unheard of before the 
 decline of the Eoman empire began, and which inherited 
 from the civilisation of that empire only the ecclesiastical 
 
IV.] Church History. 87 
 
 culture, not the political system, or even the political map, 
 which that system had laid out. The ideas of medieval and 
 modern life are of medieval and modem growth, or if con- 
 nected with antiquity, connected by a new birth of culture, a 
 re-discovery, a re-creation, not a continuous impulse of vitality. 
 Save in the one region, that of the History of Religion, Eccle- 
 siastical History ; yet in that also the one great fact of the 
 Christian dispensation, which connects the ancient Hebrew 
 isolation with the great Catholic Church life, is itself as much a 
 break as a link of continuity ; so immensely does the new tran- 
 scend the old, that, in the apostle's words, old things are passed 
 away and behold all things are become new. The Unity and 
 Continuity of Ancient and Modem History is an idea which 
 is realised on a great and intelligible scale in Ecclesiastical 
 History only ; and even there the unity is to some extent a unity 
 of ideas, a coincidence of religious and moral motive influences, 
 and not merely of historic continuity. It is in it that the con- 
 tinuity of the Latin civilisation, of the Holy Roman Empire 
 and of the Latin language, Roman Law and Latin litera- 
 ture, is traceable, and to it that we owe them. To it, or to 
 influences which it nourished or provoked, we owe the renais- 
 sance, that revival of ancient culture the very title of which 
 is a denial of the continuity which its influences seem to claim 
 for it. But I am not going- to usurp the functions of a Pro- 
 fessor of Chm-ch History, and I am very sure that Church 
 History is not the ground on which the doctrine of the Unity 
 of History is supposed by its advocates to take its stand. 
 
 One word more ; I do not deny this Unity in the high 
 region of religious History or in the scarcely less compre- 
 hensive grasp which the political philosopher may take of 
 Universal Human Life ; nor do I deny it in the minute 
 arehfeological investigations in which all particulars great and 
 small have much the same value ; nor do I deny that the 
 student of modern history may gain lessons of immense value 
 from the old. But I do maintain that it is wrong to say that 
 the one cannot be studied without the other ; for the things, 
 persons, ideas, plot and scenery are different in the two ; and 
 more than that, save in the region of Church History, the 
 
88 Unity and Continuity. [iv. 
 
 precious lessons of the two are not those in which the approxi- 
 mate continuity maybe traced : the continuity lies in the less im- 
 portant, the great contributions of either to the world's growth 
 lie in the less continuous influences ; in the ancient world in 
 a perished civilisation, in the modem world in one in which 
 all the fresh springs are, by God's gi'aee, in the new races. 
 
 You will, I hope, acquit me now of any desire to under- 
 value any kind of culture ; but, put upon our defence, we must 
 maintain the strong point, as it seems to us, of our position ; 
 and it is om- duty, as well as our right, to say what we think. 
 Most successful teachers of Modem History have passed 
 through the gate of the ancient lore ; but if they would look 
 the truth in the face, they would see that the help which that 
 ancient lore gave to the study of the modern, was first in the 
 diseiplipe of the mind, for which it furnishes an incomparable 
 exercise, and secondly in the wealth of illustration with which 
 it provides • them ; but the illustrations are not links in an 
 historic chain, and the fact that the discipline of the mind has 
 been beneficial by no means implies that the powers cultivated 
 in the two studies are the same, or the method of the one 
 applicable without much modification to the exploration of the 
 other. And this is a point which is scarcely less important 
 than the more ostensible and obvious one on which I have 
 dwelt so long. . 
 
 The method of historic investigation is different in the 
 two or three regions which we have been comparing. Of 
 that I have said something in reference to original sources, 
 and I may have to say something more in reference to 
 the educational view of Historic study. I will not there- 
 fore dwell upon it now ; but rest content to base my argu- 
 ment on what I have said ; that is, the Unity and Con- 
 tinuity are only traceable in the high regions which belong to 
 other sciences and other studies, or in the lower departments 
 of minute archseology ; it is well to abstract, and well to make 
 our own generalisations in the realms that are common to the 
 two, but it is a poor result if, after fixing our thoughts on the 
 things in which they agree arid excluding those in which they 
 differ, we find that we have come to generalisations that might 
 
IV. j A Science of History. 89 
 
 be discovered by intuition and cast away diiferences in which 
 all that is new and true and precious was inherent. 
 
 But thus I come to the region of abstractions and generali- 
 sations, and to the old question, How about the science of 
 History? As I hope I made clear before, I do not intend 
 this lecture to be a systematic exposition of my own views or 
 any one else's ; and I certainly do not intend to attempt an 
 analysis of History as the subject-matter of a science or philo- 
 sophy. I am only trying, if possible, to adjust my own im- 
 pressions to the maxims of our theoretical instructors, and to 
 say a word or two on subjects which recent discussions suggest. 
 It certainly seems curious that, although the advocates of 
 the Unity and Continuity of History, and the believers in the 
 science and philosophy of History, imagine themselves to be 
 diametrically opposed to one another, the weakness of their 
 respective positions seems to be the same. Both prefer to work 
 out generalisations and collect coincidences, rather than to 
 study the drama in its plot and personnel ; both decline to look 
 at the subject, as we might say, all round. It is true that this 
 is a fault of theory rather than of practice : a really good 
 historian may, as we all know, combine an earnest faith in the 
 Unity of History with a power of creating most exact and 
 minute reproductions of periods, scenes and characters ; and 
 such an advocate might almost convince us of the truth of 
 his doctrine, because his practice is so completely free from the 
 faults which that doctrine seems to the outside critic to in- 
 volve. I am perhaps in error too on the other side, in speak- 
 ing of the Science of History and the Philosophy of History 
 in one breath ; for certainly there is a Philosophy of History 
 which is not content with abstractions, but busies itself with 
 following up causes and following out consequences, goes 
 behind the scenes of the drama as well as directs a microscopic 
 vigilance on the stage ; and there is a sense in which the 
 Unity of History is itself a Philosophy of History. I will 
 then leave out the Philosophy of History, and finish the 
 lecture with a few words on the theory of a science of History. 
 
 Shall I be saying too much if I say at once that one great 
 objection to the very idea of reducing History to the lines and 
 
90 Scholastic Science, [iv. 
 
 rules of exact science lies in the fact I have already stated, 
 that generalisations become obscurer and more useless as they 
 grow wider, and, as they grow narrower and more special, cease 
 to have any value as generalisations at aU. Is not a historical 
 science liable, if it can be elaborated at all, to become on the 
 one hand a mere table of political formulae and on the other a 
 case-book of political casuistry ? And, in either case, is it not 
 as a mere political weapon that it is sought for, not as an in- 
 crease of knowledge, not as an investigation of truth, nor as a 
 study of History for its own sake ? And is not the fact that 
 the idea of a science of History finds acceptation, not among 
 practical historians, but among high-paced theorists, a proof 
 that such a possibility belongs to theory and not to practice ; 
 that it is aimed at as a new grace for the all-accomplished 
 doctrinaire, rather than as an object to be sought by those who 
 seek after wisdom ? 
 
 There were days, centuries ago, when the schoolmen 
 fancied that they could bring into class and line all human 
 knowledge, and encroach to some extent upon the divine, by 
 syllogisms and conversions and oppositions. Much precious 
 knowledge those men handed down to us, with much verbiage 
 and &lse logic ; but even they for the most part left History 
 alone. They ticketed every portion of man's moral anatomy, 
 found a rule for every possible case of choice, a reason and a re- 
 ward for every virtue, and a punishment for every conceivable 
 crime ; they turned generalisations into laws, and deduced from 
 them as laws the very facts from which they had generalised. 
 They benefited mankind by exercising and training subtle wits, 
 and they reduced dialectics, almost, we might say, logic itself, 
 to absurdity. I do not undervalue them, because the great 
 men among them were so great that even such a method did 
 not destroy them : in reading Thomas Aquinas, for instance, 
 one is constantly provoked to say. What could not such a mind 
 have done if it had not been fettered by such a method ? 
 
 Such, I imagine, must be the result of every attempt to 
 substitute abstract reasonings for minute examination of 
 facts in the study of History. History repeats itself we 
 know, parallels and cycles recur, the speculative mind can 
 
IV. j Genius and Knowledge. 91 
 
 evaluate the curve in which pohtical progress moves, trace 
 the contortions of the unruly spiral, and eschew a cusp as a 
 historic anomaly. But the dealings of human wills, in 
 countless combinations, and circumstances which no theory 
 can ever exhaustively calculate, are not the field for dog- 
 matic assumption or for speculative classification. Perhaps 
 you may think that I am talking at random, that no 
 people ever were so foolish as to suppose that even an ex- 
 haustive knowledge of past history could enable a man to 
 prophesy ; for such should be the result of a scientific treat- 
 ment, even if the subject-matter be akin rather to the subject- 
 matter of meteorology than to that of astronomy. It may 
 be so ; but the idea is not strange. Experience of life, it is 
 argued, qualifies us for dealing with men ; knowledge of human 
 history must qualify us for calculating on the results of even 
 historical contingencies ; the practical politician can arrange 
 the factors of his problem so as to work out the solution before- 
 hand ; the theoretic explorer of History may so manipulate 
 his factors as to provide for every conceivable combination. 
 Again, I say, it may be so ; but not in the regions of life that 
 are worthy of real study ; vague generalisations may form the 
 stock-in-trade of the political empiric, but he is an empiric 
 notwithstanding ; readiness of observation and fertility of 
 expedient, political genius, the power that interprets events 
 and realises character and motive, are not the result of abstrac- 
 tion even from universal reading. 
 
 I grant that genius may do great things with poor in- 
 struments and out of small materials. But the scientific 
 triumphs of genius aU imply minute knowledge as well as 
 the power of grasping the idea. Owen, from a single bone, 
 could reproduce an entire archaic animal, the real existence of 
 which later discovery vindicated : in that great exploit of 
 scientific genius, there was not only consummate grasp of 
 the idea but enormous knowledge of mechanical anatomy : 
 he did not elaborate the beast out of his own consciousness, 
 nor make a lucky guess ; but he looked at his bone all 
 round, and saw its mechanical capabilities, and realised the 
 idea which only could explain the possession of such capa- 
 
92 Genius and Study. [iv. 
 
 bilities. So, to some extent, the historical genius can recon- 
 struct character. From a very incomplete study of History 
 Scott could create a Richard, the truth of whose portraiture 
 careful historical scrutiny seems to assure. Out of an enor- 
 mous amount of material, Carlyle reconstructs for us Prederick 
 William I of Prussia, a living, moving, tantalising reality. 
 In both there is the eye and the hand of genius, different as 
 is the workmanship, distinct as is the result. But although 
 genius can reconstruct character, it cannot reconstruct events : 
 it flashes its lightning into the dark, and for the moment we 
 see battles and alliances, life and death, growth and decline of 
 heroes, cities and nations ; but it would require many such 
 flashes to produce one permanent impression ; and for even an 
 approach to an understanding of the vision we must go down 
 and map out the land, photograph the heroes, and classify the 
 populations of the cities. Patient study may not have much 
 to do with genius ; it has less to do with generalisations : but 
 without patient study genius will flash with no productive 
 efiicacy, and generalisations will become mere formula, useful 
 neither to teachers nor to learners, neither to statesmen nor to 
 scholars ; and even with patient study, what results ? Surely 
 that scientific generalisations are but by-play diversions and 
 amusements, not real lessons : formtdse that are convenient 
 for a moment now and then, but quite unsafe as implements 
 of investigation or even as helps for memory : truisms, or 
 fe;Uacies, or both : or if containing truth, or aiming at uni- 
 versality, diluting the truth until it is useless ; assuming a 
 universality of rule which, when it comes to be applied, is 
 met with a universality of exception. 
 
 There is a ' One in History ' as a One in Nature, but it is 
 not shown to the man whose idea of science is confined to 
 making his inventory or ticketing compartments of his cabinet, 
 even if the mechanism of his museum be ever so complete, 
 unless he has studied and learned well the conformation 
 and individual histories of the specimens which he attempts 
 to classify. Sometimes men classify the specimens which 
 other men have collected, and claim the character of philoso- 
 phers without any direct acquaintance with materials at all. 
 
V. 
 
 METHODS OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 (May 18, 1877.) 
 
 IN my Lecture delivered the other day, in discharge of a 
 duty which, in the case of a Professor who is willing to 
 work, might well be dispensed with, I attempted to arrange 
 some few thoughts on the subject of Historical study which 
 had occurred to me, on some sort of a plan, carefully dis- 
 avowing however any attempt at complete or even systematic 
 treatment ; I used the division of the subject which I then 
 proposed, simply as furnishing pegs on which to hang divers 
 desultory observations. The principle of division which I 
 adopted was merely this ; that we should view our subject in 
 three lights ; first looking on the study of history as pursued 
 for its own sake, secondly regarding it as an instrument of 
 education or training of the mind, and thirdly regarding it 
 in reference to the ulterior uses to which the results of such 
 study could be most advantageously applied ; in other 
 words, the student or professorial view, the educatorial or 
 tutorial view, and the popular or utilitarian view. Without, 
 as I said, attempting any systematic treatment, I made the 
 question of History for its own sake an occasion of saying 
 a word or two on the current ideas touching the study ; the 
 investigation of original materials, the doctrine of the neces- 
 sary unity and continuity of History, and the mueh-debatecj 
 possibility of the creation of a science of History, in the sens^ 
 of science which involves the discovery of general laws and 
 the classification of human wills and events out of which the 
 men of the future may prophesy. I have stiU the other two 
 heads of my division to trifle with, and, as it is now too late 
 to modify my plan, I can only ask for your tolerant attention 
 and proceed, in the hope that what I may have to say on the 
 
94 Educational value of History. [v. 
 
 practical work of the subject may be better worth sayiag than 
 what I said on the theory of it, a speculation on speculations. 
 The first point to be stated in relation with the second 
 I head of discussion has merely to be stated ; supposing that 
 [ the study of History is useful as an educational instru- 
 ' ment, that is, not only as providing stores of knowledge or 
 amassing tools for future use, but as having a disciplinary 
 and formative virtue, what part of the mind is it on which 
 the disciplinary process acts, and what power or virtue may 
 it be supposed to develope by training ? It is perhaps un- 
 necessary for me to say more than this, that I regard the 
 judicial faculty, 'judgment,' as in vulgar unphilosophical 
 language we call it, as that on which historical study pro- 
 duces the most valuable results ; I have so often said this 
 from this desk that I feel shy of repeating it ; but it does not 
 appear to me to be less true than it did the first time I said 
 it. The study of the early stages of that history in whose 
 later stages we know ourselves to be personally interested, 
 the study of the modern world of which we are parts, as 
 distinguished from that of the ancient world which, except 
 as a matter of culture, is dead to us, afibrds room for the 
 development of an equitable as weU as an unbiassed judgment, 
 which is a»- great advantage in itself and may be of great 
 practical use in the world. The exclusive study of the more 
 modern phases of history has a tendency to make men pai'tisans 
 or advocates ; but the study of the periods jiist a generation 
 or two farther removed produces far more effect on the judg- 
 ment ; and the study of medieval History, that is, of the ages 
 in which the things that are precious to us were rooted and 
 sprang up, but had not yet entered into the phases iu which 
 controversy is most bitter, or in which the political ques- 
 tions of the day are most directly engaged, has always seemed 
 to me to furnish very good training ; to enable us to ap- 
 proach questions in which we are ourselves engaged, with 
 moderate and cautious treatment, to allow some of them to 
 wait for solution, to determine others by the evidence of fact 
 rather than by prepossession, and to let others alone alto- 
 gether. Ancient History exercises the critical faculty in a 
 
v.] Medieval History. 95 
 
 comparatively narrow and exhausted field, although, as a 
 matter of training, every student has to go over the field and 
 exhaust its interest for himself before he gets the benefit of 
 ■what he is reading ; mere modern politics, as I have said, 
 furnish training only, and that incomplete training, for the 
 advocate and partisan ; the intermediate region is that in 
 which real personal interest may be strongly engaged with- 
 out much temptation to passionate controversy, and in which 
 therefore the judgment may be best trained for its own 
 perfect development, and for the uses of practical politics when 
 the time for practical controversy and advocacy comes. We 
 learn patience, tolerance, respect for conflicting views, equit- 
 able consideration for conscientious opposition ; we see how 
 very differently the men of the particular time seem to have 
 read the course of events, which seem to us to have only one 
 reasonable bearing ; we see how good and evil mingle in' the 
 best of men and in the best of causes ; we learn to see with 
 patience the men whom we like best often in the wrong, and 
 the repulsive men often in the right ; we learn to bear with 
 patience the knowledge that the cause which we love best 
 has sufiered, from the awkwardness of its defenders, so great 
 disparagement as in strict equity to justify the men who 
 were assaulting it ; we learn too, and this is not the least of 
 the lessons, that there are many points on. which no decision 
 as to right or wrong, good or evil, acquittal or condemnation, 
 is to be looked 'for ; and on which we may say that, as often 
 the height of courage is to say I dare not, and the height of 
 love is to say I will not, so the height of wisdom is to have 
 learned to say, I do not know. I will however leave this 
 point, as it is one on which I may have to say a word under 
 my third head. 
 
 The next point after determining the natm-e of the dis- 
 ciplinary value ascribed to historical study, especially modern j 
 historical study, is the question of method. And as I have 
 already said that it does not follow that the best method 
 of studying History in one aspect is the best way of study- 
 ing it in the other two, I will, for the sake of simplicity, 
 go directly to our own idea of teaching in this place as 
 
96 Oxford Teaching. [v. 
 
 exemplified in the Examination Statute. That statute was 
 the result of a good deal of consideration and discussion be- 
 tween men of very different views and extent of experience, 
 and I do not know that I should venture to. say that it is 
 incapable of improvement ; "but it has worked well, and any 
 improvement that may be made in it must be made on the 
 lines of its own plan, which seem to me complete. I take it, 
 however, as a peg for more general remarks. The main 
 feature of it is, as you are doubtless aware, the threefold 
 division into, first, a continuous reading of our national His- 
 tory, second, an epochal treatment of a portion of general 
 Eui-opean History, and thirdly, the special study of some 
 character or period in the original authorities. The plan 
 thus aims at realising two of the ideas which I discussed the 
 other day, although of course only by way of introduction to 
 the larger fulfilment of the promise ; it attempts in the eon- 
 timious reading of one subject to convey the lesson of 
 continuity, and in the special subject to invite the student to 
 see what original sources are like, and what is the pleasurable 
 work of studying them. 
 
 Now I am not quite sure that our way of studying the 
 special subject is exactly the best method of beginning work 
 on original authorities, but it may very well be the best 
 that we can incoi^wrate in a plan of gaining, in a year and 
 a half's reading, a mental training, or the beginning of a 
 mental training that may serve a lifetime. I am not sure 
 that it would not be more true to the idea, to require the 
 student to read a single book and explore its mechanism 
 and materials, rather than to set before him a character or 
 institution and bid him look for illustration for it in a par- 
 ticular set of books ; but it must be remembered that the 
 immediate object of the reading is to meet the test of exam- 
 ination, and that it would be almost impossible to examine, 
 on one set of questions, a set of men all of whom had been 
 working from different points ; for essay writing it might be 
 invaluable training, but for collective examination it would 
 be unreasonable. I wiU, then, content myself with remarking 
 that the special subject in the class schools should be regarded 
 
v.] An Art of History. 97 
 
 only as a starting-point in independent research ; a sort of 
 iirst step in the study of original sources, which we hope may 
 lead on to further and deeper investigation, but which, as it 
 has to serve two pm-poses, can scarcely be likely to satisfy 
 both ; it is a specimen of minute study, and it is a specimen 
 of original reading ; but the object of the minute study is 
 not the book, but the hero or the plot of it. It is, however, 
 most encouraging to those who have the future of our 
 History school at heart to know that the treatment of the 
 special subject is always one of the best features of our ex- 
 amination ; that in which the best side of the mind of each 
 exanftnee is as a rule most distinctly shown. Regarded then as 
 a study of a subject, rather than as a first step into the region 
 of original authorities, this pai't of our work exemplifies one 
 of two diametrically opposed methods of reading. And, 
 whether there is or is not a science of History, and I believe 
 that in the reasonable and intelligible sense of the word there 
 is such a science, there is, I am sure, an art of writing 
 History and an art of reading it ; and the educational use 
 of it is an exemplification of the art. 
 
 According to this, the reader or the writer may set before 
 himself two opposite ideas ; he may either wish to produce a 
 historical statue or group of statuary, we may say, or he may 
 wish to produce a historical picture. In the former case he 
 has to look out his materials first, then to construct from the 
 careful view of them an idea or model of the object which he 
 desires to reproduce, and then to work out his idea. It is 
 necessary for him to look at his subject all round, to finish it off 
 completely at every point, and, while seeking for statuesque 
 unity and perfection, to make truth and reality the first 
 object. Everything that in the remotest way bears upon the 
 history of the person or institution that he is describing, has 
 its special value ; original sources, the verdict of other his- 
 torians, tradition, popular conceptions, poetic idealising ; the 
 place which his object has occupied in the development of 
 historical life, the results which historical experience has pro- 
 duced or may have produced upon the object ; every species 
 of illustration derivable from archaeology, genealogy, laWj 
 
 H 
 
gS History as Statuary. [v. 
 
 morals, and religious history, will have to be ransacted. The 
 result will then, if the writer has chosen his subject well, and 
 with a due estimate of his own powers, be an artistic unity, 
 a perfect image, true to its author's idea, and, if he has not 
 let his own idea prejudice him in the manipulation of his 
 materials, true to the reality, so far as the reality can be 
 discovered. It is of course in the life-like portraiture of 
 great men that success of this sort is most frequently achieved, 
 for it is in the realising of grand character that the strength 
 of historical genius chiefly displays itself. But the same 
 method may be applied to an institution that has a well 
 ascertained growth, and the result in that case will ceriSlinly 
 be not less valuable. Still there are certain unities of time, 
 place, and interest, which are more readily united in biography 
 than in institutional history. As valuable History may be 
 so written, so a good deal of History may be so read, in a 
 way, that is, to produce in the mind a perfect image of the 
 character worth studying ; nay, the method is more applicable 
 to the reading than to the writing of History, because it is 
 easier for the mind to receive successive images or phases of 
 the one character, than it is for the writer to reproduce them 
 without becoming tedious ; the realisation in the mind may 
 easily be a regular and orderly development, whilst in the 
 written record of even the best historian it is liable to be- 
 come a series of postures and attitudes, attended by tricks 
 and mannerisms of style that are unworthy of the serious 
 student. 
 
 The second form of our art is analogous to painting, and 
 its result to a picture ; it aims at reproducing not a character 
 or a life, but a situation ; it requires a background and a 
 foreground, scenery and perspective, as well as unity and 
 symmetry ; it studies the relations and positions, the features 
 and habit of each of the persons or groups that the picture 
 contains, and tries to make ^hem true to the eye, whatever 
 they may be to the life. Thoroughness and complete realisa- 
 tion is not a requisite of this sort of work quite so much 
 as accurate reproduction. The painter is not, like the statuary, 
 obliged to look at his figures all round ; he need not go to the 
 
v.] History as Painting. 99 
 
 back of his picture, or if he does, he will see nothing : so the 
 historian, who works at a situation, will often satisfy himself 
 if his grouping is true and consistent for the moment which 
 he wishes to seize ; and he will not spend much time in trying 
 to show us how the scene comes to be what it is, satisfied 
 that his reproduction is an adequate representation of what it 
 seemed to be. The result will have its value ; for first, the 
 work need not be a whit less conscientious because it is les* 
 deep and searching ; and, secondly, because the good workman 
 will only try to reproduce scenes that are worth describing ; the 
 good painter wUl not waste his genius on revolting or worth- 
 less subjects, and the historian of true genius will choose for the 
 employment of his genius scenes from history that may read 
 good and noble lessons to the world that reads him. Such his- 
 torical writing is far more brilliant, if it is well done, than that 
 which I mentioned first ; but, like everything that is brilliant, 
 it is liable to be counterfeited. Sensational and picturesque 
 writing satisfies the popular taste, and sensational and 
 picturesque writing, adopted as a historical style, is very apt 
 to corrupt and destroy the more valuable features of pains- 
 taking and conscientious truthfulness. Popularity is no- 
 where a greater snare than it is in this region of work, and 
 magazine articles, and review articles, the romance of history, 
 and historic scenes and characters, are produced with great 
 facility when the principal object is to attract the half- 
 educated to read. But, notwithstanding this, both the writing 
 and the. study of history in this way has a great value, if it 
 enables the student to realise the situations more vividly, to 
 put himself in the place, so to speak, of his characters, and to 
 represent to his mind's eye, for the purpose of forming an 
 equitable judgment, the several circumstances of the case on 
 which he is trying to adjudge, in somewhat the same way 
 as that in which his characters themselves might have seen 
 them. I should say, then, read history now and then with\ 
 a view to the picturesque, but do not read it too much, and 
 do not read it at second-hand ; do not write it, or dwell too 
 much on the pictures which are not drawn by the first 
 masters ; try to reproduce, not to copy. 
 
 H 2 
 
joo History as Drama. [v- 
 
 A third form of the art, which combines and adds to these' 
 two, borrows its analogue from the domain of another of the 
 arts, and attempts to read not only character and situation 
 but plot also ; and this, I need hardly say, is in result at 
 least very far in value beyond the other two. It involves the 
 complete identification of persons, and the complete realisation 
 of relations; of persons identified through long historical 
 careers, and of relations varying from moment to moment 
 during the long periods over which the drama extends. It 
 can perhaps afford better than our second form of the art, to 
 discard circumstances and characters that are not essential to 
 the plot, but it cannot afford to neglect a single circumstance 
 or feature that may be essential to it. The result of such 
 writing is seen in its best form in the history of great 
 institutions, great empires that have had definite periods of 
 growth, duration, and decline ; Church History, or different 
 episodes in it ; the history of the Roman empire, or of Athens. 
 \ It has all the unity of the statuesque, and all the vividness of 
 the picturesque, but a continuity of life and argument that 
 are its own. I need scarcely say that to write this sort of 
 history requires the very highest mental powers, as well as 
 patient training and incredible labour. For even the writing 
 of episodes, as we call them, the minor plots of a great drama, 
 the writer must combine qualities of mind that are combined 
 in but few ; the clear sight that can apprehend the idea that 
 gives life and truth to the story, and the labour that will 
 apply itself to details as if it were only out of the study of 
 the details that life and truth could come. 
 
 But although to write suoh history may well be beyond the 
 reach of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of each thousand 
 ■of historians, there is no reason why every man who goes into 
 the schools should not try to read history with a special view 
 j to the realising of the dramatic plan ; and I think that in our 
 present scheme we hold out to the student the clue which he 
 has to foUow in order to succeed ; for both in the study of the 
 general period, and in that of the continuous history of his 
 own country, he will find the dramatic interest strong and 
 capable of almost infinite illustration. More especially if he 
 
v.] Dramatic Interest. lor 
 
 can throw himself personally into the action of it ; not merely 
 regB,rding it as an image, or a picture, or a piece of biography, 
 but as part of the growth of his own life, of the laws, history, 
 circumstances, that have helped to make him what he is ; 
 acts that have taken place in scenes with which he is familiar, 
 great deeds of war and peace done by the men whose blood 
 runs in his own veins ; high aspirations, sympathies and in- 
 stincts, that lie knows are living in his own heart and brain^ 
 not merely by imitation or engrafted hfe, but with continuous, 
 hereditary strength. I would not have him read as a partisan, 
 with the likes and dislikes, the prejudices, the false and artificial 
 antipathies of modern political life, but with the sympathies of 
 an Englishman ; I would have my brother Yorkshireman, for 
 instance, learn to look on Fairfax and on Strafford both as 
 men of flesh and blood, with beliefs, sincerities and virtues 
 that bring them very near to us, notwithstanding their anta- 
 gonism to each other, and the gap that widens daily between 
 us and both of them. I am sure that the more I know of 
 both of them, the more I find that is admirable and love- 
 able in them. But perhaps it is easier to grow enthusiastic 
 here than to maintain judicial calmness ; and I will proceed. 
 
 There is yet another way of reading and of writing history 
 which demands its place in our enumeration, which, however, 
 can scarcely be regarded as educational, because the historic 
 faculty, whatever it is, must have been already educated 
 before it can attempt to approach the task. To read and 
 write with the single and simple purpose of collecting, testing, 
 and arranging the facts of history, to discover causes and 
 work out consequences, to determine the rights and wrongs 
 of questions as they arise, the growth and decline of institu- 
 tions as they emerge from and retire into darkness when 
 their work is done, to build up history as a treasure-house of 
 knowledge, that may enable the man who attempts the task 
 to read with like facility the history of the past and present, 
 to solve the diflSculties of conflicting testimony, and hold the 
 balance of equitable judgment between conflicting systems ; 
 the study, for I must recur to the fii'st of our three heads, the 
 study of History for its own sake can scarcely be regarded as 
 
102 History for its own sake again. [v. 
 
 a method co-ordinate with the other three. But it unites the 
 advantages of all thi-ee, and furnishes still more formative and 
 disciplinary influence of its own. It is, in relation to its sub- 
 ject, an end in itself, and is not to be classed among means 
 and methods ; if there be a science, this is the science. And 
 yet, strange to say, this idea, like the others, is apt to be 
 lowered and made vulgar by the impatience and intolerance 
 of utilitarian theory ; and of all intolerant things utilitarian 
 theory, or theoretic utilitarianism, is the most so. As however 
 I do not wish to use language unnecessai-ily strong, I will 
 leave this, and remark upon two other educational theories 
 connected with the subject. 
 
 History may be read either backwards or forwards. That 
 is, the man who has time for it may begin at the beginning 
 and read, on to modern times ; noting every influence in 
 its origin and effects, the growth and decay, as I have just 
 said, of institutions, the origin, complications, and counter- 
 changes of rights and wrongs ; -and, whether he reads on a wide 
 scale or on a narrow one, he will, if he lives long enough, 
 arrive at such a knowledge of the situation of things at the 
 present day, as will give him a right to make his opinion 
 heard. This is the way in which members of parliament 
 ought to read history, and I take leave to say that, if they 
 would submit to hold their tongues until they have so read it, 
 it would be all the better for the nation and for themselves. 
 
 In working thus through the history of our own country, 
 we should come, no doubt, upon many lines of inquiry as to 
 institutions that have long been obsolete, and influences that 
 have no direct representative among the influences of the 
 day ; we shall trace the pedigrees of extinct families, and the 
 growth and disuse of worn-out fashions of thought, dress and 
 manners ; but without such reading we cannot trace the 
 origin of existing institutions and influences with anything 
 like a true appreciation of their proportion and relation to 
 national life. We may, as we proceed, have to discard much 
 that has seemed historical as now become archseological, but 
 we cannot dispense with the recollection that without that 
 ■obsolete material, that obsolete influence or form, that which 
 
v.] Reading forwards. 1 03 
 
 has succeeded, survived and continued to flourisli, could not 
 have become what it is. The tree that has stood for centuries 
 bears to the microscopic investigator marks of every winter 
 that has passed over it ; it has not cast aside one dead leaf or 
 rotten branch which would not, had it remained, have made the 
 tree something different from what it has become. I do not 
 advise microscopic minuteness in this study to the neglect 
 of other methods, but I do claim for it a place and a func- 
 tion ; and further than that, I maintain that this synthetic 
 reading of the subject is the best of all ways for those who 
 have time and patience to follow it up. But here we must be 
 cautious ; lest having begun to build we be not able to finish ; 
 and having begun to read history at the Norman Conquest, 
 we find om-selves stranded at the battle of Waterloo, or earlier 
 still. Observing a due scale and proportion of study, much 
 educational benefit will accrue by beginning at the begin- 
 ning ; neglecting the due scale and proportion, the student 
 may find that instead of educating himself to take his place 
 in the world, he has disqualified himself for being anything 
 but a student all his life ; no bad thing perhaps, but not an 
 educational result. 
 
 The second and reverse method has strong recommenda- 
 tions to other minds ; to take the interesting subject of 
 the day and work back to its beginning, following every 
 branch of inquiry that may present itself, but following it 
 chiefly with a view to the leading idea with which you 
 have started. Here too there is abundant exercise for the 
 historic instinct, the desire of getting to the bottom of every- 
 thing and looking at it all round ; arid, regarded as an 
 analytic process, complementary to that .synthetic process 
 which I have first stated, some amount of such reading seems/ 
 absolutely necessary to the education of the student. Still, I 
 question very much whether it is wise to put this idea for- 
 ward as the best. As the way in which men of modern 
 ways of thinking, and with little time for study, may be in- 
 vited, tempted to and interested in History, much may be 
 said in its favour, and much has been said on very high 
 authority. But surely it has, unless it be accompanied by some 
 
I04 Reading backwards. [v> 
 
 strong corrective, a tendency to educate men for advocates rather 
 than for judges, it leads them into a habit of looking for all 
 that may be said on one side of a subject, rather than for 
 what may be said on both sides ; and it certainly leads a man 
 to give to the point from which his investigation started an 
 exaggerated form and influence amongst the earlier competing 
 influences which, as a matter of fact, it has outgrown, or of 
 which it may itself be in some measure a resultant. 
 
 The occasional use of this method as a means of study is one 
 thing, the exclusive use of it is another ; the use of it as a 
 means of iaviting popular attention to history is a third. And 
 it is perhaps in this its third application that it should be re- 
 garded with the most favour, but only as a step towards some- 
 thing deeper and sounder. An audience may he attracted by 
 an able lecturer to listen to him on any subject whatever ; 
 he takes the subject of the day and works back ; Turkey and 
 Russia, we wiU say. Of course, if his audience is really a 
 popular audience, they bring sadly little information with 
 them to the lecture ; a lai'ge proportion probably of the elder 
 hearers can go back as far as the Crimean War, most of the 
 audience will have come into this world of trial since that date. 
 Their ideas of right and wrong will be very much prejudiced 
 by the fact that England took a side in that war, and by the 
 grand principle that whatever England does is right ; some 
 may be equally convinced, on equally sound principles, that 
 whatever the Aberdeen ministry, that is supposing them to 
 have heard of an Aberdeen miuistry, did must have been 
 wrong : probably some will have imbibed the belief that there 
 is a subtle connexion between Russia and Ritualism, or be- 
 tween Turkey and religious toleration as exemplified in the 
 massacre of orthodox Greek Christians and the protection of 
 Roman Catholics and Protestant Missionaries. Well, fur- 
 nished with materials, prepossessions, fixed ideas and ex- 
 pectancy, it would be a miracle if they did not come away 
 fuUy persuaded of their competence to decide on the minutest 
 questions of the last Protocol. 
 
 Really it does seem to me that this is beginning at the 
 wrong end, and yet I confess it is extremely difficult to 
 
v.] special Lectuiing. 105 
 
 suggest anything that is at once theoretically better and 
 practically possible. If it were only for the fact that these 
 questions of the day are to so large extent as they are, 
 doubtful and party, doubtful or party questions ; that mat- 
 ters on which our acutest and most honourable statesmen feel 
 bound to take sides diametrically opposed, are by this process 
 subjected to the rough and ready manipulation of men who 
 know nothing about the premisses and care nothing about 
 the logical connexion between them and the conclusions, care 
 nothing about the conclusions except in so far as they are 
 the conclusions of a blue or an orange lecturer ; the fact itself 
 seems to me a reductio ad absurdum of historical lecturing. 
 Yet, what is to be done ? A little learning is a dangerous 
 thing, but what of total ignorance, what of that ignorance 
 which will not bear to be enlightened unless it is played on 
 by passion or party ? How shall we remedy this ? Here is a 
 question that extends far beyond the scope of my purpose, for 
 it touches the whole great field of popular education ; it is an 
 inviting subject, for we are so distinctly at the beginning of our 
 work in this department that a man of my age may safely 
 propound any nostrum, sure that he wiU not live to see its 
 absolute uselessness proved by an adult generation of historic- 
 ally trained people. 
 
 Let me just say, before I go on to the next and last 
 point of my subject, that popular lecturing on history can 
 be only one, ay, and only a secondary one, of the imple- 
 ments of historical education, if the people of the next gener- 
 ation are to be qualified to use the power which the men 
 of this generation have placed in their hands. The schools, 
 the national schools as well as the public schools, must be 
 made to begin at the beginning ; at present the blind are 
 leading the blind ; God help us, for we are very near the 
 ditch. Lecturing is of little use, if it does not lead men to 
 read for themselves ; in many instances it is worse than use- 
 less, if it be made a substitute for self-culture. So too with 
 newspaper education ; imagine the state, moral and intellectual, 
 of the man who tries to form his mind by reading the daily 
 journals of England since the beginning of the last Long 
 
io6 Utilitarianism in Study. [v. 
 
 Vacation. What value will truth and justice have in the eyes 
 
 of a man who has read history through such a medium ? But 
 
 again I forbear : one word ; it has been said, perhaps the story 
 
 is apocryphal, that one well-known politician of our own day, 
 
 one too whose judgment would have been well worth having 
 
 on present events, once said something to the effect that there 
 
 was more valuable political training in one column of The 
 
 , Times than in all the pages of Thucydides ; I will venture to 
 
 , say that there are English journals now, claiming a world- 
 
 - wide circulation and assuming to be the very interpreters of 
 
 history and political morality, in preference to whose lessons 
 
 I should recommend the student to seek for lessons of history 
 
 and political morality among the arrowheaded inscriptions of 
 
 Assyria or the papyri of the Neapolitan Museum. 
 
 But I have already run into the third division of my subject : 
 that is the popular view of historic knowledge ; the aspect of it 
 in which it becomes merely a tool or a stock of tools capable of 
 employment for ulterior purposes; and the methods of teaching 
 it by which with the least trouble the learner can acquire prac- 
 tically useful information. I call this the popular or utilitarian 
 aspect, because it belongs to the catchpenny theory of human 
 life according to which the value of a thing is just as much as 
 it win bring ; the theory that despises science and research, 
 that regards politics as a game between Blue and Orange, that 
 places the interest of Great Britain at the crown and apex of 
 national ambitions, and regards education in general not as the 
 training of the human mind for God's service, a development 
 of powers to His glory and the welfare of our fellow-men, but 
 as a means for the acquisition of a certain sum in" the funds ; 
 the theory that regards human souls as factory hands, and 
 ascribes to parliament the power of making a false statement 
 true. But although it is the vulgar view of education, and 
 in this extreme a very vulgar view, it is founded upon a truth. 
 There are many things which a mere acquaintance with the facts 
 of history, however that acquaintance may have been gained, 
 enables a man to do better than he would do them without it. 
 There is a knowledge of history for ordinary practical purposes 
 which may be acquii-ed without either the love of the subject 
 
v.] Standard Books. 107 
 
 or going through the disciplinary study of it by way of cul- 
 ture. And this we must not undervalue, because a very little 
 may be made to go a great way ; and it is quite possible for a 
 man to wish to take an independent and right view of public 
 aflairs and political duty, who has not, and never had and 
 never can have, a proper education for forming a complete 
 judgment. We respect the man who, when he has to vote on 
 any public question, goes to his books to get up the ques- 
 tion instead of voting as the party whip would wish him ; we 
 would rather that his education had fitted him to do right at 
 once, that he had studied public questions to begin with, or 
 that he had, by the culture of educational reading, exercised 
 his mind to discern between good and evil ; but we do not 
 despise him even if he votes wrong in the end. Even an in- 
 different Cyclopaedia is better than a paid party agent as a 
 guide in doubtful questions. 
 
 Now how can this sort of information be best provided? 
 I do not know of any expedient that has not been at one 
 time or other tried ; tried in vain, you say. Not quite in 
 vain, if such expedient has, as I said, enabled a man to do 
 better than he would have done without it. We do not 
 condemn the use of a Ready Reckoner because we think 
 that a tradesman ought to do and would do better without 
 it ; it is much safer for his customers than that convenient 
 leaden canon, the rule of thumb ; but we do not think that 
 a banker who entirely depends on his Ready Reckoner will 
 ever become Chancellor of the Exchequer. One has known 
 people too who have thought the Encyclopaedia Londinensis 
 a useful sort of reading for Sunday afternoons ; no doubt it 
 would enable you, like one of Dickens's heroines, to pass a 
 number of remarkable opinions upon a remarkable number of 
 subjects. But seriously, anything should be welcome that 
 would save a well-intentioned man from the necessity of 
 taking his rule of political conduct from the leading articles 
 of party papers. We have had popular histories and pictorial 
 histories, political Cyclopaedias, and Books for the Million; a 
 whole historical department of the Society for Diffusing Use- 
 ful Knowledge. Yet it seems as if even for such work, even 
 
io8 Party-Spirit in Books. [v. 
 
 where such work would pay, no one has the spirit to under- 
 take it unless he is stirred by something stronger than the 
 desire of being useful, the desire of ventilating some party view 
 or destroying the character of some partisan opposed to him. 
 Imagine a history of England in which the lying story of 
 Hannah Lightfoot appears as an important clue to the 
 difficulties of the reign of George III, and the triumphs of the 
 Commonwealth are regarded as incomplete unless Henrietta 
 Maria can be shown to have been an adulteress. These are 
 extreme cases, because they arS cases in which a coarse and 
 violently prejudiced mind has undertaken the task of writing 
 for party pm'poses ; but the infection is not confined to coarse 
 and vulgar minds : it defiles some of the very noblest works, 
 especially historical works, that have ever been written. How 
 can we recommend the man who wants to get up the rights 
 of a case to a history like Macaulay's ? how easy must have 
 been the victory of Macaulay's hero if all his adversaries were 
 the pitiful knaves and fools that they appear to him to have 
 been. I am not calling him a slanderer, I do not believe that 
 he was one ; or ignorant or careless, for he was most learned 
 and accurate ; nor insincere, for he was most sincere ; but for 
 all that he was as much a party vraiter as Clarendon or 
 Prynne, or Burnet, or Collier. And where such a man with 
 such power of portraitm-e as would make us believe his pictm-es, 
 if not true, more lifelike and real than if they were true, — 
 where such a man with such knowledge, such memory, such 
 transparent honesty of belief in his own version of history, 
 cannot be relied upon, what shall we poor mortals do ? If all 
 the advance in historical study is to result only in the better 
 presentation of party views and pai-ty arguments ; if no one 
 will write even cram-books without cramming his own dis- 
 proportioned and one-sided theories down our children's 
 throats, it seems as if it were time to turn over a new leaf ; 
 reconcile ourselves with party government and organisation 
 and cut om-selves off from shams. Let men cease to pretend 
 to exercise or to prepare to exercise conscientious judgment. 
 Divide the world between Blue and Orange, and nail your 
 colours to the mast. 
 
v.] Charles and Oliver. 109 
 
 For my own part I do not see why an honest partisan 
 should not write an honest book if he can persuade himself 
 to look honestly at his subject, and make allowance for his 
 own prejudices. I know it is somewhat critical work, and 
 a man who knows himself in one way, may be quite ignorant 
 of himself in another. I take Hallam as an illustrious 
 example ; Hallam knew himself to be a political partisan, 
 and, wherever he knew that political prejudice might darken 
 his counsel, he guarded most carefully against it : he did not 
 claim the judicial character without fitting himself for it ; 
 and where he knew himself to be sitting as judge he judged 
 admirably : so admirably that the advanced advocates even of 
 his own views have long ago thrown him over as too timid 
 and temporising for their purpose. Yet where he was not 
 awake to his own prejudice, in matters for instance regarding 
 religion and the Church, in which he seems to have had no 
 doubt about his own infallibility of negation, how ludicrously 
 and transparently unfair he is ! 
 
 I do not see any necessity for this. I do not see why a man 
 should not say once for all, I like Charles I better than Oliver 
 Cromwell : I like the cause for which Charles believed himself 
 to be contending better than that for which Cromwell strove : 
 Charles is attractive to me, Oliver is repulsive : Charles is my 
 friend, OHver is my foe : but, am I bound to maintain that 
 my friend is always right and my enemy always wrong ; am I 
 bound to hold Charles for a saint, Oliver for a monster ; am I 
 bound never to mention Charles without a sigh or Oliver 
 without a sneer ; am I bound to conceal the faults of the one 
 and to believe every calumny against the other ? If you like, 
 put it the other way, believe in the great Protestant states- 
 man, treat Charles as the overrated fine gentleman, the 
 narrow-minded advocate of a theory which he did not under- 
 stand, the pig-headed maintainer of the cause you dislike. 
 You may be a partisan, but can you not believe that, if you be- 
 lieve your own side of the question, truth when it is explored 
 will be found on your side ? misrepresentation, exaggeration, 
 dishonesty of advocacy will only disparage the presentment 
 which you desire to make of your own convictions and yovrr 
 
no Popular Lecturing. [v. 
 
 own prepossessions. Nay, I would go further, and say I 
 should like Charles better than Oliver even if his cause were 
 less my own than I conceive it to be. I am ready to stick to 
 my friends and vote against my unfriends : but why should I 
 shut my eyes to the false and foolish things that my friends 
 do, or to the noble aspirations, honesty, and good intentions of 
 those whom I think wrong in their means and mistaken in 
 their ends. Yet, as I began by saying, without some infusion 
 of spite it seems as if history could not be written ; that no 
 man's zeal is roused to write unless it is moved by the desire 
 to write down. Of course I seem to be stating extreme cases, 
 but it is extreme cases that make their own advertisements, 
 and that do the great mischief. Here the study of ancient 
 history has its great advantage over modem ; yet battles are 
 fought over the character of Tiberius, and the 'lues rehabilitandi' 
 has given a new reading to the history of Marius and Sylla. 
 
 The reason which led me to say that even an indifferent 
 book is better than no book at all, that an encyclopedic 
 history or a popular compendium, or a cram-book, or even a 
 party pamphlet is better than no book at all, because even if 
 it misleads and misrepresents, it deceives a man one degree 
 less than he would be deceived by a mere party agent ; be- 
 cause it makes him think, even if the extent of the thinking 
 be that he thinks that he thinks ; because it either suggests 
 to him that he ought to form a judicial opinion, or keeps 
 before his mind the duty of inquiry and furnishes him with a 
 starting-point ; the same reason that led me to say this of 
 popular books, leads me also to estimate at something more 
 than their intrinsic value the popular lectures, or lecture-; 
 system, of which we have recently heard a good deal. 
 
 We are told that even a short course of lectures, clearly 
 and interestingly delivered, will be sufficient to put the 
 popular mind in possession of such an elementary knowledge 
 of history, its course, influences and material lessons, as will 
 enable men to approach the great questions of the day with 
 some useful amount of foresight and theoretic experience. 
 
 Now, if I have mis-stated this prescription, I am very sorry ; 
 but I think 1 have not. I am quite willing to admit that a 
 
v.] Real Meaning of Lectures. 1 1 1 
 
 popular lecture may give information that is better than total 
 ignorance ; I am inclined to value highly the inducement to 
 begin real study which a popular lecture may put before the 
 mind of the audience ; I am thankful to the popular lecturer, 
 although he may get no farther than to rouse the hearers to the 
 sense of the fact that he is talking about things of which they 
 have no comprehension at all ; at all events he teUs them that 
 there is such a study as history. But I confess that I do not 
 see my way to go much further, unless I may be allowed 
 very much to modify the prescribed idea of a popular leetm-e. 
 In the first place, as to lectures at all ; — that such oral teach- 
 ing is an important part of the discipline of education we are 
 all bound to believe ; it is part of the system under which we 
 have all grown up, and in a University course it is that one 
 part of the system which is capable of the most development ; 
 an implement which has been growing to perfection by the 
 labours of many generations of tutors and professors. Yet of 
 our best lectures, as well as of our worst, it may be certainly 
 said that that which a hearer carries away with him wiU be 
 in exact and direct proportion to that which he brings : or 
 that a lecture-system, unless it be added upon and followed up 
 by independent reading, must be a deceptive and even useless 
 system. Of course this is a platitude ; but just consider that, 
 if this be true of us, and true of us in those very subjects in 
 which we have been training ourselves ever since we were 
 seven years old, how much stronger is the point of it when it 
 is applied to lecture-audiences that have not studied their sub- 
 ject, that have not even the elements of the study made ac- 
 cessible to them before they come, and that have not yet 
 the means of following up the lessons that are then first pro- 
 pounded to them. 
 
 I fail to see that elementary lectures, short courses of 
 elementary lectures, can convey anything to the mind of 
 beginners, besides the most elementary teaching. Twelve 
 lectures on the scale and plan of Mr. Freeman's Handbook 
 of Universal History would no doubt contain the marrow 
 and spirit of Universal History ; but the working-man who 
 could understand them at the first reading would be fit to be 
 
112 Specialised Lecturing. [v. 
 
 Prime Minister after a second course. If, then, elementary- 
 lecturing is ever to fumisli material lessons to ignorant men, 
 it must, I take it, go on in long and progressive courses, and 
 inculcate both patient heai-ing and the duty of independent 
 reading. But, secondly, historical lecturing to uneducated 
 people must surely begin by interesting them. And accord- 
 ingly I would place the plan of lecturing on character and 
 institutions, things in which every Englishman must almost 
 of necessity feel his interest aroused as soon as he hears them, 
 first ; before the plan of elementary lectures to the people. 
 Even where they do not see the direct application of the 
 lesson, so offered, to their own circumstances, where there may 
 be no such lesson, and no such application, they may be drawn 
 to further study by a very inadequate exposition of a noble 
 life or of a great battle, or even by a historical survey of some 
 scene with the landmarks of which they are familiar. When 
 they are drawn to history, they will not be likely to wish 
 their elementary lessons to be restricted to twelve or to a 
 single course. 
 
 Without then at all disparaging such a plan of element- 
 ary lecture, I feel certain that some preparation for it must 
 be otherwise provided ; if that is to be by lecture, it must be 
 something more directly addressed to our common humanity 
 than an elementary lesson can be ; but I think that it must 
 have begun at school, and that unless it has begun at school 
 it will not do very much good. This is rather a dispirit- 
 ing view for people who are too old to go to school ; but 
 then we are not dependent on lectures altogether ; there are 
 books enough and to spare, and the man who wants to learn 
 will find time to read. 
 
 The moment however that people have, whether by 
 reading at home or by hearing lectures, got beyond the 
 elementary stage of historical study, my doubts about 
 the expediency of popular lectures cease altogether ; and I 
 am glad to say this because, in some of the remarks that I 
 have made, you may have thought me unwisely cynical and 
 inclined rather to discourage effort in this direction. Popular 
 lectures to fairly well-educated people, who have not the time 
 
v.] History in Schools. 113 
 
 or the opportunity of thorough courses of reading, must be 
 valuable ; and the experiments which have been tried in some 
 of our large manufacturing towns have been successful in a 
 remarkable degree. I do not shut my eyes to the fact that 
 in such schemes zeal often outruns discretion, that volunteer 
 lectm-ers are far more likely to spring from the ranks of the 
 unlearned than from the class that has grown old in con- 
 vincing itself of its own ignorance, and that, as I have said of 
 writing, it may be true of lecturing, the zeal for informing 
 other people may arise from political feeling quite as often as 
 from the benevolent desire of teaching them what is good for 
 them. It is most unfortunate that such teaching should be 
 one-sided : how one-sided it could be made we learned from 
 the history of Mechanics' Institutes ; now we may hope that 
 the exertions of the town clergy in their local societies are 
 doing something to redress the balance ; and if I could see my 
 way to an administration on sound principles, apart from party 
 organisation, and in the hands of competent teachers, of such 
 a scheme as that known as the University Extension Scheme, 
 I should be inclined to hope very great things from it. I 
 trust that it will be so shortly. 
 
 If by these or any other plans we can induce men in 
 authority to make the real teaching of History a part of the 
 training of elementary schools, the first, and by no means 
 the least, step will be taken towards furnishing the next 
 generation of Englishmen with the means of exercising con- 
 scientiously, honestly, and judicially, the great political power 
 which is now lodged in their hands. They wiU learn how 
 to vote, and how to guard against imposture, exaggeration, 
 and unfairness in their leaders as weU. as in their opponents. 
 And with real political awakening I shall trust that moral 
 and religious progress wiU do more than keep pace. I go 
 further ; if the study of History can really be made an edu- 
 cational implement in schools, it will raise up a generation 
 who not only will know how to vote, but will bring a 
 judgment, prepared, trained, and in its own sphere exer- 
 cised and developed, to help them in all the great affairs of 
 life. Therefore let us have lectures many and good, books 
 
 I 
 
114 The doom of Researchers. [v. 
 
 few and good ; but above all school teaching fair, honest, and 
 thorough. 
 
 Further I do not think we need look. I do not anticipate 
 Englishmen ever becoming a nation of researchers. We may- 
 come, more of us, to love investigation for its own sake, and to 
 love the study of History for the very exercise that it furnishes 
 to our powers, and for the new regions of interest which ex- 
 pand before us as we proceed. Such study must however 
 continue to be the portion of comparatively few, the few who 
 have leisure, or who have the love in such strength as to 
 enable them to overcome all obstacles. On them I trust the 
 coming age will look more kindly than the present ; which 
 has much praise for the mere material lesson, and worships 
 the statuesque, the picturesque, and the dramatic, but certainly 
 honours the inquirers, the researchers^ with a scanty meed. It 
 is an old, old story. Some of you may remember the passage 
 in Saint Augustine's Confessions, the story he tells of one who 
 was asked how the Deity, being from everlasting, was employed 
 before the heavens and the earth were made ; the reply was 
 'joculariter,' the great doctor tells us, a very pretty repartee, 
 'Alta, inquit, scrutantibus gehennas parabat.' He was pre- 
 paring, to put it gently, a limbo for the advocates of research. 
 ' Haec non respondeo,' says Augustine ; but there are people 
 at all events in one house of parliament who seem to hold the 
 same views : one is glad to see that their number is now re- 
 duced to twelve. 
 
VI. 
 
 LEARNING AND LITERATURE AT THE 
 COURT OF HENRY II. 
 
 (June 11, 1878.) 
 
 WE are at present suffering, and may for some little time 
 to come continue to suffer, from a reaction against 
 medievalism. I call it a reaction, for I think it is only caused 
 by a recoil from modes of thought, art, and action, which 
 have been pressed beyond reality, or have been pressed too 
 rigorously. There are not wanting signs that even in ai-chi- 
 tecture, in which the greatest and most permanent traces of 
 medieval genius ai-e found, the world is growing a little 
 impatient of Gothic buildings, whether as imitative creations 
 or as the claimants of exclusive orthodoxy in their art ; in 
 poetry it can scarcely be denied that the Arthurian legend 
 has begun somewhat to pall upon most ears ; in ritual or 
 ceremonial worship we see much of which we are tempted to 
 ask whether it has any meaning whatever for nine out of 
 every ten of those who profess to value it. The dear delight- 
 ful middle ages are unfortunately growing into something 
 like a by-word. We are perhaps witnessing the turn of the 
 tide of fashion which set in with Sir Walter Scott, and found 
 its great triumphs under Sir Gilbert ; of which, however, all 
 that is real and natural and free wiU live, whilst that which 
 is forced, unspontaneous and merely imitative, wiU not long 
 continue to encumber the ground. 
 
 If this be indeed the case, it will explain some things that 
 touch the study of history. Three or four years ago I was 
 startled by the remark, which occurred in a review of Mr. 
 Kitchin^s History of France in the Athenmum, to the effect that 
 all study of the early periods was thrown away, and that the 
 true interest of history begins only where that history has begun 
 
 I a 
 
ii6 Recoil from Medievalism. [vi. 
 
 to be illustrated by tbe genius of Mr. Carlyle. But I was 
 scai'cely prepared for tbe recommendation of my friend Pro- 
 fessor Pearson, in his recent report on tbe subject of education 
 to the government of Victoria, that the teaching of history in 
 the Australian High Schools sh6uld begin with the year 
 1700. And why? because the ages that precede ai-e so entirely 
 unlike our own ; there were no railways, no large manu- 
 facturing towns, no newspapers to speak of, no such relations 
 as now exist between Lords and Commons, no property tax, 
 no taxation by excise, and a good deal of living religion, 
 which religion -exercised over the daily lives and political 
 views of men an influence that is scarcely comprehensible at 
 the present day. 
 
 Such a theoiy, it seems to me, would go a long way to- 
 wards dispensing with education altogether ; but the expres- 
 sion of such a theory, if it be the result of anything else than 
 a clever man's crotchets, is a mark of a reaction ; and such a 
 reaction as is even painful to one who has spent the best 
 years of his life in attempting to connect the several stages 
 of his country's life and growth ; who believes that the age 
 of railways, and excise and newspapers, would never have been 
 had it not been for the free institutions and high ambitions 
 that were nursed through the preceding ages, and that the 
 present condition of the strength of the world is the direct and 
 continuous result of historical growth and historical training. 
 
 It is no wonder, I say, that to me, and those who have 
 pursued the same line of study, this tendency should seem 
 very much to be deprecated. I do not for a moment suppose 
 that it is dangerous ; aU experience, all belief in progress and 
 true culture, encourage me to believe that it is adventitious. 
 If Australia can content itself with the history of England 
 since the reign of Queen Anne, America has found out long 
 ago the mistake of crippling the historic instinct with any 
 such limitation ; and American scholars, lawyers, and con- 
 stitutionalists are working as zealously at the medieval forms 
 as are the students of England, Ei-ance, and Germany. And 
 not only experience of the past and faith in the futui'e, but 
 sympathy with the historical world both past and future, if 
 
VI. J Httman Nature. 117 
 
 I may use such an expression, inclines me to a protest. Like 
 the man in Terence, I say ' Plumani nil a me alienum puto ; ' 
 I have a sympathy with the struggles of the struggling ages, 
 with the weai'iness of the weary ages, with the faith of the 
 ages of faith, with the controversies of the ages of controversy, 
 with the changes of the ages of change, with the light of the 
 ages of illumination, with the darkness of the dark ages 
 themselves. Nay, I am not sure that I may not some day 
 have to profess myself a convert to the Unity of History and 
 the Education of the World. Por after all, human life is not 
 essentially changed by railways or excise, or newspapers, or 
 even by the property tax : the people before the flood ate and 
 drank, married and were given in marriage, planted and 
 builded ; still Jacob finds his Eachel at the well, and David 
 and Jonathan make their covenant together, and David 
 mourns for Absalom. Natm'al selection, and the survival of 
 the fittest, have not done away with sin and sorrow, and, 
 whatever evolution may have done in the producing of new 
 types, those new types have not swept away the old. To go 
 beyond and behind the ancients, what else do we find in Egypt, 
 Babylon and Nineveh, in Japan, and in the China of imme- 
 morial sameness ? And as there is no history in which we 
 do not find a sympathy, there is none in which we may not 
 find a lesson. 
 
 But to put aside generalities ; the two or three truisms 
 which I have uttered, and the subject which I have chosen 
 for these two lectui'es, are alike suggested by the discussion 
 which we have seen recently earned on by Mr. Freeman 
 and Mr. Froude on the subject of Thomas Becket. I am 
 not going to interfere in a struggle between two such com- 
 batants, nor shall I again refer to either of them, but the 
 opposite lights in which those two champions approach the 
 common subject, shed some rays on the fashion of thought 
 which marks not only the two writers, or the two schools of 
 which they may be supposed to be the disciples^ but the two 
 ways of looking at the middle ages which divide cultivated 
 men of the present day. And I have thought that I might, 
 in attempting to sketch the literary life of an age, on which 
 
ii8 Henry II. [vi- 
 
 so many Hg-lits from various sides are now brong-lit to bear, 
 contribute somewhat, not perhaps to the true estimation of 
 that age, but to a realisation of, and sympathy with, the life 
 of it, without which no estimation or even understanding of 
 it can be thought possible. 
 
 But the men of whom I am going to speak lived 700 years 
 ago — 700 years ; as long a time as separated them from 
 Hengist and Horsa, or Hengist and Horsa from Alexander 
 the Great, or Herodotus from the Trojan war ; or us ourselves 
 perhaps from the New Zealander, who, on London Bridge, is 
 to draw the conclusion that Thucydides ascribes to the rots 
 €TT€iTa and to recognise the disproportion between our ruins 
 and our glory. It is true ; but the only thought that this 
 suggests to me is that, if the New Zealander finds in the ruins 
 of the British Museum half as many of the literary productions 
 of our time, as we now possess of the reign of Henry II, the 
 shades of the Victorian literati may, in the Elysian fields of 
 the period, feel a thrill of satisfaction, and say that a great 
 part of their life has escaped Libitina. 
 
 In truth, I would call your attention to a point which I 
 have never seen fully set out ; the fact that the same age 
 that originated the forms in which our national and constitu- 
 tional life began to mould itself, was also an age of great 
 literary activity ; of very learned and acute men, and of culture 
 enough to appreciate and conserve the fruits of their labours. 
 
 We aE know the debt that England owes to the great 
 men of the thirteenth century, to its political, religious, and 
 scholastic life : Simon de Montfort, Grosseteste, Edward I, 
 and the rest ; but I do not remember ever to have seen an 
 estimate of the debt that the thirteenth owed to the twelfth, 
 save and except in the recognition of Henry II's constitu- 
 tional work. I can now only attempt an outline of any such 
 view as is needed for the purpose, but I think that, when I 
 have briefly reviewed the period, you will allow that in other 
 matters besides constitutional, the glories of the latter age 
 were the result of, and not much in themselves superior to, 
 the glories of the former. 
 
 I will begin with the king himself, for, as the medieval 
 
VI. J The Family Taste for Learning. 119 
 
 writers were never tired of quoting, ' vulgi tiu'ba movetur 
 regis ad exemplar.' Henry II was by his very descent a 
 champion of literary culture. Not to speak of his grand- 
 father, Henry Beauclere, whose clerkship was very probably of 
 a very elementary sort, he was the lineal descendant of that 
 Fulk the Good who had told King Lothar that ' Rex illite- 
 ratus ' was ' asinus coronatus.' He shared too those hereditary 
 characteristics which so strongly marked his two uncles, 
 Baldwin III and Amalric I, Kings of Jerusalem. Both of 
 these princes were, according to William of Tyre, good 
 scholars, and both extremely fond of history. Baldwin was 
 the better professor ; Amalric the better examiner ; Baldwin 
 the more serious and orthodox, Amalric the more superficial ; 
 but both were students of history, and given to reading and 
 discussion — discussion which threatened now and then to go 
 beyond the bounds of orthodoxy. 
 
 Peter of Blois gives a similar character of Henry, and in 
 words so nearly resembling those of William of Tyre that the 
 two writers notably confirm one another's probability. And in 
 Peter's sketch this feature comes in quite by the way, for he 
 is describing Henry as a great huntsman. ' He has always 
 in his hands bows and arrows, swords and hunting spears, 
 save when he is busy in council or over his books. For as 
 often as he can get breathing time amid his business cares, 
 he occupies himself with private reading, or takes pains in 
 working out some knotty question among his clerks. Your 
 king,' he is writing to the Archbishop of Palermo, ' is a good 
 scholar, but ours is far better ; I know the abilities and 
 accompKshments of both. You know that the King of Sicily 
 was my pupil for a year ; you yom'self taught him the 
 elements of verse-making and literary composition ; from me 
 he had further and deeper lessonSj but as soon as I left the 
 kingdom he threw away his books and took to the easy- 
 going ways of the court. But with the King of England 
 there is school every day, constant conversation of the best 
 scholars and discussion of questions.' 
 
 He had indeed been well taught; notwithstanding the 
 troubled times in which his youth had been trained, he had 
 
T20 Learned Men aboiit Court/ [vi. 
 
 learned literature at Bristol Castle in the household of his 
 uncle, Robert of Gloucester ; his tutor Matthew, who was some 
 time his chancellor, and who probably was identical with the 
 Bishop of Angers, Matthew of London, took him in charge 
 when he was nine and kept him close at work for four years ; 
 there doubtless he had the acquaintance of Gilbert Foliot, 
 then Abbot of Gloucester, certainly one of the ablest poli- 
 ticians as well as of the best scholars of the time ; whilst, 
 when political affairs allowed it, he might learn somewhat 
 more under the eye of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, 
 the patron of Vacarius the lawyer and John of Salisbury the 
 philosopher. 
 
 The hereditary taste for history may perhaps, to some 
 extent, account for the considerable number of independent 
 historians who flourished under him ; such chroniclers as those 
 known by the name of Benedict of Peterborough, and Roger 
 of Hoveden, bear intrinsic marks of having been royal his- 
 toriographers ; one distinguished officer of the Exchequer, 
 Master Thomas Brown, kept a Roll on which were entered all 
 the doings of the king : Richard Fitzneal, the High Treasurer 
 of the Exchequer, composed a similar book, the Tricolumnis, 
 in which he kept a regular register of Henry's acts and of 
 the public documents of the time. There was, as we shall 
 see presently, a fashion for writing history. 
 
 But not only so ; Henry was also a lawyer. Very early in 
 his reign we find him, in the Chronicle of Battle, dictating a 
 new form of writ ; he heard and decided law suits, he took an 
 active part in devising budgets, he took an independent line 
 on religious toleration, and reinsed to persecute. AU these are 
 signs of general enlightenment, but the man is even better 
 known by his friends. Becket indeed was no great scholar 
 in the early days when the king treated him as an equal 
 and confidential friend, but later in life, when we find Henry 
 choosing for companions such men as Hugh of Lincoln and 
 Baldwin of Canterbury, both of them as remarkable for 
 learning and eloquence as for piety, or even Giraldus Cam- 
 brensis, who had a fund of humour and cleverness that is 
 as noteworthy as his extensive reading; or Peter of Blois, 
 
VI.] Eleanor and her Sons, 121 
 
 who acted for some time as the king's secretary, and, with 
 all his time-serving and self-seeking, was a distinctly learned 
 man in both history and theology, we feel sure that Henrj^ 
 was neither the mere voluptuary that his enemies represented 
 him, nor merely the man of business that his more lasting 
 works prove him to have been. 
 
 It has been the fashion to suppose that some literary in- 
 fluences were brought into England from Southern France 
 by Queen Eleanor, and that it was from her that Richard, 
 and perhaps John also, inherited some instincts of the kind. 
 But I confess that, as ag'ainst the claims of her husband, 
 Eleanor's title to our gratitude depends very much on con- 
 jecture, and partly on a confusion between Aquitanian and 
 Proven9al civilisation. That Eleanor was a clever and culti- 
 vated companion for her husband we may accept as a matter 
 of course, and she probably would have some share in the 
 early education of her sons ; but they were very soon re- 
 moved from her influence, and after the year 1 1 73 she prob- 
 ably saw very little of either them or her husband : whilst 
 in England, court or country, her direct influence could never 
 have been comparable with that of the king. As for her 
 judgments in the Com-ts of Love, I suppose, we may safely 
 relegate them to the regions of romance, and if they were 
 authentic they would not prove much as to her Kterary cul- 
 ture. But we may, I think, confidently assume that she was 
 a well-educated woman for those days, and that in her long 
 captivity she had something else to amuse herself with 
 besides needlework. A woman who, after twelve years of 
 seclusion, could come out of prison not only fit to take the 
 reins of government during a short interregnum, but able 
 to exercise great influence in European politics until she was 
 nearly eighty years old, must have possessed not merely 
 vitality and ability, but mental resources also of no ordinary 
 character. 
 
 However this may have been, some of her children, if not 
 all, were educated with care, and appear as either possessed 
 of learning themselves or as the patrons of learned men. 
 Henry, the eldest son, was, as we are told, devoted to arms ; 
 
122 Henry and Richard. [vi. 
 
 if he was not equally accomplished in letters it was not 
 because such accomplishments were undervalued by the people 
 whom he was expected to rule. There is among the letters 
 of Peter of Blois an epistle written in the name of Eotrou, 
 archbishop of Rouen, and at the express wish of the Norman 
 bishops, urging in strong terms, and by cogent examples, 
 the importance of a literary training for a young priace. 
 Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, King David, Constan- 
 tine, Theodosius, Justinian, and Leo are pressed into the 
 service. No doubt the advice was taken ; but the stormy 
 career of the younger Henry does not aiford many indications 
 of its results. One book we know, a book unfortunately lost, 
 was especially written for his amusement. Gervase of Tilbury, 
 who, many years after Plenry's death, wrote for his grandson, 
 the Emperor Otto, the Otia Imperialia, tells us that he wrote 
 a Liher Facetiarum for the young king, in which no doubt he 
 collected the amusing stories of the popes and emperors that 
 were current at the time, some of which are probably preserved 
 for us in the pages of Ralph de Diceto. It is possible that 
 the Otia Imperialia were originally drawn up for the instruc- 
 tion of the same prince. It is curious, however, that in none 
 of the panegyrics of this unfortunate boy is any special stress 
 laid on his knowledge of letters, and it is even possible 
 that the epistle of Archbishop Rotrou was intended as a re- 
 monstrance against the exclusively military training of the 
 heir to the crown ; certainly Thomas Becket, to whose care 
 he is said to have been committed in his youth, would, at 
 that period of his career, have been better qualified to in- 
 struct him in arms than in letters. 
 
 With Richard it was otherwise. In his case we must cer- 
 tainly allow some amount of literary knowledge and skill. We 
 may not perhaps credit him with the quotations from the 
 classical poets which the historians of the third crusade put in 
 his mouth, but we cannot refuse to believe those writers when 
 they tell us of the lampoons of the king's own composition which 
 were sung in the camp in contempt of the Duke of Burgundy ; 
 and the stream of time, in which so many more precious things 
 have been submerged, has brought down to us some few sir- 
 
VI.] International Intercourse. 123 
 
 ventes or satiric lays that entitle Richard to the name of a trou- 
 vere. His education in the south of France no doubt qualified 
 him for such compositions ; but his father's foreign dominions 
 may also have furnished him with more valuable instruction. 
 At the schools of Tours his half-brother Geofirey was educated, 
 and there Eichard himself may have obtained the elements 
 of that ' scientia ' which is markedly ascribed to him in 
 contrast with his brothers. Of Geoffrey of Brittany we know 
 no more than that he was an accomplished knight. John's 
 reputation for scholarship seems to rest on the fact that he 
 once borrowed a book of the Abbot of S. Alban's. But the 
 real interest of such inquiries does not lie iu the question 
 whether such and such kings could read or write, but in the 
 general character of the court which was kept about them ; 
 the king might be illiterate, but if the court around him was 
 full of learned men we may safely infer that the central 
 figm-e was no contemner of learning. Of the king's daughters 
 we know little more than that they were all married to 
 princes who took a conspicuous place among the pioneers of 
 medieval culture. Matilda, the eldest, was the wife of Henry 
 of Saxony, who was not only a great conqueror but a great 
 traveller and collector of chronicles ; Eleanor, the second, 
 married King Alfonso of Castile, the founder of the University 
 of Palencia ; and Johanna, the youngest, William, the good 
 king of Sicily, who was not only, as we have seen, both an 
 educated man himself, but also the patron of many learned 
 Englishmen. 
 
 There was something, however, besides the literary wide- 
 awakeness of Henry and his family that made England and its 
 Court at the time a centre of literary activity. Henry was 
 the most powerful king of the West, and his hand was in the 
 affairs of all the Western kingdoms : and this at the time 
 when international acquaintance was carried on upon the very 
 largest scale. There can hardly have been a period of our 
 history in which the intercourse between England and France 
 was freer or more frequent. The enormous number of letters 
 which passed between England and Rome, every letter, 
 remember, carried by a separate messenger ; the stream of 
 
124 Norsemen at Cozirt. [vi. 
 
 pilgrims to the East, and the prominence given in the 
 histories of the time to the adventures of the few that 
 returned ; the cosmopolitan character of the clergy, the fre- 
 quent promotions of English and Normans in foreign churches, 
 and their continued intercourse with their friends at home ; 
 the recourse to foreign Universities, and the honours won by 
 English scholars at those Universities, were a constant in- 
 ducement to others to follow them ; the welcome given at the 
 English Court to foreign scholars, and finally, the fact that the 
 English Court was open to all exiles from East or West, 
 North or South ; all these served to arouse and keep awake 
 that curiosity about foreign matters which will not be satis- 
 fied without the acquisition of learning : so that learning is 
 not sought for itself only, but as a part of the equipment of a 
 man of the world. A little may go a long way under such 
 circumstances, but yet every little helps to make a miekle, and 
 there were many men about, as I shall hope to show you, who 
 were bent on picking up all they could, and to whom nothing 
 came amiss. 
 
 ' To run rapidly over the more prominent examples under 
 each of the heads I have enumerated : in 1 155, the first year 
 of Henry II, there was an embassy from the kings of Norway. 
 Henry received the envoys, and sent them back with ambas- 
 sadors of his own and large presents ; and the next year there 
 was a similar transaction with Sweden. Here at once opens 
 up a field of interesting investigation. Norway and Sweden 
 were about as far from England as they are now, but they 
 seem to have been even more neighbourly. The Norse 
 settlements in the islands had not forgotten their origin. 
 The Bishop of Sodor and Man was expected to seek conse- 
 cration at Drontheim. Just before Henry's accession, the 
 Bishop of Bergen had visited Fountains Abbey and obtained 
 a colony of Cistercians for a eeU in Norway itself, called, 
 after that beautiful custom of the order, the House of Light. 
 Again, in 11 64, another Norwegian prelate appears in the 
 royal accounts as receiving a gift of ^3 6s. M. ; and again, 
 in 1183, the Archbishop Eystein, of Nidros, was maintained 
 for 17 weeks at the expense of the English Court. These 
 
VI.] Germans at Court. 125 
 
 two dates synchronise with the Norwegian revolutions under 
 Magnus Herlingson and Swerre Birkbain, and we thus learn 
 how the detailed accounts of those revolutions came into 
 the English Chronicles of Benedict and Eoger of Hoveden, 
 and William of Newburgh : it was at St. Edmund's that 
 Archbishop Eystein was entertained at the king's expense from 
 August 1 181 to February 11 8a. And this leads us on to the 
 recollection that it was the Englishman Nicolas Breakspere 
 who had been legate of the Roman see for the settlement of the 
 Scandinavian churches, before he became pope as Adrian IV, 
 and so liberally bestowed the realm of Ireland on the king of 
 the English. 
 
 The intercourse with Germany under Frederick Barbarossa 
 was steady and probably continuous ; for although there was 
 little love lost between England and the empire, and the Ho- 
 henstaufen were always somewhat drawn to France, the quarrel 
 of Henry with Becket and that of Frederick with Alexander III 
 so nearly coincided, that there was always a prospect that the 
 two great sovereigns might make common cause against Lewis 
 VII. Hence in 11 65 there was a German embassy under 
 the Archbishop of Cologne in London, and the English lords 
 showed their orthodoxy by refusing to meet the schismatic 
 prelate at dinner, although Henry's own envoys at Wiirtzburg 
 were credibly reported to have given in the national adhesion 
 to the antipope. The marriage of Matilda with duke Henry, 
 his subsequent quarrel with the emperor, Henry's negotiations 
 for the support and restoration of his son-in-law, the long 
 exile of Henry the Lion and his stay in England, gave English 
 society much interest in German politics ; so much so, that it 
 is from the English Chroniclers of this period that much of 
 the German history of the time has to be written ; and 
 English writers took sides in the Welf and Hohenstaufen 
 quarrel, describing both events and characters with partisan 
 colouring that is rare even in their pictures of home politics. 
 Thus, too, copies of important documents came to be preserved 
 in the English Annals, and we are so led to infer that the 
 relations of the Court, to whose hands primarily these docu- 
 ments must have come, with the recording annaKsts, were of 
 
126 German and Spanish Embassies. [vi. 
 
 the closest description; and we understand how the great 
 Longchamp or Walter of Coutances could send down import 
 tant dispatches to he copied into the historical collections of 
 Ralph de Diceto. For when we talk of the public and of the 
 court of Henry II, we are not talking of such a vague and 
 abstract idealism as the court and public of the reign of 
 Victoria, made up of society at large at one end and the press 
 and newspaper correspondents at the other; with all that lies 
 between ; the Court is a small body of well-known men, and 
 the public is the aggregate of the clergy and knights who 
 know foreign lands, can speak foreign tongues and take an 
 intelligent interest in European politics. Not to dwell, how- 
 ever, on these points; in 1176 there were at the English 
 Court at Westminster, on the 13th of November, embassies 
 from Constantinople, and from Frederick I, the Eastern and 
 Western Csesars, from France, both Rheims and Flanders, and 
 from Henry the Lion ; the same year the Sicilian envoys 
 came to demand Johanna in marriage for their king, and the 
 kings of Navarre and Castile applied to Henry to arbitrate on 
 a great international dispute in Spain. It is true that on this 
 last occasion there were some difficulties of interpretation ; 
 the English could not understand the Spanish envoys, a fact 
 which seems to indicate that thus early Spanish Latin had 
 become somewhat rusty, for of course it must have been in 
 Latin that the negotiations would be conducted ; but the 
 difficulty was surmounted and the arbitration settled ; the 
 documents concerning it, which are totally without interest to 
 the English mind except in so far as they contained a full 
 pedigree of the Spanish dynasties, being circulated among the 
 chroniclers of the time, and so preserved in several authorities. 
 
 With Italy and Sicily, owing first to the constant recourse 
 to Rome during the Becket and other Canterbury quarrels, and 
 secondly to the sustained connexion with the Sicilian Normans, 
 which came to its climax in the marriage of Johanna, the offer 
 of the Sicilian crown to Henry himself, and the contract of 
 marriage between Arthur of Brittany and king Tancred's 
 daughter, the relations of the English were very close. 
 
 But in fact the diplomatic activity of Henry II throughout 
 
VI.] Medieval Letters. 127 
 
 his reign was enormous ; all nations of Europe came by 
 envoys to his court, and his ministers, especially Richard 
 of Ilchester and John of Oxford, ran about from one end of 
 Europe to another. Spain, the most distant in interest of all, 
 became familiar by the pilgrimages to Compostella and by 
 the substitution of service against the Moorish infidels for 
 service against the Turks. Both Henry and his eldest son 
 purposed, or said they purposed, pilgrimages to Compostella, 
 and it is well known how great was the debt of the infant 
 kingdom of Portugal to English pilgrims. We see, too, how 
 the elaborate surveys of the Spanish coasts found their way 
 into several of our chronicles, so that Spanish geography, 
 scarcely less than German political history, owes something to 
 the English of this period. 
 
 To go, however, one step further ; the diplomatic intercourse 
 is illustrated not merely by the occasional visits of ambas- 
 sadors, but by the constant interchange of letters between 
 Englishmen abroad and at home, or between Englishmen and 
 foreigners. Now the subject of medieval letter-writing is one 
 on which a very great deal of entertaining discussion might 
 be taken, but I can now only note a few points in this par- 
 ticular connexion. 
 
 At first sight, medieval letters are disappointing ; the 
 amount of sentiment, and especially of religious generalities, 
 seems altogether out of proportion to the amount of news. 
 That arises from two causes : firstly, many of our collections of 
 letters are edited collections, made by the writers, who prided 
 themselves upon their correct Latinity, and published their 
 correspondence rather as literary exercises than as historical 
 memorials ; thus, so far from setting special value on the 
 spontaneous unartificial morsels, which are to us the bonnes 
 bouehes of letter-writing, these men actually cut them out of 
 their codified letters. This may be seen in almost every case 
 in which copies of the original letters can be compared with 
 the revised editions put out by the writers ; especially is it the 
 case with Alcuin's letters. Many of the letters of Peter of 
 Blois look as if they had received the same treatment, and in 
 the Becket correspondence the reader is often nonplussed by 
 
128 Letters and Literature. [vi. 
 
 finding a provoking etcetera, which marks the point at which 
 the gossip, or even the serious news, was expunged by the 
 editor. 
 
 The other reason is that in very many cases the letters were 
 little more than credentials. The real news was carried by the 
 bearer of the letter, and the real force of the communication 
 was not in the postscript, we may say, but in the postman. 
 StiU, we often come upon letters and letter-writers of real 
 interest, and a good man may certainly be known by good 
 letters, although many good men wrote very weak ones. John 
 of Salisbury, among Becket's correspondents, wrote real letters, 
 and those of Richard of Ilchester, preserved among Foliot's, 
 are the writing of a business-like man. Even amidst the 
 wearisome sameness of the Canterbury letters we now and 
 then get a glimpse of life, such as in the letter of Master John 
 &om Lombardy, when he explains why he could not write 
 from the Great S. Bernard. ' Pardon me for not writing. I 
 have been on the Mount of Jove ; on the one hand looking up 
 to the heavens of the mountains, on the other shuddering at 
 the hell of the valleys ; feeling myself so much nearer to 
 heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard. 
 " Lord," I said; " restore me to my brethren, that I may tell 
 them, that they come not into this place of torment." Place 
 of torment, indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony 
 ground is ice alone, and you cannot set down a foot safely; 
 where, strange to say, although it is so slippery that you can- 
 not stand, the death, into which there is every facility for a 
 fall, is certain death. I put my hand in my scrip, that I might 
 scratch out a syllable or two to youi- sincerity ; lo, I found my 
 ink-bottle filled with a dry mass of ice : my fingers, too, refused 
 to wi-ite : my beard was stifi" with frost, and my breath con- 
 gealed into a long icicle. I could not write the news I wished.' 
 But this is a digression, and such scraps are not common. 
 
 Well, the mass of twelfth century letters is so large that, 
 notwithstanding the drawbacks, they furnish a large con- 
 tribution to the materials for national, literary, and social 
 history. John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, Arnulf .of Lisieux, 
 Thomas Becket, Gilbert Foliot, the monks of Canterbury, 
 
vi.] Promotions Abroad. 129 
 
 fomish a series of thick volumes, the many-sided interest 
 of which is not easily exhausted. These collections contain 
 news from every part of Christendom ; some of them, although 
 only a few, are really news letters, containing all that the 
 writers could pick up, like the news letters of later times. 
 All, however, contain evidence by which the literary culture, 
 as well as the political interest felt at the time, may be tested. 
 The citations of the Latin poets which occur so very frequently 
 are amusing, and often amusingly inappropriate. There is 
 something touchingly comic in the monk of Canterbury who 
 will bring in Ovid's Art of Love as a treasury of stock quo- 
 tations. Lucan's Pharsalia, Claudian, Statins, even Silius 
 Italicus, but Ovid most of all, notably more than Virgil and 
 Horace, seem to have been the storehouse of proverbs. Shall 
 we be so cruel as to say that the frequency with which par- 
 ticular passages are quoted suggests that the writers betook 
 themselves to a Margarita Poetica, a dictionary of quota- 
 tions, rather than to the authors themselves ? No, it is only 
 true in the very penny-a-lining letters of inferior men. 
 Certainly the best writers, like John of Salisbury, could both 
 read and criticise the originals. But again I am straying from 
 the point. 
 
 The next head which I mentioned as illustrating the pro- 
 cess by which international intercourse worked in a direc- 
 tion favourable to literary progress, was the otherwise curious 
 and interesting point, the number of Englishmen promoted in 
 foreign churches ; and, by interchange of good oiEces, the 
 cases in which foreigners of note were promoted in the English 
 Chm'ch. I say, in both eases, men of note, because no doubt 
 many Frenchmen, and even Italians, of whom nothing else is 
 known, were enriched with English preferment, and, probably, 
 the few names of Englishmen promoted abroad, which history 
 has recorded, might be supplemented with large additions if 
 the records of foreign churches had been kept as carefully as 
 those of our own. And I am not careful to distinguish here 
 between Norman and native Englishmen, because, from the 
 very accession of Henry II, I regard the two elements as 
 forming one people, and indeed, except in the very highest 
 
 K 
 
1 30 Foreign Promotions. [vi. 
 
 ranks of the baronage, it is impossible now to distinguisli 
 whether the English or the Norman strain was the strongest 
 in any given Englishman. And for a similar reason, it is not 
 necessary to include the Norman and Angevin provinces in onr 
 calculation. Many of the great families from which Norman 
 bishops were taken, such as the Beaumonts and the Bohuns, 
 were equally powerful on both sides of the channel, and, it may 
 be added, in the Norman kingdom of Sicily also. Such men 
 as Rotrou of Beaumont, Archbishop of Rouen, and Henry of 
 Beaumont, Bishop of Bayeux, not only were members of a kin- 
 ship which counted the English Earls of Warwick and Leicester, 
 and the Norman Counts of Meulan as cousins^ but were near 
 relations of the Sicilian kings, and knew how to push in the 
 southern regions the fortunes of their servants : the broken 
 up condition of France left potentates like the Counts of 
 Champagne and Flanders able to treat on an equal footing with 
 the royalties around them^ and to govern their own churches 
 quite as freely as the King of France or the Emperor could 
 govern theirs. Hence there was a good deal of international 
 promotion as a matter of course. I shall, however, name only 
 the greatest names : and first take the Englishmen who were 
 promoted abroad. 
 
 The two most eminent instances in France and the French 
 speaking countries are the two Johns, John of Poictiers 
 and John of Salisbury; the latter a name that is so inti- 
 mately bound up with our literary history that it may be ad- 
 duced to illustrate almost every sort of distinction. John of 
 Poictiers was a native of Kent, probably of Canterbury itself; 
 he was one of the fellow-scholars with Becket and Roger of 
 Pont I'Eveque in the household of Archbishop Theobald, 
 which, as I shall have to note presently, was at that 
 time a substitute in England for the as yet undeveloped 
 Universities ; he ran neck and neck with those great candi- 
 dates for promotion, and managed, by the adroitness and 
 moderation of his conduct, to steer clear of the difficulties in 
 which they were constantly embroiled with either one another 
 or some third party. Promoted early in the reign of Henry 
 to the rich stall of treasurer at York, John became in 11 6a 
 
VI.] Englishmen in France. 131 
 
 Bishop of Poietiers, and in 11 81 Archbistiop of Lyons ; that 
 great and semi-independent see he held until 11 93, when he 
 resigned and fell back on his minor preferments and the 
 company of the Cistercians of Clairvaux ; but to the day of 
 his death he retained the living of Eynesford in Kent, and 
 kept up a close correspondence with the Canterbury clergy 
 and with the learned men of England, especially Kalph 
 de Dieeto, Dean of S. Paul's, with whom he had in his 
 youth competed for the archdeaconry of Middlesex. The 
 letters of John of Poietiers are among the less important 
 contributions to the Becket literature, but they are worth 
 reading as the composition of a man of mark, of sound learn- 
 ing and prudent character, and an eminent canonist. The 
 career of John of Salisbury I shall recur to more particularly 
 further on ; he also was a son of the Church of Canterbury, 
 and retained the closest relations with his Alma Mater as long 
 as he lived. 
 
 Another Canterbury man was Ralph de Serris, or Ralph of 
 Sarr in Thanet, who was Dean of Eheims from 11 76 to 1194 ; 
 who was a most dutiful son of the church to which he owed 
 his education, and no doubt a faithful agent of the monastic 
 interest, which found at Rheims such powerful protection in 
 the Archbishop William of Champagne and the great family to 
 which he belonged. Of Ralph of Sarr as a literaiy man I 
 only know that he wrote fairly good Latin. These three men, 
 you will observe, although sons of the Convent of Canterbury, 
 were not monks ; they were pupils of the great school of the 
 monastery and, as clerks of the primate, affiliated to that 
 Church. When they received foreign promotion they had to 
 be released by a formal document from their allegiance to the 
 Mother Church. John of Poietiers was one of the clerks 
 whom Archbishop Baldwinj and Hubert after him, would 
 have made canons of that college at Lambeth which they 
 intended to set up as a centre of ecclesiastical learning and 
 dignity, emancipated from monastic restrictions ; a scheme 
 which, if it had succeeded, might have possibly fixed the 
 University life of England, and its ecclesiastical centre, in 
 London itself. 
 
 K 3 
 
132 Englishmen in Italy. [vi. 
 
 Not to waste time upon minor names, we go on to Italy : there 
 the greatest name of course is that of Nicolas Breakespere, the 
 pupil of the Monastery of S. Alban's ; the great legate of the 
 north, the confidential friend of John of Salisbury, the one 
 English pope, and the bestower of Ireland on Henry II. His 
 life and career lie only on the very edge of the period which we 
 are considering ; and I can say no more of him than that he 
 is one of those figures of medieval history of which what 
 little we know is suggestive of a great deal more that we 
 should desire to know. He was unquestiona-bly a great pope ; 
 that is, a great constructive pope, not a controversial one, like 
 those who preceded and followed ; a man of organising power 
 and missionary zeal ; a reformer, and, although he did not take 
 a wise way of showing it, a true Englishman. Next in dignity 
 to him would come, if we were quite sure of anything respect- 
 ing him, the great Eobertus Pullus, who is said to have been 
 made Chancellor of the Apostolic See under Lucius II and 
 Eugenius III, and who likewise lies a little outside our limits. 
 His history has yet to be worked out ; but as he is, like John 
 of Salisbury, a historical link of some importance, I must say 
 a word or two about him. We know from a letter of S. 
 Bernard addressed to Ascelin, Bishop of Rochester, between 
 the years 114a and 11 48, that Eobertus Pullus was at that 
 time studying with great success in the University of Paris ; 
 he was then, it would appear from the Rochester Pasti, Arch- 
 deacon of Rochester; and S. Bernard's petition to the Bishop, 
 that he might be allowed to pursue his studies at Paris, is thus 
 quite in character with the usual practice for an archdeacon to 
 go and study for some time in a foreign university before he 
 began the formal exercise of archidiaeonal functions. In 1 146, 
 or thereabouts, Robert was still at Paris teaching theology, 
 and there John of Salisbury attended his lectures during the 
 last two of the twelve years, dating from 1136, that his edu- 
 cation was in progress. If these dates are accurate, it is a 
 little difficult to identify him with the person who appears 
 as Chancellor of the Apostolic See in 1145 and 1146. It is 
 not impossible that he was then for a short time transferred to 
 Rome; this, however, will leave no time for his teaching 
 
VI.] Thomas Brown. 133 
 
 divinity, as he is said to tave done, at Exeter and Oxford. 
 He is mentioned as Chancellor of the Apostolic See by 
 the contemporary writer John of Hexham, who dates him 
 in 1 146. Anyhow, he was a man of great mark; that 
 we know from S. Bernard and John of Salisbury, and from 
 his extant works, Sentences, and Sermons. But there was 
 another Robert, also connected with Rochester, also an Italian 
 Chancellor, and mentioned as a distinct person by the same 
 historian of Hexham. He was a native of ' Salesby,' whether 
 Selby or Salisbury I shall not decide, who tried his fortunes 
 in Sicily and became chancellor to King Roger about the same 
 year 1146. Is it possible or probable that he has somehow 
 become confounded with Robertus Pullus ? Certain it is that 
 Paris, Archdeacon of Rochester in Henry II's reign, was the 
 nephew of Robertus Pullus ; certain it is also that Paris had 
 relations in Sicily, and was chosen as an envoy in 1176 to that 
 court because of his connexions there : it is needless to add that 
 archdeaconries went in those days very frequently from uncle 
 to nephew, and not uncommonly from father to son. Whether, 
 however, we have here two Roberts, or two Robert! PuUi, for 
 the sojourn in Apulia might entitle the second Robert to the 
 name of PuUanus, or only one, we have the starting-point of 
 the usage according to which English ministers were domiciled 
 at the Sicilian Court. Robert may have been the first ; he 
 was not the last. 
 
 Master Thomas Brown, with whose name the readers of 
 Mr. Freeman's books must have become by this time familiar, 
 was another Englishman, a great financial authority, who 
 enjoyed the confidence of King Roger until the death of that 
 king in 1 1 54- Thomas Brown is the first modem Englishman, 
 if not the first Englishman of any sort, whose name was written 
 in Greek. In that language, as Thomas Brounos, it appears 
 among the attestations of Greek Charters of King Roger. 
 After Roger's death, when a new king arose, who, according to 
 the Dialogus de Scaccario, knew not Thomas, he returned to his 
 native land, and was immediately summoned by Henry II to 
 his restored exchequer ; he became the king's almoner, and 
 kept at the exchequer a separate roll of the king's doings. 
 
134 Englishmen in Sicily. [vi- 
 
 He had a handsome pension, too, £'^6 a year, if not more, 
 and an allowance for his nephew Ralph. Madox goes so far 
 as to conjecture that the special duties which were assigned 
 to him were the basis of the later office of Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer. 
 
 Another Englishman in Sicily was Herbert, a man of Middle- 
 sex, who was Ai-chbishop of Compsa between the years 1169 
 and 1 1 80; another, more famous, was Richard, surnamed 
 Palmer, Bishop of Syracuse from 1 1 65 to 1 1 83, and Archbishop 
 of Messina from 1 1 83 onwards ; a kindly man who entertained 
 the relations of Becket when they were diiven into exile. He 
 had the credit of first proposing a matrimonial alliance between 
 the two royal houses, and seems to have been detached from 
 Becket's interests by the hope of obtaining the Bishopric of 
 Lincoln. Walter, Archbishop of Palermo 1169-1187, and 
 Bartholomew his brother. Bishop of Agrigentum, who suc- 
 ceeded him at Palermo, are likewise called Englishmen. So 
 close and continuous was the connexion maintained by these 
 men with the kindred realm that we can quite understand the 
 influences which prevailed on WiUiam the Good to propose 
 Henry II as his successor, and Richard I meditating the trans- 
 lation of the Archbishop of Monreale to Canterbury. More 
 apposite, however, to our present subject is the fact that 
 owing to these men and their connexions at home, there was 
 a constant flow of epistolary intercourse between England and 
 Italy, independent of that which moved to and fro between 
 Rome and the English Church. Henry II doubtless availed 
 himself of both currents for his diplomatic intrigues. The 
 King of Sicily and the Bishop of Syracuse, as well as the men of 
 Milan and Bologna, were sub-agents in the great game which 
 he was playing. And the Italians, Italian as they were, learned 
 to feel some interest in England besides a pecuniary one. The 
 books of later Italian heraldry recognise, I fear somewhat 
 apocryphally, the exiled kinsfolk of Becket as the progenitors 
 of the family of Becchetti of Fabriano. Now and then they 
 repaid the loan of Robert Pullus and Thomas Brown with 
 a scholar or clerk of half English birth, as Robert and 
 Thomas had in their turn repaid part of the debt incui-red by 
 
VI,] Exchange of Scholars. 135 
 
 England from Lanfranc of Pavia and Anselm of Aosta. 
 But here I must stop ; in the other lecture I shall hope 
 to get into the more purely literary half of the subject, and 
 trace some of the results that accrued from these multiplied 
 relations of courts and councils. The subject, superficially as 
 it must be treated in lectui-es like this, persistently grows 
 upon our hands. 
 
VII. 
 
 LEARNING AND LITERATURE AT THE 
 COURT OF HENRY II. 
 
 (June 13, 1878.) 
 
 IN following out the inquiry which I began in the last 
 Leetui-e, in order to complete the outline of oui- subject and 
 take into account all the influences that conduced to a full 
 literaiy intercourse between England and the Continent during 
 the period of Henry II, the next point that I should take 
 would be the enumeration of those foreign scholars and literary 
 ecclesiastics who were favoured or promoted in England. This 
 point, however, need not detain us long, for there were very 
 few. England itself had no love for foreigners ; whether as 
 captains of mercenaries, or as papal nominees to ecclesiastical 
 preferment, they impartially detested them ; and the detes- 
 tation was very frequently justified by the view which the 
 foreigners took of England and the English ; a country out 
 of which as much revenue as could be wrung should be wrung, 
 and a people at whom, when they had plundered them, it was 
 their delight to laugh. Nor were the Angevin kings much 
 inclined to a policy which they knew to be most odious to 
 their subjects ; Henry II avoided either ruling or controlling 
 England by foreign ministers, and did very little to encourage 
 an influx of foreign ecclesiastics. Excepting such persons as, 
 like Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and two or three 
 others, were closely connected by blood with the royal house, 
 few foreigners were made bishops, and when Beeket, according 
 to his biogi-apher, wished to restore learning at the eom-t, he 
 urged the king to recall home the English scholai-s who were 
 studying abroad. Of the few, who would be all that could be 
 named, the most prominent are Peter of Blois and Master 
 Vacarius. 
 
 Peter of Blois seems to have made his home in England, 
 
VII.] Foreign Scholars in England. 137 
 
 after he had tried his chances in Sicily, where he had been tutor 
 to William the Good. He settled here about the year 11 73, 
 after the Becket troubles were over, and made himself useful 
 to both the king and the archbishops. Like John of Salisbuiy 
 he made his pen serviceable to his masters, and many of the 
 letters of his composition which are preserved were written in 
 their names. As chancellor or secretary to the Archbishop, as 
 Archdeacon first of Bath and afterwards of London, and Dean 
 of Wolverhampton, Peter seems to have led a scrambling sort 
 of literary existence ; being used by the kings and primates 
 on services both diplomatic and ecclesiastical, for which his 
 versatility and command of language qualified him, but not 
 being much trusted or highly promoted. Master Vacarius, on 
 the other hand, was a very obscm-e, or rather indistinct, person ; 
 indeed so little is known of him that it is almost hazardous 
 to commit oneself to the theory that the earlier and later 
 Vacarius were the same person. He is of course known to 
 lawyers as the Lombard scholar, who, in 1149, attempted to 
 introduce the study of the civil law into England and to teach 
 it at Oxford. He is said to have been silenced by King 
 Stephen, and as a teacher he disappears, but from two or 
 three passages in the Becket letters it seems that he remained 
 in England ; in the list of the canons of Southwell his name 
 occurs later on in the century, and as late even as 11 98 Pope 
 Innocent III commissioned Vacarius, with another ecclesiastic 
 of the northern province, to carry into execution certain letters 
 touching the crusade. If the name is indeed rightly read, 
 and belongs to the Magister Vacarius of 1149, he must have 
 been very old and of little use. The history, however, both of 
 Peter of Blois and of Vacarius, has been carefully worked out 
 by independent writers of authority, and I use them here 
 only as examples. Mere ecclesiastics, such as Simon of Apulia, 
 who was made Bishop of Exeter by King John after having 
 been Dean of York for many years ; and ministers of state, such 
 as Walter of Coutances, William of S. Mere I'Eglise, and per- 
 haps William Longchamp, call for no notice in this connexion ; 
 and I pass on to the much more important point — the literary 
 intercourse and activity promoted by University life. 
 
138 University Life. [vii. 
 
 I have already mentioned the two or three foreign schools 
 which were most frequented by English scholars. Paris was the 
 centre of theological learning and general cultm'e, Bologna was 
 the school for lawyers, especially the canon lawyers ; for the civil 
 law, although equally well taught there, did not obtain much 
 fevour with Englishmen ; and besides these, the pupils who 
 either could not aiford to go to Paris, or could afford to exhaust 
 aU the teaching that the neighbour lands afforded, went to the 
 schools of Tours. Tom*s had the advantage of being locally 
 situated within the dominions of the king of England, and 
 although it did not aspire to the character of a University, as 
 later understood, it had a very ancient and very eminent 
 succession of teachers. 
 
 John of Salisbury, in the second book of the Metalogicus, 
 sketches the twelve years of his University career; in 11 36 
 he went to Paris and studied at S. Genevieve's under the 
 clams doctor identified with Abelard, who taught him dia- 
 lectic, as did also Master Alberic, who succeeded, and Eobert 
 of Melun, the English doctor who, after the accession of 
 Hemy II, was invited home again and made Bishop of 
 Hereford. He then read for three years, with WUliam of 
 Conches, gi-ammar ; then, with Richard I'EvSque, he attacked 
 the quadrivium, and, under Peter de Helie, rhetoric : after 
 that he took to Aristotle again under Adam of Petitpont, an 
 English scholar who was afterwards made Bishop of S. Asaph ; 
 his next teacher was William of Soissons, who was attempting 
 to upset the old logic. At this point of his career, after ten 
 years of study, he began to take pupils, his poverty com- 
 pelling. From William of Soissons he went on to GUbert of 
 la Porree and Robert Pullus. He had now reached the study 
 of divinity and wound up with Simon of Poissy, a faithful 
 lecturer but somewhat obtuse debater ' fidus lector sed obtusior 
 disputator ; ' if he had gone through the discipline that John 
 had passed through, it was no wonder. After these twelve 
 years of study John went to Celles as chaplain or secretary to 
 the Abbot Peter ; and about 11 50 returned to England, where 
 S. Bernard recommended him to Archbishop Theobald. His 
 eaz-eer of usefulness in England thus began just at the time 
 
vn.] John of Salisbury. 139 
 
 when Vacarius was teaching law, and Theobald was maintain- 
 ing the school of literature in his own palace from which so 
 many conspicuous men afterwards sprang. For thirty years 
 John continued to live, the central figm-e of English learning ; 
 suffering indeed many troubles with Becket, whose companion 
 he was in his exUe, but restored to his home in 1170 ; in 
 1 176 he was made Bishop of Chartres, and he died in 1180. 
 His career is conspicuous, and he had both ability and oppor- 
 tunity that were given to few. 
 
 I can only mention now the names of the other students at 
 Paris who to some extent trod in his footsteps : Ralph de 
 Diceto the historian, Archdeacon of Middlesex and Dean of S. 
 Paul's, studied at S. Genevieve shortly after John of Salisbury; 
 he lived to the end of the century : Robert of Melun and 
 Robert Pullus had not only been pupils but teachers at Paris, 
 and Adam of Petitpont the same ; these have been already 
 mentioned. Walter Map, the poet and satirist, afterwards 
 Archdeacon of Oxford, was another Parisian student ; so was 
 Giraldus Cambrensis ; so probably were Roger of Hoveden 
 and most of those ecclesiastics of the time to whom the title 
 magister is given in formal documents, of whom it would be 
 useless labom- to give a catalogue. The scholars of Tours were 
 of the same class. Bologna was the special university for 
 young archdeacons ; and, as most archdeacons were appointed 
 when very young and by family interest, there was a tolerably 
 rapid succession of them, and I fear it must be added that 
 they fell into a great many temptations. We all know of the 
 question discussed at this period, ' An possit archidiaconus 
 salvus esse ; ' whatever were the peculiar temptations of his 
 official career, he was lucky if he passed without debt or 
 difficulty through his university course. In laoo Heniy de 
 Jacea, Archdeacon of Liege, and not only archdeacon but 
 bishop-elect, was kiUed in a scuffle with the townsmen of 
 Paris. At Bologna debt seems to have been the greater 
 snare. Gilbert Foliot, when Bishop of London, had sometimes 
 two archdeacons at once studying there ; and at the same 
 time there was resident there a Canon of S. Paul's, Master 
 David, whose letters have been recently published in the 
 
1 40 Master David. [vn- 
 
 Spieilegium Liberianum. David was an Englishman who 
 had studied at Clermont and at Paris, and had gone on to 
 Bologna in the idea of qualifying himself for an archdeaconry, 
 of which the bishop had perhaps given him a half promise. 
 At Bologna he had got into debt, and set up as tutor to the 
 young archdeacons ; he then went on to Rome, where, by 
 the use of the names of his great patrons, he nearly succeeded 
 in getting a recommendation for the Deanery of S. Paul's. 
 Very ungrateful conduct this was, for the deaneiy was one 
 of the best things that could be got in London, and Master 
 Ralph de Diceto, who was to be the next dean, was actually 
 being made to allow Mr. David an exhibition of ten pounds a 
 year from his own archdeaconry towards his expenses. It is 
 satisfactory to know that David did not get the deanery, 
 although we know no more about him. The two young 
 archdeacons fulfilled their term of study and one of them 
 became a bishop. All the three had, by the provisions of the 
 cathedral statutes, dispensation from residence whilst they were 
 away at the schools. The statute of S. Paul's, drawn by Ralph 
 de Diceto himself, allowed not only non-residence but a pen- 
 sion of 40*. per annum from the communa or dividend of the 
 canons ; the student must go for not less than a year ; he 
 might go for two or three. This permission was freely used : 
 the great churches, which had thirty or forty canons, at all 
 stages of the ecclesiastical career, could well afford to dispense 
 with the services of the younger ones, and they, notwith- 
 standing the temptations of University life, could scarcely fail 
 to bring back with them at the end of the time some ex- 
 perience, some culture and knowledge of the world, that fitted 
 them for the occupations of their later life, whether their 
 destiny was to serve the king in his court and embassies, or 
 to make themselves useful in the educational work which was 
 still carried on largely in all the cathedral establishments. 
 
 And so by a natural transition we pass to another point 
 of interest, the attempts made by the bishops and clergy 
 to furnish to Englishmen in their own land some of the 
 appliances of learning which they found at the foreign 
 Universities. And this had a pai-ticular impoi-tance at this 
 
VII.] Beginnings at Oxford. 141 
 
 particular time ; for there is no doubt that the reign of Henry 
 II is a period which saw a great development of University 
 life, if not the very origin of University life itself, at Oxford. 
 Before this time we hear of Vacarius lecturing in law, and, by 
 somewhat questionable authority, of Robert Pullus lecturing 
 on theology here ; but both, or either, may have been mere 
 teachers in the royal court, or private tutors under the Canons 
 of S. Frideswide. But before the end of the reign there 
 was a University with doctors and masters. Yes, and public 
 lectures; for did not Giraldus Cambrensis, in 1187, cometo 
 Oxford and read his Expugnatio Hiberniae in public lectui-es ? 
 and did he not secure himself an audience by entertaining, on 
 the first day, all the poor of the town at his lodgings, and on 
 the second all the doctors of the diverse faculties and the 
 more distinguished scholars ; and on the third day the rest 
 of the scholars, the passmen as we should put it, with the 
 county people, the townsmen, and the citizens ? Ah ! he tells 
 us, it was a sumptuous and noble affair, a renewal of the old 
 and authentic days of the poets ; ' nor has the present age, 
 or any antiquity, remembered in England any such gaudy 
 day.' It is a lesson for all time. Beyond, however, the 
 fact that thus comes full upon us, that in 11 87 there was 
 at Oxford a great school with diverse faculties of doctors, 
 ergo, a constituted University, we know little or nothing of 
 University life here so early. Only we know that those who 
 in later times might have been able to tell us something true 
 about this, chose to tell us what was false ; and, by hunting 
 up and forging evidences of greater antiquity, lost their hold, 
 and prevented us from ever obtaining a hold on the materials 
 which might have furnished authentic history. There can be 
 no doubt that, when the idea of the University had once 
 impressed itself on the minds of Englishmen, it would rapidly 
 work a change. It centralised teaching and it promoted 
 competition. Not that the idea had to work itself out on 
 English ground ; our English Universities, however far in 
 the historic distance we may throw back their origin, must 
 have been framed on the model of the Continental Univer- 
 sities. I do not mean that they had not their rise in in- 
 
142 Archbishop Theobald. [vn. 
 
 dependent and special circumstances, or that ttey were not 
 the successors of more ancient schools of study, many of 
 which continued to exist for some time around the greater 
 cathedi-als ; but that their University organisation, their 
 degrees and faculties, were borrowed from the established 
 institutions on the Continent. They centralised howerer, 
 and to a great extent superseded, the earlier schools ; they 
 afforded more room for speculation, gave greater scope for 
 competition and greater chances of independence. 
 
 But as this was the age of transition from the local to the 
 centralised system, our business now is rather with the eai'lier 
 than with the later form. I have already said that the house- 
 hold of Archbishop Theobald, in the reign of Stephen, to some 
 extent satisfied the want which was afterwards met by the 
 University system. He provided learned teachers, and his 
 clerks, after learning what they could at Canterbury, went 
 over to Paris and Bologna to take their degrees after suffi- 
 cient and more advanced study. It was not however only 
 in the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury that such a 
 school existed. Every great man had a great house and 
 household, with his chapel or collegiate church at his capital 
 house, and his school of clerks as well as pages. Many of 
 these large establishments lasted, with diverse modifications, 
 into comparatively modem times, and one of the traces of 
 survival still subsists in the privilege of noblemen to qualify 
 so many domestic chaplains, although the particular privileges 
 of the chaplains are mostly things of the past. But, of coui-se, 
 as the castles of the Earls were rather schools of knightly 
 than of clerkly accomplishments, the best illustrations of the 
 scholarly life are found in the houses of the prelates. 
 
 The king's palace was not Jess a centre of learned talk and 
 training, although, as the king was seldom at home more than 
 two or three days together, it is not absolutely certain that he 
 would take a strong interest in the matter ; the fact of Oxford 
 having been a convenient royal residence may account perhaps 
 for one of the influences that fixed the University here, just as 
 the school of S. Frideswide's priory may account for another. 
 It is in the proof that there existed a general fashion of literary 
 
VII.] Palace Schools. 143 
 
 association and conversation that these clusters of scholars, 
 settled in the great houses, are so interesting. 
 
 Peter of Blois gives a sketch of one such cluster in the house 
 of the Archbishop. ' Good master,' he writes, ' you blame me 
 for spending my days at court, when I might fructify in the 
 scholastic camps. But this court in which I live is, I assure 
 you, a camp of God, none other than the house of God and the 
 gate of heaven. In the house of my lord the Archbishop are 
 most scholarly men, with whom is found all the uprightness of 
 justice, all the caution of providence, every form of learning. 
 They, after prayers, and before meals (mark the connexion, 
 and think of Giraldus's public lecture), in reading, in dis- 
 puting, in the decision of causes, constantly exercise them- 
 selves. All the knotty questions of the realm are referred to 
 us, and, when they are discussed in the common hearing, each 
 of us, without strife or objectation, sharpens his wits to speak 
 well upon them, and produces, from a more subtile vein, what 
 he thinks the most prudent and sensible advice.' This is in 
 contrast with the turbulent, and sometimes stormy, discussions 
 in the rising Universities. 
 
 Herbert of Bosham, one of the biographers of S. Thomas and 
 himself one of the Archbishop's clerks, affords us some glimpses 
 into the working of this institution ; and gives us long dis- 
 cussions between Becket and the learned staff that accom- 
 panied him in most of his tribulations. Some of these are 
 very curious ; they show that the Archbishop had amongst his 
 chaplains a staff of professors on a small scale ; this one skilled 
 in canon law, that in historic precedent ; one to whom they 
 looked when an apposite quotation from the poets was wanted, 
 and another who had pretensions to be a philosopher. In one 
 of the supplementary chapters Herbert gives a list of these, 
 the emditi Sancti TJiomae ; the catalogue includes, of course, 
 many of the names that I have already mentioned, John of 
 Salisbury, Archdeacon Robert Foliot, and Ralph of Sarr ; 
 besides these* there were, Lombardus of Piacenza, afterwards 
 Archbishop of Benevento, Reginald the Lombard, son of 
 Bishop Jocelin of Salisbury, afterwards Bishop of Bath and 
 Archbishop, Gerard la Pucelle, Hugh of Nonant and Gilbert 
 
144 Scraps. [vii. 
 
 Glanville, afterwards bishops, and several others; of whom 
 the most famous was Uberto of Milan, afterwards Pope Urban 
 III, who had attached himself to Becket in his exile. 
 
 I think that a generation further back, in the household of 
 Theobald or of Henry of Blois, we might perhaps find, if record 
 had remained, a more illustrious list ; Theobald certainly con- 
 tributed the traditions of Bee Abbey, which had gathered 
 round Lanfranc and Anselm, whilst Henry concentrated about 
 him all that remained of the enlightenment and refinement of 
 English and Norman society. 
 
 Whilst Theobald, however, collected learned men and Henry 
 collected statuary from Italy, whilst the great Bishop Roger 
 built his miracles of castles, England was a prey to conflicting 
 factions, and every great man was bound above all things to 
 be a politician. Hence the academic and political elements 
 were thus early found in closest union : if Henry, Baldwin and 
 Amalrie, discussed deep questions of theology with their coun- 
 cillors, the knotty questions of the realm were laid before 
 Peter of Blois and Giraldus Cambrensis ; and the minds of the 
 curiales were, notwithstanding the sneers of the satirists, occu- 
 pied on the same matters as those of the scholares. 
 
 To this community of subject it is that we owe some of the 
 most significant anecdotes of the great men of the time : the 
 scraps of conversation of Ranulf Glanville, the great justiciar, 
 who discussed, as he was riding out, the decay of valour among 
 the French ; the amusing exaggerations of Giraldus when he 
 criticises the colloquial Latin of Hubert Walter ; the most 
 interesting details of the friendship between S. Hugh of Lin- 
 coln and Henry II ; and very much that enlivens such books 
 as the Polycraticus of John of Salisbury, the de Nugis Curia- 
 lium of Walter Map, the de Institutione Principum and other 
 discursive productions of Giraldus, the Otia Imperialia of Ger- 
 vase, and the Satires of Nigel of Canterbury. It is true indeed 
 that men professedly literary would most naturally, I am 
 afraid I cannot say necessarily or invariably, preserve such 
 scraps as might be supposed to have a Hterary or historical 
 interest ; and therefore that such anecdotes may not be a fair 
 specimen of the ordinary conversations of the educated classes 
 
VII.] An Iter Anglicum. 145 
 
 of the time. Granting that, it is at least pleasant to find that 
 amidst the great and varied mass of literary remains there is 
 so very little, hardly anything, that would show the prevailing 
 tone to have been coarse or base. There is some profanity, not 
 a little hardness and narrowness, but very little indeed of the 
 foolish and inconvenient jesting which later on becomes the 
 mark of all courtly literature. 
 
 If now we were to imagine a foreign scholar visiting 
 England at the period of which we were speaking, either, 
 like Mabillon or Pertz, making an Iter Anglicum to collect 
 materials for history, or like Solon simply, Oewpiris e'lvsKev, to 
 see what the world was like, or like the admirable Crichton 
 to air his own erudition and try the mettle of English scholars 
 in literary tournaments, or like John of Salisbury to gather all 
 the knowledge that he could, how would he fare ? He would 
 land, we suppose, at Dover and be lodged in the Benedictine 
 Priory there, where he would find that his visit was recorded 
 among the visits of kings and ambassadors in a precious 
 chronicle that embodied the annals of all public events and 
 copies of public documents ; then he would go on to Canter- 
 bury, where he would find himself at once in a great literary 
 centre, with teachers and libraries and all appliances that 
 stand to the population and society of the day in much the 
 same proportion as the Kterary life of Oxford or Cambridge 
 would at this moment. He would find Gervase, the sacrist, 
 busy over the chronicles of the kings and the history of his 
 own time ; Nigel writing his verses, polishing the great 
 medieval satire Bm-nellus, or inditing the prose letter in 
 which he castigates the faults of the secular clergy ; a monk 
 in a strictish convent, but corresponding with the ministers 
 of a powerful and politic court : there too he would find 
 Odo the prior, a great theologian, William the sub-prior and 
 Edward Grim, biographers of S. Thomas ; if he came after 1 186 
 he would find the whole convent busily writing Latin letters, 
 letters in very fair grammatical Latin, garnished with quota- 
 tions from Ovid and Lucan and the laws canon and civil. If 
 he went on to Rochester, there he would be entertained by 
 Archdeacon Paris, the nephew of Robert Pullus, possibly a 
 
 L 
 
146 Canterbury to Exeter. [vii. 
 
 near kinsman of the great chronicler of the next age ; there 
 he might find Bishop Glanville, the preacher of the Third 
 Crusade, one of the learned pupils of S. Thomas, and close 
 kinsman of the great lawyer ; or if he went on to Chichester, 
 he would fall in with the Dean Matthew, or Jordan, or 
 Gervase, aU of them members of the same company, and 
 Herbei-t of Bosham in the close neighbourhood, the squii-e 
 parson of the time, also a careful and admixing biographer. 
 Going on to Winchester, he would be entertained either 
 by the venerable Bishop Henry, whose memory was a very 
 storehouse of history ; the grandson of the Conqueror and 
 depository of all the great traditions of the generation, the 
 king-maker of the twelfth century, who also had his learned 
 men around him ; or by Richard of Ilchester, the confidential 
 minister of the king, himself no mean adept in the writing of 
 historical dispatches ; Richard of Devizes is there too writing 
 the history of his time ; further on, at Salisbury, another of 
 the eminent ministers is the dean, John of Oxford, a traveller, 
 and lawyer and divine, a man whose very name suggests that 
 he might have been one of the first magistri of his own Uni- 
 versity : possibly John of Salisbury might be there too, or 
 Reginald, the bishop's son, as archdeacon or bishop, a most 
 intelligent and travelled diplomatist. At Exeter, early in the 
 reign, he would find Bishop Bartholomew, the famous preacher 
 and canonist, Baldwin, the archdeacon and scholasticus, after- 
 wards archbishop and crusader, with his brother Joseph, the 
 poet, who attempted in an Hexameter Epic to rival the 
 glories of Virgil, and in his lost Antiocheis to build up a 
 poetic memorial of the First Crusade ; no mean poet, although 
 ambitious, but considered worthy to rank with the classics 
 edited, in usum serenissimi Delphini, with Dictys of Crete 
 and Dares of Phrygia. 
 
 But if oui- friend was bent northwards, we might take 
 him at once to London and introduce him to the Dean and 
 Chapter of S. Paul's or the great Bishop Foliot and the 
 king's court. At S. Paul's he would meet, ten to one, not 
 only the lord mayor, aldermen, and justices, whom the canon 
 in residence was specially bound to entertain, but any dis- 
 
VII.] London and the Court, 147 
 
 tinguislied strangers who happened to be in town : the vener- 
 able old dean, Ralph de Diceto, would show him the beautiful 
 MS. of his Imaginationes ; from the canon Richard, the high 
 treasurer, he might learn the history of the Exchequer, or 
 even borrow the precious Tricolumnis before it was lost ; 
 Peter of Blois would be grumbling at the small profits of 
 his archdeaconry, but wisely putting his pen to good in- 
 terest ; Roger Niger perhaps just flying from the wrath of 
 the king, whom he has exasperated by savage invective ; 
 and the great Foliot himself, the able statesman who pitted 
 all his skill, experience, and learning against the zeal of 
 Becket and lost the game, at least in the opinion of his 
 contemporaries. 
 
 At the court would be Ranulf Glanville, the father of the 
 study of English common law, and the astute band of justices 
 who shared with him the confidence of the most sagacious 
 and business-like of kings. Our friend would find the his- 
 torical mind fairly well awake to the importance of the era in 
 which it found itself: the author of the Gesta Regis Henrici 
 may not yet have chosen to be anonymous, but have been 
 keeping a busy account from day to day of the king's 
 doings ; Thomas Brown would be there with his roll, and 
 Peter of Blois moralising 'de Praestigiis fortunae,' on the 
 magic tricks of Fortune exemplified in the career of his royal 
 patron ; and the author perhaps of the Draco Normannicus 
 awaiting a reward for panegyrising the old Empress Maud ; 
 not to speak again of Ralph de Diceto and Gervase of 
 Tilbury. At Westminster he would fall in with the Abbot 
 Laurence, a theologian of some note in those days when 
 almost every learned man was a theologian. In London in- 
 deed, or at Westminster, all the men whom I have mentioned 
 might at any stirring time be found together : William Fitz - 
 Stephen, the biographer of Becket, possibly becoming a judge 
 after he had tried his fortune as a scholar, but known to us 
 by the lively picture which he has drawn of London in 
 his own days ; Giraldus Cambrensis, the erratic Norman- 
 Welshman, who, as he would be looked for everywhere, might 
 safely be caught near the king ; even Roger of Hoveden, the - 
 
 L % 
 
148 London to Lincoln. [vii. 
 
 leai-ned Rector of Howden and chronicler of the north, hnt 
 a king's chaplain and occasional justice of the forest. Time 
 would fail him to learn even the names of all the subordinate 
 scholars of London: he goes on northwai'ds by S. Alban's 
 and Peterborough. 
 
 - Nothing is more curious than the lively historic activity 
 going on in the monasteries : MSS. are copied, luxurious 
 editions are reeopied and illuminated ; there is no lack 
 of generosity in lending or of boldness in borrowing ; there 
 is brisk competition and liberal open rivalry. S. Alban's 
 is especially rich in the collected materials that lie at the 
 foundation of her great code of chronicles. At Peterborough 
 Abbot Benedict is equally busy, directing transcription and 
 compiling or editing his own recollections of S. Thomas ; but 
 eveiy little monastery has its record : Crowland is thinking of 
 hiring Peter of Blois, or some pretended Peter who borrows 
 an illustrious name, to fabricate for her an apocryphal chronicle ; 
 at Ramsey there is an invaluable chronicle kept, going far 
 back into the old English times, and there is the same at Ely 
 conducted by a succession of learned and patriotic monks. 
 But at Peterborough the pen has just dropped from the hand 
 of the native annalists. 
 
 Coming to Lincoln, there is Walter Map with his poems 
 and stories about the courtiers, acting as archdeacon or pre- 
 centor ; the wise S. Hugh himself, the bishop, has stories 
 to tell at the high table in the hall, and admiring disciples 
 anxious to gather up every word that falls from his lips. 
 
 So our friend goes on into Yorkshire ; if he stays at 
 Howden by the way he may be put under contribution 
 by the rector and made to teU what marvellous tale he can 
 tell about his own country ; perhaps to compare notes about 
 the news from Constantinople, or the study of the enchant- 
 ment that guided the storms in the Gulf of Satalia, or the 
 last enormity of Swerre Birkbain and the fellow kings of 
 Norway. For Roger of Hoveden is quite Herodotean both 
 in the faithfulness of his personal relations and in the wish to 
 incorporate in his chronicle aU that he can gather touching 
 the geography and history of strange lands. Going on to 
 
VII.] York and Yorkshire. 149 
 
 York, the traveller finds himself in the midst of legal con- 
 troversies ; there had heen good schools there once, but the 
 head master was lost in a storm at sea in 1 177 and since then 
 the canons have taken to quarrelling. There have always 
 been two parties there and some black sheep in the flock. 
 The archbishop too, since Becket's death, has been under a 
 cloud, so the chapter is at sixes and sevens. Peter of Blois 
 looks in occasionally when in residence at Ripon, and Hubert 
 Walter, the dean, tries to keep matters fairly well, but there 
 are quarrels even within the precincts of the church, and 
 in more than one case there are rival claimants for the same 
 stall : on one solemn occasion the precentor stops the music to 
 spite the treasurer, the treasurer puts out the lights to be even 
 with the precentor. But, notwithstanding, there are quiet 
 pens taking notes ; and a good deal of York news filters into 
 the general history. There is the biographer of the arch- 
 bishops, one or more than one ; not far off, at Newburgh, in 
 the Augustinian priory, is William, the little inquisitive and 
 intelligent canon, who is writing a history of England, not in 
 the mere receptive spirit of the annalist like Hoveden, nor 
 in the didactic style of William of Malmesbury, but like a 
 thoughtful man who wishes to trace the origins and tendencies 
 of the events that he records, who weighs his epithets and 
 suspends his judgments, and, whilst he admits the marvellous, 
 argues only when and where he has suflicient data. If 
 William of Newburgh ever comes up to York, depend upon it 
 he is well received by aU the thoughtful men. The Prior of 
 Hexham too is ex officio a canon of York, and he also is, as his 
 predecessor was, a writer of history strikingly in advance of 
 the mere annotator of annals. 
 
 If the visitor can be prevailed on to go so far north as 
 Hexham, he may even reach Melrose, and there watch the 
 process of annal making, and come home by Durham. There 
 he will find a magnificent court under Bishop Hugh, the 
 great prince prelate of the period, who lives in three-quarters 
 independence between the kings of Scots and English ; and 
 in his train poets, preachers and writers of histories, who 
 are one after another continuing the work which had been 
 
150 Lost Books. [vii. 
 
 begun by Bede, and continued after long breaks by Simeon and 
 the Hexham writers. And so, having completely traversed 
 the literary world of England, he may come south, through 
 either the eastern or the western counties, sure to find at every 
 monastery or cathedral he may visit some one employed in 
 keeping up the record of public as well as local history, or 
 otherwise attempting to keep alive the fire of literary zeal. 
 
 He would go away, I think, from such a view with the 
 impression that, whatever di-awbacks there might be to the 
 full enjoyment of life, England was a paradise of clerks. True, 
 the cruel legate, Hugeson, had betrayed them to the king, 
 had actually yielded the point, that most important point, 
 about the forest law, and allowed the king to prosecute clerical 
 ofienders against the peace of the king's venison, and have them 
 hauled before the sheriffs in the county court, but that was 
 the only drawback to the free enjoyment of clerical society. So 
 far as books were concerned, there was such a supply of writers 
 and readers as would be found nowhere else in Europe, except 
 in the University of Paris itself. Such an impression, I take 
 it, would not be far from the truth : for the extant remains of 
 the literary work of the period are so great, that, if we suppose 
 them to bear the ordinary proportion to the lost works of the 
 same age, they would prove it to be enormously prolific. I do 
 not claim for it such a distinction, because I think that most 
 of what was really worth preserving has been preserved ; pre- 
 served because the men whose task it was to take care of it 
 were sensible that it was the work of an age of transcendent 
 importance in every region of BngHsh life; constitutional, 
 moral and intellectual. 
 
 The greater works of the time survived not only because 
 they were the most famous works of the time, but because 
 they were of really great value. Thus Glanville's work on 
 the Laws became the manual and text-book of the lawyers ; 
 the Dialogus de Scaccario the standing order book of the 
 high Court of Exchequer; the annals of Roger Hoveden 
 the recognised book of authoritative chronicle record, to 
 which, whenever a question of foreign policy or even domestic 
 diplomacy arose, recourse might at once be had. That the 
 
VII.] Latin Poems, 151 
 
 lawyers and statesmen of the day were not above the study of 
 history may be proved by the later use of these and the like 
 chronicles ; especially when Stephen Langton produced the 
 Charter of Henry I before the barons at S. Paul's, or when 
 Edward I consulted all the cathedral and monastic chronicles 
 of England in order to ascertain the true nature and extent of 
 his claims over Scotland ; or when Edward III elaborated his 
 claim to France ; or when the Commission of Doctors at West- 
 minster searched all chronicles for information on the pedigree 
 of the house of Lancaster ; or when Beaufort and Gloucester 
 explored them to ascertain the constitutional position of a 
 regent ; or when, to crown all, poor Henry VI, who probably 
 was the best historical scholar in his divided realm, was 
 requested by the lords of his parliament to search, out of the 
 chronicles which he had loved so well, the materials by which 
 they might come to the conclusion that he was a traitor and 
 a usurper. 
 
 There have been, as I said, losses ; but it may well be that 
 the great value of the works that have survived may lead 
 us somewhat to exaggerate the worth of those which have 
 perished ; the Antiocheis of Joseph of Exeter, the Trieolumnis 
 of Bishop Richard, the de Prsestigiis Fortunse of Peter of 
 Blois, the Liber Facetiarum of Gervase of Tilbury may not 
 have been so permanently important as we should suppose ; but 
 there is no question of the serious importance of the lost leaves 
 of the Gesta Stephani or the Draco Normannicus. 
 
 I have, you may observe, given prominence in this lecture 
 to certain names and certain sorts of names. I have given 
 them prominence because it was desirable, even at the risk 
 of repetition, to impress them on the memory, even if it 
 should prove impossible to form or fix any individual con- 
 ception of them : they are the greatest names, and the 
 names of those who have left the most precious books behind 
 them. But they are very far from aU ; a reference to some 
 such book as Mr. Wright's Biographia Britannica Literaria 
 would furnish a long list of names of men who have places 
 in the bibliographies ; both historians, philosophers and natu- 
 ralists, according to the idea of those days. If we turn, 
 
152 Latin Verses. [vii. 
 
 too, to Leyser's Bibliotheca Poetica we find many names of 
 English poets, Englishmen, that is, who wrote Latin verses, 
 but of whom little else is really kaown, and whose verses are 
 neither in manner nor matter so good as the poorest prose of 
 the period. Geoffrey Vinsauf, who no doubt was the best 
 known Latin poet of the time, has left no personal history ; 
 his work, framed on the Epistle to the Pisos, is by no means to 
 be despised as a guide to the medieval idea of Latin poetry, 
 nor is it a mean work in itself. But the average of the poetry, 
 with that exception and the Trojan War of Joseph of Exeter, 
 is low, whether we look at the classical forms followed by these 
 writers and some of the satirists or at the rhymed Latin 
 poems of which Walter Map was so fertile a producer. A 
 great many of the good prose writers, however, attempted 
 versification. We have, starting with Henry of Huntingdon, 
 a generation earlier, a fair list of good scholars who thought 
 verse the best medium of enthusiastic panegyric. John of 
 Salisbury mingles encomium and sarcasm in his Entheticus, a 
 book in which he has described in enigmatic language most of 
 the courtiers of the time, with praise or dispraise. WiUiam 
 Fitz-Stephen, the biographer of Beeket, courted the ear of 
 Henry II with a poem which he presented to him at BrUl, 
 and which seems to have been so far successful that the king 
 pardoned him for his adherence to the archbishop ; Giraldus 
 Cambrensis wrote epigrams, Walter Map hymns and poems of 
 edification as well as satires ; the author of the Dialogus de 
 Scaccario and the Latin biographer of Richard I both run 
 into what would be doggerel if it were not Latin, apparently 
 out of the very glee of their hearts and devotion to their 
 subject-matter. 
 
 But as every one who could write prose thought that he 
 could write verse, and as good Latin verse required a some- 
 what higher strain than passable Latin prose, it is not sur- 
 prising that the verse has been mostly forgotten. The ques- 
 tion then which this point seems to suggest, to what did it all 
 come, what amount of real, critical, and literary culture does 
 this great mass of Latin writing truly imply ? must be answered 
 thus : The Latin of the twelfth century is fairly good and 
 
VII. J Latin Prose. 153 
 
 grammatical Latin; adjective agrees with substantive and 
 verb with its nominative case ; ut governs the subjunctive, and 
 the dependent sentence follows the mood and tense prescribed 
 by the principal sentence. There is a great fertility of 
 vocabulary, there are frequent and consistent uses of words 
 which in classical Latin are somewhat rare, as if the writer 
 prided himself on knowing how to use dumtaxat and quippe 
 and utpote, and brought them in at every turn : but even here 
 there is nothing that is laboured ; the Latin, if too free, is 
 scarcely ever unnatural. It is Latin written as by men who 
 on literary matters talked and thought in Latin ; it is not a 
 dead but a living language, senescent, perhaps, but in a green 
 old age. The more pretentiou.s writers, like Peter of Blois, 
 wrote perhaps with fewer solecisms but with more pedantry, 
 and certainly lost freedom by straining after elegance. 
 
 Just think now what this common familiarity with Latin 
 implies. It implies almost as ready a hold on aU the great 
 works of antiquity as the power of reading English at the 
 present day implies with respect to our own national classics. 
 To John of Salisbury, after his twelve years of study, all the 
 writings of the Latin historians, poets and orators, the Chris- 
 tian fathers, the legists and the canonists, were not more ready 
 of access than they were to the practical administrator, who 
 could write freely and plainly an account of the details of his 
 official board. This facility of learning was limited only by 
 the scarcity of books ; a very fatal limitation, but not half so 
 fatal as the common fault of these days, when there are so many 
 more books than there are readers with a will to read. All 
 these writers of Latin were readers of Latin, and many of 
 them read a great deal. John of Salisbury's reading certainly 
 rivalled that of Burton, the author of the Anatomy of 
 Melancholy, and his power of reference and quotation was 
 assuredly not inferior. As he worked among the classics, 
 Ralph de Diceto worked among the historians of the silver 
 and later age ; Aulus Gellius and Seneca, I will venture to 
 say, were commoner books in the hands of ordinary readers 
 then than now : as for the poets, I have spoken before. The 
 great Roman historians were, I fear, less directly known. 
 
154 Vernacular Writers. [vii. 
 
 Some parts of Csesar's Commentaries, Suetonius, Floras, 
 Eutropius, Justin, were, I think, directly known ; I question 
 whether Livy or Tacitus was ; except so much as had filtered 
 through the Historia Miseella, or the translations and addi- 
 tions to the Chronicon of Eusebius. Seneca certainly was 
 read and utilised ; there is indeed a manuscript of Seneca 
 which contains on a fly-leaf a trace of having been at the 
 English court about this very time. But John of Salisbury's 
 acquaintance with Roman literature can only be estimated 
 by a careful reading of the Polycratieus ; but we must re- 
 member that what he could read was at least within the reach 
 of his contemporaries. 
 
 I have not said much in these lectures about the vernacular 
 writers of the reign, whether of the Norman or English race ; 
 for indeed they can hardly as yet be said to be literary people. 
 But I must not finish without a word about them, lest I should 
 be thought to undervalue them. The poem of Jordan Fan- 
 tosme, on the rebellion of the sons of Henry in 1173 and 
 1 1 74; the poem on the Conquest of Ireland; the original 
 French poem of Ambrose, on which the Gesta Ricardi are 
 foimded ; the Life of S. Thomas of Canterbury, by Grarnier of 
 Pont S. Maxence ; the valuable poetic chronicle of Benedict 
 of S. Maur, are the beginnings of a new literature the value 
 of which is prospective ; predecessors of Villehardouin and 
 Joinville and the Chronique d'Outremer, after the law, if 
 there be such a law, that in the development of a vernacular 
 literature poetry takes precedence of prose. I sometimes think 
 that the growth of this school or schools of composition was 
 owing to the increased interest taken by women in the history of 
 their country ; certainly the spread and strengthening of it tends 
 to show that the classes to whom the use of Latin, except in 
 the Church services, was becoming less and less familiar, were 
 beginning to care to have a literature of their own. It shows, 
 moreover, taken in connexion with that deadly liveliness of 
 the Latin poetry which I have adverted to, that, whilst Latin 
 was still a ready enough medium for serious writing, it was 
 necessary to find something better and freer than Latin verse 
 to interest people. Medieval Latin prose never dies out; 
 
VII.] Conchision. 155 
 
 medieval Latin verse coniinues to live only as a pedantic and 
 attenuated survival from the moment that either Norman 
 French, or medieval English poetry comes into fashion. Into 
 these fields of investigation I do not now propose to intrude. 
 I shall have done something to reconcile myself with the per- 
 functory and superficial way in which alone my irksome duty 
 on these occasions can be discharged, if I have called your 
 attention to the literary side of a period of our history which, 
 although it may be the fashion to regard it as obscure and 
 barbarous, still contains the germination and early growth of 
 institutions which are vital portions of our national existence. 
 An age so important as that of Henry II in constitutional 
 growth could not be an age of barrenness and deadness in any 
 department of culture, altogether ; that it was not is amply 
 proved not only by the remains of literaiy work which are 
 still preserved to us, but by the glimpse they give us into 
 circles of scholar-like activity, a highly stimulated growth of 
 literature, and an extent of education which we ought to be 
 the last to undervalue. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE MEDIEVAL KINGDOMS OF CYPRUS 
 AND ARMENIA. 
 
 (Oct. 26 and 29, 1878.) 
 
 I HOPE that I need not apologise for my choice of a subject. 
 The events of the last two years can scarcely he called to 
 mind without much misgiving-, both as to the way in which 
 they have been construed by contemporary readers, and as to 
 the way in which they will be judged by history. I am not 
 one of those who hold that the maintenance of an opinion 
 contrary to their own belief, implies either moral delinquency 
 or mental imbecility. I have been quite prepared to admit 
 that two honest men, equally gifted and alike trying to be 
 impartial, may come to diametrically opposite conclusions from 
 the same evidence. But it is sickening to see the policy of 
 a statesman, still more to see the question of a fact, debated, 
 maintained or contradicted, by advocates whose arguments are 
 not based upon attempts to find out the truth, but are simply 
 weapons of attack and defence. ' This is to be believed 
 because it suits the party ; this is to be discredited because it 
 would damage the party : this is true because Pericles has 
 said it ; this is false, or why should Alcibiades, or Cleon, or 
 whoever it may be, have called heaven and earth to witness 
 that it is true ? ' It wiU be a good thing if, after so much that 
 is disheartening in the popular treatment of great questions, 
 even one little benefit may be secured. Whatever may be 
 thought of the Anglo-Turkish Convention, on whatever grounds, 
 moral or political, we may determine that the salvation of 
 Tm-key is possible, or that Cyprus is an unhealthy island, 
 a professor of History may draw some little comfort from 
 
VIII.] The Crusades. 157 
 
 the fact that the attention of people has been called to a 
 portion of the history of Christendom of which little notice 
 has been taken of late years, and which is closely connected 
 with one of the greatest movements that ever affected the 
 history of the world. Having said this I will add, that my 
 object in this lecture is not to ventilate dogmas, to impress 
 any principle, moral or political, or to justify any foregone con- 
 clusion. I plead guilty to the charge brought against me of 
 choosing subjects which are of no importance to any human 
 being ; I wish simply to talk about a subject on which a good 
 deal of intelligent interest has arisen, and in the further 
 discussion of which many fresh points of interest may be 
 expected to present themselves. 
 
 It is right, however, that I should preface one word of 
 caution against myself. The Crusades are not, in my mind, 
 either the popular delusions that our cheap literature has de- 
 termined them to be, nor papal conspiracies against kings and 
 peoples, as they appear to the Protestant controversialist ; 
 nor the savage outbreaks of expiring barbarism thirsting for 
 blood and plunder, nor volcanic explosions of religious in- 
 tolerance. I believe them to have been, in their deep sources, 
 and in the minds of their best champions, and in the main 
 tendency of their results, capable of ample justification. They 
 were the first great effort of medieval life to go beyond the 
 pursuit of selfish and isolated ambitions ; they were the trial- 
 feat of the young world, essaying to use, to the glory of God 
 and the benefit of man, the arms of its new knighthood. That 
 they failed in their direct object is only what may be alleged 
 against almost every great design which the great disposer 
 of events has moulded to help the world's progress ; for the 
 world has grown wise by the experience of failure, rather than 
 by the winning of high aims. That the good they did was 
 largely leavened with evil may be said of every war that 
 has ever been waged ; that bad men rose by them while 
 good men fell is, and must be, true wherever and when- 
 ever the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. 
 But that in the end they were a benefit to the world no one 
 who reads can doubt ; and that in their course they brought 
 
158 The Levantine Kingdoms. [viil. 
 
 out a love for all that is heroic in human nature, the love of 
 freedom, the honour of prowess, sympathy with sorrow, per- 
 severance to the last, and patient endurance without hope, the 
 chronicles of the age abundantly prove ; proving, moreover, 
 that it was by the experience of those times that the forms 
 of those virtues were realised and presented to posterity. 
 This much I say, by way of a caution, that you may not accuse 
 me of an attempt to impose upon you. The history of the 
 Crusades has always had for me an interest that quite rivals 
 all the interest I could take in the history of the Greeks and 
 Romans ; and very much of that interest is of the same sort ; 
 a half archaeological interest in a life and growth from which 
 we have om-selves received some great impulses, but almost 
 all the minutiae of which are important only through their con- 
 nexion with those great impulses. Such a half archaeological 
 interest I hope you may feel in the history of medieval Cyprus, 
 and what little is to be told of its sister kingdom. 
 
 The last decade of the twelfth century saw the establish- 
 ment of two small Christian kingdoms in the Levant, which 
 long outlived all other relics of the Crusades except the military 
 orders ; and which, with very little help from the West, sus- 
 tained a hazardous existence in complete contrast with almost 
 everything around them. The kingdoms of Cyprus and 
 Armenia have a history very closely intertwined, but their 
 origin and most of their circumstances were very diiferent. 
 
 By Armenia as a kingdom, is meant little more than the 
 ancient Cilicia, the land between Taurus and the sea, from 
 the frontier of the principality of Antioch, eastward, to Kelen- 
 deris or Palaeopolis, a little beyond Seleueia ; this territory, 
 which was computed to contain sixteen days' journey in length, 
 measured from four miles of Antioch, by two in breadth, was 
 separated from the Greater Armenia, which before the period 
 on which we are employed had fallen under the sway of the 
 Seljuks, by the ridges of Taurus^. The population was com- 
 
 ' The boundaries of Armenia at its greatest extension are thus given by 
 Du Laurier, in the Armenian volume of the Eeeueil des Historiens des 
 Croisades, pp. xix eq. : — ^Westward, Side or Eski-Adalieh ; eastward, the 
 Pylae Cilicise, or passes of the mountains close to the gulf of Alexandretta. 
 
VIII.] Armenia. 159 
 
 posed largely of the sweepings of Asia Minor, Christian tribes 
 which had taken refuge in the mountains. Their religion was 
 partly Greek, partly Armenian, for the Armenian Catholicos, 
 after resting for a eentuiy and a half in. Mesopotamia, took 
 refuge at Sis, and founded there an independent or national 
 Catholicate at the close of the thirteenth ^ century. Their 
 rulers were princes descended from the house of the Bagratidse, 
 who- had governed the Greater Armenia as kings from the 
 year 885 to the reign of Constantine Monomachus, and had 
 then merged their hazardous independence in the mass of the 
 Greek empire^- After the seizure of Asia Minor by the 
 Seljuks, the few of the Bagratidse who had retained possession 
 of the mountain fastnesses of Cilicia or the strongholds of 
 Mesopotamia, acted as independent lords, showing little respect 
 for Byzantium save where there was something to be gained. 
 Such was the lord Taphnuz of Edessa, on whose inheritance 
 Baldwin of Boulogne founded his principality ; such were the 
 lords Leo, Thoros, Melier, and Rupin of the Mountains, who 
 ruled Cilicia during the twelfth century ; trying to balance their 
 position between the Byzantine and Latin influences on each 
 
 The custom-house, towards Icomum, was at Pilerga, and the passes Westward 
 were at Gei-manicopolis and Claudiopolis. 
 
 ^ The Catholicate was without fixed residence from 1066-1114; it was then 
 settled at Hrom-Gla, on the Euphrates, in the principality of Edessa, where 
 it remained until 1292, when it settled at Sis. 
 
 ^ The Armenian historians describe the Greater Armenia after the fall of 
 the Arsacidse, under Arsaces IV, A.D. 387, as divided between Persia and 
 IByzantium ; the Ai'sacide rulers governing as tributaries until 428. Prom 
 438 to 625, it was governed by Persian governors, 'Marzbaus,' fi'equently 
 native Armenians of the house of the Bagratidse; from 632 by a Curopalatea 
 or patrician named at Constantinople ; sometimes by the patriarch, sometimes 
 by the Khalif. In 885 the Bagratide, Aschod I, was recognised by theKhalif 
 Motamed as king, and was crowned. His successors were Sempad I, 890 
 Aschod II, 914 ; Apas, 928 ; Aschod III, the Merciful, 952 ; Sempad II, 977 
 Kakig I, 989 ; John Sempad and Aschod IV, 1020 ; Interregnum, 1040 
 Kakig II, 1042. Kakig gave op his kingdom to Constantine Monomachus in 
 1045, and was murdered in 1079. These kings reigned at Ani. There was 
 another principality at Kars, which surrendered to Constantine Ducas in 
 1064. Senekerim John, king of Vasburagan, had, in 1021, surrendered to 
 Basil II, and received Sebaste in Cappadocia ; and Abelgarib had Tarsus as a 
 separate lordship from Constantine Monomachus in 1042. — The Bagratidse 
 claimed an Israelite origin. S. Martin, M^moires Historiques et G^ogra- 
 phiques sur I'Arm&ie. 
 
1 60 Cyprus. [hill- 
 
 side of them. Rupia of the Mountain was prince at the time 
 of the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin ; he died in 1189, and 
 his successor, Leo or Livon, after having successfully courted 
 the favour of pope and emperor, was recognised as king of 
 Armenia by the emperor Henry VI, and crowned by Conrad 
 of Wittelsbach, archbishop of Mainz, in 1198. This act 
 which, although Livon forfeited his position by obtaining 
 recognition from Alexius Angelus, implied a cessation of the 
 old dependence on Byzantium, and an ecclesiastical reconcilia- 
 tion with Rome, was the typical act of Armenian history; the 
 whole of which, save and except the defence against the 
 Saracens and the Tartars of a later date, was an attempt to 
 secure independence by skilful balancing of Greek and Roman 
 influences ; to obtain money from the West and arms from 
 Constantinople, to obtain alternate alliances by royal marriages, 
 and ecclesiastical freedom by regular variations between the 
 two poles. For this latter policy the position of the Armenian 
 Church was peculiarly fitted. It was so far schismatic as not 
 to be integrally a portion of either Roman or Byzantine obedi- 
 ence, and so little heretical that its alliance was courted by 
 both communions. Hence its importance in the eoncihar 
 history of the middle ages ; an importance which has no suf- 
 ficient parallel in the secular history of Armenia. 
 
 The origin of the Latin kingdom of Cyprus is less obscure 
 and more romantic. Cyprus had been seized by the Arabs in 
 the early days of Islam (cir. 700 — cir. 963), but recovered for 
 the empire by Nicephorus Phocas, and ruled by dukes down to 
 the reign of Manuel Comnenus. Its population was a mixed 
 one ; there were Griflbns or Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, 
 Maronites, native Cypriots, Greek parojci, emancipated slaves, 
 the descendants of Albanian soldiery of the empire, and of 
 Venetian emigrants of the first Crusade. But the land was 
 fertile, and they had dwelt together in peace. In the reign of 
 Manuel the happy days of Cyprus ended and the period of 
 calamity began. According to the anchorite Neophytus, who 
 wrote the tract ' de Calamitatibus Cypri,' the native authority 
 for the conquest by Richard CoBur de Lion, Isaac Comnenus, a 
 nephew of the emperor Manuel, had been appointed by him to 
 
VIII.] Richard I. 1 6 1 
 
 rule the Armenian frontier ; he had quarreled with the 
 Armenians, been taken prisoner and sold to the Latins ; that 
 is, to Bohemond III of Antioeh, whose step-father, Reginald 
 of Chatillon, had many years before ravaged the isle of Cyprus 
 in revenge for the hostility of Manuel Comnenus. He was 
 ransomed from captivity by the emperor Andronicus, and, 
 about the year 1 184, came to Cyprus and set up an independent 
 tyranny. He called himself l3a(Ti\.€vs, but ruled as a despot of 
 the worst order. All the better class of Greek inhabitants 
 fled to Constantinople ; and the state of Cyprus under Isaac 
 Comnenus was only paralleled by that of Jerusalem under 
 Saladin, On the evidence of Neophytus, Richard of England 
 came not as a freebooter, but as a deliverer from utter misery. 
 In this point there is a fair consensus of Eastern and Western 
 testimony. Richard seized Cyprus not as a pirate, but as 
 an avenger and emancipator. The story is short, or may be 
 made so. 
 
 After wintering at Messina, Richard having with him, in 
 his fleet, not in his ship, his betrothed wife Berengaria and 
 his sister, queen Johanna, of Sicily, sailed for Acre on the 
 loth of April, 1191 ; the fleet was dispersed by a storm on 
 Good Friday, April la ; and Richard, after being obliged to 
 land at Rhodes, was driven by a second storm on the ist of 
 May into the Gulf of Satalia. Before this day the queens 
 had appeared off Cyprus, and found anchorage off Limasol. 
 Isaac had attempted by courteous offers to get them into his 
 power, but his hospitality was presented in so military a 
 fashion, that the guardians of the royal ladies took fright, . 
 and avoided landing. On the very day on which they were 
 obliged to promise that they would go on shore, Richard's 
 ship came in sight. His first act was to demand from Isaac 
 an account of the treatment of the wrecked vessels which had 
 been driven on the coast of the island and plundered by the 
 emperor. Isaac replied contumeliously, and Richard landed in 
 force. On the 6th of May Limasol was taken : the emperor 
 was unhorsed by Richard in single combat, and fled to Nicosia. 
 On the lath of May Richard and Berengaria were married at 
 Limasol ; and Berengaria was there crowned, not queen of 
 
 M 
 
1 62 Story of Neophytus. [viir. 
 
 Cyprus, for the island was not yet taken or claimed, but queen 
 of the English. Negotiations for peace and alliance were on 
 foot, when Isaac suddenly broke off the deliberations and 
 fled to Famagosta. Richard, who had now obtained the 
 assistance of Guy of Lusignan and the prince of Antioch, 
 and who was much pressed for time, left him no rest. Guy 
 employed himself in capturing the chief strongholds ; Eiehard, 
 who was illj after taking Buffevento, occupied Nicosia. There 
 the emperor submitted to him on the 31st of May, and sur- 
 rendered himself, his daughter and his treasures. Richard 
 put him in silver chains, having promised that he would not 
 put him in irons ; placed the little girl under charge of the 
 queen, and spent or distributed his treasure. Cyprus was 
 conquered in a fortnight. Richard bestowed on the island the 
 inestimable gift of his presence for five days after the emperor 
 surrendered : Isaac he sent off under the charge of Ralph 
 Fitz- Godfrey to Tripoli ; he extorted from the Cypriots half 
 their property, in return for a charter by which the laws of 
 Manuel Comnenus were restored to them ; constables were 
 placed in the several castles, and Richard Camville and Robert 
 of Turnharti were left behind to govern Cyprus as justices and 
 sheriffs on the English model ^. What followed is not very 
 clear. Before a month was over Camville was dead, and 
 Turnham had been obliged to put down a revolt and hang a 
 pretender. Richard foiind his new acquisition a burden ; 
 Neophytus briefly says that the ' Incliter ' sold the island for 
 300,000 pounds of gold to the Latins. The Templars were 
 the purchasers ; they also found the burden a heavy one, 
 especially at a moment when the war with Saladin demanded 
 all their energies. The small garrison which they were able 
 to keep in the island was shut up in Nicosia by the angry 
 Griffons, and there was every chance that Cyprus would be 
 lost as rapidly as it had been won. This was the state of 
 affairs in May 1193, when Richard, by a piece of rough diplo- 
 macy, prevailed on Guy of Lusignan to surrender his claim 
 to the shadowy crown of Jerusalem, and to accept the lordship 
 of Cyprus instead. The Templars were glad enough to sell 
 ' Eio. Divis. c. 61. 
 
VIII.] The Lusignans. 163 
 
 their rights, and Guy, with Richard's advice, bought them. 
 A successful sally of the garrison of Nicosia saved the Latins 
 from massacre, the alarm of which they avenged by an indis- 
 criminate slaughter of the Greeks. Guy thus obtained his 
 first hold on the island ; so much of the Greek population as 
 was still spared fled in panic ; and way was thus made for 
 the institution, in this remote corner of the Levant, of a 
 dynasty and government of the straitest feudal character ; the 
 introduction into a land, empty of all but the cultivating 
 classes and slaves, of the fully developed and now crystallised 
 block of feudal polity. 
 
 The house of Lusignan maintained itself in Cyprus for 
 nearly three centuries, during which, although fallen some- 
 what from the blessedness which had been broken up by Isaac 
 Comnenus, the island seems to have retained so much fertility 
 and prosperity internally as to make its later history very dark 
 by contrast. The flight of the Greek population, which had 
 begun under Isaac and been completed after the massacre of 
 Nicosia, left the island open to colonists from the West. The 
 peculiar privileges of the Cypriot Church, which was autoce- 
 phalous, made it easy for the remaining prelates and people 
 to accept the Western obedience, and enabled the house of 
 Lusignan to appeal confidently for the support of European 
 Christendom. The short period too dm-ing which, under 
 Guy and his successor, the administration of Cyprus was kept 
 separate from that of the waning kingdom of Palestine, gave 
 those kings a moment's breathing time, and this they im- 
 proved with a success which the long continuance of their 
 dynasty against fearful odds may be held to prove. 
 
 Guy, we are told, received Cyprus for life only, and did 
 homage for the island to Richard. As he already bore the 
 title of king, the question whether he should hold Cyprus as 
 a kingdom does not seem to have arisen. He appears in 
 the Lignages d'Outremer as ' seignor,' not as ' roi de Chypre ; ' 
 and no coins occur on which he is called king of Cyprus. 
 On his death, in April 1194, Richard putting in no claim for 
 the reversion, his brother, Amalric of Lusignan, constable of 
 Palestine, entered on the possession as his heir ; he was not 
 
 M 3 
 
164 The Suzerainty of Cyprus. [viii. 
 
 as yet King of Jenisalem ; it was a matter of importance to 
 him to be recognised as King of Cyprus ; and he accordingly 
 did homage to the Emperor Henry VI. He was crowned by 
 the Bishop of Hildesheim, who was sent over from Sicily to 
 perform the ceremony ; this was done in 1 197. Immediately 
 after this, Amalrie succeeded to the crown of Jerusalem ; the 
 crown of Jerusalem which, after the year 1369, became per- 
 manently united with that of Cyprus, was an independent 
 crown, and the king of Jerusalem an anointed king: the 
 union of the crowns therefore seems to have precluded any 
 question as to the tenure by which the kingdom of Cyp)rus 
 should be held. The crown of Cyprus was conferred at 
 Nicosia, that of Jerusalem at Tyre or at Acre, and, after the 
 capture of Acre, at Famagosta. The homage then due to 
 Richard, or to the crown of England, ceased at the death of 
 Guy; although the discontented barons of Cyprus are said 
 to have revived the idea of such a relation when they wanted 
 the aid of Edward I, in layi- The homage secured to the 
 Emperor by Amalrie was possibly recognised until 1269, but 
 was throughout complicated by the claims of Frederick II 
 and his sons on the kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1459 the 
 illegitimate pretender, James II, did homage to the Sultan of 
 Egypt as suzerain of Cyprus ; but that act was not the recog- 
 nition of a right ; it was only a bid for support, and was one 
 of the immediate causes of the entire downfall of the house of 
 Lusignan. Guy, however, does not seem to have troubled 
 himself about his title. His reign lasted only two years, 
 and his whole time was given to the restoration of something 
 like prosperity in the desolate land ^. According to the con- 
 temporary ' Chronique d'Outremer' he opened an asylum for 
 the dispossessed Franks of Armenia and Palestine. These, to 
 
 ' There were five classes of native cultivators in Guy's time ; — 
 (i) Parici — T^pomoi — slave cultivators. 
 
 (2) Lefteri — (XABtpoi — freed folk. 
 
 (3) Albanesi — descendants of Albanian soldiery. 
 
 (4) Veneziani bianoM — descended from the soldiers of Vital Michaele 
 in the first Crusade. 
 
 (5) Perperiarii, enfranchised Paroeci — paying a tax of 15 perperi ; 
 (cited from Bustron by Beugnot, Assizes of Jerusalem, i. 207). 
 
VIII.] The Latin Lords in Cyprus, 165 
 
 the amount of 300 knights and 300 men-at-arms, with a great 
 number of bourgeois, he enfeoffed with estates of land in 
 Cyprus ; so liberal was he that he retained for himself only- 
 twenty knights' fees. Possibly the truth was that he was 
 obliged to sell the land of the island to find the money due to 
 the Templars ; but the mode in which it was done proves that 
 the feudal idea, on which a few years later the Latin conquests 
 in Romania were apportioned, was full grown. The arrange- 
 ment however made by Guy had to be altered by Amalric 
 when he reached the dignity of kingship. He threw himself 
 on the mercy of his vassals ; they responded liberally, and 
 surrendered to him so many of his brother's grants that at his 
 death a royal revenue of 200,000 byzants was forthcoming. 
 Guy had perhaps made as much as he cared to make of his life 
 interest, but he was, like his patron, careless in the spending 
 of money, whilst unlike Richard's, his opportunities of acquir- 
 ing it were very limited. 
 
 Thus, however, the land system of Cyprus was restored ; the 
 300 knights, 300 men-at-arms, and extensive bourgeoisie, con- 
 stituted one or two permanent estates of the kingdom. The 
 nobles, who were, no doubt, included in the number of the 
 knights, were the numerous lords who had either fled before 
 Saladin, or were so little hopeful of the event of the Crusades, 
 that they thought it wise to look to Cyprus as a prospective 
 refuge. Hence throughout the middle ages the Cypriot lords 
 retained the titles of their homes in Palestine ; and the Pales- 
 tine titles, when the families of their possessors were extinct, 
 were conferred as a sort of Kfe peerage at the will of the 
 kings. Of the few Frank families that showed any vitality 
 the house of Ibelin was far the most prominent and prolific ; 
 the lords of Ibelin and Mirabel, sprung from the house of 
 Puiset, viscounts of Chartres, and closely connected with the 
 counts of Champagne and Blois ^, had played a conspicuous 
 
 ^ Balian le Fran9ois, the first of the family, ia described in the Lignages 
 d'Outremer as brother of Count Guillin de Chartres ; by which we are to 
 understand that he was a relation of Hugh de Puiset, count of Joppa, son of 
 Everard, and grandson of Geldewin, viscount of Chartres. His name Balian 
 is probably a softened form of Waleran ; see Du Cange on the Lignages, 
 pp. 360, 361. One lady of this house married an English knight, Hamo 
 
1 66 The Cypriot Church. [vin. 
 
 part during the twelfth century in Palestine ; they were still 
 more prominent in Cyprus: from them the royal house re- 
 ceived wives and guardians for the infant kings ; two of the 
 great recorders of the Assizes of Jerusalem were lords of Ibelin ; 
 one as regent or bailiff of Cyprus conducted the valiant re- 
 sistance to the claims of Frederick II : and in fact, if any one 
 had cared to write it, the fortunes of the house of Ibelin 
 would have been as great part of the history of Cyprus as 
 those of the house of Lusignan. Other great families were 
 those of Gibeleth and Bethsan, named from Byblus and Beth- 
 shan or Scythopolis. The whole peerage of Cyprus however 
 contained only a few names, which sound strangely enough, 
 as they illustrate the geographical unity of history. There 
 were princes of Antioch, Galilee, and Montreal, lords of Bey- 
 rout, Sidon, Toron, Csesarea, Tyre, and Tiberias ; counts of 
 Jaffa, Tripoli, and Carpasso ; there were also, as grand serjean- 
 ties, the double stewardships, coustableships, and marshalships 
 of Cyprus and Jerusalem, and the chamberlainship of Cyprus ; 
 these are all, or nearly all. They constituted a high court of 
 baronage or parliament, as they had done in Palestine, and 
 were the supreme council of the king, of which we have so 
 much information in the Assizes of Jerusalem. 
 
 As for the ecclesiastical estate, tradition assig^ns also to 
 King Guy some trenchant measm-es which help to complete 
 the parallel or the contrast between him and William the 
 Conqueror. The old Cypriot church had an archbishop and 
 fourteen suffragans ; the archbishop was Archbishop of Cyprus, 
 and owed obedience to no patriarch. The flight or submission 
 of the Greeks left the field open to the Latin clergy ; and 
 Guy placed a Latin archbishop at Nicosia, with suffragans at 
 Famagosta, Limasol and Baffo. This arrangement was sanc- 
 tioned by Celestine III in 1196. As time went on, the 
 Greek clergy returned, and Jacobites and Nestorians followed ; 
 very uneasy relations were produced between the two chief 
 hierarchies, one of which depended on Rome, whilst the other, 
 
 I'Estrange, who died in Palestine about 1272 ; this was Isabella, daughter of 
 the lord of Berytus and widow of the young king, Hugh III. See Assizes of 
 Jerusalem, ii. 449. 
 
VIII.] The Lawyers of Cyprus. 167 
 
 now seated at Famagosta, claimed the ancient prerogative of 
 the Cypriot church. The schismatic clergy were, however, 
 subjected by Honorius III to the Latin bishops, whilst Alex- 
 ander IV, in the year 1360, went so far as to forbid the 
 election of a Greek archbishop after the death of the reigning 
 prelate, and reduced the number of Greek sees to four, Soli, 
 Lencara, Arsinoe, and Carpasso ; the bishops were also sub- 
 jected to the Latin metropolitan, who was bound to administer 
 justice among them. Probably Guy has obtained credit for 
 some of the measures which properly belong to the popes and 
 to a liter date. The clergy of the island were as numerous 
 as the difference of nationalities required. The Mendicant 
 orders formed the strength of the Latin portion, the secular 
 priests that of the Greek and Armenian. Monasteries 
 abounded. In Nicosia alone were 35° churches. 
 
 These then being the estates of the realm, the powerful 
 people were all Franks, the returning Greeks and Armenians 
 would only creep into an equality of privilege, or return into 
 the enjoyment of their old customs, as the governing race 
 allowed ; and, although they ultimately grew and prevailed 
 while the governing race dwindled and perished, all political 
 interest centres in the governing race. For them the existing 
 polity of Palestine was transported across the sea ; not as yet 
 reduced to writing, for the system of Godfrey of Bouillon, ' the 
 Letters of the Sepulchre,' if it were ever codified, had perished, 
 and the Assizes had not yet taken their historic form. But 
 the new kingdom was singularly rich in lawyers, and this was 
 early recognised ; in 1314 we find Lewis of France, son of 
 Philip II, applying for a legal opinion on a point of procedure 
 to Hugh I of Cyprus ; the old lords of Palestine spent their 
 leisure in Cyprus recording the customs of their lost inherit- 
 ance, and the extant Assizes of Jerusalem were the result of 
 their studies. The names of the great legists are Philip of 
 Navarre, John and James of Ibelin, and Guy le Tort. John 
 of Ibelin, who died in 1366, and bore the title of count of 
 Jaffa, Ramlah (Rames), and Ascalon, drew up the existing 
 Assize of the High Court. It is in exact symmetry with 
 Western usage, that this great compilation was not received 
 
1 68 The Assizes of Jerusalem. [viii. 
 
 as a code until the year 1369 : like the ' Siete Partidas ' of 
 Alfonso the Wise, it was but a body of jurisprudence, the use 
 of which depended on its own reasonableness, or a collection of 
 customs which were recorded because they were used, not 
 merely used because they were recorded. The Highest Law 
 was still ' the custom ' recorded in the heart and mouth of ihe 
 ' lawful man.' 
 
 The Assizes of Jerusalem, then, although no doubt ihey 
 describe what we may call the common law of the Cypriot 
 kingdom, so far as concerned the Franks, cannot be regarded 
 during the greater part of the period as an authoritative code ; 
 the native population of Cyprus, like the native Syrians of 
 Palestine, had laws and customs, such perhaps as the kws of 
 Manuel Comnenus for which they obtained Richard's confir- 
 mation ; and the city of Famagosta at a little later period, 
 after having been for some years under the government of the 
 Genoese, was allowed to retain the laws of Genoa. "Within 
 the feudal fabric itself, custom, or perhaps principle, was more 
 dominant than law ; the lords of the great fiefs did not 
 accept the rules of the high court as binding unless they had 
 themselves consented to them ; the unity of feudal jurispiu- 
 dence lay rather in ideas than in cogent uniformity. Add to 
 this the fact that the Frank population of Cyprus showed no 
 tendency to ordinary increase, but was either constantly dimin- 
 ishing or recruited by arrivals from the West, whilst the 
 Greek population was at home, strong, numerous^ and wealthy ; 
 that the Latin Church accordingly, although powerful in the 
 protection of Rome and of the Cypriot crown, was surpassed 
 in wealth and historical greatness by the Greek and Armenian 
 communities ; and we cannot but conclude that in this, which 
 is regarded as the most flourishing period of Cypriot history, 
 there was little chance of strong government or administrative 
 development. The Assizes of Jerusalem lay like a crystal 
 block, a model of usages, incapable of enforcement and in- 
 capable of growth. The kings lived for the most part the 
 life of adventurers or knights-errant, playing their part in 
 the defence of Christendom, but still, like the great military 
 orders and fragmentary principalities of Palestine, only as an 
 
VIII.] State Councils. 169 
 
 isolated garrison in the middle of a world out of which they 
 were being gradually driven ; no morei as Richard had hoped, 
 an advance post in the great campaign by which the East was 
 to be humbled before the West. 
 
 Hence, no doubt, it is that, notwithstanding the example of 
 the kingdom of Naples, which was the nearest Catholic neigh- 
 bour of Cyprus, we find no traces of a Cypriot parliament. 
 There were councils of nobles and councils of bishops ; there 
 were high courts and bourgeois courts ; and there were, as 
 elsewhere, three estates well defined, clergy, nobles, and 
 burghers ; but if there ever was any attempt to range these in 
 an organised body either for legislation or for money grants, I 
 have failed to discover it. The ' Banes,' or ordinances, with 
 which the customs of the Assizes were supplemented, were 
 issued by the king's proclamation ; in two or three cases the 
 participation of the court or of the barons is expressed. In 
 136a we have an ordinance issued by the king, Peter I, by the 
 assent of the men of his court. A few years before, his 
 father. King Hugh, issued his kws by proclamation : ' Hear 
 the ban of God and of my Lord the King, Hugh of Lusignan 
 of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and of Cyprus ; know all men 
 that on the i6th of May, 1355, the Lord King and his men 
 ordained an assize.' Here it is possible there may be some 
 reference to a general court or ' witenagemot,' but not, I think, 
 to an assembly of estates. According to the Assizes of Jeru- 
 salem, every vassal who, whether immediately dependent on 
 the king or on a mesne lord, had done homage to the king as 
 chief lord, was a member of the royal court ; a usage which 
 in so small a state must have crushed out every tendency to 
 representative government ^- In default of further evidence 
 we must, I think, assume that, as in France before the institu- 
 tion of the states-general, the only check on the king was his 
 court of vassals ; whereas, after the example had been set in 
 the states-general, diets and parliaments of the West, the 
 national life of Cyprus was too much attenuated to allow it 
 to reproduce such institutions on an unfriendly soil. The 
 Basse Cour or Court of Bourgeois, organised under the vis- 
 
 ' Assizes, i. 254. 
 
1 70 The Succession. [viii, 
 
 counts or sheriffs of Cyprus, with jurats and other machinery 
 of courts of law, was an organisation of tribunals of justice 
 and local government, not a legislative constitutional organi- 
 sation : its assizes are therefore a book of procedure rather 
 than a code of laws, and, like the Assizes of the High Court, 
 rather a record of customs than a body of statutes. These 
 courts also, like the court of barons, may be regarded as 
 developments towards constitutional growth, arrested and 
 petrified at a"certain stage. 
 
 But I have said more than enough upon a subject which, 
 somewhat repulsive by itself, needs severe study before it will 
 begin to be remunerative. The Assizes of Jerusalem will 
 always remain a mine of feudal principles and a treasure to 
 scientific jurists ; they reflect infinite lustre on the Cypriot 
 lawyers who, in an age of turmoil and exertion, continuous 
 and overwhelming, found time and labour for recording them. 
 We conceive that the lords of Ibelin must have been well 
 acclimatised in more ways than one ; it is certainly cm-ious 
 that they supplied the main historical support to the kings of 
 Cyprus in marriage, war, and jurisprudence. 
 
 King Guy had a very short reign ; and most of the acts 
 that are ascribed to him I have already noted. After the 
 collapse of the third crusade and the three years' truce between 
 Richard and Saladin in 119a, he seems to have retired to 
 Cyprus, and to have died in April 1194 ; the same year the 
 old Emperor Isaac died in the custody of the Hospitallers at 
 Merkeb. Isaac's daughter was stiU wandering up and down 
 Christendom ; by the agreement for Richard's release she was 
 to have been handed over to Duke Leopold of Austria, her 
 kiasman, but when Baldwin of Bethune brought her to 
 Austria, she found Duke Leopold dead ; she was accordingly 
 brought back to Richard, and subsequently mamed to a 
 Flemish knight, who came to the East in the fourth crusade 
 in the retinue of John de Neesle, and, in her name, put in a 
 claim for Cyprus, which King Amalrie summarily rejected. 
 The rights of Guy devolved upon his brother; or rather 
 Cyprus, for the reversion of which no arrangements had been 
 made, fell to the lot of the possessor. 
 
VIII.] Amalric of Ltcsignan. 171 
 
 Amalrie of Lusignan had been, under his brother, constable 
 of both kingdoms, and Prince of Tyre ; he was thus in com- 
 mand of such military force as his brother had possessed, and 
 succeeded quietly to his dominion : from Henry VI, as I said, 
 he obtained recognition as king, and was crowned in 11 97 ; in 
 1 1 98 he obtained the crown of Jerusalem, marrying, as fourth 
 husband, the lady Isabella of Anjou, who had carried the right 
 of succession first to Henfrid of Toron, then to Conrad of 
 Montferrat, and then to Henry of Champagne. The German 
 chancellor. Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim, who had crowned 
 the King of Cyprus, negotiated the marriage and succession, 
 and Amalrie, leaving Cyprus under the administration of the 
 Hospitallers, transferred his court to Acre. We hear no more 
 of Cyprus during Amalric's reign. He was an able warrior, 
 and as successful as mere warlike ability, coupled with very 
 indifferent morality towards the infidels, could make him. 
 With the aid of the German crusaders of 1 197 he recovered 
 Berytus, where the ceremony of his coronation took place ; he 
 also took Byblus, and besieged Toron ; but the difficulty of 
 keeping terms between the Germans, the Franks, and the 
 military orders, was too great for him. The siege was raised, 
 the Germans retired, and Amalrie had to make a truce with 
 Safadin. 
 
 The Crusade of Villehardouin passed over without any direct 
 effect on either Cyprus or Palestine. Amalrie died at Acre in 
 April, 1305, and was buried in the church of S. Sophia at 
 Nicosia. He left the crown of Cyprus to his eldest son Hugh, 
 the son of his first wife, Eschiva of Ibelin, under the guardian- 
 ship of Walter of Montbeliard, his brother-in-law. The crown 
 of Jerusalem, the right of which depended on Queen Isabella, 
 was left unclaimed : John of Ibelin, half-brother of Isabella, 
 and imcle of the jurist, was lieutenant of that kingdom ; and 
 he, after some years' searching, found a husband for Mary, the 
 queen's eldest daughter by Conrad of Montferrat ; John of 
 Brienne was accepted as king of Jerusalem in 13 10. The 
 queen's second daughter Alice, the child of Henry of Cham- 
 pagne, was given to the young king, Hugh of Cyprus. The 
 event of the minority was a descent made by Walter of 
 
172 The Fifth Crusade. [viii, 
 
 Montbeliard on the coast of Asia Minor, the only result of which 
 was booty. Hugh came of age in laii, and was in that year 
 crowned at Nicosia. His reign was short, and was devoted 
 chiefly to the restoration of order and prosperity in Cyprus. 
 He encouraged the study of law, and was so learned in it him- 
 self that Lewis of France applied to him for an opinion on 
 legal procedure, which was held as authoritative by the feudal 
 lawyers. From Palestine he seems to have stood aloof, partly 
 perhaps owing to the fact that the death of Queen Mary, who, 
 dying in iai2, left only an infant daughter, might seem to 
 open the succession to his wife, Queen Alice. In laiy how- 
 ever he joined the expedition against the fortress of Tabor, 
 persuaded by King Andrew of Himgary, who visited Cyprus 
 on purpose to engage his support. The attempt on Tabor was 
 unsuccessful ; and Hugh retired to Tripoli, where he died in 
 February, 121 8. It thus happened that neither the great 
 Crusade of laoa nor the expedition against Damietta in iai9 
 directly touched the fortunes of Cyprus ; for the heir of King 
 Hugh was an infant of nine months old ; and the Queen 
 Alice, who with the aid of the child's great uncles, the lords 
 Philip and John of Ibelin, was guardian, seems to have 
 avoided too close alliance with the new troops of Crusaders. 
 Cyprus was, however, a regular station for the pilgrim fleets, 
 and as regularly an object of attack whenever the Sultans saw 
 an opportunity of unresisted devastation. 
 
 The little interest of the history runs rapidly on to the 
 Crusade of the Emperor Frederick II, which brought about 
 many other critical conjunctures in the history of Christendom. 
 This particular portion of the history is of no small legal as 
 well as historical interest. The kings of Jerusalem being men 
 of action, practising little self-restraint and never taking care 
 of themselves, generally died young, and left the fate of their 
 kingdom in suspense on the life of their young children. 
 Hence constant minorities, and the need of provisions for 
 guardianship, a need which, as yet, had scarcely begun to be 
 felt in the kingdoms of Europe. The practice therefore of the 
 kingdom of Jerusalem in the matter of regency became a 
 stock of legal cases, which, if not cited as occasion arose in 
 
yiii.] Question of Guardianship. 173 
 
 corresponding' circumstances in the West, afford to us at least 
 a number of parallels. The earlier practice had been to give 
 the wardship of the person of the heir to the nearest relation 
 incapable of inheriting ; that of the kingdom to the pre- 
 sumptive heir ^. But the rule laid down in the Assizes, which 
 is really perhaps a generalisation from the earlier cases rather 
 than a deliberate constitution, was that the mother of the heir 
 should be his guardian ; in case of her death, the next relation 
 on the side on which the kingdom moved, that is, the heir- 
 presumptive ; in case no such person could be found, it was 
 for the barons of the kingdom to meet and choose a regent or 
 guardian. The practice seems to have been to leave the 
 queen-mother as regent with a bailiff or high-steward to do 
 the work of government. 
 
 In the year laaS the case in Cyprus was this: the King 
 Henry, although old enough at seven to be crowned, was still 
 a minor. His mother. Queen Alice, had married a second 
 husband Bohemond V, heir of Antioch, and had quarreled 
 with the lords of Ibelin, who were not only her nearest rela- 
 tions, but the most powerful and cleverest of the acclimatised 
 baronage. These lords were the sons of that Balian of Ibelin 
 who was supposed, by going to mass instead of to battle, to 
 have ruined the chances of Guy of Lusignan at Nazareth in 
 May, 1187 : he had married the widow of King Amabic I, 
 and his sons were thus half-brothers to the many-husbanded 
 Queen Isabella, great uncles to King Henry, and half-uncles 
 to Queen Alice. So long then as the family party hung 
 together, they formed a strong phalanx ; when they quarreled, 
 all the internal strength of the kingdom was turned against 
 itself The second marriage of Queen Alice probably broke up 
 the unity. Philip of Ibelin died in 1227 ! John of Ibelin, 
 lord of Berytus, naturally expected to succeed him as bailiff ; 
 the queen proposed a baron named Amalric Barlais. John 
 
 ^ Assizes, i. 261. If a vassal die the custody of the ward is not to be iu 
 the heir, but in the nearest kinsman on the side on which the fief cannot fall. 
 Cf. Glanville, vii. c. 11 ; Etablissemens, i. m. 117. If he is a sovereign or 
 suzerain, his men shall have care of his body and fortresses, the heir to guard 
 the heritage (i. 435). See Itinerar. R. K. p. xcvii. 
 
1 74 Frederick II. [yn\. 
 
 succeeded in maintaining his position, and became bailiff or 
 regent under the nominal gimrdianship of the queen. But 
 the struggle was still proceeding when Frederick II, on his 
 way to Palestine, arrived in the Levant. Frederick II, as I 
 need not remind you, was already the ' Stupor mundi,' the 
 man of unbounded ambition and almost ubiquitous versatility, 
 who never did a great or truly kingly act, or followed any but 
 a selfish aim. He was, as son of Henry VI, heir of imperial 
 aspirations that coveted the whole world, and, as the husband 
 of Yolanda of Brienne, father and guardian of the young heir 
 of Palestine. Yolanda, who must have been a child when she 
 married him, died in this same year laaS, leaving an only 
 son, the luckless Conrad. When then Frederick reached the 
 Peloponnesus, he was met by five Cypriot barons of the 
 queen's party, who asked his aid against the lord of Berytus. 
 The emperor, whether desirous as he might well be to make 
 Cyprus available for military purposes, or simply wishing to 
 assert his right as overlord, undertook to deal with John of 
 Ibelin ; the barons told him that the revenues of Cyprus were 
 large enough to secure the conquest of Palestine, and Frederick 
 thought them worth a trial. He arrived at Limasol, and 
 wrote to John as his dearest uncle, begging him to come to 
 him with all his family and concert measures for the crusade. 
 John called together his friends at Nicosia and consulted 
 them : they told him that to admit Frederick was to betray 
 the infant king, but advised him to return a courteous answer, 
 to meet craft with craft. But this John would not do ; he 
 swore that he would rather die than let the Crusade fail by his 
 default ; and therefore presented himself to the emperor with 
 all his force, and with the little king in his train. Frederick 
 received him ostentatiously, made him change his black 
 mourning robes for scarlet, and entertained him at dinner : 
 after dinner, the usual time apparently for quarreling, he 
 turned round upon him and insisted on the resignation of the 
 lordship of Berytus, which was a fief of the crown of Jeru- 
 salem, and also of the office of bailiff of Cyprus. John 
 boldly told the emperor that this treatment was only what 
 his friends at Nicosia had bidden him expect. The emperor 
 
VIII.] Fatal Divisions. 175 
 
 changed colour at the reproach, which showed in what estima- 
 tion his honour was held. But the friends of the Crusade 
 interfered, and an agreement was made that the question of 
 Berytus should be decided by the high court of Palestine, that 
 of the regency by the high court of Cyprus. This was not 
 carried into effect. John, dreading the emperor's treachery, 
 fled to Nicosia : there Frederick besieged him and forced him 
 to a compromise ; he did homage for Berytus, and the emperor 
 was allowed to receive the revenues of Cyprus until King 
 Henry reached the age of twenty-five, thus apparently exer- 
 cising the rights, if not under the name, of an overlord ; but 
 whether he claimed the right as emperor or as king of Jeru- 
 salem, or as representing the nearest kinsman, is not clear ■'. 
 Frederick left Cyprus under charge of five barons of the island, 
 and went on to Palestine. After his short stay in the Holy 
 Land, and his politic but not very far-sighted treaty with the 
 infidels, he left the East to take care of itself. For about 
 three years the arrangement continued in force ; but in 1231 
 the emperor's marshal and deputy, Richard Filangier, tried to 
 wrest Berytus from John of Ibelin, and threw him into open 
 rebellion. John equipped a fleet, and, with the young king, 
 landed in Cyprus. The marshal retired before him. John 
 occupied Famagosta ; the marshal retreated to Nicosia ; there 
 he was defeated and forced to disband his army, which passed 
 over into the service of the king of Armenia. Cherin held out 
 until Easter, 1233 ; and then the last remnant of Frederick's 
 army left Cyprus. 
 
 John of Ibelin died in 1 236 ; the imperial power was by 
 that time broken up in Palestine as well as Cyprus ; and now 
 Queen Alice attempted to turn the tables on Frederick him- 
 self The relics of the whole Crusading history were im- 
 perilled ; Frederick would accept no invitations, nor would he 
 send Conrad to assert the rights of Yolanda. Alice, therefore, 
 as heir of Jerusalem, put in her claim for the regency of 
 
 ' That Hugh had to perform homage and swear fealty to Frederick II 
 appears from the letter of Innocent IV, releasing him from the oath in 1247. 
 See Mas-Latrie, Hist, de Chypre, vol. ii. p. 63. It is said that the barons 
 recognised the emperor as suzerain, but refused liege homage. 
 
176 Henry of Lusignan. [viil. 
 
 Palestine ; the poor barons clung to a straw ; they accepted 
 her, and she named her third husband, Ralph of Soissons, 
 bailiff of Jerusalem. No sooner was he appointed than he left 
 his post and went back to France. Jerusalem had already 
 fallen to the Sultan of Damascus in 1239 ; after a brief re- 
 storation in 1243, ^^ ^^ ^'^ *^® Kharismians in 1244; to the 
 Sultan of Egypt in the same year. The crown became a 
 derelict ; the title was borne after Conrad by his half-brother 
 Henry, the son of Isabella of England ; and subsequently by 
 a number of ruling houses, who seem to have clung to the 
 name far more faithfully than they had ever clung to the 
 reality of the dominion. The remains of substantive power 
 devolved with the title on Hugh the Great, King of Cyprus 
 in 1369. 
 
 The rest of the history of King Henry is soon told. He 
 came of age in 1233, married a daughter of the house of 
 Montferrat, and lost her the same year ; a second wife, 
 Stephanie of Armenia, died in 1350, and he then married 
 Placentia of Antioeh. Henry took a subordinate part in the 
 Crusade of the middle of the century. His action is obscure, 
 as are all the details of the period. In the expedition of 1 340 
 he seems to have borne no part : Richard of Cornwall does not 
 mention a visit to Cyprus either going or returning ; but 
 Henry seems to have, in 1346, asserted his right to Jerusalem 
 on the death of his mother, and to have been recognised as 
 king by Innocent IV, who included King Conrad in his 
 father's doom. In the Crusade of S. Lewis, Henry is said by 
 the Cypriot historians to have shared both perils and glories ; 
 he certainly received the French king, and entertained him at 
 Nicosia during the winter of 1348, which was so fatal to many 
 of the French nobles. We are not told that King Henry 
 furnished any part of the supplies that S. Lewis collected in 
 Cyprus, the mountains of com or the towers of wine casks ; 
 all these were furnished by the emperor and the Venetians. 
 The King of Cyprus entered Damietta with the French king 
 in triumph in 1349 ! ^^^ ^'^ did iiot> as has been asserted, 
 share his captivity. After this we read no more of him ; he 
 died early in 1353, having been the sport of fortune all his 
 
VIII.] Hugh II. 177 
 
 life, and leaving the inheritance of his history to a child of a 
 few months old, Hugh II, who reigned from 1253 to 1:^67. 
 
 The only incident of the reign of Hugh II turns, like that 
 in his father's reign, on the question of regency. Queen 
 Placentia acted as regent, but in the second year of the reign 
 went over to Palestine and married Balian of Ibelin, the 
 reigning lord of Arsouf. As Hugh was the last of the 
 Lusignans, the marriage seems to have been unpopular ; and, 
 either in consequence of it, or after the death of the queen 
 herself, a new bailiff was appointed. This was Hugh of An- 
 tioch, son of Henry of Antioch, and grandson of Bohemond IV ; 
 his mother Isabella was daughter of King Hugh I. He was 
 nearest in blood to King Hugh and his presumptive successor. 
 One military exploit signalised the regency : in i iG^ he led 
 to the defence of Acre against the Sultan Bibars a fleet of 
 Cypriot vessels. Then, says Sanuto, was the military force of 
 Cyprus in great valour and of great prudence ; there were in 
 the company 130 knights and much cavalry besides. The 
 contribution however helped the falling cause but little. All 
 in Palestine was going to ruin ; already the Venetians and the 
 Genoese were at war ; the Templars and the Hospitallers were 
 irreconcilable ; the Frank princes were selling their estates 
 and returning westward. The lord of Sidon sold, in 1360, 
 Sidon and Belfort to the Templars ; Balian sold Arsouf to the 
 Hospitallers. Henry of Antioch and his wife claimed the rCf 
 gency of Palestine as against the house of Brienne. In 1264 
 Bibars destroyed Csesarea ; and the defenders of Acre were 
 obliged, in self-defence, to lay waste their suburbs, and leave 
 open to the Saracens the great poliandrum or cemetery of 
 S. Nicolas, in which 134,000 men had been buried in one year 
 during the third Crusade. In 1361, the year before Hugh's 
 appointment to the regency, the Latin empire of Constanti- 
 nople fell. All the older medieval things were passing away 
 in both East and West, and the tide which had led on the 
 Crusades was turning. 
 
 The child king, Hugh II, died in 1267-, and the bailiff, 
 Hugh III, succeeded as king. Hugh II was the last of the 
 house of Lusignan who was left in the East ; in the We&t 
 
178 Thomas Aquinas. [viii. 
 
 there were still many members of the prolific family. Our 
 memory recurs most naturally to that large family of the 
 Aliens, the half-brothers of our king, Henry III, who nine 
 years before had been banished in consequence of their opposi- 
 tion to the Provisions of Oxford; their father, Hugh X of 
 Lusignan, Count of la Marche, was nephew to the Kings 
 Guy and Amalrie. Hugh of Antioch, too, the new king, re- 
 presented the house of Poictiers, being sprung from Raymond 
 of Poictiers, the uncle of Queen Eleanor, the wife of Heniy II. 
 The reigning house of Lusignan in la Marche came to an end 
 in 1303. But although this was the case, the Cypriot dynasty 
 continued to bear the name of Lusignan, to which by a female 
 descent it was entitled ; and there are many Lusignans, in 
 England as elsewhere, flourishing at the present day. 
 
 Hugh III, the new king, had the advantage of acquiring 
 the throne when he had age and experience to fill it : and he 
 reigned fourteen years, long enough to establish his own 
 authority, and to see the downfall of all the Frank states 
 around him. I will mention three points only in his history ; 
 for although he bore the title of the Great, ' Hugh the Great,' 
 it was a very forlorn hope that he was called on to lead. He 
 seems to have been the king of Cyprus to whom S. Thomas 
 Aquinas dedicated the famous treatise ' De Regimine Prin- 
 cipum ; ' a book which, owing to the great reputation of its 
 author, and the definiteness of the principles which it enun- 
 ciates, became a handbook of the relations of Church and State 
 in the middle ages. Of the work which we now possess under 
 this name, only a book and a half out of the four books was 
 the work of S. Thomas, the rest was added probably by 
 Ptolemy of Lucca ; but the book itself was a model which 
 later publicists chose to follow or to comment upon. Many of 
 these commentaries are found in our libraries ; and down to 
 the age of Sir John Portescue, the book addressed to the King 
 of Cyprus occupied a position of authority inferior only to the 
 Politics of Aristotle. It is not improbable that the book was 
 originally written for the education of the young King Hugh 
 II ; but it is certainly Very curious that the composition both 
 of the great Feudal Code of the Assizes, and of the manual of 
 
VIII.] Edward of England. 179 
 
 medieval polities, should have a direct relation to this remote 
 little island. The second point to be noted is this : — 
 
 Hugh saw nearly all the Crusading conquests lost. In 
 ia68 Antioch was taken, and the prince, Bohemond VI, 
 retired to Tripoli. In 1369 Hugh claimed the crown of 
 Jerusalem, and was crowned at Tyre on the 34th of September. 
 But this empty honour was not obtained without competition. 
 The king's great-aunt, Mary of Antioch, daughter of Bohe- 
 mond IV, and grand-daughter of King Amabic, contested 
 the title ; she carried her cause to Rome for the arbitration 
 of the pope ; and imable to make good any claim herself, she 
 sold in 1277 her rights to Jerusalem to Charles of Anjou, 
 the King of Naples, the brother of S. Lewis, and head of 
 that Angevin house which transmitted the crowns of Jeru- 
 salem and Sicily to E-ene of Anjou, the father-in-law of our 
 King Henry VI. Hugh III then was King of Jerusalem 
 when Edward I made his crusade. In May 1271, and for 
 several months later, the two kings were together at Acre ; 
 and during their intimacy Hugh put before Edward a question 
 which bore a signally close relation to that on which so much 
 of the interest of Edward's own reign was to turn. The 
 documents concerning it are preserved among the Assizes of 
 Jerusalem. Unfortunately we have only the case, not the 
 opinion which Edward gave. The question was, what obliga- 
 tion lay on the knights of Cyprus to feudal service within 
 the kingdom of Jerusalem ; exactly parallel to the great 
 question of 1297 in England, upon which the Confirmation 
 of Charters resulted. 
 
 It was not decided by Edward, but John of IbeHn had 
 laid down the rule : ' Three things are they bound to do out- 
 side the realm for the lord : i. For the marriage of him or 
 any of his children ; 3. To guard and defend his faith and 
 honour ; 3. Por le besoing aparant de sa seignorie ou le 
 comun profit de sa terre.' When we find a jurist named 
 Accursi d'Arezzo practising at Acre in 1270, it becomes 
 even probable that Edward picked up his friend Francesco 
 there. It was possibly on this occasion that Edward laid 
 down the rule that, for the recovery of the East, Egypt should 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o Siege of Acre. [vin. 
 
 be first occupied, then the Holy Land, and then Constan- 
 tinople. When that was done, and not till then, would the 
 Christian warriors, settled and established, be able to dwell 
 safely. So at least says Marino Sanuto, writing in 1321. 
 
 But neither Edward's little army nor his legal skill could 
 save King Hugh from discomfiture ; in 1272 he was forced 
 to submit to make a treaty with Bibars,, which left him only 
 Acre and the right of pilgrimage to Nazareth, and for this 
 he had to thank, it was said, the diplomacy of Edward. After 
 Edward's departure, and an attempt to sustain the Frank 
 cause in Tripoli, Hugh seems to have devoted himself to the 
 care of his island kingdom, which was itself threatened by 
 the monstrous policy of Charles of Anjou. That wretched 
 tyrant, by way of inaugurating his purchased sovereignty, 
 wrested Acre from King Hugh in 1377- He did not live 
 to recover it. After a siege of four months the Cypriot 
 knights declared their term of service at an end, and the 
 siege was raised. Hugh was a patron of learned men, and 
 a founder of monasteries. Probably he saw that unless the 
 Christians were unanimous he must be content to sit still. 
 The Hospitallers supported him ; the Templars spited him ; 
 the Genoese helped him ; the Venetians thwarted him. So 
 he stayed in Cyprus, where the people to a gi-eat extent 
 prospered under his care, and had sons and daughters. His 
 wife was a lady of the house of Ibelin : he died at Tyre in 
 1384 ; he was buried in the abbey of Lapais. His eldest 
 son, John I, who succeeded him, died in 1285 ; his brother 
 and successor, Henry II, reigned from 1385 to 1334; wit- 
 nessing a period of transitional history which affected the 
 East as well as the West, and which furnishes, material of 
 more curious if not wider interest. 
 
 So long as Acre held out against the Infidels, that is 
 exactly a hundred years from the date when Richard restored 
 it to Christendom, almost all the living interest of the 
 Crusades centres in that curious stronghold ; for it must have 
 been a very strange encampment of fighting and praying men 
 of all nations. There each of the great orders had its strong 
 tower, palace, and appointed share of the wardship of the 
 
VIII.] Last Days of the Crusades. i8i 
 
 walls. There the Hospitallers and the Templars issued from 
 their palaces the orders that governed their brethren throughout 
 Christendom ; the Genoese and the Pisans had their quarters 
 in close neighbourhood ; the Venetians had their Tower far 
 off, between the Tower of the English and the ward of the 
 Hospitallers ; and the mendicant orders had each their house 
 and church to themselves. Immensely strong, and able to 
 draw in supplies constantly from the sea, Acre was a standing 
 menace to the Eastern world ; but without were fightings 
 and within were fears. The very closeness in which the 
 conflicting powers were encamped intensified the dangers 
 of their disunion. There was still great appearance of 
 strength ; the King of Jerusalem and Cyprus was at least 
 safe in the castle around which this fortified camp was 
 spread ; all along the coast northwards, of Syria and Armenia, 
 were placed the strong munitions of the military orders ; 
 over the sea, a little way, was Cyprus, the great granary of 
 Palestine, and within the lines of Palestine itself were strong- 
 holds of both the knights and the ' pullani,' or acclimatised 
 Franks, which were fortified with great skill, and need indeed 
 succumb to nothing short of famine. All this, however far 
 short it fell of a well-administered state or a well-regulated 
 camp, was still a strong power, when the fatal quarrels in 
 the West, the downfall of the Hohenstaufen, the wicked 
 policy of Charles of Anjou, the rivalry of the Venetians and 
 the Genoese, combined to bring about the end. 
 
 Acre held out almost to the last ; Antioch had fallen in 
 ia68 ; all Palestine proper, save Acre and the road to Naza- 
 reth, had been surrendered in 1372 ; TripoH was lost in 1289. 
 Dependent on Acre were Tyre, Sidon, and Berytus, and a 
 few straggling forts that must fall when Acre fell. That 
 was on the i8th of May, 1291. The King of Jerusalem and 
 Cyprus at the time was Henry II, the second son of Hugh III, 
 who had succeeded his brother John in 1285, and had been 
 duly crowned in 1286. The recovery of Acre from the forces 
 of the King of Naples, which was effected before he could 
 duly receive the crown of Jerusalem, was the one brilliant 
 exploit of a long and otherwise unhappy reign. The assistance 
 
1 82 Capture of Acre. [viii. 
 
 which the military orders aiforded him on the occasion caused 
 the regent of Naples to confiscate all the estates of those 
 orders within the kingdom of Naples, which formed a pre- 
 cedent for the atrocious measures of Philip the Fair against 
 the Templars. Five years afterwards the Sultan Khalil Ashraf 
 besieged Acre : King Henry brought his forces to the rescue, 
 but, on the day of the assault by the Mussulmans, lost heart 
 and sailed away. For three days the luckless defenders 
 struggled and perished, and on the fourth day the city was 
 taken. I shall not dwell on the valour of the knights or 
 on the atrocities of the captors. The same day at evening 
 the Franks of Tyre embarked and set sail for the West. The 
 Templars left Sidon and went to Cyprus ; and the people of 
 Berytus surrendered. The break up of the great camp was 
 followed by a dispersion of the forces of the Cross. The 
 kingdom of Armenia began to falter in its obedience to the 
 Koman Church. The Armenian Catholics had to flee from 
 Mesopotamia to Sis in 1293 ; and about the same time the 
 relies of Antiochene chivalry took service under the Armenian 
 king. The military orders were only kept in Cyprus by the 
 gift of Limasol, which King Henry bestowed on them con- 
 jointly ; but soon the Templars sought their Western pre- 
 ceptories, within a very few years to perish utterly ; the 
 Teutonic knights found work in the conversion of the North ; 
 the Hospitallers, maintaining a better heart, fitted out a new 
 Crusade, and in 1308 seized the island of Rhodes, whence for 
 two hundred and fifteen years they made the Mediterranean 
 too hot to hold a Turkish fleet. The rest of the unattached 
 Franks found a home in Cyprus. 
 
 Amongst these was one little known and obscure knightly 
 order, which Englishmen need not be ashamed to recognise ; 
 the Order of the Knights of S. Thomas of Acre. This was a 
 little body of men who had formed themselves into a semi- 
 religious order on the model of the Hospitallers. In the third 
 Crusade, one William, an English priest, chaplain to Ralph 
 de Diceto, Dean of S. Paul's, had devoted himself to the work 
 of burying the dead at Acre, as the Hospitallers had given 
 themselves at first to the work of tending the sick. He had 
 
VIII.] The Knights of S. Thomas. 183 
 
 built himself a little chapel there, and bought ground for a 
 cemetery ; like a thorough Londoner of the period, he had 
 called it after S. Thomas the Martyr ; and, somehow or other, 
 as his design was better known, the family of the martyr 
 seem to have approved of it ; the brother-in-law and sister of 
 Becket became founders and benefactors, and a Hospital of 
 S. Thomas the Martyr of Canterbury, of Acre, was built in 
 London itself on the site of the house where the martyr was 
 born ^. Little indeed is known of the early days of the 
 knights ; they were not numerous, and probably poor ; but 
 when Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester and ex- 
 justiciar, was in Palestine in 1231, he placed them in a new 
 church and under the rule of the Templars, giving them also 
 in his will a legacy of 5°° marks ^. They had their proper 
 dress and cross : according to Favin their habit was white, 
 and the cross a full red cross charged with a white scallop ; 
 but the existing cartulary of the order describes the habit 
 simply as a mantle with a cross of red and white ^. They 
 were building a new church when Edward was at Acre ; and 
 in 1 27 8 we find him writing to the King of Cyprus on their 
 behalf *. The Chronicle of the Teutonic knights, in relating 
 the capture of Acre, places the knights of S. Thomas at the 
 head of the 5000 soldiers whom the king of England had 
 sent to Palestine ^, and Herman Corner, who however wrote 
 
 ^ In the nintli year of John, Oct. 13, 1207, messengers of the house of 
 S. Thomas at Acre, being canons, had a safe-oonduct. They had come to 
 England to seek alms for the redemption of captives ; Rot. Pat., ed. Hardy, 
 i. 76. The ' Terra Sanoti Thomas ' abutted on the land of the Temple at 
 Casale Album, near Coquet ; Paoli, Cod. Dipl. S. Joh., i. 468. Richard, the 
 English tanner, at Acre, in 1273 sold two houses in the Street of the Tannery 
 to the Hospitallers ; ib. 195, 196. 
 
 ^ Matthew Paris, ed. Wats, p. 472. ' MS. Cotton, Tiberius C. V. 
 
 * Mas-Latrie, Hist, de Chypre, ii. 81, 82, where two documents are printed 
 from the letters of Edward in the Public Record Office. In one of these the 
 king commends Ralph de Coumbe, master of the Hospital of S. Thomas, to 
 the good offices of Hugh of Lusignan, in Cyprus ; in another, dated Sept. 1 5, 
 1279, Ralph de Cardolio and the brethren write to the king on the misfortunes 
 of Palestine, and \irge that the master of the Order should be sent into 
 Syria. See the 7th Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Records, App. II. 
 No. 2252 ; Royal Letters, MS. (Chancery), No. 4260. 
 
 = Matthsei, Vet. .Slvi Analecta, x. 182; Eccard, Scriptores, i. 942. 
 
1 84 S. Thomas of Acre. [viii. 
 
 a century later, mentions them amongst the defenders of 
 Acre. We know from their cartulary that they had lands 
 in Yorkshire, Middlesex, Surrey, and Ireland ^ ; their Master 
 was called Master of the whole Order of the Knighthood of 
 S. Thomas the Martyr, in the kingdom of Cyprus, Apulia, 
 Sicily, Calabria, Brundusium, England, Flanders, Brabant, 
 Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Cornwall. Some few noble 
 names of the masters have been preserved ; Ralph of 
 Coumbe was master in or about 1278^, Henry de Bedford 
 in 1323, and Eobert de Kendale in 1344. In 1350 the 
 order was recognised as still existing by the German traveller 
 Ludolf of Suchen. In 1357 Hugh de Curteys, the preceptor 
 of Cyprus, invested one Eichard of Tickhill with the habit 
 
 ^ At Wapping, Plumstead, Coulsdon, and Doncaater. The estate at Wap- 
 ping was the gift of Tierri of Alegate ; MS. Cott. fo. 156. Coulsdon wa3 
 confirmed to the master of the knights by a charter of Henry III, in 1261 ; 
 fo. 236 : the Hospital of S. James, at Doncaster, was given by Peter de 
 Mauley : ' Deo et militise beat! Thomse martyris de Aeon ; ' fo. 258 : the 
 benefactors in Ireland are enumerated by Edward I in a grant of confirmation, 
 5th June, Ac. 17 ; Fulk de Villars, John de la Zouche, Edmund Bret, Gilbert 
 Marshall, Walter Marshall, and Philip Horsey. James Butler, Earl of 
 Ormond, was another at a later date. 
 
 '^ Frater Eadulfus preceptor fratrum Saucti Thomae de Aeon in Anglia; 
 A.D. 1 249. William of Huntingfield ' magister militiae hospi talis B. Thomas 
 Martyris de Aeon Londini;' MS. Cotton, fo. 166. Eichard of Southampton 
 was master of the Hospital, X I Edw. II ; Thomas de SaJlowe, ' magister 
 domus,' 40 Edw. III. 
 
 Aug. 7, 1323, Henry de Bedford, master general of the order, creates John 
 de Paris prior and custos of the Chapel of S. Nicholas of Nicosia ; sealing 
 with his seal for Cyprus. 
 
 June 17, 1324, William de Grlastingebury, preceptor of the house of S. 
 Thomas of Acre, in the diocese of Nicosia, with consent of the chapter of the 
 house, to wit, Nicolas Clifton, John of Paris, and William of S. Bartholomew, 
 appoints Nicolas Clifton proctor against a brother Henry, who calls himself 
 master ; ' actum Nicosise in oapella Sancti Nicolai presentibus Henrico et 
 Thoma presbyteris Anglicis et prasdioto Johaune priore dictse capellae.' 
 
 Aug. 30, 1 344, Eobert Kendale, master of the whole order, appoints Henry 
 
 of Colchester and William of Brunill to collect money for the order ; ' dat. 
 
 Nicosiae ' in the house of Guddefrid, archdeacon of the church of Pamagosta, 
 
 ■vicar of Philip, archbishop of Nicosia. 
 
 Feb. 2, 1357, Hugh Curteys invests Richard of Tickhill ; "actum in regno 
 
 Cypri in Nicosia intra ecclesiam Beati Nicolai Anglicorum, praesentibus 
 
 Francisco de Gave burgensi Nicosise, domino Eob. de Swillington canonico, 
 
 domino Eicardo de Chatesby presbytero Anglico ; Guillelmo Gaston de Anglia 
 
 Turcopclo regis et pluribus aliis.' 
 
VIII.] ' Libellus de Reatperatione.'' 185 
 
 of the order, in the presence of Robert Swillington, canon, 
 Sir Richard Chatesby, an English priest, and William Gaston 
 of England, Turcopolier to the king of Cyprus. The ceremony 
 was performed in the church of S. Nicolas of the English in 
 the city of Nicosia; one of the many churches which formerly, 
 according to Father Stephen of Lusignan, adorned that city, 
 of which the Venetians destroyed 130 in the process of fortifi- 
 cation. [It is possible that it still exists, and is indeed that 
 church of S. Nicolas, which our dear friend the bishop of 
 Gibraltar tried to recover in 1879.J The hospital in London 
 became, probably at the fall of the Templars, a mere Augus- 
 tinian Hospital. Its church, or one built on the site of it, is 
 now the chapel of the Mercers' Company^. 
 
 England had not, with all her business under Henry III 
 and Edward I, forgotten Palestine : some of her sons fell 
 at Acre, and the remnant of the little order found a home 
 at Nicosia. But the great king himself never forgot his 
 first love ; in fact all the nobler Plantagenets, Richard of 
 Cornwall, Edward I, Henry of Lancaster, Henry of Boling- 
 broke, Henry V, and Cardinal Beaufort, all either made the 
 pilgrimage or looked forward to a great crusade. To Edward I, 
 in or about 1303, was addressed the very amusing ' Libellus 
 de recuperatione Terrse Sanctse ^,' the work of an ecclesiastical 
 judge in Aquitaine, whose name is unknown, but who specu- 
 lates like a special correspondent of the period ; a book which 
 shows a just sense of the evils which had rendered the united 
 action of Christendom impossible ; points out ways in which 
 all political dangers in Europe can be avoided ; stigmatises 
 the crime of war between Christian princes, the ruinous 
 discord between Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, and proposes to 
 settle the military orders chiefly in Cyprus, and employ them 
 in the recovery of the holy places. Curiously enough, one 
 of the remedial measures proposed by the writer, who is 
 especially strong on the subject of natural science, is that 
 
 ' The history of the London house may be read in Newoourt, Eepertorium, 
 i- 663 ; and Men. Angl. vi. 645 ; it must be carefully distinguished from the 
 Hospital of S. Thomas the Martyr in Southwark, the germ of the present 
 S. Thomas's Hospital. See also Itinerarium Eegis Eicardi, prsef. pp. cxii-cziii. 
 
 ' Printed at the end of the second volume of Bongars' Oesta Dei per Francos. 
 
1 86 Projects of Recovery. [viii. 
 
 girls should be taught to practise medicine and surgery ; 
 they are to learn grammar, and logic also, natural principles, 
 and mathematics, but it is that they may qualify as wives 
 for the Oriental princes. 
 
 But to retm-n to Cyprus : Edward, as I said, was not the 
 only one of his family who remembered it : Henry III had 
 proposed to the Bishop of Bethlehem a marriage between his 
 son Edmund and the queen-mother Placentia in i %^6 ; the 
 young king was also to marry one of his daughters ^. The 
 records however, of both that reign and the next, contain 
 more references to Armenia than to Cyprus ; thus in 1360 
 Alexander IV exhorts Edward to defend Armenia against 
 the Tartars; in ia8o the Bishop of Hebron, vicegerent of 
 the patriarch, sends the thanks of the Franks, and adds that 
 Armenia and Cyprus have been laid waste by a plague of 
 locusts ^ ; the same intelligence is sent by the master of 
 S. Thomas from Acre ; the wars of Charles of Anjou cut off 
 aU hope of succour, and the king of the Tartars had demanded 
 provisions from Acre. Boniface VIII was unwearied in im- 
 pressing on England the importance of these regions ; in 
 1298 he urges the sending of a subsidy to Sembat, king of 
 Armenia ^ ; in 1 300 he is negotiating a general confederacy 
 which will include the princes of Armenia and Georgia. 
 Edward cannot do much, but if he cannot send knights he 
 will send missionaries. The king of the Tartars sends envoys 
 to him, and one of them is baptized. The last measures of 
 Edward I and the first of Edward II are to the same purpose. 
 Edward I issues safe-conduct to the bishop of Lydda and other 
 Dominicans who are going to convert the heathen ; Edward 11 
 sends a warning to the king of the Tartars against Mahomet- 
 anism. The kings of Armenia, who have apparently little else 
 to do, send constant appeals for money. Faithful Armenia, 
 says Sanuto, writing in 1321, lies among the wild beasts ; on 
 one side the lion, the Tartar ; on another the leopard, the 
 Sultan ; on a third the wolf, the Turks ; on the fourth the 
 serpent, the Corsairs. But these I must notice by and by. 
 
 1 Feed. i. 341. 2 lb. 402, 586. 
 
 " lb- 9°°. 742, 749. 902. 919- 
 
VIII. j The Kingdom of Armenia. 187 
 
 Henry II of Cyprus reigned nominally from 1285 to 1324; 
 but during great part of the time he was superseded by one 
 or other of his brothers : his quarrels with them form the 
 whole history of his reign ; at one time he was a prisoner in 
 Armenia, whither his brother, Amahic, the prince of Tyre, 
 had sent him ; another brother, Guy, the constable of Cyprus, 
 was put to death by his orders for a conspiracy agaiast him. 
 The Popes were much exercised by this fraternal strife ; but 
 it was not until after the death of Guy that Henry had 
 peace. As so often happens after an unquiet reign, he outlived 
 all his enemies, and died rather regretted than not. This 
 was in 1334 : he was buried in the church of the Franciscans 
 at Nicosia. When he had been able to exercise independent 
 authority he had used it well ; he had welcomed the refugees 
 from Acre and fortified Famagosta ; he contributed largely 
 to the judicial decisions which form the supplement to the 
 Assizes, and he established a strong judicature in Cyprus. 
 But he was an epileptic, which perhaps accounts for his 
 incapacity to retain the rule ; and he left no children. 
 
 With the accession of his nephew, Hugh IV, begins a 
 more stirring, and, perhaps, the most interesting, period of 
 the Cypriot history. Before however entering on the outline 
 of this portion of our subject, we may just look back to 
 Armenia, where the native kingdom and the native dynasty 
 were nearly coming to an end. Leo I, the first king, who 
 was regarded by the Armenian writers as a really great and 
 patriotic ruler, died in 1219, leaving an infant daughter, who 
 carried the crown to her husbands in succession ; Philip of 
 Antioch first, who, failing to make himself agreeable on the 
 Church question to the native lords, especially a great lord 
 called Constantius, or Constantino, was put to death with his 
 partisans. The second husband was Hayton, the son of Con- 
 stantius, who reigned for nearly fifty years, at first under his 
 father's directions, and after the year 1237 independently. 
 Hayton was thus king dm-ing the whole of the crusading 
 period of the thirteenth century, and had dealings with 
 Lewis IX in his first Crusade, and with Edward of England 
 during his stay in Palestine. He was moreover the king of 
 
i88 Hay ton the Monk. [vm. 
 
 Armenia in whose time Marco Polo set out on his travels 
 in Asia ; and it was through his means that the "Western 
 kings became acquainted with the Tartar dynasty at Samar- 
 cand and its tendencies to favour Christianity. For the 
 Tartar rulers during this period were far from being committed 
 to Islam ; they received and favoured missions and protected 
 Christian doctrines in a liberal fashion, without understanding 
 them or finally committing themselves ^. Hay ton may pos- 
 sibly have the credit of having stirred up the Mongols against 
 the Khalifate of Bagdad, which Hulaku brought to an end in 
 1359. ^^^ alliance with the Tartars brought down the 
 Sultan of Egypt on Armenia ; and, after the capture of 
 Antioch, Hayton resigned his throne and retired to a monas- 
 tery, where he took the name of Macarius, and died soon after. 
 His brother, the constable of Armenia, Sempad, Sembat, or 
 Sinibald, was the author of an Armenian chronological history 
 of authority. A better known person, also of the royal house, 
 was the monk Hayton, who about the year 1305 wrote a 
 history called the Flower of the Histories of the East. Hayton's 
 career is curious. He had been lord of Gorigos, or Corycus, 
 on the Mediterranean coast, and had both fought in Palestine 
 and negotiated among the Tartars, where the Armenian 
 princes were constantly tantalised with the hope of converting 
 the khans. About 1390 he went to Cyprus and became a 
 Prsemonstratensian canon, as Brother Antony. From Cyprus 
 he turned westward and came to France, where the Pope 
 was. It was at Poictiers that he dictated his history, which 
 accordingly was written in Latin. It has been printed both 
 in Latin and in a French translation of the same century, 
 but contains more about the Tartars than about the Fi'anks. 
 It is not improbable that to Hayton's influence we may 
 trace some of the interest shown in Armenia by Edward I 
 and Edward II. 
 
 ' Mosheim in his 'Historia Tartarorum ' has collected all the notices acces- 
 sible in his time of the attempts to convert the Tartars, which for a long time 
 had a show of success. After dallying with Christianity, the Khans seem to 
 have become finally Mahometan and hostile at the beginning of the 14th 
 century. But the subject, since the publication of the Armenian authorities, 
 has become susceptible of much more elucidation. 
 
viii.J Succession in Armenia. 189 
 
 King Hayton, however, who died in T271, was succeeded 
 on the Armenian throne by his son Leo II, who seems to 
 have clung to the Tartar alliance as against Egypt, and to 
 have come to an open rupture with the Pope on the other 
 side. He was likewise in close alliance with Byzantium, and, 
 although his history is obscure, he seems to have asserted an 
 independent position for which his successors toiled in vain. 
 He reigned eighteen years, and was followed by four of his 
 sons in succession. Of these Hayton II pm-chased the support 
 of the West by reconciling himself and his people to Rome ; 
 he was a poet and historian also, and ended in becoming a 
 Franciscan as Friar John. With his brother, Thoros, who 
 on his withdrawal became king, he went to Constantinople 
 to obtain help from Andronicus Paleologus. On their return 
 they found themselves unseated by a third brother, Sembat ; 
 fled to Cyprus first and then to Tartary, but were taken ; 
 Hayton was blinded and Thoros strangled. Sembat had 
 thrown over the Roman alliance and been crowned by the 
 Armenian Catholicos ; but, finding the Saracens still gaining 
 ground, he changed his tactics, and obtained from Boni- 
 face VIII a bull for a subsidy, which was circulated in 
 England in 1298 1. He was supplanted in his turn by his 
 brother Constantius. He, after a short reign, was succeeded 
 by Leo III, son of Thoros, who reigned under the guardianship 
 of his uncle, the blind brother John, who had been king as 
 Hayton II. Both Leo and his uncle were put to death by a 
 Tartar general, at the suggestion, according to the Roman 
 writers, of the discontented Armenians, who had been again 
 too summarily reconciled to the papacy in a council at Sis, 
 in 1307. Oissim, who succeeded in 1308, was another son 
 of Leo II. He was connected with the Cypriot histoiy, 
 taking part with the brothers of King Henry against him ; 
 and he also obtained a confirmation of the union with the 
 Roman Church in 1316. Leo IV, who was the last of the 
 native dynasty, succeeded his father Oissim in 1320. His 
 whole reign was a continued struggle against the Moslems, 
 who were encroaching on every side, and his name became 
 
 ' Feed. i. 900. 
 
I go War in the Levant. [viii. 
 
 very well known in the West. It was in his defence that 
 John XXII proclaimed a Crusade in 1333 ; and among other 
 helps Edward III, in 1335, allowed his amhassadors £"40 from 
 the London subsidy. Leo found himself before his death 
 reduced to the few mountain fortresses from which his 
 ancestors had emerged two centuries before. He failed to 
 gain the support of the Armenians, and was thus thrown on 
 that of the Latins, who could really give him no aid. He 
 was assassinated about 134a, and his dynasty ended with 
 him. The five remaining Kings of Armenia sprang from a 
 branch of the Cypriot house of Lusignan, and were little 
 more than Latin exiles in the midst of several strange popu- 
 lations all alike hostile. 
 
 We have now to return to Hugh IV, King of Cyprus, a 
 prince who is known in literary history as the king to whom 
 Boccaccio dedicated his genealogy of the gods. He reigned 
 twenty-five years, and has the merit of setting on foot the 
 great alliance between the Venetians, the Pope, and the 
 Knights of Rhodes, to which the chief successes of his reign 
 and that of his son were due. It is true that these successes 
 wear to modern eyes the look of mere piratical exploits : but 
 we have two points to remember in this connexion. All 
 naval war, not only during the middle ages, but down to the 
 seventeenth century, was more or less piratical ; and the war 
 between the Christians and the Saracens, although interrupted 
 now and then by truces, which both parties felt ashamed to 
 make and took the first opportunity of breaking, was really 
 continuous and internecine. The coasts of Asia Minor had 
 been gradually lost to the Christians ; the coasts of Egypt 
 were to some extent open to reprisals. The fact that the 
 coast of Syria and Palestine afibrded so few harbours had, 
 when once the fortified harbour of Acre had fallen into the 
 hands of the Saracens, the efiect of removing the seat of war 
 to the Asiatic and Egyptian coasts. That was the deliberate 
 opinion of King Edward I, who had ruled that Egypt must 
 be the first point of attack, then Palestine, and then Con- 
 stantinople. Hence the two attacks on Damietta in 121 9 
 and 1249. Now, after a long period of defence, the Christians 
 
VIII.] Attempts at Crusades. 191 
 
 took the initiative. The leaders and fighters in all this from 
 1308 to 1533 were the Knights of Rhodes, but Cyprus was 
 very frequently the head-quarters and source of supplies, and 
 the Western pilgrims were not chary of labour, blood, or 
 treasure. In all the great achievements of the time too 
 some English pilgrims were associated. The single exploit 
 however of King Hugh's reign was a descent on Smyrna in 
 1344. John of Biandra, Grand Prior of Lombardy, the head 
 of the expedition, made himself master of the citadel ; and 
 Smyrna remained in the hands of the knights until the close 
 of the century. The King of Cyprus had contributed a con- 
 tingent towards the fleet, but, except by weakening the 
 Saracen power a little, he obtained no immediate benefit for 
 his state \ 
 
 The great plague of 1349 fell with especial fatality on 
 Cyprus ; only one castle, that of Dieudamour, was safe for 
 the king to] dwell in ; and the island got such a reputation 
 for unwholesome air that the trade almost ceased. The Frank 
 population especially diminished. In 1349 the traveller, 
 Ludolf of Suehen, described the barons of Cyprus as the 
 richest in the world : after the plague Hugh had to recruit 
 the ranks of the nobles by conferring titles on the merchant 
 class. The succours sought in Europe were only scantily 
 afforded. The King of Armenia cried louder and got more 
 sympathy than the King of Cyprus. Still some brave men 
 went out to the East. It is at least to this period that we 
 have to refer the pilgrimage and warlike exploits of Henry 
 of Lancaster, the great duke-palatine and father-in-law of 
 John of Gaunt. He, according to his biographer Capgrave, 
 about the year 1351 made his grand tour, a,nd fought not 
 only in Prussia, where he went first, but also in Rhodes, 
 Cyprus, and the East, ending his military education with a 
 campaign in Granada. William Lord Roos of Hamlake, 
 died in 1353, either in Palestine or in Cyprus, on a more 
 
 ' Paoli, Cod. Dipl. Ord. S. Joh. ii. 93, gives a commission from the Pope to 
 the Archbishop of Candia to recover from the King of Cyprus, the Grand- 
 Master of Rhodes and the Doge of Venice, the money covenanted for the 
 defence of Smyrna. 
 
192 
 
 King Peter. [viir. 
 
 distinctly religious pilgrimage: to 1357 we have referred our 
 last glimpse of the English order and their church at Nicosia. 
 In 135 a Henry Lord Percy left by will 1000 marks sterling 
 in florins of Florence for his son Heniy to make the pilgrimage. 
 But the French \¥ar in the West, and the struggles of the 
 Venetians with the Genoese, prevented anything like national 
 or united expeditions. In the midst of turmoil King Hugh 
 died in 1359, and was buried in the Blackfriars' church at 
 Nicosia. His eldest son, Guy, prince of Galilee and constable 
 of Cyprus, had died before him, leaving a son, Hugh of 
 Lusignan. He, on his grandfather's death, went into the 
 West to obtain some support in his claim on the crown, 
 which, owing to the fact that representation was not allowed 
 by the laws of Cyprus, failed to obtain recognition. This is 
 that Hugh of Cyprus whom the Pope in 1360 made senator 
 of Rome, and who really ruled there from January to August 
 1361. He has been confounded by some of the Cypriot 
 historians with his grandfather, who accordingly is made to 
 abdicate and die at Rome. Hugh, having failed to find 
 employment for his military genius at Rome, resigned the 
 senatorship, and we hear no more of him ^. 
 
 The crown of Cyprus had been secured by Hugh IV to his 
 second son Peter, whom he had had crowned, before his death, 
 at Nicosia. 
 
 Peter, with apparently some characteristics of genius, had 
 several more or less allied to insanity. He had made a vow 
 of slaughter against all Mussulmans generally, and, for the 
 purpose of keeping it, wore his naked sword hung round his 
 neck. Our acquaintance with him is largely due to Froissart, 
 who follows his exploits with some minuteness ; but we have 
 a more valuable record in the work written by Philip de Maz- 
 zeriis, chancellor of Cyprus, on the life of the legate Peter 
 Thomas, whose period of activity nearly coincides with the 
 reign of King Peter, 1361-1369^. Peter Thomas was a 
 native of Guienne, a born subject of Edward III, and was 
 
 • Gregorovius, Gesch. d. St. Bom., vi. 393 ; Theiuer, Diplom. S. Sedis, 
 ii. 391. 
 
 ^ Acta Sanctorum Boll. Jan. ii. 995-1023. 
 
VIII.] Pilgrimage of King Peter. 193 
 
 probably instrumental personally in creating tbe interest felt 
 in England and Guienne in the plans of the King of Cyprus. 
 He crowned Peter at Pamagosta, and made an attempt to 
 bring over the Greek population of Cyprus to the Roman 
 obedience. The first exploit of King Peter was the voyage 
 across the enchanted gulf to Satalia, and the capture of the 
 place, where, as Froissart teUs us, he slew without exception 
 all the inhabitants of both sexes whom he found there. In 
 this expedition he was assisted not only by the Catalans and 
 the fleet of Rhodes, but by an English force, or a force under 
 an English knight, whom the Italian historians name Robert 
 of Toulouse^, and describe as sent into Armenia to demand 
 tribute from the princes. If Robert of Toulouse was engaged 
 in the sack of Satalia, we must hope, for our national credit's 
 sake, that he was only an Englishman by courtesy, a Knight 
 of Rhodes of the langue of England, which would contain 
 knights drawn from the continental estates of the Plan- 
 tagenets. Having fleshed his maiden sword at Satalia, King 
 Peter set out on a mission westward, a general canvass of 
 Christendom. Having gone by way of Rhodes to Venice, the 
 legate, making known the approach of the king, applied for 
 succour to the ' communitates, dominos et tyranuos ' of Lom- 
 bardy, and then passed on to Avignon. In March 1363, King 
 Peter himself reached Avignon, where the Pope gladly received 
 him, and determined to preach a new Crusade, of which King 
 John of France, who had just emerged from his prison in 
 England, should be the leader. After settling this, the king 
 went to Prague, where he saw the emperor Charles IV, and so 
 to Juliers, Brussels and Bruges. Everywhere he was received 
 with suppers and tournaments, in both of which he seems to 
 have played his part. Whilst he was enjoying himself, the 
 legate was negotiating, and it was determined that the Cru- 
 sade under King John should start from Marseilles in the 
 following March. Froissart follows the movements of King 
 Peter through Picardy to Calais, and on to London. At 
 London he was well entertained ; Queen PhUippa made him 
 
 ^ The name is variously given ; DtJaurier reads it Lusngnan ; it also appears 
 as Julassan, wliicli looks like a corruption of an English name. 
 
 
 
194 Crusade of King Peter. [viii. 
 
 handsome presents ; King Edward gave him a ship named the 
 Catharine. The mayor, Henry Picard, gave him a dinner, and 
 allowed him to win fifty marks at play : but as the poor king 
 did not lose with a good grace, the mayor gave him his money 
 back again. Of substantial aid he got little ; and Edward 
 was not liberal even with promises ; he himself was too old to 
 go, but his sons and nobles might. Peter went back therefore 
 to France. Before he went he was robbed by some English 
 highwaymen ; as however Edward paid all his expenses, he 
 was probably no great loser. 
 
 King John had during this time returned to England, 
 where he took part in the festivities, but died soon after, in 
 AprU 1 364, thus putting an end to one part of the great de- 
 sign ; and one of Peter's first acts after returning through 
 Guienne to Paris, was to attend King John's ftmeral, May 7, 
 1364, and the coronation of his successor. He seems then to 
 have revisited the emperor and the kings of Hungary and 
 Poland, a route which hindered him from reaching Venice 
 until the legate had left. The legate had been called away to 
 Cyprus to settle a quarrel between the Genoese and King 
 Peter's officers. Peter appeared at Venice rather forlorn ; but 
 he had obtained the support of some English lords, one of 
 whom, the Earl of Warwick, must, if the traditions of the 
 Beauchamps are to be trusted, have gone on before him ; for 
 in the great battle in Turkey, fought Nov. i, 1364, he took 
 prisoner a son of the King of Lithuania, whom he brought 
 back to England and made a Christian. Two other English- 
 men of distinction are known to have followed Peter ; John 
 Lord Grey of Codnor, and a knight of the house of Stapylton, 
 who had been especially impressed by the virtues of the 
 legate. 
 
 Having got together as many volunteers as he could, and a 
 considerable fleet. King Peter sailed from Venice and joined 
 the fleet of the Hospitallers. The great stroke to be made 
 was the capture of Alexandria. This was efiected with no 
 small bloodshed and very rich spoils. Alexandria taken, the 
 next object was to strengthen the fortifications and make it 
 the head-quarters of a Crusade. But here the English 
 
VIII.] The English Lords. 195 
 
 auxiliaries objected. There can be no doubt that the story is 
 true, for it is from the pen of the legate himself : they refused 
 even to stay all night in Alexandria, and having conspired 
 with a certain prince, whose name the legate feels bound to 
 keep secret, set sail for Cyprus. They sent word home too 
 that the city was only half taken '^. It was a great dis- 
 appointment to the ardent crusaders ; but no doubt the 
 English lords who had had experience in foreign warfare saw 
 that Alexandria was untenable, and the season, for it was now 
 the loth of October, 1365, was too far advanced. The failure 
 of the Crusade was bitterly commented on by Petrarch, who 
 in a letter to Boccaccio writes, at the time, in the severest 
 way of the greediness and irresolution of the Transalpines ^, 
 and many years after laments, in an epistle to PhiHp de Maz- 
 zeriis, the loss to Christendom, and the wretched effect pro- 
 duced, by the failure, on the character and fate of the king ^ 
 The English lords seem to have stayed sometime longer in 
 Cyprus : the legate died at Famagosta in January, 1366, 
 and they brought back to England the biography by Philip 
 the Chancellor, which has furnished the most certain details 
 of the story. After the Alexandrian expedition the Venetians, 
 whose commerce was suffering, prevailed on Peter to treat for 
 a peace with Egypt, which was to establish Cypriot consulates 
 and reduce the customs in the ports of the Levant ; but the 
 attempt failed. The next year, with the Genoese and the 
 Hospitallers, he ravaged -the Syrian coast, but again had to 
 make peace. He then visited Rome in search of succour, and 
 
 ' ' Kecesserunt Anglici qui videbantur fortiores, facta conspiratione cum 
 principe cujus ex parentela et dolosa sequela nomen tacere debeo ; ' P. de 
 Mazz. AA. SS. 1. u. p. 1016. 
 
 ^ ' Siquidem Petrus Cypri rex Alexandriam cepit in Egypto, magnum opuB 
 et memorabile nostrseque religionls in immensum amplificandEe fundamentum 
 ingens, si quantum ad capiendam tantum ad servandam urbem animi fuia- 
 set ; qui certe non defuit, ut fama, nisi comitatus ejus ex transalpinia maxime 
 gentibus collectus, melioribus semper ad principia rerum quam ad exitus, ilium 
 in medio praestantissimi operis deserentes, ut qui pium regem non pietate sed 
 cupiditate sequentes, collectis spoliis abiere piique voti impotem avari voti 
 compotes fecere ; ' Petrarch, 0pp. p. 843 ; Ep. Senil. lib. 8. ep. 8. 
 
 ^ lb. Lit. 13. ep. 2\ 'Petrus rex Cypri, indigni vir exitus sed sacrse memoriae 
 nisi,' etc. 
 
 o a 
 
1 96 Troubles. [viii. 
 
 returned finally to Cyprus in September 1368. The rest of 
 King Peter's life was very wretched : he had left his queen 
 during his long visit to the West, and she had proved faith- 
 less : he retaliated on the nobles who had been her favourites, 
 and gave rein to his cruelty and laseiviousness. If he were 
 not mad, as seems most probable, he was desperate ; and his 
 family took the lead in getting rid of him. He was assassin- 
 ated by a body of nobles, who acted with the concurrence of 
 his brother John, the prince of Antioch, on the i6th of 
 January, 1369. His wife was Eleanor of Aragon ; and it was 
 this connexion, no doubt, that gave him a higher place than 
 his predecessors had enjoyed in the estimation of the Western 
 kings. 
 
 Peter II, who succeeded him, was a boy of thirteen ; his 
 uncle John acted as regent. Peter reigned tiU 1382. He 
 avenged his father's death by murdering his uncle in 1375. 
 His reign witnessed a fatal rupture between the Venetians and 
 Genoese, which accelerated the fate of Cyprus. The repre- 
 sentatives of the two republics quarreled about precedence at 
 the coronation : the court decided in favour of Venice. This 
 was complicated by a quarrel between the queen-mother and 
 the prince of Antioch. The Genoese took up arms and over- 
 ran the whole island. The boy king was taken prisoner, and 
 to secure his ransom had to pledge Famagosta to the Genoese. 
 This great city and the port, which Sir John Mandeville 
 thought the finest in the world, was permanently lost to the 
 kings, for it was subsequently made over to the Genoese alto- 
 gether in order to obtain the release of James, the king's 
 uncle and successor, who had been detained as a hostage by 
 the admiral Pregoso. 
 
 The particular interest which attaches to the struggle of 
 Venice and Genoa, — a struggle which only ended when the 
 Levant was left to the Turks, and was one great cause of the 
 abridgment of Christendom at the close of the middle ages, — 
 and the glorious exploits of the knights of Rhodes, however 
 close to our subject, are far too wide and engrossing topics to 
 be discussed incidentally. But the fate of Armenia, where 
 the very succession of the kings is very obscure, demands a 
 
VIII.] Kings of Armenia. 197 
 
 word. The first Latin king, according to the native his- 
 torians, was John of Lusignan, also called Constantine, who 
 reigned only a year ; his brother, Guy of Lusignan, who suc- 
 ceeded in 1343, was connected by marriage with the Canta- 
 cuzenes, and even addressed Edward III as cousin '^. Both 
 the brothers were little else than adventurers. Guy reigned 
 for only three years. In 1347 iiis successor Constantius, or 
 Constantine, was, through an envoy of the same name, coUect- 
 ing money in England by virtue of a brief issued by Clement 
 VI ^. He seems to be identical with Constantine, who, in 
 I35i> was on the throne; in his favour also alms were 
 collected in England. He died in 1361. After an interval 
 of three years, dming which the crown was offered to Peter of 
 Cyprus, and an unknown fourth king may possibly have 
 reignedj Leo V appears on the throne in 1365. He had a 
 hard fight for it ; from 1371 to 1373 he was lost to his 
 people, concealed in a mountain fortress where he had been 
 obliged to take refuge. A new king was sought for, a hus- 
 band for the supposed widow, and Gregory XI offered the 
 crown to Otto of Brunswick. He, however, preferred to 
 marry Johanna of Naples, and Leo emerged from seclusion. 
 But with little better prospects ; taken prisoner by the 
 Egyptian sultan in 1375, he was released in 1383, to be 
 thenceforth a wanderer and a pensioner on the Western 
 princes. After his release he made the pilgrimage to Jeru- 
 salem, and went thence to Avignon and so to Spain. In 
 Spain he obtained a provision. King John of Castile gave 
 him three lordships, one of them Madrid ; and as lord of 
 Madrid King Leo granted a charter to the bm-ghers of the 
 town. But he did not stay in Spain. In 1384 he was in 
 France offering his services as a mediator between Charles VI 
 and Richard II. His offers were not welcome to the English 
 lords, who then held the king in tutelage. They refused him 
 in the first instance his passport — -said that though he 
 profiered peace he only wanted money ; he was an iUusor, and 
 they would have nothing to do with him. Notwithstanding 
 this he obtained not only a safe-conduct but a permit for a 
 
 ' Feed. ii. 1220. '^ lb. 1234; iii. 103. 
 
198 Henry of Lancaster. [viii. 
 
 cargo of Freneli wine to be brought to England for bim ; be 
 made an eloquent speecb before the king and council at tbe 
 palace of Westminster; and received a pension of j^iooo a 
 year ; tbe first instalment of wbich was paid into bis own 
 bands in gold nobles. He bad a passport again in 1393, a 
 few months before bis death. His pension was still paid in 
 1391, in the fifteenth year of the unlucky king : at that time 
 Leo, it was said, bad been driven from bis dominions ; the 
 pension was to be continued until be regained them. For- 
 tunately for tbe English exchequer, it was not required, for 
 according to the epitaph of King Leo in tbe Church of the 
 Celestines at Paris, the very noble and very excellent Prince 
 Lyon of Lusignan, fifth Latin king of Armenia, rendered bis 
 soul to God Nov. 29, 1393. He left no legitimate issue, and 
 bis claims devolved on bis cousin of Cypras. The name of 
 the kingdom of Aipienia was thus familiar in English ears at 
 this time. English sympathy bad not flagged during these 
 years. In 1383 another Lord de Roos, Thomas, son of the 
 lord who died in 1352, had set out for the East, but died 
 before he lefb England ; bis son John fulfilled the vow, 
 and having reached Cyprus, died at Papbos in 1393. A 
 large party of English visitors had appeared there in that 
 year. 
 
 James I, tbe uncle and successor of Peter II, reigned from 
 1382 to 1398, and was on excellent terms with England. 
 There is a letter addressed by him to Richard II, in July, 
 1393 ■^, in which he acknowledges tbe receipt of the epistle of 
 commendation brought by Lord de Roos, and tells him that it 
 was needless, because all tbe King of England's friends were 
 welcome. He thanks him too for tbe message which he had 
 received by bis most noble cousin. Sir Henry Percy. We 
 learn from this that Hotspur bad made Cyprus a part of 
 bis great tour ; and, as the same year is fixed for tbe pil- 
 grimage of Henry of Bolingbroke, we may surmise that they 
 came in company. Henry of Bolingbroke, having sailed in 
 July from Lynn, went by way of Prussia, Poland, Hungary, 
 and Venice to Jerusalem ; on his return he visited Cyprus, 
 ' Eaine, Extracts from Northern KegisterB, p. 425. 
 
VIII.] Wars of King Janus. 199 
 
 and so back by Italy and Bohemia ^- King James was a 
 kindly old man, bat much tied up between the Venetians and 
 the Genoese. He had accumulated three crowns ; he had re- 
 ceived that of Jerusalem at Nicosia, as Famagosta was now 
 lost ; in 1393 he received that of Armenia, which he handed 
 on to his successors. James had been a hostage or prisoner at 
 Genoa when the Cyprian crown fell to him ; he had been sent 
 thither when the perfidious Admiral Fregoso had seized the 
 island ; and at Genoa his son, King Janus or John II, was 
 born. 
 
 The reign of Janus, thirty-four years long, was one sad 
 struggle, with the Genoese on the one hand and the Turks on 
 the other. The main features of the story are these. King 
 Janus, with a very natural ambition, stimulated moreover by 
 hereditary and personal enmity, made it the first object to re- 
 cover Famagosta from Genoa, and for this end, in the year 
 140a, prepared a force and fleet to besiege the Genoese there. 
 The days df Genoese greatness were over. In 1396 the Doge 
 Adorno had submitted to Charles VI of France, and Genoa 
 had become a French dependency. Famagosta had been won 
 by. the Fregosi, the opposite faction to that of Adorno, but the 
 French were, as usual, ready to maintain their claim to con- 
 quests under whatever regime they were acquired. On the 
 alarm of war in Cyprus, they sent Marshal Boucicault with a 
 small fleet into the Levant. King Janus prepared for resist- 
 ance, but the Grand- Master of Rhodes, Philibert of Naillac, 
 interposed as mediator, and a collision was avoided ; the poor 
 king had to pay 150,000 ducats for the expenses of the ex- 
 pedition. Peace was however made, and both parties turned 
 their arms against the Mahometan neighbours. The Genoese 
 ravaged the Syrian coast ; King Janus plundered the shore of 
 Egypt. Booty was abundant, but the inexorable vengeance 
 of the Sultans was aroused ; the savaging of Syria ended in 
 the loss of the last fragments of Armenian sovereignty ; and 
 the plundering of Egypt drew down the Mameluke Sultan on 
 Cyprus. Truces and treaties were made, but were kept on 
 neither side. In the midst of war Cyprus was agaiu; for the 
 
 ^ Capgrave, Ulustrious Henries, p. loo. 
 
20d The Last Days. [viii. 
 
 third titae since the Black Death, devastated by the plague ; 
 and the Sultan saw his opportunity; in 141 7 he took and 
 wrecked Limasol. In 1420 he swore the entire destruction of 
 the Cypriots, and prepared for a final conquest. Four years 
 after, during which King Janus, although he continued his 
 policy of piratic expeditions, had made scarcely any prepara- 
 tion for defence, he attacked the island, including Cypriots 
 and Genoese in a common purpose of extirpation. Famagosta 
 was taken and pillaged. Two years later the king was de- 
 feated and taken prisoner, and Nicosia was sacked. The 
 king's imprisonment lasted fifteen months ; during which an 
 attempt was made by an Italian, Sforza Pallavicino, to seize 
 the goTemment. In this he was defeated by the Queen 
 Charlotte of Bourbon, who sent against him Carion of IbeHn, 
 one of the last, if not the last of that great house, of whom 
 anything historical is recorded. Ransomed at an enormous 
 cost, Janus returned in 1427, but thoroughly broken in spirit 
 and despairing of the fortunes of his house. One of his last 
 acts was to marry his daughter Anne to Lewis of Savoy, a 
 connexion which in the next generation helped to place the 
 nominal crowns of Cyprus, Armenia and Jerusalem, among the 
 honours of that aspiring house. He died in 143a, and with 
 him the last sunset gleams of Cypriot glory vanished. 
 
 The native historians date the beginning of the downfall to 
 the murder of King Peter in 1369 ; and if that date be taken 
 we must allow that Petrarch, who thought that that event 
 determined the loss of the East, was gifted with somewhat of 
 prophetic spirit. But I think that, unfortunate as that event 
 was for the Lusignan house, the doom of the Levantine prin- 
 cipalities was already sealed. The great plague had swept off 
 the old acclimatised Franks, especially those nobles who, like 
 the lords of Ibelin, had increased and multiplied in the land. 
 With aU their faults these nobles were bona fide Crusaders ; 
 men who, like the first champions, were ready to cast in their 
 lot in a Promised Land, and not, like the later adventurers, 
 anxious merely to get all they could out of it, to make their 
 fortunes. They were swept away. Then there was the an- 
 tagonism of Genoa and Venice, a piece of history which, so 
 
VIII.] Venice and Genoa. 201 
 
 long as history is read in books written in direct hostility to 
 Venice, will be read two ways. Genoa had from the very 
 early Crusades been the ally of France, as Pisa had been the 
 ally of England. Venice had succeeded to the political con- 
 nexions of Pisa ; the tower of the English at Acre abutted on 
 the ward of the Venetians and the Hospitallers ; not that 
 during these ages the English national power was of any 
 weight in the Mediterranean, but a good deal of national 
 piety and knight-errantry found expression in pUgrimages 
 which now were conducted by way of Venice, in alliance with 
 the Teutonic knights and the Hospitallers. The final acquisi- 
 tion of Cyprus by Venice, and the extremely unfair way in 
 which it was acquired, seem to have afforded the grounds for 
 supposing that the republic had long coveted the island, and 
 that her policy had been for several generations directed to 
 that end. This crooked policy is contrasted by the hostile 
 writers with the open violence of the Genoese exemplified in 
 the war of 1374, and the seiziure of Famagosta. But I confess 
 that I see little to choose between the two, and that what 
 little there is seems in favour of Venice. Neither republic 
 looked at the defence of Christendom as the great thing to be 
 sought. The trading interest, or territorial ambition com- 
 plicated with trading interest, was the main thing. If 
 Venice profited most by the common policy, it is not so much 
 a proof of previous diplomacy as a result of her longer tenure 
 of power. That the Venetians however had an equal share 
 with the Genoese in weakening the Frank kingdom it is im- 
 possible to prove : the Genoese hold on Famagosta was a fatal 
 if not a mortal wound. 
 
 But still more powerful agencies were at work. The hands 
 of Christendom were paralysed, and the barbarians were gain- 
 ing strength and unity. The close of the fourteenth century, 
 an exceptional but a very critical era, seems to show us all 
 nations, aU royalties, churches, religions, civilised and bar- 
 barous, in a cauldron or a whirlpool from which there was very 
 small chance of emerging whole. A madman on the throne of 
 France, an impotent drunkard claiming the crown of the 
 Csesars, a frantic absolutist overthrowing the constitution of 
 
202 Queen Helena, [viii. 
 
 England ; the see of S. Peter divided between two, three, four 
 Popes ; the Emperor of Constantinople begging money openly 
 in the courts of the West ; the three barbarian powers pitted 
 against each other — providentially, we may say, for who could 
 have resisted their united force? — the Ottoman sultan the 
 prisoner of Tamerlane ; the Mameluke sultan only sustained 
 in independence by the contest between the Turks and the 
 Tartars. Yet Europe does emerge ; the battle of Nicopolis 
 puts an end to the Crusades ; the retreat of the Tartars 
 enables the Ottomans to recover their ground ; Byzantium 
 has a respite of half a century, and Egypt of more than a hun- 
 dred years of Mameluke tyranny. It takes a century more to 
 constitute the great national factors of modern history. But 
 out of the whirlpool little states like Cyprus do not emerge ; 
 and after the death of King Janus, the causes that were at 
 work worked quickly and steadily. The immediate cause of 
 the break-up was connected with the same sort of religious 
 disputes which, after occupying half the century in councils 
 and debates, left the Byzantine empire defenceless before the 
 Ottomans. King John III, who succeeded in 143a, took for 
 his second wife, in 1435, Helena, the daughter of the despot of 
 the Peloponnese, Theodore Paleologus. The house of Lusignan 
 had been hitherto, as a matter of necessity, devotedly Catholic ; 
 the house of Paleologus was devotedly orthodox ; Cyprus was a 
 Catholic kingdom with an orthodox population ; a Latin king 
 with a Greek people ; the Latin Church was rich, and the 
 Greek Church was not poor, but the political power was en- 
 grossed by the former. Helena would not see this. She 
 determined, if she could, to make Cyprus orthodox; she, 
 through her husband, who was a weak and vicious man, 
 refused the papal nominee to the archbishopric of Nicosia, 
 imprisoned him, and was accused of poisoning him. The 
 grand-master of Rhodes came in, as usual, in the part of a 
 peace-maker, and prevailed on the king to receive the prelate ; 
 and soon after, in 1458, both Helena and her husband died. 
 But the quarrel had shaken the tottering kingdom; the 
 grand Caraman, the Turcoman ruler of Caramania, took the 
 opportunity of these quarrels to seize Corycus, the last Frank 
 
VIII.] Caterina Cornaro. 203 
 
 stronghold of Armenia. The Cilieian and Syrian begs with 
 the Egyptian sultan formed a league for the conquest of 
 Cyprus, which was foiled by the Rhodian galleys, or the Latin 
 kingdom would have succumbed before the capture of Con- 
 stantinople. The end was clearly coming, and it was not now 
 a question between Venetians and Genoese, but between 
 Christian and Moslem, which should take the island as a 
 derelict. The royal house was nearly extinct. Charlotte of 
 Lusignan, the only legitimate child of John III, succeeded him 
 in 1458. She was the widow of John of Portugal, prince of 
 Antioeh, who had been poisoned by the creatures of Helena 
 in 1457. She married, in I459) her cousin Lewis count of 
 Geneva, of the house of Savoy, who was crowned the same 
 year. Her bastard brother, James, archbishop-elect of Nicosia, 
 the son of a Greek lady, whose nose Queen Helena had bit off, 
 was disappointed of the succession, and turned traitor. He 
 aspired to the vain glory of sovereignty, and, having done 
 homage to the sultan of Egypt, invaded Cyprus. For four 
 years Queen Charlotte was besieged at Cheriu ; in 1464 she 
 fled to Ehodes, and thence to Italy, where, in 1485, she made 
 over her rights and the three crowns she wore to the house of 
 Savoy. James II, a prince of some power, governed or com- 
 manded in Cyprus from 1464 to 1473, and ^^ some extent jus- 
 tified his usurpation by taking Famagosta from the Genoese, 
 but his reign was one long series of conspiracies. He was 
 assassinated two years after his marriage with Caterina Cor- 
 naro (in 1471); who bore a son after her husband's death. 
 This was King James III, who died when he was two years 
 old. The Venetians held that the rights of the infant 
 king devolved on his mother, and in her name governed 
 Cyprus. 
 
 On the details of the Venetian title I cannot now enter ; 
 the whole history has been accepted on the evidence of the 
 enemies of the republic, whose story is briefly this. In order 
 to qualify Caterina for a foreign marriage she was declared 
 the adopted daughter of S. Mark, and her husband the son-in- 
 law of the republic. The republic, anxious for the succession, 
 poisoned the son-in-law, who in his wiU entailed the crown on 
 
204 Descent of Claims. [viii. 
 
 his children, posthumous and illegitimate, with remainder to 
 the house of Lusignan. But this was set aside by the con- 
 nivance of Caterina with the Venetians, who, after they 
 had ruled Cyprus for fifteen years in her name, obtained from 
 her a renunciation of her rights in favour of the republic; 
 this was done in 1489 ; and then, formally as well as actually, 
 Cyprus became a Venetian dependency, tributary to the Sultan 
 of Egypt. Caterina herself retired to the Venetian territory, 
 where she lived at the villa Paradiso in the Trevisan moun- 
 tains, painted by Titian, and patronising the scholars of the 
 renaissance, until the year of her death, i5io. After eighty- 
 one years spent under Venice, Cyprus was conquered by the 
 Turks in 1570. From the date then of Caterina's surrender, 
 and indeed from the death of King James, the history of 
 the island falls into the mass of that wonderful Venetian 
 history of which we read so little, but which must contain 
 so many lessons, and so many warnings for a nation like 
 our own. 
 
 The titles of the several royalties which thus came to an 
 end were claimed, as titles easily may be claimed, by other 
 competitors : the Dukes of Savoy called themselves Kings of 
 Cyprus and Jerusalem from the date of Queen Charlotte's 
 settlement ; the Kings of Naples had called themselves Kings 
 of Jerusalem since the transfer of the rights of Mary of An- 
 tioch, in 1277; to Charles of Anjou ; and the title has run on 
 to the present day in the houses of Spain and Austria, the 
 Dukes of Lorraine, and the successive dynasties of Naples. 
 The kingdom of Armenia must, I think, have been dropped ; 
 but the Savoyard claim to Cyprus was held as an offence 
 to the Venetian republic, a poiut of ceremonial which, in 
 the seventeenth century, put a stop for thirty years to any 
 diplomatic intercourse between Venice and Savoy. The suc- 
 cessors of Richard I never put in a claim to the reversion ; the 
 quartering of the arms of Cyprus, which is said to appear on 
 the tomb of Queen Elizabeth, being no doubt a part of the 
 bearings derived from her great-grandmother, Jacquetta of 
 Luxemburg, whose daughter, Elizabeth Wydville, carried the 
 blood of the house of Brienne and the Dukes of Athens into 
 
VIII.] English Hospitallers. 205 
 
 the line of York ^- The Kings of Sardinia continued to strike 
 money as Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem, until they became 
 Kings of Italy. There is no recognised King of Cyprus now, 
 but there are two or three Kings of Jerusalem ; and the 
 Cypriot title is claimed, I believe, by some obscure branch of 
 the house of Lusignan, under the will of King James II. 
 
 So much for the archeology of the question. The interest 
 of England in the aifairs of the Levant did not come to an end 
 with the surrender of Cyprus to Venice ; for the Knights of 
 Rhodes maintained the defence of Christendom for half a cen- 
 tury longer, and England was a close friend of the order until 
 Henry VIII confiscated its estates. The Turcopolier of the 
 Knights Hospitallers was always an Englishman ; he was the 
 commander of the light infantry of the order. I have found 
 no list of the Turcopoliers ; but in the fifteenth century we 
 have the names of Peter Holt, Thomas Launeleve, or Lang- 
 clifie, Hugh Middleton, and John Kendall ; all of them would 
 seem North-countrymen. In the last century a medal of 
 John Kendall was found in Knaresborough Forest, and it 
 would appear that he was a member of the family which was 
 particularly marked by its devotion to S. Wilfrid of Ripon. 
 The last known brother of the Order of S. Thomas of Acre, 
 Richard of TickhUl, must also have been a Yorkshire man. 
 The Cypriot king also had a Turcopolier, who, in I357> was 
 an Englishman. But these are trifles. 
 
 I said in beginning my lecture that I should draw no moral 
 
 ' The descent is a long one, and there is a question whether the arms are 
 those of Cyprus at all. But certain claims to represent the elder house of 
 liusignan had come into the family of Luxemburg. Jacquetta was daughter 
 of the Count Peter of S. Pol, whose mother. Marguerite of Enghien, carried 
 the representation of the Counts of Brienne to the Luxemburga. Mary, 
 daughter of Hugh I of Cyprus and his queen, married Walter IV of Brienne, 
 father of Hugh, and grandfather of Walter V, duke of Athens ; Walter V 
 had a daughter Isabel, who married Walter IV of Enghien, father of Lewis, 
 Count of Brienne and Conversano, and grandfather of Margaret, who was 
 the heiress of Enghien. She married John of Luxemburg, and was mother 
 of Peter, Count of S. Pol. As a claim to the throne of Cyprus, this descent 
 was worthless ; but it was a royal descent, and, after the extinction of the 
 Lusignans and the house of Antioch-Lusignan, might be thought to have a 
 value of its own. Queen Elizabeth, however, was in no sense the heiress of 
 S. Pol, much less of Lusignan. 
 
2o6 Suggested Questions. [viii. 
 
 or political lesson from the history of Cyprus and Armenia. 
 No lesson can safely be drawn from it, if by lesson we mean 
 absolute instruction or warning that it would be foolish to 
 despise. But it does suggest some generalisations and prompt 
 some questions. We can see that the loss of the Levantine 
 states in the middle ages, that is, the cessation of the defence 
 of Christendom against Mahometanism, was mainly caused by 
 the jealousies of the Christian powers themselves : the deter- 
 mination of the Venetians and the Genoese to set their re- 
 spective commercial profits above all other considerations. 
 Whilst the Teutonic knights were fighting in the North and 
 the Rhodians in the Soutb, Cyprus, the storehouse of Palestine, 
 was left a prey to the evils out of which the Genoese and 
 Venetians could make their market. It was so in the age 
 that followed: the alliance between Francis I and Solyman 
 paralysed all action by which Charles V and Ferdinand I 
 would have defended the provinces on the Danube and Tran- 
 sylvania, and sufiered the Turkish dominion to grow almost 
 unimpeded, until the world began to think that the Turks had 
 a vested interest in the lands they devastated. But the ques- 
 tions which arise are not easily stated, and not easily answered. 
 How can the East be redeemed by the acclimatisation of 
 Northern races ? are the Northern races the only races that 
 can redeem the East, and if so, how are they to be saved from 
 the evils, moral, intellectual, and political, which acclimatisa- 
 tion seems invariably to bring with it ? Are the Eastern 
 races to be redeemed at all, or is that part of the aspiration of 
 the Christian Church and of social philanthropists to be a vain 
 dream ? Is the task of empires to conquer or to colonise ; the 
 task of colonies to extirpate or to develope ? Is a commercial 
 or a military policy the surest agent of civilisation ? Can a 
 worn-out nation be revived and refreshed and recruited by a 
 bracing treatment ? can it be revived at all ? Does the difier- 
 ence between European and Asiatic history consist in the 
 vitality of the historic nations in Europe and the inexhaustible- 
 ness of the hive in Asia ? If not, how is Europe to treat Asia, 
 so that the march of civilisation may afiect the lands in which 
 the stream of history seems to have long been stayed ? if it is 
 
viii.] Conclusion, 207 
 
 so, how shall the East be rescued from the successive waves of 
 barbarism which may be now impending, and how kept alive 
 when those successive impulses are exhausted ? Small as our 
 subject was, it was a part of that which touches all, the world's 
 government and the long patience of Providence. 'And I 
 said, it is mine own infirmity, but I will remember the years 
 of the right hand of the Most Highest.' 
 
IX. 
 
 ON THE CHARACTERISTIC DIFFERENCES. 
 
 BETWEEN MEDIEVAL AND MODERN 
 
 HISTORY. 
 
 (AprU 15, 1880.) 
 
 IF I were asked for what reason I have, in my teaching in 
 this place, preferred medieval to later modern history, 
 I should answer, because I think that for the training of the 
 judgment, the former furnishes material more readily ap- 
 plicable to educational purposes than the latter. It is further 
 removed from the arena of political controversy, and, whilst 
 it possesses interest quite sufficient to awaken every senti- 
 ment that may lawfully affect the judgment, it stirs no 
 emotion that could reasonably be expected to pervert or 
 overbalance it. We find in it heroes and heroines quite 
 heroic enough to justify hero-worship ; we find in it questions 
 of controversy quite sufficiently exciting to divide parties ; 
 and points of sufficiently continuing and permanent import- 
 ance to kindle our zeal in a moderate degree in connexion 
 with the questions and interests of to-day. The rights and 
 wrongs of the political life of modem Europe are rooted in 
 the medieval history of Europe, and we can trace sufficient 
 connexion between the extreme past and the present, to give 
 interest to the earliest investigations. So we try to train 
 the judgment by investigating causes, effects, ideas and 
 results, rights and wrongs, in a subject-matter sufficiently 
 akin to modern life to engage lively feeling, and yet suf- 
 ficiently apart from it to prevent party views from being 
 predominant. I have said this so often on these occasions 
 that I am almost ashamed to say it again ; I must however 
 go on until I can find some one to believe me. The use to 
 which the trained student may put his judgment when he has 
 educated it is a quite different thing : only I believe that 
 
IX.] Distinctions. 209 
 
 whatever side he may take, or, even if he turn his back 
 altogether on the line of study along which I have tried 
 to lead hinii he wUl approach questions of the day with 
 a more balanced judgment ; he will be less disposed to see all 
 good on one side of the great questions, and all evil on the 
 other ; he will come to the strife of politics with his weapons 
 more carefully chosen, better handled and better sharpened 
 than if he had never passed through the training. 
 
 Medieval History is a history of rights and wrongs ; modem , 
 History as contrasted with medieval divides itself into two j 
 portions ; the first a history of powers, forces, and dynasties ; * 
 the second, a history in which ideas take the place of both 
 rights and forces. The point of time at which we should 
 mark the separation in the latter is the first French revolution. 
 There is a continuity of life through the three ; the funda- 
 mental principle, which stiU holds its ground in the struggle 
 of ideas, is distinctly traceable in the primitive struggle of 
 rights and wrongs ; and far more and more distinctly in the 
 more modern struggle of the balance of power ; but in the first 
 and second period, ideas have little weight compared with 
 rights and forces ; in the first rights are more potent than force, 
 in the second forces are more potent than rights ; and now 
 rights, forces, and ideas are matched in the arena of modem 
 politics in such a way as to make right and force themselves 
 ideas. At this moment — I use an illustration which ought 
 properly to grow out of something that must show further 
 on — Austria may be regarded as representing the more ancient 
 form of right, Russia as representing the form of force, and 
 Germany, Italy, and France difi'erent forms of leading idea. 
 I do not mean that Austria is justified on appeal to right, or 
 that Russia relies solely on force, or that the other three 
 states have not ample grounds, both in right and force, for 
 their present position, but that historically those are dis- 
 tinctions essentially characteristic. 
 
 You may wonder at my temerity in the use of such very 
 abstract terms, and you have a right to bid me define more 
 clearly the historical periods of which I am speaking ; I will 
 then define medieval history for our present purpose as begin- 
 
2IO Right and Rights. [ix. 
 
 ning with the eleventh century, and proceed to state next 
 what sorts of rights, forces, and ideas, I consider, mark 
 differentially the three periods at which I have been looking. 
 It may almost provoke a smile that I should use words so, 
 that I should speak of rights and wrongs in ages in which all 
 was done with the strong hand, or of forces where iatrigne 
 and policy conspicuously take the place of violence and blood- 
 shed, or of ideas in connexion with the present age at all. I 
 do not care now to justify my use of these particular words, 
 but I can tell you what I mean, and then, if you can supply 
 me with better formulae, I will use them. 
 
 Our first position then is, that the idea of right or rights 
 was the leading idea of the middle ages. I say now right or 
 rights, because, whilst in the greatest men of the period there 
 was a conscious attempt to exalt law and a willingness to 
 abide by it, there was in the inferior actors, in the worse 
 men, a disposition to maintain their own rights within re- 
 cognised limits, and, when they attacked the possessions or 
 infringed the apparently equal rights of their opponents, to do 
 it on the ground of legal pleas. We all know how enormous 
 is the debt which English law owes to the great legislators 
 of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries ; Henry II 
 and Edward I are, both of them, conspicuous examples of 
 both the tendencies which I have coupled under the term ; in 
 their better actions defenders of the law, in their worse actions 
 captious defenders of their right. The same is approximately 
 true in other countries ; Lewis IX is not only the great 
 legislator of France, but almost the single example of the 
 period, in which the more powerful sovereign grants to his 
 competitor, even in the hour of his utmost weakness, the ftiU 
 extent of his legal right ; the treatment of Henry III by 
 S. Lewis is a very striking example of the respect for rights 
 that do not happen to be your own. As to generalities, 
 I need only remark that the names of Frederick II and 
 Alfonso the Wise stand by those of Edward and Lewis as the 
 founders of the non- Roman jurisprudence of Europe, and that 
 in Germany in the fourteenth century the two great legis- 
 lators are the two champions of the rival houses, Lewis of 
 
IX.] Growth of Laws, 211 
 
 Bavaria on the one side, and Charles the IVth on the other ; 
 the codification of Bavarian law and the issue of the Golden 
 Bull were at all events attempts in the direction of civilisation 
 in accordance with the highest existing ideal. 
 
 The foundation of legal studies in the Universities, the at- 
 tempts by legal means to control the customs of private war, — 
 private war being itself an example of the strength of the idea 
 of rights, — the proclamation of the public peace from time to 
 time in Germany by emperors who had the will but not the 
 power to enforce it, and the multiplication of central tribunals 
 in the place of local ones, are examples of the same. No doubt 
 they are developments, evolutions of the unconscious progress 
 of civilisation ; that I am not enough of a philosopher to 
 dogmatise about, but if they were, that is the line which the 
 development or evolution took. The middle ages proper, the 
 centuries from the year 1000 to the year 1500, from the Emperor 
 Henry II to the Emperor Maximilian, were ages of legal 
 growth, ages in which the idea of right, as embodied in law, 
 was the leading idea of statesmen, and the idea of rights 
 justified or justifiable by the letter of law, was a profound 
 influence with politicians. It may seem fanciful, but I can- 
 not help adding a parallel illustration. The scholastic phi- 
 losophy was an attempt to codify aU existing knowledge under 
 laws or formulae analogous to the general principles of justice. 
 It was no attempt, as is sometimes said, to bind all know- 
 ledge with chains to the rock of S. Peter, or even to the rock 
 of Aristotle ; just as right is one and indivisible, and all rights 
 are referable to it (if we only knew where to find it) as the 
 ultimate touchstone and arbiter, so Truth is one and in- 
 divisible, and the medieval philosophy found its work in 
 reconciling all existing knowledge logically with the One 
 Truth which it believed itself to possess. What logic was to 
 the philosopher legislation was to the statesman and moralist, 
 a practical, as the other was a theoretical, casuistry ; an 
 attempt to justify all its conclusions by direct reference to first 
 principles. 
 
 You may tell me, if this is true, the age of which you 
 are speaking ought to have been a scientific age, or at least 
 
 P 3 
 
212 Law and Science. [ix. 
 
 a mathematical age, and it was not. I reply that it was 
 a scientific age in many respects, only it had misunderstood 
 to some extent the character of its subject-matter ; it applied 
 scientific method to matters which were not capable of being 
 scientifically treated, an error which it had in common with 
 a good deal of the scientific philosophy of other ages, the 
 present age not least signally. It used principles and ap- 
 plied demonstration in matter to which neither the principles 
 nor the method were properly applicable ; it argued too rashly 
 from the known to the unknown, and relied too implicitly on 
 its own implements. But that is by the way : our present 
 parallel is simply, that in both philosophy and law the middle 
 ages exemplified a like tendency to generalise and to syllogise ; 
 the names of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus stand over 
 against the names of Edward I and Lewis IX as leaders of 
 thought, emancipators for the time, imprisoners for the future, 
 in a far wider realm than that of practical legislation. 
 
 But this has taken me rather off the point. The great men, I 
 I have said, were law abiding ; so also were the small men : and 
 ' the same standing ground furnished the strength of both. 
 Perhaps the easiest example to take is from the end of the period, 
 the Emperor Frederick III ; a man whose history, if it did not 
 faU in a period of worn-out influences, in which ,the old order 
 was vanishing in the twilight that ushered in the new, would 
 be worthy of the deepest study. Here was a man, nominally 
 the master of the world ; a man capable of the highest aspira- 
 tions for the future of his house, able to lay his plans and to 
 compass designs which, read by the light of his existing means, 
 look like the merest dreams of the merest visionary ; a man 
 of capacity and a man of ambition, but possessing with the 
 crown of the Csesars hardly a rood of land in his own im- 
 divided possession ; — within his reach, with but an infant's 
 life between, a great inheritance to which he might assert a 
 colourable claim, and which ultimately fell to his descendants, 
 yet silently, patiently waiting, and holding back his hand 
 from all unrighteous aggression : his designs, dreams as they 
 seem, come to fruition in the third generation, and his im- , 
 poverished house becomes mistress of half, or more than half. 
 
IX.] Recognition of Weak Rights. 213 
 
 the world. He contented himself with his right and his \ 
 rights, and the idea was still so potent as to lay the basis for 
 the powers of the next age. Unfortunately no one can be 
 enthusiastic about Frederick III, but he has his place in the 
 moral history of kings. 
 
 But to proceed ; the continued existence of small states \ 
 throughout the middle ages is a very important illustration of 
 the subject before us ; another is the extreme dislike, apparent 
 in both continental and English history, to the forcible extinc- 
 tion of historical claims to territory. I do not mean to say 
 that there were not some very remarkable instances of de- 
 parture from this rule ; indeed, as I shall show, two at least 
 of the most important changes in the map of Europe, the most 
 potential and far-reaching changes, were produced by the 
 breach of it ; but the rule as a rule was observed. In 
 England we know how the long-suffering of the Plantagenet 
 kings allowed the continuance of such houses as the Mowbrays, 
 the Ferrers, the Mortimers, the Despensers ; how, when gene- 
 ration after generation had proved that disaffection was a part 
 of the hereditary constitution of the offending races, the heirs 
 of the traitors were restored or rehabilitated, untU, in the 
 wars of the Roses, the opposing houses perished in one 
 another's downfall. There was no fear of shedding blood, but V 
 there was great fear of destroying right. So, too, with small 
 states abroad. The little principalities of the Low Countries 
 subsisted side by side with their powerful neighbours ; the small 
 kingdoms of Spain united and separated according to the 
 special law of inheritance that was recognised by each ; and 
 where an attempt at infringement was made, the aggressor 
 found himself matched against a wide and powerful union of 
 powers instinctively actuated by the iutention of right. In 
 France we see this exemplified, not merely by the long con- 
 tinuance of the Plantagenet inheritance in the South, but by 
 the existence of Provence, by the toleration of the accumula- 
 tions of the Burgundian inheritance, by the independence of 
 Flanders and Lorraine. In all these cases there were con- 
 ducing causes, but in each case there was also the plea of 
 right. Proprietary right, we say ; the recognition by kings 
 
214 Small States. [ix. 
 
 that, if they do not recognise the proprietary rights of the 
 weaker, then the stronger will not consider theirs ; proprietary 
 rights, the leading idea that the tenant belongs to the land 
 and the land to the landlord, and if the principle be broken 
 down in one case, it cannot be maintained in another: pro- 
 prietary right, I gi-ant, but still right, stiU something that 
 may be justified by law, not merely by the logic of the strong 
 hand. 
 
 The whole history of Germany is, during this period, full 
 of the same idea : small states continuing to exist side by 
 side with larger ones ; each of them in one aspect a centre of 
 light and political culture, in another a centre of intrigue and 
 petty tyranny : I am not concerned to defend them, but to 
 adduce them as facts. Italy can show parallels, but her history 
 is, to a great extent, here, as elsewhere, exceptional, and may 
 more instructively be made to furnish counter illustrations ; 
 but the long struggle of the Hohenstaufen in the South, and 
 of the Lombard cities in the North, is capable of being read 
 in the same light : they would have perished before they did, 
 if not as they did, if it had not been for the idea of right, 
 inspiriting the weak, dismaying the strong, and affording a 
 rallying point for the wronged from generation to generation. 
 But two great influences in the medieval world, the 
 medieval empire and the medieval papacy, how are we to 
 class them ? Is the permanent toleration of their existence to 
 be accounted for by the fact of their legal claims, or by that 
 sort of prestige which might seem to throw them into the 
 class of ideas ; the inherited dignity of Csesar and of Peter ? 
 The imperial dignity, during a great part of the period 
 before us, was shadowy in the extreme ; nay, during the 
 whole period its substantive existence depended on the strength 
 which the families who passed it on amongst themselves de- 
 rived from their patrimonial estates. After the extinction of 
 the Hohenstaufen, the imperial dignity became ia itself an 
 almost honorary distinction ; either shunned for its costliness 
 or coveted for the chances which it gave to a second-rate house 
 of increasing its power by such little windfalls as might come 
 to it. Yet it continued to subsist when any one of the great 
 
IX.] Continuance of the Empire. 215 
 
 vassals might witli impunity not only have declared his own 
 independence but have extinguished the dignity which had 
 ceased to symbolise, not only universal empire, but even national 
 unity. 
 
 From time to time the phantom empire clothes itself in 
 power and strength ; the house of Bavaria fails to hold the 
 dignity, but, on legal pleas which, if their legality were con- 
 tested, it could not vindicate by arms, possesses itself of two 
 or three electorates, and founds a distinct fe,mily policy of most 
 important consequence. The house of Luxemburg, a little 
 county under Henry VII, gains in the third generation the 
 superiority of the two non-Teutonic kingdoms, and under 
 Sigismund, knight-errant and political pedant, sways the 
 destinies, for the moment, of Christendom itself. The house 
 of Austria, in the same way, lays thus the foundation of that 
 empire which is to be one of the great forces of the next age ; 
 not by fraud, not by violence, but here by a politic marriage, 
 here by a well advocated inheritance, here by a claim on an 
 imperial fief forfeited or escheated : honestly where the letter 
 of the law is in her favour, by chicanery it may be here and 
 there, but that a chicanery that wears a specious garb of right. 
 The imperial idea was but a small influence compared with the 
 superstructure of right, inheritance, and suzerainty, that legal 
 instincts and a general acquiescence in legal forms had raised 
 upon it. In the counter influence, that of the Roman see, there 
 is perhaps more of the idea and less of the substantive right. 
 I am speaking, of course, politically, and not theologically. 
 The idea of the Petrine succession was a developing idea, that 
 of the Csesarean succession was a waning and diminishing 
 one : the latter was the declining from a great fact, the ancient 
 dignity and power of imperial Rome ; the former was the 
 growth into a great fiction, the temporal supremacy of papal 
 Rome. 
 
 The empire astonishes us with the vitality which the uni- 
 versal acquiescence in its rights, however attenuated, conserves 
 to it : the papacy appals us by the arrogance and grandeur of 
 assumption which it raises on a foundation that seems to be 
 itself a hypothesis, to say the least. Yet, as the languishing 
 
2i6 Continuance of the Papacy. [ix. 
 
 empire lives by law, the aspiring papacy must live by law, 
 ^ and rights and proprietary rights too. So the forged dona- 
 tions of Italian territory, the baseless claims to feudal supre- 
 macy within the Sicilian kingdom ; the spiritual position 
 based on the false decretals ; all of them attempts to supply to 
 the rising power the sort of strength that sustained the fell- 
 ing power. When the point of substantive independence is 
 reached, how are the wider claims made to rest on the firmer 
 basis of spiritual and religious obedience : the law of papal 
 Rome becomes the living voice of the Catholic Church, the 
 voice of the pope in cathedra an infallible utterance ; the 
 jurisprudence of the decretals a universal jurisprudence ; the 
 sovereignty of Innocent III and Boniface VIII, a sovereignty 
 which it is blasphemous to deny, criminal to gainsay. But 
 when the idea has gained recognition, far be it from us to say 
 that the power so won was used unlawfully. No, the spiritual 
 claims of the papacy, however unjustifiable in their early 
 history, were to a large extent justified by the beneficial use 
 to which they were put by the better pontiffs. The Court 
 of Rome was a tribunal for international arbitrament, the 
 ' efficiency of which was one great proof of the law-abiding 
 character of the ages which it influenced. I do not forget 
 the wars of the medieval papacy, wars, some of them, which 
 were encouraged and even prompted by those who were ex 
 ofiieio the peace-makers of the world : but when we consider 
 how, with all those exceptions, the influence of the Church, 
 during these ages worked from the Roman centre, was as a 
 rule employed for the prevention of war, for the shortening of 
 inevitable struggles, and for the healing of wounds that could 
 not otherwise have been healed, we cannot deny to it such 
 justification as belongs to men who believe themselves to be 
 the ministers of a higher than human righteousness. 
 
 But I have no wish to touch more on controversial points : 
 let papal Rome, as the law-giver of the medieval Church, 
 have all the credit of her great achievements : however based, 
 on law or on idea, her position was a standing protest against 
 brutal force, a standing ofier of peace and goodwill to those 
 who could pay for it ; a great office of incipient diplomacy, a 
 
IX.] Legality in War. 217 
 
 great treasury of legal chicanery, but still a refuge against 
 overbearing violence. The position of both empire and papacy 
 is historically maintained by a public sense of law and right. 
 
 But perhaps the field in which the most abundant illustra- 
 tions of the thesis will be found is that in which a priori we 
 should be least inclined to look for it ; in the region of war ; 
 in the drum and trumpet territory in which, accordiag to the 
 new reading of history, so little can be found to indicate the 
 growth of human thought or the development of national 
 character and life. Medieval wars are, as a rule, wars of 
 rights : they are seldom wars of unprovoked, never wars of 
 absolutely unjustifiable, aggression ; they are not wars of idea, 
 of liberation, or of glory, or of nationality, or of propa- 
 gandism. Ah, you will say to me, you are wrong there ; how 
 about the Crusades, how about the Norman Conquest, how 
 about Scottish independence, -how about Lewis of Bavaria and 
 John XXII, how about the Hundred Years' War ? Not one 
 of these was simply a war of aggression which those who 
 waged it felt it to be without justification, except perhaps the 
 Norman Conquest ; and we all know what an amount of special 
 pleading was thought necessary to justify that. Do not mis- 
 take me : if I had meant to say that law and right were the 
 ruling ideas of medieval politicians, I should have said so at 
 first ; but I could only have proved my thesis by showing that 
 there was no war at all. There was war in abundance, public 
 war and private war : the Temple of Janus could not have 
 been shut for all those centuries, if it had been still standing 
 and put to its mythical purpose. What was meant was not 
 that men loved law, but that they did so far respect it as to 
 vsdsh to seem to have it always on their side. They did not 
 attack their neighbours because they wanted glory ; or because 
 they could not bear rivalry, or because their neighbours' armies 
 were too strong for their safety, or because their neighbours' 
 armies were so ill equipped that they might be an easy con- 
 quest ; but they alleged a legal claim or a legal grievance ; 
 and in the majority of cases really legal claims and really 
 legal grievances. Of course, if law had been supreme, the 
 wrong-doer would have yielded at once, the false claimant 
 
2i8 ^English Wars. [ix. 
 
 would have Hd his diminished head at the first expression of 
 the opinion of a competent counsel or an authorised judge ; 
 we know how often that is done in these days in quarrels great 
 and small. But I make no such claim for these ages ; I only- 
 say that, when a man coveted his neighbour's vineyard, he 
 went as it were to law for it, and did not simply take it by 
 force. The Norman Conquest of England, I need hardly say, 
 is scarcely a fair illustration. It is at least as much a 
 viking invasion as a war waged according to the inter- 
 national law of the age ; yet the pleas of bequest, the legacy 
 of Edward the Confessor, the papal sanction, the oath of 
 Harold, the legal election by the witenagemot of the humbled 
 race, alike the inventions and the ceremonial of the succession, 
 were a concession to a public sense of right. Take the other 
 great wars ; of England first : we cannot doubt that in all the 
 quarrels arising from the Norman, Angevin, and Poictevin 
 inheritances, the right of proprietary succession was on both 
 sides distinctly recognised : the wars arose not on account of 
 the mere wish of France to revindicate her alienated provinces, 
 but on account of the disputed right to a feudal superiority, or 
 the possession of a debateable frontier, or the division between 
 two co-heiresses, or the existence of a custom of representation. 
 When, as under Philip Augustus, the design of aggression 
 was strong enough to take a more decided line, still it was on 
 no false pretext that war was waged, and on no merely im- 
 aginary process that forfeiture Was decreed ; the barons of 
 Poictou legally impleaded John for his treatment of the Count 
 of la Marche, the barons of Brittany legally arraigned him 
 for the destruction of Arthur : as his feudal lord, Philip sum- 
 moned him, and John, as a contumacious vassal, suffered judg- 
 ment by default. In the execution of the sentence Philip had 
 on his side, not only the popular hatred of his competitor, 
 but the conscious recognition that legally John had lost his 
 cause. Normandy and Anjou were practically undefended ; 
 Philip's victories were justified by the recognition of the 
 countries which renounced their old rulers for sound and lawful 
 reasons. There were no nonjuring bishops in Normandy and 
 Anjou. It would not be difficult to show how the legal aspect 
 
IX.] Scottish Struggle. 219 
 
 of the Poictevin succession affected the different fate of 
 Guienne and Gascony ; but I pass on, for I have mentioned 
 that abeady in reference to Henry III and S. Lewis ; I 
 may just add that when Lewis, in 1 359, obtained from his 
 brother-ia law a final surrender of Normandy and homage and 
 fealty for Gfuienne, Henry formally acknowledged the justice of 
 the sentence under which his father had forfeited the former, 
 and Lewis practically acknowledged the justice of the claim 
 by which Henry retained his hold upon the latter. A piece 
 of legal formalism this, we say ; yet it was so powerful a piece 
 of formalism that it unquestionably made the breach between 
 Simon de Montfort and the royal party an irreparable breach, 
 and led directly to the catastrophes of Lewes and Evesham. 
 
 We come next to the French and Scottish wars of Edward I. 
 The claim of the Scottish overlordship was made with every 
 •pretence to legality, and, there can be little doubt, was believed 
 by the king himself and accepted by the lords of Scotland as 
 long as they remained hopeless of their national iadependence 
 or blind to their chances of escape. John Balliol's forfeiture, 
 his renunciation of homage, his cession of the crown to Edward, 
 were all legal acts : the attempt of Philip the Pair to exert 
 over Edward the same sort of jurisdiction that PhUip Augustus 
 had successfully exercised over John, was foiled by Edward, 
 but was in itself an almost exact parallel to his treatment of 
 Balliol. The Scottish war was again, in his eyes, an attempt 
 not to choke national independence, but to enforce legal right. 
 As the age advances, we find Philip of Valois and Edward III 
 comparing pedigrees before they go to war ; for more than a 
 century two rival kings, Philip and Charles, kings of the 
 French, and Edward, Richard and the Henries, kings of France, 
 dispute the sovereignty of a great nation which is not con- 
 sulted under which lord it wiU live, but has to abide by the 
 conflicting judgments of varying courts appellate on the field 
 of battle. 
 
 After that come the wars of the Roses ; wars which were 
 at once fought out in battle, camp and court, pamphlet, book 
 and parliament. In the wars of York and Lancaster, just as 
 in the war of Stephen and Matilda, the legal recognition 
 
220 German Wars. [ix. 
 
 of the rightful king ; the existence of the .king de facto a? 
 a bar to the recognition of the king de jure ; the solemn 
 character of the ties that unite the baronage to the head, 
 which they are determined to disown, but will not disown 
 without a formal legal sentence; the parallels furnished 
 by the cession of Edward II and Richard II, the curious 
 pedantic circumstantiality of processes which, before they 
 reached the stage of reality, had cost the lives of thousands ; 
 all these mark not merely the legal character and instinct 
 of Englishmen, but the characteristic of the long medieval 
 centuries, the conscience that war is justifiable only by law. 
 
 If we turn to Germany, the great struggle of the Investitures 
 is in its outer aspect a struggle about legal forms : there were 
 deeper causes at work, the national schism between Saxony 
 and Swabia, caused by the legal wrongs which the Saxons 
 believed themselves to have endured from Henry III, and the 
 religious schism which arose from the rival ambitions, per- 
 sonal and ideal, of Henry IV and the popes ; but the bone of 
 contention was a legal claim. The struggle of the Welf and 
 the Hohenstaufen was a legal struggle ; although the weaker 
 went to the wall, his cause was capable of very definite de- 
 fence ; the sentence under which he fell, although unrighteous, 
 was formally legal. Other illustrations are furnished by the 
 dealings of the Hohenstaufen with the popes ; the great house 
 fells by mancBuvres and expedients of much the same sort as 
 those by which it had destroyed the Welfs : the papacy ex- 
 pands the principles on which it had claimed the inheritance 
 of the countess Matilda, and at the same time formulates the 
 claims by which in the fourteenth century it was to cripple 
 the central power of Europe and reduce, itself an exile, the 
 rival influence to the shadow of a shade. 
 
 Let these, however, suffice for the pattern wars ; the same 
 characteristics belong in varying intensity to all the minor quar- 
 rels, down to the lowest grades of recognised private wars ; war 
 for the right of a bridge-toll, a mill or a pigeon-cote. War 
 was, in one aspect, a sublime ordeal, but, like the ordeal, it was 
 attended with all the forms and ceremonies of law : public war 
 was an ordeal resorted to when all inferior tribunals had failed 
 
IX.] Private War. 221 
 
 to satisfy the litigants ; and private war was little else, except 
 that there the coercive power of the tribunals which should 
 have been appealed to was greater, and the waging of war 
 in contempt or despite of them a bolder defiance of the laws 
 of human society. PubHe war was not, like private war, 
 branded as a social crime, because the one tribunal which 
 might have decided the questions at issue without blood- 
 shed was both dishonest and weak. Private war was not 
 only a contempt of competent jurisdiction but a sin against ■ 
 social order. Yet down to the close of the period, the habit 
 of private war was in a great part of Europe unbroken and 
 unrepressed : in the empu-e the successive proclamations of 
 the peace were inoperative ; in the other states the custom 
 was extinguished only with the independence of the powers 
 that practised it : wherever there was disorganisation, wherever 
 the feudal, spirit broke the bonds in which constitutional rule 
 had limited its powers, there private war was regarded as the 
 ultimate appeal : men went to law to avenge their wrongs and 
 to vindicate rights, and, when they could not get law that was 
 strong enough to enforce itself, they went to war. 
 
 Lastly, look at the Crusades. The Crusades were the great 
 exception to the rule as I have stated it ; they were not wars 
 waged for proprietary rights ; they scarcely even pretended to 
 be so. The Holy Land, the patrimony of the Crucified, as the 
 Cmsaders called it, was not theirs by any title of law ; histori- 
 cally the only power which had a legal claim to Palestine was 
 the Byzantine empire, but the territorial claims of the Comneni 
 were, throughout the crusading period, defied where they were 
 not ignored ; the Crusaders believed the Greek emperors to be 
 either in league with the Moslems, ready to betray Christen- 
 dom for a price, or else, as schismatics, one shade more or less 
 culpable than the Mahometans. The Crusades were, more- 
 over, at least in the commencement, originated not by the 
 national authority, king or emperor, of a Christian state, but 
 by adventurers, who might for the purpose be called private 
 adventurers, acting under the exhortations of the popes. In one 
 aspect they were wars of speculation, in another wars of re- 
 ligion, in another wars of defence. The first Crusade was 
 
2 22 The Crusades. [ix. 
 
 perhaps more than the others a war of specvdation, the second 
 a war of religion, the third a war of defence ; in the fourth, 
 agaia, speculation under Venetian influence threw both religion 
 and defence into the shade : and all the later Crusades were 
 wars of defence. Yet, although to say this is a partial con- 
 demnation, I cannot go further. The conquest of Palestine 
 was to Robert of Normandy, Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond 
 of Tarentum, a sanctified experiment of vikingism; but to 
 Godfrey of Bouillon, to the great mass of the Crusading armies, 
 to the popes even, it was something far different. It was a 
 war of idea ; a going forth to recover the heritage of Christ, 
 the land, as they termed it, on which His feet had stood : it 
 was a going out of the petty range of proprietary rights and 
 wrongs, out of the petty interests of armed litigation. As I 
 have said before in this place, the Crusades, with all their 
 drawbacks, were the trial feat of a new world, a reconstituted 
 Christendom, striving after a better ideal than that of piracy 
 and fraternal bloodshed. In the character of wars of defence 
 they need not be defended : they stemmed the tide that but 
 for them must have covered Europe, as it had covered Asia, 
 with desolation. 
 
 Perhaps I need go no fiirther ; but there is one class of 
 wars which I have not yet noticed, and which yet are very 
 characteristic in their history of the principle for which I have 
 been contending. The civil wars which were waged for 
 national liberties were not in any great measure wars for ideas, 
 but wars for rights. I do not mean to say that this was quite 
 the case in Italy : in Italy the question of rights had become 
 so complicated that nothing but the infusion of an element of 
 idea could have produced even a semblance of order out of the 
 chaos. The old sway of Rome, the successive deluges of Goth, 
 Lombard, Greek and German, had thrown rights and wrongs 
 into an inextricable hotchpot. The restoration of order was 
 the initiation of liberty ; with liberty, or the idea of it, came 
 new forms of organisation, democracies, aristocracies, munici- 
 palities, tyrannies, monarchies: each formulating rights and laws 
 as they arose, but less bound by laws of rights and obligations 
 because for the most part they lacked historic basis. What 
 
IX.] Conclusion. 223 
 
 the faction of to-day might set up, the faction of to-morrow 
 might puU down : the exiles of to-day were the governors of 
 to-morrow, the forfeitures of to-day only the reprisals of the 
 forfeitures of yesterday. In England it is very different. \ 
 Here the rights struggled for are historical rights, and the 
 liberties secured are historical liberties. Step by step, from 
 precedent to precedent, the national growth asserts itself, and 
 the kings, yielding their consent, recognise the justice of the 
 claim, or, exchanging resistance for sympathy, throw new but 
 stiU. historical energies into the common growth. We have 
 ia the medieval growth of our constitution little to be ashamed 
 of ; little of conspiracy, little of fanaticism, little — as little as 
 there can be in the essential character of a politician^of self- 
 seeking. There is enough of the idea of liberty and sound 
 government to lift the struggle out of the region of mere legal 
 resistance to mere legal oppression : there is a growth towards 
 liberty in all the vindication of even class rights and special 
 privileges: a growth towards liberty so spontaneous, I had 
 almost said so little self-conscious, as to show that it is a 
 natural, not a factitious growth : it is not taught by philo- 
 sophers, it is not extorted by agitators, it is the outgrowth of 
 law and a law-abiding spirit, tending by its very nature to 
 freedom and order conjointly. The transition from medieval 
 to modern history is in this department of national life not an 
 abrupt transition, but a growth befitting a land of settled 
 government ; 
 
 A land of just and old renown, 
 Where Freedom broadens slowly down 
 
 From precedent to precedent; 
 Where faction seldom gathers head, 
 But, by degrees to fulness wrought, 
 The strength of some diffasive thought 
 Hath time and space to work and spread. 
 
X. 
 
 ON THE CHARACTERISTIC DIFFERENCES 
 
 BETWEEN MEDIEVAL AND MODERN 
 
 HISTORY. 
 
 (April 17, 1880.) 
 
 IN the lecture wliich I gave the other day, and of which 
 the present is a continuation, I made an attempt to show 
 what I meant by a distinction which I had drawn between 
 medieval and modem history in the two divisions into which 
 it is separated by the gulf of the French revolution. I had 
 begun by a little self-justification in the preference of medieval 
 to modern history as an instrument of education, and, while 
 treating the subject from a higher point of view than that of 
 mere utility, had run off into a disquisition on the distinguish- 
 ing characteristics of the divisions in question. On the remark 
 which I have made elsewhere that the leading influence of 
 early medieval history was the strong insistance on law and 
 right, I had founded a somewhat rambling examination of 
 the main points of the history of the middle ages, the cha- 
 racters of their great men, the permanence of their institutions, 
 and the peculiar character of their wars. I had marked the 
 characteristics of the second division as power or force, and 
 that of the third as the influence of ideas. I now proceed to 
 explain what I meant by this and to illustrate it, leaving my 
 hearers to infer, as I proceed, what my reasons have been for 
 preferring the earlier portion as the subject of my own teach- 
 ing. When I have said what will no doubt appear to you to 
 be more than enough about that, I shall venture to make 
 some remarks on the influence of the ideas by which at the 
 present day politics and politicians seem or profess to be 
 guided. In that division of the subject I may seem to become 
 somewhat political myself; if I do, I shall not ask your 
 
X.J The Balance of Power. 225 
 
 pardon. I have never been ashamed to express my convictions 
 where they happened to differ from those of my fiiends with 
 whom on most other sabjects I should be willing to agree. I 
 shall not, therefore, I think, rightly be thought rash or dispu- 
 tatious if I venture to express difference from those modern 
 political schools with which I feel that I cannot sympathise 
 at aU. 
 
 So now to the subject. Almost any student who has read , 
 the usual books, if he were asked to mark what was the 
 foremost idea of the three centuries that intervene between the 1 
 year 1500 and the year 1800, would reply that it was the idea 
 of the balance of power. The balance of power, however it be 
 defined, i.e. whatever the powers were between which it was 
 necessary to maintain such equilibrium, that the weaker should 
 not be crushed by the union of the stronger, is the principle 
 which gives unity to the political plot of modern European 
 history. "Whether the balance is to be maintained against the 
 preponderance of the house of Hapsburg, or the preponderance 
 of France, or 4;he preponderance of Catholic powers as opposed 
 to Protestant ones ; this is the key to the plot. 
 
 But it is not the existence of the key or the character of 
 the plot, but the existence of the drama of modern European 
 politics, that is the first featm-e of our sketch : the existence 
 of the powers by whom the drama is played and between 
 whom the balance is maintained. Medieval history may, it 
 is true, be read as a drama, but it is not one in which the plot 
 is obvious ; it is rather more a series of dramas which may be 
 combined, like Greek trilogies, but have unities and plots of 
 their own. The history of each great nation is a drama by 
 itself ; the blending of the several dramas may be so read as to 
 show how the nations were severally being educated for work 
 on a stage in which they should appear together: in the 
 modern life of Europe they do appear together, and take each 
 the part for which it has been educated in the earlier stage. 
 But that early preparation had been carried on, to a great 
 extent, separately. England and France had been no doubt 
 training one another for centuries, but the balance of power 
 between England and France never came into the great plot 
 
 Q 
 
2 26 Gradual Transition. [x. 
 
 of later days ; the discipline of Spain had been worked out 
 within the walls of the peninsula; between France and 
 Germany there had never been a great war ; between Germany 
 and Italy, as nationalities, no straggle had as yet been possible ; 
 and the border warfare of the border states had been carried on 
 without any great amount of interest or interference from the 
 greater or growing agglomerations of territory which under 
 the name of nations, states or dynasties, now come to the &ont. 
 The Crusades had been a common field of work and a common 
 stage of action, but the nationalities which in the Crusades 
 had fought side by side in union or in rivalry, had long retired 
 from the uncongenial work, and aU the zeal of the best popes 
 and the most heroic kings had been unequal to the task of 
 uniting Christendom again for the common emancipation. 
 
 There was, however, no great crash at the passing away of the 
 old things and the coming in of the new. The new influences, 
 many and various in character, quickly combine to produce the 
 new actors and to clear the common stage. The concentration 
 of power in the royal hands in France, under Charles VII and 
 Lewis XI ; the creation of a compact and solid kingdom out 
 of a number of rival and hostile feudal provinces or dynastic 
 appanages, a concentration for which, during the whole of the 
 medieval period from Lewis VI onwards, the kings had been 
 working, but which only became possible when the long 
 struggle with England had made it necessary ; a concentration 
 of power which signified not only territorial union, but ad- 
 ministrative autocracy ; which reduced aU powers except that 
 of the crown, states general, parliament, clergy, feudatories, 
 all to a shadow ; a concentration in which, in the language of 
 the time, France emerged from tutelage and attained to such 
 maturity of manhood as might be expressed in the later 
 formula ' The state, it is I myself.' This compactness, this 
 concentration, equipped France for her part. 
 
 Just at the same moment England emerged from the terrible 
 dynastic straggle in which, with the competing houses, the very 
 bone and sinew of liberty seemed to have perished. The baron- 
 age, attenuated to a shadow of its former bulk, and with its 
 power as attenuated as its numbers, the Commons wearied, 
 
X.] Concentration of States. 227 
 
 exhausted with political struggles, turning their back on 
 polities altogether to seek new and more profitable interests in 
 new channels, and to leave the battle of rights and wrongs to 
 settle itself; the clergy, on the one side left alone among the 
 estates to continue the tradition of liberty, but on the other 
 declining rapidly from their function of the national conscience 
 and memory, to be mere officials, servants of the great 
 monarchical administrative unity that towered so high over 
 the prostrate estates ; all three alike in isolation or in. pitiful 
 sympathy left the national action at the disposal of a king, 
 a king like Henry VII, who would be a tyrant only in self- 
 defence, to be succeeded by a son who would be a tyrant in 
 very self-will. England, growing rich in the peace which its 
 politic king and its busy people alike left all else to cultivate, 
 growing stronger in wealth and union and abeyance of liberty, 
 was likewise ready to act as a force at the will of one man. 
 
 Spain had finished the seven centuries of her crusade, and the 
 two rival kingdoms, rid at last of the enemy, met and were 
 united in the Catholic couple. In Germany Maximilian had 
 at last concentrated in his own hands the territorial acqui- 
 sitions of his hoase, had united Austria and her outlying states, 
 had obtained for his son the accumulation of Burgundian fiefs, 
 and for his grandsons the crown of Spain and Sicily, the 
 reversion of Hungary and Bohemia besides. The Hapsburg 
 power is a union of many unions, ill compacted, heterogeneous, 
 uncongenial, but of extremely great might, a power consoli- 
 dated by legal titles, happy and unhappy marriages, legal wind- 
 falls, traditional pretensions, but yet the most important factor 
 for many years to come in the welfare of Europe. The strengiih 
 of France is in her compactness and concentration, that of 
 Charles V, for in him the Austrian force is first impersonated, 
 in its extent and universality. To that extent and universality 
 the discovery and the rapid pouring in of the wealth of 
 America gave still new weapons and greater opportunities. 
 France and Austria were both equipped for their struggle. 
 
 The minor actors had somehow girt up their loins also : the 
 popes, giving up their place as the overseers of a too wide 
 dominion, had begun to accumulate the territorial aggregate 
 
 Q 3 
 
2 28 Charles and Francis. [x. 
 
 of provinces in which they also could call themselves the state. 
 Gustavus Vasa was reconstructing Sweden; although the 
 attempt to unite the Scandinavian kingdoms had failed, the 
 same influence that was knotting up the south into bundles 
 was knotting up the north. 
 
 And so the struggle of powers begins. First comes the 
 rivalry of Francis I and Charles V ; with Henry VIII and 
 the popes hovering round the combatants, aspiring to hold 
 the balance between them, and made alternately their tools 
 and scapegoats. The struggle is a curious one : the older 
 idea of rights to be fought for has not altogether disap- 
 peared, but now the interest is not in the right, but in 
 the battle. So it has been since Charles VIII, marching into 
 Italy, had opened the new drama. Rights were sought out 
 and put forward as the pretexts of the struggle, but the 
 straggle was for superiority and the hold on power. The 
 action of the house of Austria was in itself defensive action ; 
 on every side its spreading dominions were at the mercy of 
 the strong enemy whom they seemed to hem in ; the action of 
 Francis and Henry II was necessarily aggressive ; wherever 
 they turned, except seawards, there were the forces of Austria 
 watching them ; over the Pyrenees, over the Alps, over the 
 Hhone, over the Rhine, within the historic limits of France, 
 northwards and eastwards, there was the rival power, and even 
 on the sea-board there were the hostile fleets. 
 
 Next comes the Reformation, a struggle it may be said of 
 ideas, as the Hapsburg struggle with France is a struggle of 
 rights, but primarily a struggle of powers ; the rights in the 
 one case, the ideas in the other, being the occasion rather than 
 the essential ingredients of the rivalry. 
 
 But setting the idea side of the Reformation for the 
 moment in the background, follow the rivalry of the fore- 
 most powers. In this aspect the Reformation cuts curiously 
 across the earlier dividing lines : it breaks up such unity 
 of German action as has yet existed, and gives France its 
 first great advantage : the strange alliance of Henry II with 
 the Protestant powers, an alliance most distinctly of force, 
 not of idea, strikes the first hard blow at the preponder- 
 
X.J Henry IV. 229 
 
 ance of Austria, and the irrecoverable loss of the three 
 bishoprics is one of the mortal wounds of the empire. The 
 next act is the rebellion of the Netherlands and the con- 
 temporary wars of the league in France ; the Austrian heritage 
 is broken in two, but the family interest and aUianee for a 
 time supplies the place of personal union. For a generation, 
 however, Austria proper stands outside the struggle of the 
 balance ; she has to repress the movements towards religious 
 reformation, and to ward off the attacks of the Turks on the 
 side of Hungary. Where her weight is at all operative it is 
 thrown on the side of Spain. Spain is the overshadowing, all- 
 threatening force ; France doing her best to produce the dis- 
 ruption of the Netherlands, Spain doing her best to produce 
 the disruption of France ; again the reformed party, acting as 
 a force rather than a sentiment ; for although on Philip's side 
 the interests of Spain and religion are at one, France is perse- 
 cuting at home the very ideas for which she intrigues abroad. 
 After a while the balance wavers : the strong hand of 
 Philip II is taken off, the unworthy hand of the Valois lets faU 
 the sceptre which it had held with so weak and vacillating grasp. 
 Henry IV becomes the dominating influence. Henry IV is a 
 man of ideas, a man of sentiment, a man of force ; not of much 
 sense of law and right. To his mind a reconstituted Europe 
 was the ideal ; not of course to accept as his the minute re- 
 modelling of the map which was once ascribed to him and his 
 advisers, we can yet see enough of his design to know that he 
 planned a forcible partition of the Hapsburg inheritances, 
 the erection of a counterpoise to the empire in Germany 
 itself, and the rearrangement of the minor states in a way 
 which would have left France the civil and religious arbiter of 
 Christendom. His day is but a short one, and the ideas which 
 he or his counsellors conceived came to bearing in the struggle 
 of forces which occupied the long reign of his grandson. 
 
 But the scene of the drama changes at the same time. The 
 United Provinces have gained recognition ; the action of 
 Spain is becoming languid, and its energy bears no propor- 
 tion to its still subsisting power and mass. The great act 
 is now in Germany, the Thirty Years War : a war of two 
 
230 The Thirty Years War. [x. 
 
 forces, two rights, two ideas : Austria against the princes, 
 Catholic against Protestant, ancient territorial right as 
 against new territorial force. Here too the religious influence 
 produces cross division ; the Lutheran and the Calvinist wiU 
 not fight side hy side ; the Bavarian sets Catholicism before 
 imperialism ; Austria sets the family interest before either ; 
 yet Austria is as Catholic as the Jesuits and as imperial as 
 the jurists can make her. But notwithstanding this cross 
 influence of rights and ideas, the Thirty Years War is mainly a 
 war of force, a war for determining the balance, not between 
 ideas or rights, not between competing religions or competing 
 liberties, but between armed sovereignties and territorial ag- 
 gregations. Make the utmost of the idealism of Gustavus 
 Adolphus, the legal pretexts of his interference are even worse 
 founded than those under which Denmark in the earlier stage 
 of the war had thrown in her lot as against the empire ; and 
 the idealism of Gustavus, his high and noble purpose of coming 
 down as the saviour of religion, ends in the artificial aggran- 
 disement of Sweden, as the luckless intriguing policy of 
 Christian ends in the complete humiliation of Denmark. The 
 interference of France, without sympathy of idea, without 
 pretext of legality, is a simple intrusion of force. But I 
 pass on. 
 
 The Thirty Years War exhausted Germany, even the vic- 
 torious powers were worn out, much more the defeated ones : 
 the stage is left clear for the glories of Lewis XIV. ' The 
 state is myself ' The right is the glory of France.' Perhaps 
 the lurid glare of the glories of this act, the act of the Great 
 Monarch, throws a shade on minor actors and less prominent 
 motives, but it can scarcely be misread ; it is the triumph of 
 force over both old rights and new ideas ; a regime in which 
 might is construed as right. The dominance of the idea of 
 force in the aggression produces a corresponding influence in 
 the resisting powers. They are bound not by sympathy but 
 by necessity ; the alliances that resist the great monarch are 
 alliances of expediency, not of principle, and when the resist- 
 ance is past they are ever ready for new combinations. 
 
 The struggle of the Spanish succession followed, a struggle in 
 
X.] Lewis and Frederick. 231 
 
 which ancestral right was matched against the doctrine of the 
 balance, and the force of the stronger determined the verdict. 
 The struggle of the Imperial succession next led on to the 
 triumphant career of Frederick II, and that unmistakeably to 
 the new forms of political combination and antagonism which 
 emerged from the French Revolution. Lewis XIV and 
 Frederick the Great impersonate the two principles, or aspects 
 of the one principle, that might gives right ; Frederick was 
 far the greater man, of course ; Frederick had rights ; he had 
 claims old and legal on Silesia, and the old question of the 
 Cleves Juliers inheritance had been a burning question for a 
 century before he began to fight ; and he had ideas — who so 
 many ? Lewis XIV had scarcely any plea of right for his 
 aggressions, and his sole idea, as his sole policy, was himself, 
 his interest and glory and that of France in him. But it all 
 came to the same thing. Frederick knew that he was strong, 
 and revived old pleas that his father had let slumber. Lewis 
 knew that he was strong : the rival powers at both con- 
 junctures were exhausted ; war, policy, money, philosophy, 
 intrigue, rights and ideas, all gave way or led on to the 
 triumph of force. The right, the idea, the balance of power, 
 was on the side of the strongest battalions. 
 
 But now I must turn back to the Reformation, for there can 
 be no question that, in the changes that brought about and re- 
 sulted from that crisis, both rights and ideas were very strong 
 within certain circles of their own, and to make the balance of 
 power, the struggle of material forces, the sole lesson of this 
 portion of history, would be a serious mistake. Yet I think 
 even here we shall see that the principle of the idea was less 
 operative than the principle of force, the policy of force more 
 effective than the policy of idea. The crisis of the Reformation 
 is not less remarkable for its results than for its causes. The 
 throwing off of the Roman supremacy, in doctrine and ecclesi- 
 astical government, was, in those countries in which it was 
 permanently effected, a most complex proceeding. No doubt 
 there was throughout Em-ope much religious disaffection at 
 the opening of the sixteenth century ; but for a century before 
 there had been even more prominent doctrinal disaffection, and 
 
232 Concentration of Powers. [x. 
 
 only just a century before the Churcli had passed through a 
 most dangerous schism, which threatened its substantial 
 organisation as well as its doctrine. The desired reformation 
 in head and members had been familiar all this time. But it 
 did not come till now ; till the stage had, as we have seen, 
 been cleared for the new actors. We might conjecture that 
 whilst the concentration of the new powers gave them in 
 themselves greater vitality and more manageable force, it 
 would exhaust the vitality of the older organisation, which 
 had kept them together whilst the divisions were smaller and 
 the common action less vivid. Whilst aU the powers of 
 Christendom were busy with their own internal rights and 
 border quarrels, a languid acquiescence in the undivided 
 supremacy of Rome was more a powerful influence than it 
 could be when two or three new and well girt combatants 
 were ready to assert their own amapKua \ stiU more, when the 
 new combatants saw the truth that they must be lords in 
 their own houses. As we saw, the concentration of power in 
 Spain, France, and Germany meant more than the absorption 
 of weaker states ; it meant the absorption of inferior powers in 
 the state. The strong actors in the new drama must be strong 
 governors at home as weU. as strong combatants abroad. Great 
 designs, great rivalries, demanded concentrated energies, deter- 
 mined wills. Strong government came in with the sixteenth 
 century, and strong government was a very strong element in 
 reformation history, for it weakened the solidarity of the 
 Catholic Church and prepared the way for the formida ' cujus 
 regio ejus religio,' the disruption of national churches as well. 
 But neither these causes, religious disaifection and the dis- 
 integration of the weak church organisation by the growing 
 strength of absolutism, nor the ideas of the new learning, nor 
 the rivalries of political rulers fostering abroad forms of dis- 
 content which they persecuted at home, nor the lust of en- 
 larged territory, nor the coveting of ecclesiastical wealth, nor 
 the envy of unprivileged classes, nor the new power of the 
 press, would alone have sufficed to do the work that was done. 
 Who could have reckoned on the coincidence of the Indulgence 
 agitation in Germany, the divorce agitation in England, the 
 
X.] The Reformation. 233 
 
 growth of Huguenotism in France, tlie rising up of men like 
 Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Knox in such rapid succession, and 
 with such marked differences, and such diverse contributions to 
 such a complex result? There was unquestionably, in eon- 
 junction with the yearnings for spiritual change, a deep and , 
 strong impulse for breaking with the past ; breaking with 
 national traditions and with religious traditions ; a tendency 
 which would, if it had been unchecked, unobstructed, or not 
 diverted into other channels, almost of necessity have amounted 
 to revolution. 
 
 Strong government had not come too soon ; but for that, 
 with all its oppressions, its repressions, and its persecutions, 
 there would have been a period of anarchy in the breaking up 
 of the deeps of old society. Well, however it was to be met, 
 reformation came ; the absorption of a great part of the lands 
 of the churches followed or accompanied reformation ; either, 
 as in England, by the seizure and surrender of monastic 
 estates, or in Germany by the adoption of transparent fictions 
 which enabled Protestant princes to lay on ecclesiastical 
 positions a hold which was never to be relaxed ; or, as in 
 Scotland, by sweeping away the old fabric altogether. The 
 ancient right of territorial ownership was weakened, and the 
 process of secularisation, which was in Germany completed at 
 •che peace of Westphalia, set the seal of legality on the status 
 quo. 
 
 Protestantism had done its utmost to shift the balance 
 of power. Yet, as I said before, it had really done little more 
 than produce a cross division in the conflicting parties. 
 Where Protestantism was an idea only, as in Spain and Italy, 
 it was crushed out by the Inquisition ; where, in conjunction 
 with political power and sustained by ecclesiastical confisca- 
 tion, it became a physical force, there it was lasting. It is^ 
 not a pleasant view to take of the doctrinal change to see that, 
 where the movement towards it was pure and unworldly, it 
 failed ; where it was seconded by territorial greed and political 
 animosity, it succeeded. But so it has been with many of the 
 changes by which in the long run both Church and world have 
 been benefited. In the case of the English reformation, it is / 
 
234 Diplomacy. [x. 
 
 certain that without the redistribution of monastic estates the 
 change must have been long delayed, and might have been 
 suddenly and permanently reversed. Anarchy and confusion 
 were imminent under the puritan rule of Edward VI, as well 
 as under the papal reaction of Mary. If Elizabeth and her 
 advisers had leaned to either, the flood must have poured in ; 
 unsympathetic as is the Elizabethan Church rule, little as we 
 can find to love among the men whom she set up as Fathers 
 to the Church, it was their strong rule that saved England 
 from revolution far more dangerous, far more calamitous, than 
 all the mistakes, the terrors, the persecutions, the reactions, of 
 the so-called rebellion and revolution periods of the seven- 
 teenth century. But again the subject is one that tempts to 
 too wide digression : only, after what I have said, whether 
 you agree with me or no, you will see why I have thought 
 it better to treat the Reformation under the aspect of force 
 rather than idea. 
 
 We must not, however, imagine that in any but the ex- 
 tremest eases of change, political, territorial, or religious, the 
 old landmarks were so entirely swept away that none of the 
 earlier ideas of rights remained. No : it was the conflict 
 between the old influence of right and the new influence 
 > of force, between old legality and new strong government 
 that forced into existence the diplomacy of the sixteenth and 
 following centuries, — diplomacy, in its beginning a sort of 
 kriegspiel, in which threats and bribes on paper took the 
 place of mobilisations and marches, sieges and invasions. 
 Most curious are the beginnings of the diplomatic policy of 
 Wolsey and his master ; the restless attempts to make the 
 political force felt without the cost of exerting it ; how as 
 soon as they have concluded an alKance, do they begin to 
 work for a counter alliance ; how they seem to conclude 
 treaties with one high conflicting party that overlap the 
 treaties they have just made with the other ; what secrecy, 
 what mystery, what bribery, what intimidation ; and amid 
 all, a little sour grain of conscience, that the old law-abiding, 
 treaty-keeping faith and loyalty would have been better. A 
 plea must be sought for every aggression ; no compact must 
 
X.] Growth of ideas in policy. 235 
 
 be broken without hesitation unless a flaw can be found. 
 Whether it be true that Charles V justified the imprisonment 
 of Philip the Magnanimous by the misreading of a single 
 letter in the word which had induced him to sm-render, I do 
 not know ; the story may be false, but the moral is true ; 
 men were loth to own themselves actuated by simple greed. 
 And as diplomacy was in its beginnings, so it lasted for a long 
 time ; the ambassador was the man who was sent to lie abroad 
 for the good of his country. Rights, pleas, grudges, were 
 registered against the time when strength would accrue to 
 make them real weapons of argument and instruments of 
 aggression. 
 
 But as the old influence of right lingered on, the new 
 influence of idea was ft-om time to time giving distinct 
 warnings of a further change. There was an idea of religion, 
 there was an idea of liberty, struggles for the vindication of 
 historical nationalities, although, as ideas, they were overborne 
 or absorbed by the mightier forces which played around them. 
 It could scarcely be but that strong government should force 
 up premature longings for liberty, or that religious repression 
 should compel a desire for tolerance. Yet we must not make 
 too much of the first glimmerings of the changes that were 
 coming. The revolt of the Netherlands was perhaps the 
 most resolute attempt at Hbei-ty that had been seen since the 
 middle ages opened ; the idea of nationality was strong in the 
 Spanish provinces of the Hapsburg inheritance and in the 
 Bohemia of the Thirty Years War. But they never became 
 ruling principles ; nor were they likely to do so until they 
 were emancipated from the mere selfish and localised interests 
 with which they were bound up. Class liberties, isolated 
 nationalities, local privileges, may keep up the memory, the 
 tradition of liberty, nationality, and privilege, but they do 
 not become leading ideas until they have been accepted as 
 universally just and desireable, until they can command assent 
 and inspire sympathy. The religions that demanded tolera- 
 tion but meant tyranny were no true exponents of religious 
 liberty: the classes that would limit royal prerogative to 
 lay their hand heavier on their own vassals, were no true 
 
236 Growth of Ideas. [x, 
 
 exponents of constitutional government. The hand that 
 cherishes nationality in Italy, and represses it in Greece, is no 
 true defender of nationality. 
 
 But the clock and the limit of my paper warn me to pro- 
 ceed at once, imperfectly as I must have indicated or sug- 
 gested my view, to the third portion of the subject. Later 
 modern history, the history of the last hundred years, seems 
 to me to differ from that of the two preceding divisions, 
 by the prominence and real importance of ideas, as compared 
 with the earlier reigns of right and force. I need not 
 repeat that the prominence and real importance, the theore- 
 tical and practical weight of political ideas being admitted, 
 we need not suppose either of the preceding principles 
 to be extinguished ; nor, on the other hand, need we suppose 
 that the ideas which latterly come to the forefront were either 
 unknown or unappreciated in the earher periods. I have just 
 said that liberty, nationality, and the like were strong agents 
 before they became the strongest ; we may freely admit that 
 both force and right still exercise a strong influence, though 
 not the strongest, in modem politics. Keeping this in mind, 
 you wUl not expect me to discuss the origin and growth of the 
 ideas in question ; rather it wiU be enough to indicate the 
 point at which they seem to take such hold on the political 
 mind as to presage their future importance. 
 
 It seems to me that the partition of Poland, in the last cen- 
 tury, was the event that forced the idea of nationality upon 
 the world, and the revolt of the American provinces of the 
 British empire forced the idea of self-government, not as a local 
 British invention, but as a sort of political gospel, upon general 
 belief. You will not suspect me of being a believer in the 
 ' rights of man,' or in the legal position of the American 
 revolutionists ; you will not, I trust, suspect me of believing 
 that territorial right can ever be made a justification of moral 
 iniquity or of abandoned misgovernment and tyranny: and 
 yet I may insist more strongly on temtorial right and believe 
 more strongly in the universality of true principles than 
 others who talk politics more fluently than I can deliver 
 public statutory lectures. 
 
X.J The French Revolution. 237 
 
 But to stick to facts : as the suppression of Poland, on , 
 the one side, forced on the world the conscience that nation- ' 
 ality is more than a geographical formula, on the other 
 hand, it showed how easily force and fraud could remove 
 the ancient landmarks of territorial right. It was, therefore, 
 a two-edged experiment, and no doubt it cut the hands of 
 all the intermeddling powers. As the vindication of American ( 
 liberties made a precedent for the ideas of the French Revo- ' 
 lution, the partition of Poland pointed to the reconstruction 
 of the map of Europe ; the destruction of that kingdom 
 was a precedent for the destruction of any kingdom ; the 
 extinction of that nationality aroused a sympathy, awakened 
 an idea of the importance of nationality as a reconstituting 
 idea in reformed society. 
 
 Well, the French Eevolution set at liberty aU the disrup- 
 tive influences that existed in the weakly governed states 
 of the continent, and roused to a somewhat rash, hurried, 
 and incautious hostility the instincts of the strongly governed 
 but ill-prepared powers like Prussia, Austria, Russia, and 
 England. And the first attempts at a propaganda of liberty, 
 and the first attempts at a propaganda of nationality, were 
 marked by great excesses and great mistakes : excesses and 
 mistakes so potential that the propaganda of the two in- 
 fluences together determined in the Napoleonic empire, 
 the tyranny and glory of France and the privilege of all 
 nations to acknowledge and toil under the shadow of her 
 supremacy. Liberties were enunciated in fulsome language, 
 nationalities were carved out with amusing caprice ; but glory 
 and victory were the real aim ; force exerted itself as strongly 
 under Napoleon as under Peter the Great and Frederick the 
 Great and Lewis the Great. By and by came the recoil, i 
 Napoleon was humbled ; the map of Europe was reformed on' 
 a plan which showed a respect for territorial rights, and a 
 just recognition both of the earnings offeree and of the growth i 
 of ideas. But the end was not yet ; liberty, though recog- 
 nised, was distrusted ; nationality, though allowed some 
 weight, was everywhere set beneath territorial right and 
 material power: and self-government made very little way 
 
238 Modern Struggles. [x. 
 
 in the world for at least fifteen years after the battle of 
 Waterloo. 
 
 When the world had rested, when polities began to move 
 again, both these ideas came to the front : the nation- 
 ' ality of Greece ; the independence of Belgium, a distinct 
 nationality as regarded the state with which it had been 
 bound up : these were the first notes of the triumph of one 
 idea : the second French Revolution cannot be said to have 
 opened the campaign of self-government, for the revolt of the 
 Spanish and Portuguese colonies had done that ; but it was an 
 important contribution to the cause among the old countries 
 of Europe : the German principalities had to hasten the gift 
 of constitutional governments which had been long deferred, 
 and were, even when granted, to a great extent illusory. 
 
 An uneasy time of peace and repression were the seventeen 
 years that followed : since 1 848 the action of the drama has 
 been exciting and unintermitting. France, dissatisfied with her 
 government, threw Europe again into turmoil ; again there 
 was a cry of liberty and nationality, again force and legality 
 were equal to the occasion, and society was saved. France 
 sank under a military despotism which subsisted by keeping 
 the world in arms. But the ideas were stronger at each 
 revolution and each struggle. France went to war for the 
 idea when she had nothing else to go to war for ; and, having 
 bound liberty hand and foot at home, proclaimed herself again 
 the apostle of Uberty. It was liberty for your friends, humi- 
 liation for your enemies, as usual : but the result facf outran 
 the intention. 
 
 After the Crimean War, of which I will not trust myself 
 to speak further than to say that I believe it to have been 
 a profound misunderstanding of the current of the world's 
 progress, a mistake of legality, a miscalculation of force, a 
 misconception of idea, but which had the sole merit of teach- 
 ing the generation of soldiers to fight and of diplomatists to 
 conjure ; after the Crimean War we get, first, the reconstruc- 
 tion of Italy on the principles of nationality and with a fi-ee 
 constitution ; then the reconstruction of Germany, then the 
 reconstruction of Austria ; of Germany on a principle of nation- 
 
.V 
 
 X.] Ideas of 1880. 239 
 
 ality and self- government which has yet to find a balance for the 
 preponderance of force, and in Austria on a principle of nation- 
 ality and self-government that has yet to determine its relations 
 to the older rules of legality on which historically the unity of 
 Austria depends. And within the last two years the world 
 has been kept alive by the struggle for nationality and free- 
 dom, between Russian force and Turkish tyranny. 
 
 Out of the crucible, out of the fiery furnace, against the will 
 of the potent actors, as if by a law that may not be broken, the 
 victory of the idea is rapidly being realised. There are, of 
 course, other ideas, counter ideas, ideas which are only the old 
 legality and the old material force disguised under new names. 
 Such ideas may be Pansclavism, or Internationalism, or 
 Nihilism, if it be anything but a negation of ideas. Such 
 ideas may be that of Russia at Constantinople, of a restored 
 Poland, of a free church in a free state, of universal volun- 
 taryism, of scientific frontiers. I am not here to justify or to 
 condemn, much less to prophesy ; and whatever it is that is 
 coming, I am sm'e we are only at the beginning of it. At 
 present Russia stands before the world, really as representing 
 force, in pretension, — pretension which I am far from believing 
 to be insincere, — as the liberator of the Christian races of the 
 East. Austria is far the most conspicuous defender of historic 
 territorial right ; and all those who are not afraid of the nick- 
 name of reactionists will be slow to condemn her for the 
 maintenance of a principle on which she has grown into 
 power, and which she is doing her best to reconcile with more 
 potent ideas and influences more likely to be permanent. 
 France to some extent represents democracy, to a far greater 
 extent she stiU, as ever, represents the old claim to arbitrate in 
 Europe. Prussia or Germany, in the same way, represents the 
 force which, relying on the strength of nationality, has for the 
 moment made her the leading power in Christendom. For 
 the perishing remnants of Turkey a faint plea of territorial 
 possession has gone forth, but the conscience of friend and the 
 determination of foes have alike repudiated it as an excuse for 
 misgovernment and palliation of tyranny. There is no idea, 
 no sach justification for that curse of Christendom. Turkey 
 
240 
 
 Conclusion. [x. 
 
 means nothing, represents nothing but butchery, barbarism, 
 and the vilest slavery. What does England represent ? What 
 is she to represent in the future ? What would we wish for 
 her but cleai--sighted justice and living sympathy with what 
 is good and sound in the progress of the world ? 
 
 Having achieved that sentiment, I must now sHp into 
 bathos. I have preferred medieval history to modern in my 
 own teaching, partly because I believe the study of rights is 
 more wholesome as an educational study than that of the 
 balance of forces, partly because I think it a safer study 
 altogether than the theoretical study of political ideas. 
 Political ideas are apt to lay hold on the fancy and on the 
 aiiections, and to make men partisans before they are at all 
 competent to weigh the merits of parties, to adjust the 
 balance between order and progress, between historical right 
 and historical growth : and there is in the study of them very 
 little training. Educationally, I prefer the first division. I 
 may also be turned towards it by certain legal tendencies and 
 documentary tastes of my own. I am only justifying myself, 
 not laying down a law for others. There are other sorts of 
 studies here besides law and history. I can conceive the man 
 who has spent his terms here on philosophy taking more 
 naturally to the examination and analysis of ideas, and the 
 mathematician being more charmed by the thought of reading 
 national complications as illustrations of the pai'allelogram of 
 forces : the student of physical science will no doubt soon be 
 able to infer the national idiosyncrasy of races from the shape 
 of their skulls. With all this I am so far from finding fault 
 that I rejoice and delight in the thought of so many minds 
 and so many studies working towards my truth. But I plead 
 for a toleration which I have done my best to justify. 
 
XI. 
 
 THE REIGN OF HENRY VHI. 
 
 (June 7, 1881.) 
 
 I SHALL not trouble you with any detailed reasons for my 
 choice of a subject for this Term's statutory lectures ; it is 
 enough to observe that I have been busUy employed upon the 
 reign of Henry VIII for some months of ordinary lecturing, 
 and that there is every probability that I may have to work 
 upon him for some months to come. You will at once admit 
 that Henry VIII is too big a subject to admit any rival on the 
 same canvas, or under the same hand ; whoever undertakes 
 him at aU must be content to devote himself for the time 
 entirely to him. This being said, you must further concede 
 to me that, although the subject is interesting enough, two 
 lectures, in which anything like a bird's-eye view can be 
 offered, must be very dry ; I will not say dull, but so concen- 
 trated as not to allow much extmneous illustration. That 
 granted, I propose to put before you, in as concise a form as 
 possible, the main points of importance in the reign, in some 
 degree adopting the method which I have followed in the 
 analytical chapters of my Constitutional History. If, in doing 
 this, I succeed only in drawing out a plan on which the long 
 history of the reign may be arranged for subsequent reading, I 
 feel that I shall have done something. I intend to try to do 
 more, but I may not, in the further aim, satisfy you, and I 
 certainly shall not satisfy myself 
 
 My plan will be to offer you, at the beginning and end of the 
 lectures, some general remarks on the position and character of 
 England and her king at the beginning and end of the reign ; 
 
 £ 
 
242 England at Henry s Accession. [xi. 
 
 but to devote the main part of our discussion to the definite 
 arrangement of the particular acts and measures of the period, 
 saying as little as possible about external matters, but fixing 
 as accurately as we can the framework of internal history ; 
 its principal changes and their tendency. I will not now 
 anticipate any general conclusions, but simply propose an 
 arrangement under the ordinary heads of taxation, legislation, 
 administrative action, ecclesiastical reform, and parliamentary 
 history. 
 
 The position of England at the opening of Modem History, 
 the position which she had assumed under Heniy VII and in 
 which Henry VIII found her at his accession, was that of a 
 young, well concentrated and well equipped, but untrained, 
 actor for the great drama of European politics. England had 
 had more than twenty years of such peace as amounted to a 
 disuse of warfare ; that is, her yeomanry had only maintained 
 the use of arms as a part of their education, they had no prac- 
 tical acquaintance with military tactics or with blood and 
 iron. But in other respects she was well furnished ; she had 
 money, and good intelligence, and astute ministers, men of 
 wide mind like Wolsey, and of minute experience, and of no 
 small ambitions. I am not going to say that England came 
 upon the stage with more real wisdom or with more honesty 
 of purpose than the other powers : her diplomacy seems to 
 have partaken quite as much of the character of chicanery as 
 did that of Spain, France, or Austria : but her interests in the 
 struggle of European forces, which is now commencing, were 
 not so direct as theirs ; her sympathies were not definitely 
 with either the one side or the other ; and, if her hereditary 
 antipathy to France might seem likely to throw her too 
 unreservedly on the side of France's enemies, the cool way in 
 which, on all occasions except when money was wanted, her 
 attentions were received by the Imperial administration in 
 Spain and the Netherlands, was quite enough to repel any 
 approach to sympathy. 
 
 So, as a rule, throughout the reign of Henry VIII, the 
 cool heads among English politicians dreamed of nothing 
 more for their country than the position of an arbitrator, 
 
XI.] His Foreign Policy. 243 
 
 an umpire between great rival parties on the Continent, 
 from whose humiliation nothing was to be gained, and 
 from whose over-exaltation something was to be feared. 
 Henry VIII might sometimes dream of the Empire, or of the 
 recovery of Normandy and Aquitaine, as Wolsey might dream 
 of the papacy; but the wiser heads contemplated no such 
 shadows ; nor, I think, had those aims more than a slight and 
 momentary influence on the king and cardinal ; the people 
 were not unwilling, up to a certain point, to fight and, up to 
 a certain point, to pay : but they did not care to sacrifice their 
 blood and money, and win neither spoils nor glory. So, 
 although there was much talk of war, and much money spent 
 on armaments, money well spent perhaps in part, for the 
 armed power of England was a not unimportant qualification 
 for her position as arbitrator, there was very little real war ; 
 there were countless treaties, leagues, unions, truces, armis- 
 tices, sufierances, neutralities and abstentions, but the expedi- 
 tions of Dorset and Howard to Spain and France in 151 3, the 
 king's expedition to Tournay in 1513, the invasion of France 
 by the Duke of Sufiblk in 1533, and the expedition of Henry 
 to Boulogne in I543^ are the sum and substance of Henry's 
 military doings outside of Great Britain. 
 
 A momentary effort, a little advantage gained, time taken to 
 secure it, and the utmost terms exacted for the surrender of it, 
 is the whole story. In spite of many leagues with France, the 
 sword is never really drawn against Charles ; and, in spite of 
 many leagues with Charles, war of England against France has 
 no other direct object than the acquisition of a stronghold on or 
 near the coast. Money is spent in loans, or dangled in the 
 shape of promises, there are threats of diversion and plans of 
 united campaigns which come to nothing more. England 
 claiming to be an arbitrator is really a make- weight. 
 
 I cannot therefore agree with those who would extol the 
 foreign policy of England in the beginning and end of the reign 
 as a masterpiece of diplomacy^\ Honesty would have been the 
 simpler, the wiser, and the cheaper policy ; and so I think the 
 nation itself felt. Far more would really have been gained by 
 letting the competitors fight out their quarrel and exhaust 
 
 E 3 
 
244 The King s Character. [xi, 
 
 themselves ; and the position of England could have been 
 made safe at a tenth of the cost. But it was a new game, a 
 new drama, and England as represented by Henry must have 
 a leading part. 
 
 Within the borders of the island, the old struggle of 
 Scotland, allied with and prompted by France, is a matter of 
 secondary interest ; and the two great crises, the battle of 
 riodden in 1513 and the death of James V in i543, great as 
 they are in picturesque and personal interest, scarcely trouble 
 the current of peace at home ; the border warfare, seldom inter- 
 mitted, the party struggles of the Scots themselves, whether 
 the time is one of truce or of hostility, furnish opportunity for 
 military and administrative occupation, and for the energies of 
 uneasy men. I pass then rapidly and generally over these 
 external points in which so much of contemporary history is 
 expended, and prefer to look more closely at home. 
 
 And let us first look at the king. I am not one of those 
 critics who incline to a very disparaging estimate of Henry 
 VIII. He was not, as a man, more vicious than many kings 
 who have maintained a very fair reputation in history. In 
 force of character there are few indeed that oome near him ; if 
 he seems to act upon pure self-wiU, he is able to give a reason 
 for his acts, and that such a reason as we cannot on mere pre- 
 judice determine to be unreasonable ; he makes his way with 
 good men and bad men alike, and, with a few notable excep- 
 tions, he is able to overrule all protest. On mature considera- 
 tion, I am inclined to regard Henry himself as the main 
 origiaator of the greatest and most critical changes of his 
 reign ; and I a.m sure that, after the fall of Wolsey, there is 
 no minister, great or small, who can claim anything like an 
 original share in determining the royal policy. He could 
 keep More as his chancellor, and Warham as his archbishop, 
 whilst he was pushing measures which they abhorred ; he 
 could send Cromwell to the block the moment he discovered 
 that he was pursuing designs of a colour which did not 
 recommend itself to him ; and to Audley and Wriothesley no 
 one would dream of giving the name of an independent or 
 original minister. Cranmer and Gardiner he tolerated alike 
 
XI.] The Royal Idea. 245 
 
 and in turn, but Cranmer kept his place by abstention from 
 polities and by the facility with which Henry could use him 
 when he wanted ; whilst Gardiner, on the other hand, sank the 
 ecclesiastic in the politician until his time came. 
 
 So, for all the critical years of the reign, Henry's strong- 
 will threw the advice or agency of any subordinate politician 
 into the shade. Henry was every inch a king ; the king, the 
 whole king, and nothing but the king. Another of our kings, 
 George IV, I think, who also had matrimonial troubles, in 
 writing to his ministers used to employ an expressive phrase to 
 describe a contingency which it was useless to contemplate. 
 ' If I were an individual,' he writes, ' I might, should, or would 
 do so and so.' Now Henry VIII in that sense was never an 
 individual : he was always a king, looking on himself as a 
 thing apart from mankind, on kingship as an end in itself, 
 on kingly volition as the only and ample reason for anything 
 whatever ; on his dignity as such a complete vice-Deity that, 
 under his fiat, municipal law rose, without any further sanction, 
 to the level of divine revelation. His marriages are royal 
 marriages, his murders royal murders, his diseases royal diseases. 
 There is nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. Bessie 
 Blount is as much a fact as Anne Boleyn, and Anne Boleyn as 
 Katharine of Aragon. If they are to his taste they are 
 honoured and worshipped with him ; if he is tired of them the 
 country is tired of them too ; they are abominable ; they 
 confess themselves guilty of impossible sins ; send them by 
 parliamentaiy petition to the block. 
 
 What is strange in aU this is not the idea itself, which 
 George IV may have had as strongly as Henry VIII : it is 
 the force of character that makes the idea tolerable to other 
 men ; that makes More, Warham, Cranmer, Gardiner, Crom- 
 well, faithful administrators of the idea ; and that forces, 
 against their wiU evidently, but stiU effectively forces. Parlia- 
 ment and Convocation, Lords, Clergy and Commons, to register 
 simply the peremptory orders of the king as their own wishes. 
 There were cliques and parties at Henry's court during the 
 whole of his reign, there was a strong party against Wolsey, 
 there was a protestant and a catholic party, and a Norfolk and 
 
246 Moris Caution. [xi. 
 
 a Suffolk party ; but I am sure that it is a mistake to regard 
 Henry as pulled by one or other of these alternately ; or to think 
 that the changes of his policy, and I am not at all sure that 
 the changes were at all so great as they are commonly re- 
 garded, were dictated by any other than his own despotic wiU : 
 lie used, I think, the parties, not they him ; what influence he 
 allowed them was allowed for his ends, and the moment he 
 saw them pursuing their own ends he stopped them. 
 
 Of course such a theory about him, if true, necessitates the 
 belief of great development of design and new purpose in the 
 king himself : but that I think is the most natural solution of 
 most of the critical questions of the reign. The words which 
 More addressed to Cromwell, soon after he resigned the chan- 
 cellorship, seem to be a key, almost prophetic in simplicity, to 
 the after-history. ' Master Cromwell,' he says, ' you are now en- 
 tered into the service of a most noble, wise, and liberal prince : 
 if you will follow my poor advice, you shall in your counsel- 
 giving to his grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but 
 never what he is able to do.' ' For if a lion knew his own 
 strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.' 
 
 From the very beginning of his reign, he is finding out what 
 he can do ; from the fall of Wolsey, and especially after the 
 sacrifice of More, he is coming to regard what he can do as the 
 only measure of what he ought to do : he is becoming the king 
 for whom the kingdom is, the tyrant whose every caprice is wise 
 and sacred : he turns the theory of kingship into action ; the 
 king can do no wrong ; therefore men shall call right all that he 
 does : he is the king, not an individual ; what in an individual 
 would be theft, is no theft in him ; all property is the king's, 
 he can take it, and he takes it ; all that proceeds from his mouth 
 is law ; the king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, therefore 
 all that comes out of the king's heart is the Lord's doing. 
 
 Yet with all his grotesque and inhuman self-absorption, the 
 miserable and growing result of the long tenure of irrespon- 
 sible power, we cannot wisely deny the king some great 
 qualities besides mere force. Contemporary foreigners, the 
 justice of whose general judgment is amply proved by later 
 history, and whose opinion, according to Lord Bacon's dictum, 
 
XI. J Henry s Ability. 247 
 
 is generally that which future ages will be found to confirm, 
 are unanimous in their glorification of Henry's personal and 
 mental gifts. His beauty was of that sort that commended 
 itself to the taste of those times. And more than that : for the 
 painters of his portrait have succeeded in giving him an indi- 
 viduality and a humanity which shows either that he possessed 
 a remarkable physique, or that they took more pains with him 
 than they did with his wives — the deadly-lively sort of ladies 
 whose portraits are, if not a justification, at least a colourable 
 occasion for understanding the readiness with which he put 
 them away. Henry's portrait, I said, would fill any canvas ; 
 and, allowing for what must be allowed for, dress, expression, 
 and attitude, it must be allowed to be the portrait of a per- 
 sonable king. 
 
 His mental abilities I rank very high : he had been carefaUy 
 educated by good scholars, and had made remarkable progress ; 
 not so great, Lord Bacon tells us, as his brother Arthur ; but 
 still remarkable at a remarkable time : he did not let his 
 knowledge acquired in boyhood fade out of his mind : after his 
 accession he must have continued his reading ; his book against 
 Luther, which, whatever assistance he may have received, was in 
 conception and execution entirely his own, was an extraordinary 
 work for a young king ; and the intelligent interest which, 
 down to the last, he showed in religious and other ecclesias- 
 tical questions, even when he was most capricious and peremp- 
 tory, evinces both memory and a real appreciation of subjects on 
 which eontemporaiy kings thought it sinful to think at all. 
 If it were not for the miserable self-will and self-worship 
 which runs through these, there might be something to 
 admire. 
 
 Well, it is not for us to judge. The king is apart from 
 other men in his opportunities, in his excuses, in his tempta- 
 tions ; even in his responsibility for the direct results of his 
 acts ; and he must stand alone in the judgment. But I will 
 leave the remaining sentiments or reflexions which suggest 
 themselves, to be justified after the review of the reign which 
 I propose to take now. 
 
 The first question, who were Henry's responsible advisers, is 
 
248 Henry's Ministers. [xi. 
 
 capable of a very short answer considering the length of his 
 reign : he succeeded a king who had been his own first 
 minister, and who had under him two sorts of secondary- 
 ministers ; one set, like Warham and Fox, trustworthy men to 
 whom he gave official confidence, that confidence which a self- 
 confident autocrat can afibrd to give to men whose interests 
 are the same as his own ; and another set, like Empson and 
 Dudley, whom he used as tools, responsible tools, to be used 
 as long as they were useful, but to be held responsible the 
 moment their use was over or the outcry they provoked 
 became more noxious than the ends they served were advanta- 
 geous. Henry VIII, doing everything on a larger scale than 
 his father, had the same ideas of ministerial usefulness : during 
 a reign of thirty-eight years he had only five chancellors, 
 Warham, Wolsey, More, Audley, and Wriothesley ; and the 
 office of lord high treasurer was held by two dukes of Norfolk 
 in succession during the whole reign. Of the chancellors, 
 Wolsey alone was displaced against his will ; Warham had 
 been long anxious to retire ; More resigned in disgust ; Audley 
 retained the seals to his death, and Wriothesley was chancellor 
 when the king died. Of these seven ministers we may sum- 
 marily conclude thus : the two Norfolks and Warham were in 
 position ministers of the old type, official and confidential, 
 but not leaders of political parties, until, after the fall of 
 Wolsey and, in the later years of the reign, after the MS. of 
 Cromwell, the second duke undertook the more onerous and 
 critical position which in the end was so nearly fatal to 
 him. 
 
 Wolsey was too great a man, and More too good a man, 
 to be tools of Henry, especially after the inclination towards 
 tyrannic caprice became more pronounced; Audley and 
 Wriothesley were tools, either altogether selfish and un- 
 principled, or, like Cromwell, able to combine self-aggrandise- 
 ment and servility with some quantum of ulterior political 
 design, which raises them above that common herd into which 
 Empson and Dudley fall. 
 
 Besides these ostensible ministers, Henry had a council, in 
 which perhaps more influential advisers might be looked for : 
 
XI.] His Council. 249 
 
 such as were his brother-in-law, friend, and boon companion 
 Suffolk, who, worthless enough himself, still was no man's 
 enemy; Cromwell, the greatest and most famous, whose character 
 and career are even more mysterious than his master's ; and the 
 men who made their position and reputation by their share in 
 the business of the divorce, such as Cranmer, of whom, in this 
 aspect, the less said the better, and Gardiner, the rough and 
 ready, faithful, skilful, imperious yet adroit minister, on whose 
 back history has laid so great burdens. It is no doubt within the 
 walls of the council chamber that we have to look for the sug- 
 gestions of such parts of the royal policy as were not due to 
 Henry himself: we can hardly, except in the cases of Wolsey 
 and Cromwell, very distinctly lay our hand on the authorship 
 of a particular scheme : and it is quite certain that, when a 
 particular scheme that pleased the king was started, he 
 adopted it as his own with an ardour and pertinacity fully in 
 keeping with his own idea of his infallibility. So, although 
 for a time Wolsey, and after him Norfolk, and after him 
 Cromwell, and after him Norfolk again, seem to be the prime 
 ministers of a country in which for at least two centuries 
 such prime ministers had been constitutional facts, and 
 although there was in the council a fertile seminary of 
 politicians creeping into power, yet on the whole Henry was 
 his own chief counsellor ; in spite of his inconsistencies the 
 most consistent, and in spite of his changes and caprices the 
 most persistent, of all the men who changed, at this great 
 critical juncture, the whole face and attitude of England. 
 What more need be noted, in such a brief outline as I am now 
 drawing of these things, of the vast industry and broad views 
 of Wolsey, of the wisdom and virtue of More, of the myste- 
 rious unconseientiousness of Cromwell, and the Hke, may be 
 taken as we proceed. 
 
 The first region of constitutional action that lies before us 
 is the finance of the reign ; a subject on which we have 
 abundant, though not very conclusive data, in the acts of the 
 parliaments which now begin to put on record the amounts 
 expected from the several grants ; in the subsidy rolls, which 
 show how the sums granted were assessed and collected, in 
 
250 Financial Summary. [xi. 
 
 the correspondence of the period, which sets before us what 
 the estimated expenditure was from time to time, and in the 
 incidental references of the annalists which tell us how the 
 imposts were from time to time felt by the people. Of the 
 thirty-eight years of the reign, twenty-one passed away with- 
 out a parliament, and therefore without a budget ; and long 
 prorogations had now become so much the rule, that only nine 
 new parliaments, nine general elections, were held during the 
 whole time ; the country therefore had not much opportunity 
 of showing a change of feeling in this respect. 
 
 It is thus comparatively simple to state the parliamentary 
 grants : tonnage and poundage, and the subsidy on wool, wool- 
 fells and leather, were, in the first parliament of the reign, 
 granted to the king for his life : the ancient vote of tenths and 
 fifteenths was made on eleven occasions, sometimes as a sufficient 
 grant and sometimes as a supplementary grant when a more 
 grasping exaction had disappointed the oflficers of the Ex- 
 chequer ; and nine several subsidies of a new kind, a graduated 
 income and property tax, were levied at more critical periods, 
 as for the expeditions of 151a and 1513, for the payment of 
 expenses in 1515, and for the warlike preparations made in 
 1523, 1539) ^'^•i 1543' These latter taxes were exactions on 
 lands and goods according to fixed scale, minutely drawn out 
 in each of the acts that sanctioned them : but, as the impost 
 invariably fell short of the amount expected from it, we must 
 conclude that, like the old tenths and fifteenths, it was assessed 
 on fancy valuations and produced no very pressing hardships ; 
 judging from the existing returns it pressed very lightly upon 
 individual payers, from the highest class to the lowest. 
 
 Besides these legal taxes from the laity, the king had votes 
 from convocation following those of parliament in due propor- 
 tion, the clergy paying a tenth whenever the parliament voted 
 a tenth and fifteenth, adding a subsidy when the parliament 
 granted a subsidy ; and, after the parliament of i534j P^'ying 
 to the king a whole tenth annually, which had been previously 
 paid, almost if not quite regularly, as a contribution to the 
 funds of the papacy. These were the regular and constitutional 
 sources of income. 
 
XI .J Estimates of Expenditure. 251 
 
 Besides these, we have to include in the list of the king's 
 resources, first the heavy loans which were exacted by a regu- 
 lar process, not very far removed from compulsion, in the years 
 1522-8 and 1542, and which were so fully remitted by the par- 
 liaments of 1539 and 1543, that even those unlucky creditors 
 whom the king had paid were obliged to refand the money ; 
 secondly, the exactions from the clergy under the threat of 
 prsemunire in 1531, amounting to about ^"'130,000; thirdly, 
 the very large payments of tribute from France under the 
 treaties of Edward IV and Henry VII ; and, fourthly, the 
 enormous revenue, enormous at the lowest estimate, which 
 accrued during the last years of the reign from the spoils of 
 the shrines and the plunder of the monasteries. Besides these, 
 there was an occasional devotion money, like that collected 
 in 1544 nominally for war against the Turks ; a benevolence, 
 or amicable contribution, such as in 1535 produced consider- 
 able disaffection in the country ; and lastly, enormous sums 
 raised under occasional forfeitures. I shall not attempt a 
 summary of these taxes, but may mention a few data that 
 may be relied upon : the value of a tenth and fifteenth was 
 .^30,000 ; of a clerical tenth, ,^10,000 ; the estimated amount 
 of the subsidy of 151 3 was j^^i 60,000 ; the estimate for the royal 
 expedition made in 1533, ^£''373,404 18*. ^d.; the estimated 
 sum of the loans of 1523 was ^360,000; the income from the 
 monasteries cannot be stated in reasonable figures ; but of 
 this a considerable part was during the few years that it 
 accrued expended in pensions. Of estimated outlays we have 
 but a few illustrations ; the expenses of the household were a 
 little over .^■'30,000 a year, but these of course .represent only 
 the fixed charges, not the king's lavish personal expenditure ; 
 Wolsey's estimate for the war of 15 13 was =^640,000; and 
 when we find Giustiniani estimating the outlay at half of the 
 ten millions of ducats which was the treasure supposed to be 
 left by Henry VII, we are inclined to conclude that the esti- 
 mate was not below the mark ; anyhow the cost of the expe- 
 dition to Toumay was such as to recommend a peace policy 
 for several years. 
 
 The time may come when these accounts may be subjected 
 
252 A Hand-to-Mouth Policy. [xi. 
 
 to a formal historical audit, that is when the researches at 
 the Record Office furnish us with a complete view of extant 
 material ; but it would be very rash now to define with 
 any exactness either income or outlay for a reign of such 
 abnormal character. The only general conclusion that I can 
 come to is that, in despite of Wolsey's financial ability, and 
 the cleverness of the agents who were trained under him, 
 the policy of the whole reign in this respect was a hand-to- 
 mouth pohcy, assisted by occasional godsends in the shape of 
 forfeitures and benevolences. In this department the parlia- 
 ments showed some spirit, as we shall see ; the result of that 
 was the grant of subsidies to reach over several years ; under 
 these subsidy-acts the king collected as much as he could, and 
 then collected money in other ways until, the patience of the 
 lenders being exhausted, a new parliament was got together 
 to wipe off the old debt or promise a new subsidy. There can 
 be little doubt that some of the most important legislative acts 
 were carried, at least through the Commons, by the induce- 
 ment that the king would be able to dispense with direct tax- 
 ation ; and although that undertaking was a fallacious one, 
 men could be found to overawe opposition or make a show of 
 self-sacrifice which was sure of subsequent reward. I may note 
 some of the parliamentary methods when I reach that part of 
 our subject : for this is the only point on which Henry in his 
 parliaments had any real difficulty. 
 
 A hand-to-mouth policy has this drawback ; that, on 
 critical occasions, it involves critical demands, and critical 
 demands produce special irritation. That rule is exemplified 
 very clearly in the reign of Henry VII, whose financial 
 policy was much safer than his son's ; it was not a hand- 
 to-mouth policy, but a severely economical one' and both poli- 
 cies coincide in having nothing to spare for emergencies ; 
 accordingly we find, on every imposition of a subsidy in 
 the reign of Henry VII, an outbreak of popular disaffection, 
 taking hold of some political quarrel. There was under 
 Henry VIII something of the same sort ; but it was, as a 
 rule, more easily localised, and put down at once ; the restora- 
 tion of law and order by his father had borne this good fruit. 
 
XI. j The Great Divorce. 253 
 
 In 1497 a rising in Devonsliire caused by an income tax, 
 utilised by a faction, and facilitated by the weakness of local 
 organisation, could affect all Southern England, and force the 
 king into the field. In 1536, even a great religious movement 
 like the Pilgrimage of Grace sinks into a local and provincial 
 risiag, an abortive tumult. It is not necessary, however, at 
 this point to formulate a general conclusion as to the oppres- 
 sive character of Henry's financial administration : the legal 
 taxes were not excessively heavy, and the illegal exactions 
 were condoned by subservient parliaments. The question of 
 the high-handed confiscations leads on to further questions. 
 
 I do not wish in these lectures to give more than its proper 
 prominence to the great question of the divorce ; even to give 
 it its proper prominence would involve discussions far more 
 lengthy than I have time for now ; I shall therefore hope that 
 you will take as read all the details of the negotiations con- 
 cerning it, and simply look upon it as a force, or the applica- 
 tion of an impact, which had much greater consequences, and 
 originated a larger developing series of measures, than could 
 have possibly been calculated on. In a word, to use Sir Thomas 
 More's expressive formula, it opened the eyes of the lion as to 
 what he could do ; not all at once, but by a very gradual pro- 
 cess, which may indeed be traced most distinctly with refer- 
 ence to the Reformation history, but is also apparent in the 
 other departments of administration. 
 
 It is clear, from the beginning of his reign, that Henry 
 was a prince who had only to learn the extent of his 
 powers, in order to attempt to exercise them. If we 
 may believe the law reporters, as early as 15 15 lie liad 
 declared himself determined not to allow any superiority 
 of external spiritual courts in a country of which he was 
 sovereign ; and there are signs, in Wolsey's history, that 
 the imminent danger of the king's taking advantage of the 
 Statute of Prffimunire was in his mind long before he was 
 actually sacrificed. But the earlier years of the reign were 
 remarkably free from occasions on which any great constitu- 
 tional crisis could arise. Henry's ambition, like Wolsey's, was 
 mainly set upon an influential place in the councils of Europe, 
 
2 54 Importance of the Divorce. [xi, 
 
 and among the people at large there was contentment. Henry- 
 had been brought up very strictly, and married, very young, 
 to a wife, to whom he gave his full affection ; the good im- 
 pressions of his training were, at least for several years, strong 
 enough to keep him out of the domestic scandals that divide 
 courts ; and although Bessie Blount and the Duke of Richmond 
 became prominent about ten years after the reign begins, it is 
 not until 1534 or 1535 that the divorce question even looms 
 in the distance. Up to that time the want of constitutional 
 principle in the king and his minister has been chiefly appa- 
 rent in the matter of money-getting. Soon after this Henry 
 seems to have fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, and to have 
 begun to contemplate the divorce. The mere formalities of 
 obtaining such a divorce were not formidable ; but the parties 
 interested in preventing it were very formidable indeed. The 
 emperor was the queen's nephew. The pope's power was 
 being rudely shaken both in Germany and in Italy. To be 
 brief ; the pope was prevailed on to commission Wolsey and 
 Campegio to determine the validity of the king's marriage ; 
 when the trial had begun, the cause was called back to Rome ; 
 Henry felt that his only chance of getting the divorce was to 
 have it tried in England ; the pope felt that the only chance 
 of avoiding a crisis, in which between Henry and Charles he 
 must certainly either temporally or spiritually be ruined, was 
 to keep the discussion languidly dragging on at Rome until 
 the parties were tired, or something else turned up. This, 
 thus early, Henry had the sense to see ; he therefore destroyed 
 Wolsey, and that by the very Statute of Prsemunire at the 
 evasion of which he had so long connived : his eyes were 
 opened to the powers of the Prasmimire, and in his confiscation 
 of Wolsey's estates he had his first taste of spoil. He saw that 
 the Prffimunire made him absolutely master of the clergy, and, 
 as absolute master, the primary owner of all Church property. 
 Hence the great chain of ecclesiastical statutes follows in an 
 order that we might almost dignify by the name of Evolution. 
 As lord and master of the Church, he could utilise Church 
 machinery to obtain the divorce and the marriage on which 
 he had set his king's heart ; and, when he was tired of the 
 
XI.] The Prcemunire. 255 
 
 second wife, he could obtain, from the archbishop he had made, 
 an annulling of that marriage as easily as he could obtain a 
 Bill of Attainder from the parliament ; and, when in time he 
 married another woman whom he did not like, he could by a 
 commission to the national synod obtain another judgment of 
 nullity of marriage, and by negotiating with parliament 
 another petition for another marriage. This wonderful Prae- 
 munire, of which the foreign residents at the English court 
 speak with horror as a mystery of which the king alone pos- 
 sessed the key, might be a lash brandished over laity and clergy 
 alike so long as the papal supremacy was admitted by either. 
 
 Thus the desri'e of spoil, the ambition of uncontrolled sove- 
 r^gnty, and the facilities of gaining his own immediate ends 
 in marriage, urged on the king in the line of doing, not what 
 he ought, but what he could. In 1531, by the threat of Pra3- 
 munire he compelled the clergy to recognise him as the 
 supreme head on earth of the Church of England, and to pay 
 him £118,840 by votes of Convocation: he tried the same 
 policy with the Commons ; endeavouring to compel them to 
 purchase their exemption from the same sentence, if not by 
 votes of money, at least by modifications of the land laws in 
 the direction of wills and uses. In this he was for the moment 
 defeated by the vigilance of the Commons, but he kept this 
 line of legislation before his eyes, and with singular per- 
 tinacity; the Statute of Uses was delayed until 1536 and 
 the Statute of Wills until 1540, but both statutes were pro- 
 mulgated in 1533, and formed part of a policy which we may 
 compare, not favourably, with that of Edward I ; but which 
 has a special legal side of such importance, that only the 
 superior importance of the ecclesiastical questions of the time 
 can account for its being overlooked. It is true that, in their 
 later results, the two statutes of which I have spoken seem 
 small and beneficial as compared with the mischievous results 
 of the Church policy, but they were, like it, distinct puttings 
 out of the claws of the awakened lion, which would have gone 
 much further and held much tighter if they could. ^ 
 
 But I proceed with the ecclesiastical evolution. The recog- 
 nition of the king in 1531 as supreme head on earth of the 
 
256 Defiance of the Pope. [xi. 
 
 Church of England was closely connected with the appro- 
 priation of the ,^118,840 by the supreme head. But the 
 facility with which the Church parted with its money opened 
 the supreme eyes a little wider. If they will pay money they 
 will surrender power : a form of three articles is sent to Con- 
 vocation in 153a by which the clergy are to renounce their 
 right of spiritual legislation without royal licence, and consent 
 to a reform of the canon law under the king's authority. After 
 some discussion, with the fear of another Prsemunire, the 
 clergy consent to that also. By crafty dealing with the 
 House of Commons, the Court, in which Cromwell is now be- 
 coming a leading man, obtains an address complaining of the 
 ecclesiastical courts, their use of canon law on the one side 
 and theif practical abuses on the other ; if the commons will 
 help the king against the pope, the king will help the com- 
 mons against the spiritual courts; he will not press the 
 Statutes of Uses and Wills if they will agree that he shall 
 forbid the payment of annates. The commons resist, but 
 their strong men have gone over to the king. The Annates 
 Bill is passed ; the Submission of the clergy is exacted ; and 
 More, the good and wise chancellor, resigns the seals. He 
 and the foreign ambassadors saw which way the Lion was 
 looking better than the Lion himself. If the clergy accept 
 the Submission, says the Imperial resident, they wiU for the 
 future have less power than the shoemakers, who at least can 
 make regulations for their own craft. That was done how- 
 ever. 
 
 In the autumn Archbishop Warham died ; it became clear 
 to the king that, if he appointed Cranmer, who was already 
 committed to him in the question of the marriage, that 
 long-standing difficulty could be got over. As yet there 
 was no formal breach with Rome, his hand had lain heavy 
 only on his own Church ; the Annates Bill even had not been 
 confirmed yet. Cranmer should be regularly consecrated, 
 commissioned, and made legate, and then called on to act up 
 to his expressed convictions. So certain was the king of his 
 power, that, in anticipation of the sentence, he married Anne 
 Boleyn ; appointed Cranmer archbishop, obtained from him a 
 
XI.] Treatment of the Clergy. 257 
 
 sentence of the nullity of his previous marriage and of the va- 
 lidity of his new marriage, and got opinions from the divines 
 and canonists in convocation which had a similar effect. Then, 
 and not before, he confirmed the act about Annates, and de- 
 fied the papal power. 
 
 But, having gone so far, why not go a little further? 
 In the parliament of 1533 he obtained the passing of 
 the Statute of Appeals, founded on what seems to be the 
 true theoiy of Church and State ; forbidding the carry- 
 ing of appeals to Rome at all, and providing sufficient 
 machinery for appeals at home : the Annates Bill had pro- 
 vided for the confirmation and consecration of bishops, and 
 the two together proclaimed with one breath the emancipation 
 of the Church from Roman supremacy, and its competence 
 for complete internal administration under the supremacy of 
 the king. But from this moment the ecclesiastical reforms 
 became involved more and more with the king's marriage 
 policy. Anne Boleyn, her father, and Cranmer, who seems to 
 have been their family counsellor, were bent on further 
 measures of hostility to Rome ; and Cromwell, who was the 
 king's minister rather than the queen's, was likewise politi- 
 cally a protestant. The year 1534 saw the clergy, both 
 secular and regular, compelled to make a new submission, to 
 recognise the validity of the marriage and the succession, and 
 to admit a new and comprehensive oath for the mainten- 
 ance of the two. A new statute of appeals, founded on the 
 Submission of 153*! modified the appellate jurisdiction, and 
 furnished a recourse to the king in chancery as the final 
 reference which in the former statute had been left to the 
 Archbishop and, in causes touching the king, to the Upper 
 House of Convocation ; a new statute on Annates reformed 
 the regulations for the appointment of bishops ; the synodical 
 declaration which denied the authority of Rome, and a statute 
 which forbade all payments to Rome, swept away all signs of 
 the old subjection. 
 
 But there is no step, in parliament at least, towards doctrinal 
 change : the law of heresy is reformed but not made less 
 stringent, and it is no longer heretical to speak against the 
 
 s 
 
258 Dissolution of Monasteries. [xi. 
 
 pope. Even in the Articles of 1536 the progress towards 
 change is defined by the simple elimination of distincHve papal 
 doctrine ; the convocation urges an authorised translation 
 of Holy Scripture as the best antidote to heresy. But events 
 were proceeding more rapidly than ideas : the oath of succes- 
 sion necessitated the imprisonment of More and Fisher; a 
 second session in the autumn of I534 gave the secular recog- 
 nition to the king's style as supreme head on earth of the 
 Church of England ; that title was publicly promulgated by 
 letters patent in January, i535 j ^^^^ '^'^ accusation of at- 
 tempting to deprive the king of this designation brought the 
 two worthiest men in England to the block during the sum- 
 mer of that year. The death of Fisher, the confidential friend 
 of his father and grandmother, and that of More, who repre- 
 sented all that was good in his own early experience, whether 
 they were wrung from him by the importunities of his wife, 
 or coldly acquiesced in as cases in which all human feeling 
 must be sunk before the self-idolatry of the theoretic king- 
 ship, seem to prove and to have proved to the king himself 
 that no sci-uples should ever hereafter touch him. 
 
 The next step of change was the dissolution of the smaller 
 monasteries : Wolsey, in his great scheme for church reforms, 
 had led the way to this. He had seen the increasing import- 
 ance of the great towns of England, and the increasiag mis- 
 chief caused by the incurable uselessness of the monastic 
 foundations ; and he had obtained bulls of legation from Rome 
 enabling him to suppress convents and establish bishoprics. 
 That had opened the king's eyes to a new possibility, and, 
 although he waited several years before he executed his 
 scheme, all that was good in the scheme was Wolsey's, all 
 that was bad in it wears an unfortunate air of having been 
 done by Cromwell. But it was almost a point of honom- with 
 Henry to show that without the pope he could do all that 
 Wolsey had been empowered to do. So in the autumn of 
 1535 Cromwell and his agents efieeted a visitation of the 
 monasteries, the report of which insured their condemnation ; 
 and, in the last session of the Long Parliament in 1536, the 
 dissolution of the smaller houses was decreed. A new court, 
 
XI.] Doctrinal Attitude. 259 
 
 the Court of Augmentations, was founded to manage the 
 property whicli by the same act was vested in the king and 
 his heirs. The greater monasteries survived a little longer, 
 and in their case the process of surrender took the place of a 
 general and compulsory dissolution. In the session of i539) 
 however, a similar act vested in the king the property of the 
 surrendered houses, and in that year the abbots disappeared 
 from parliament. At the same time the king was empowered 
 to establish new bishoprics ; suffragan bishops had been the 
 subject of legislation in i534j when the act was passed which 
 supplied to the more aged and busy prelates the assistance that 
 had been hitherto furnished by titular bishops in partibus 
 commissioned at Rome. 
 
 These acts very nearly complete the series by which Henry 
 evolved the idea of a regal papacy out of the royal supremacy. 
 For some subordinate purposes, as for dispensations and facul- 
 ties, he allowed the Archbishop of Canterbury to exercise a 
 quasi-legatine authority under himself, and with a check in 
 Chancery on his proceedings ; but in all such matters he was 
 himself the fountain of power. The climax was reached when, 
 by the appointment of CromweU as Vicar- General, with an 
 authority and precedence above all prelates and nobles, he 
 emulated the papal assumption of exercising direct powers 
 through a legate a latere. UnluckUy for himself and for 
 Henry also, the royal legate a latere proved too great a power 
 to manage ; meddled with too many things, provoked too 
 much hostility, got his feet entangled in the marriage net 
 he had provided for the old lion, and perished more sadly, 
 because more ignominiously, than his predecessors in power 
 and ruin. 
 
 I have spoken thus far mainly of Henry's ecclesiastical 
 measures as they affected endowments and jurisdictions ; but 
 there is a side, the side of doctrine, which is not less important. 
 He never forgot that he was the defender of the faith ; nor, 
 whatever were his eccentricities and aberrations in minor 
 particulars, does he seem ever to have gone in this region 
 further in the direction of change than the more enlightened 
 popes and cardinals of his own age would have gone. Wolsey 
 
 s a 
 
26o Defence of the Faith. [xi. 
 
 would have agreed with him in the dissolution of the monas- 
 teries ; the convocation had petitioned for a translation of the 
 Bible ; the worship of the saints and the excessive devotions at 
 their shrines had long been a burden to the souls of men, not 
 merely men like Erasmus, but of far more unimpeachable 
 orthodoxy. The supremacy of the chair of S. Peter was by 
 no means as yet an article of unquestioning faith ; even the 
 marriage of the clergy was a point not beyond discussion. 
 But there were things which, quite UTespective of the pope 
 and his claims, could not be touched without the taint of 
 heresy. And of these Henry, with all his inconsistencies, 
 was a constant defender. He might tolerate a certain evan- 
 gelical obliquity in Boleyn's eyes ; he might choose to be 
 blind to Cromwell's sympathies with foreign protestantism ; 
 he might tolerate Mrs. Cranmer, as he had not looked too 
 curiously into the semi-matrimonial connexions of the great 
 cardinal ; he might even -go the length of marrying a lady 
 like Anne of Cleves, in whom, through the phlegmatic im- 
 penetrability of the Planders mare, some instincts .of unortho- 
 dox skittishness might be detected. But Henry was royally 
 orthodox. If, for any purpose of the moment, he relaxed the 
 stringency of the courts, he kept the law very strong against 
 heresy. This acted in a curious way. The king's idea that 
 he was supreme in Church and State, whilst in some regions 
 it led him to maintain the administrative machineiy of the 
 two severely separate, in others led him to some mixture of 
 his functions. In his iirst act of heresy he repealed the 
 statute of Henry IV ' de hereticis comburendis ' which seemed 
 to give too much power to the bishops, but re-enacted those of 
 Richard II and Henry V which tended to make heresy an 
 offence at common law. A similar intention is clear in the 
 Act of Six Articles of 1539, and with this light upon it, in 
 the several modifications of the Six Articles which were pro- 
 posed in the later parliaments. I shall not speculate on the 
 possibility that, if he had lived longer, he might have 
 developed more in the direction of protestant doctrine ; I 
 think however that it is unlikely ; doctrinally, although quite 
 able to maintain his own line, he clearly symbolised con- 
 
XI.] Progress of Reform. 261 
 
 sistently with Gardiner and not with Cranmer. The extinc- 
 tion of the Norfolk interest might have led him to further 
 negotiations with protestantism abroad, but with domestic 
 Puritanism, such as that by which Somerset palliated his 
 greed for confiscation, there is no trace in Henry. For spoil 
 however the old lion went on yearning to the last; the 
 dissolution of chantries and colleges, to follow that of the 
 monasteries, was one of the measures of his last parliament. 
 
 It may strike some of us that the process of change had 
 now gone far enough ; the English Church was freed from 
 the yoke of Rome, but she retained all her proper framework 
 and at least half of her old endowments ; I say at least half, I 
 should not like to commit myself to a statement that there 
 was much more. She had obtained the Bible in English 
 and the use of the chief forms of prayer in the vernacular, 
 and was preparing for a revision in form of the Sacramental 
 Services ; she had rid herself of a mass of superstitious usages. 
 It is true that the king remained a believer in Roman Catholic 
 forms of doctrine ; but it must always be remembered that 
 those forms had not yet, by the Tridentine decrees, been 
 hardened into their later inflexibility ; and, when we consider 
 the terrible risks which, in the next reign, the Church of 
 England ran, of losing all sense or desire of continuity, iden- 
 tity, or communion with the historic Catholic Christendom, 
 we may feel thankful that such risk was run under a weak 
 king and feeble ministers, not under the influence of a strong 
 win and strong hand like Henry's. 
 
 You will see thus that I believe him to have been a man of 
 purpose ; not the mere capricious tyrant who found it a pleasant 
 exercise of despotic power to burn Catholics and Protestants on 
 the same day, or found a malicious gratification in making 
 Cranmer support the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist and 
 Gaidiner the doctrine of unlimited obedience : further than this 
 I do not go. I believe him to have been a man of unbounded 
 selfishness; a man to whom the acquisition of power was 
 precious mainly as a step towards the acquisition of greater 
 power ; a man of whom we may say, as I said at first, that 
 he was the king, the whole king, and nothing but the king ; 
 
262 Domestic Policy. [xi. 
 
 that he wished to be, with regard to the Church of England, 
 the pope, the whole pope, and something more than pope. You 
 remember how in his early days Maximilian had tempted 
 him with the offer of the Empire, he himself to retire on the 
 popedom with an inchoate claim to canonization. Henry 
 was determined to have in England at least both Empire 
 and Papacy, to make the best, or rather the most, of both 
 worlds. 
 
 I have said more than in proper proportion I ought to have 
 said with reference to Henry's ecclesiastical policy, and left 
 but little time for the analogous features that may be traced 
 in his temporal policy: one reason for that is the greater 
 interest we all feel in the religious question of the Reforma- 
 tion; another is in the fact that his ecclesiastical measures 
 had a much more lasting consequence than his temporal ones. 
 We have long rid ourselves of aU the secular burdens imposed 
 by what we call the Tudor dictatorship, but we are still living 
 under religious or ecclesiastical conditions that owe very 
 much, even of their present form, to the hand of Henry. 
 You will, I hope, know me too well to misinterpret me in 
 these expressions ; you will not suspect me of making 
 Hemy VIII the founder of the Church of England; but 
 I do not conceal from myself that, under the Divine power 
 which brings good out of evil and over-rules the wrath of 
 man to the praise of God, we have received good as well as 
 evil through the means of this * majestic lord who broke the 
 bonds of Rome.' 
 
 If now we attempt to find in Henry's treatment of the 
 temporalty a reflexion of the principles on which he dealt 
 thus summarily with the spiritualty, what "do we find ? The 
 answer to one important part of that question I propose to 
 take in the next lecture, in which I shall work with rather 
 more detail than is possible in so wide a resume as I have 
 attempted in this, an examination of his dealings with the 
 administrative machinery of the parliaments. But in a general 
 way I will attempt to state the answer now. As for taxation, 
 we have seen how, by his early as well as his late policy, the 
 real hold on the purse-strings was wrested from the hand of 
 
XI.] Taxation and Legislation. 263 
 
 the nation. A king who had over his parliaments the strong 
 hold that Henry had, who could dictate to them the measures 
 he wished to pass, even down to the smallest details, and 
 even make them petition for acts when he was the only man 
 in the kingdom that desired them, might, we think, have 
 contented himself with taking money through the overawed 
 or subservient Commons. But he did not ; he chose to exact 
 money by loan and then to come to the nation that lent the 
 money for exoneration ; the very fact that he went about the 
 loan by exactly the same process of assessment and collection 
 that he used in assessing and collecting a legal tax, shows 
 that he saw what he was doing : he saw that he had the 
 power, and he used it. Wolsey might dislike the idea of 
 meeting a parliament that might speak unreservedly about 
 himself ; Henry had no such dislike ; he could browbeat, or 
 bribe, or buUy, or divide, or balance parties, but he never could 
 have doubted for a moment that in the end he should get his 
 own way. 
 
 Next to taxation, perhaps even more important than taxa- 
 tion, was the right of legislation ; legislation of the temporalty 
 could at no time be carried through without the king's 
 enacting words ; and the submission of the clergy in 1533, 
 embodied in the Statute of Appeals in 1534, had estab- 
 lished the same rule for the spiritualty. But this did not 
 content the Lion. In the Proclamation Act of 1539 the 
 parliament is made to surrender to the king the power of 
 legislation ; as head on earth of the Church he might already 
 issue, and had issued, proclamations touching Christian faith ; 
 and by the natural power of king he had issued proclamations 
 for the public peace : but, O strange wilfulness of human 
 nature! men had not much minded: these proclamations 
 alike were set at nought by those who would not consider 
 the divinity of royalty ; therefore, lest the king should be 
 tempted to become a tyrant, lest the king should be com- 
 pelled by the wilfulness of his subjects to extend beyond their 
 natural limits the liberty and supremacy of his royal power 
 and dignity, what was to be done ? Was he to renounce the 
 power of proclaiming, and bind the parliament to codify the 
 
264 Political Executions. [xi. 
 
 temporal law, as lie had promised to the spiritualty to codify 
 and reform the canon law ? Quite the reverse ; in order that 
 he might not be tempted to usurp the functions of legislator, 
 the parliament was to invest him with those functions, and, 
 provided his proclamations did not contravene the existing 
 laws, to give to them the full force and virtue of acts of the 
 whole body of the realm. Here was a 'lex regia' indeed; 
 a dictatorship which, with all conceivable limitations, left the 
 ' king master and only master ' in his own house. 
 
 The security of life and property was of course worth little 
 when such things were possible : but Henry had a strong 
 executive force at his disposal, and the actual working of this 
 despotism did not affect the body of the people so much as might 
 be expected. The clergy were of course in constant terror of 
 the shadow of a praemunire ; the reformers, alternately flat- 
 tered and banished, had no easy time of it ; and the position 
 of even a bishop's lady must have been, to say the least, 
 peculiar. But on the great men, the taller poppies, the actual 
 pressure occasionally fell. The nation had fought hard for 
 justice in the tribunals and for the limitation of the doctrine 
 of treasons. Bills of attainder, trials in Star Chamber, and 
 multiplication of treasons, form the dark side of the policy of 
 Henry VII ; they c&me to full development under Henry VIII. 
 
 Edmund de la Pole, Buckingham, Wolsey, Fisher, More, 
 Anne Boleyn, Cromwell, the Marquess of Exeter, the Countess 
 of Salisbury, Montacute, and last of all Sm-rey and his father, 
 were victims of a system, of various contrivances but of one 
 purport, for destroying without law, or without trial, or 
 without defence, those whom the king determined, ffom what- 
 ever motive of policy ©r of caprice, of jealousy or of satiety, to 
 sacrifice. Add to these the religious or ecclesiastical holo- 
 causts, and the number of inferior victims who were involved 
 in the fall of the great ones, and for whom there was no need 
 to violate laws that could so easily be manipulated. The 
 liberty of the subject to act or speak, or even to think, was 
 reduced to a minimum under an executive familiar with 
 constructive treasons. 
 
 But it is time to close this part of our discussion ; and I 
 
XI.] Conclusion. 265 
 
 must leave some, especially of the legal measures of the reign 
 which would most natm'ally have fallen in with the Kne of 
 this lecture, for the more formal treatment, which I propose to 
 take in the next lecture, of Henry's dealings with parliament. 
 Perhaps when we have looked at these, we may find time to 
 inquire to what extent he really fulfilled the office of dictator, 
 anticipated the line of history, or carried with him the wishes 
 of the nation. 
 
XII. 
 
 PARLIAMENT UNDER HENRY VIII. 
 
 (June 9, 1881.) 
 
 THE great question of the reign of Henry VIII is, no 
 doubt, this : to what extent did he, in the remarkable 
 career of destruction and reconstruction, of public and private 
 self-will, of commingled revolutionism and conservatism, carry 
 with him the assent and goodwill of his people ? then, when we 
 have detennined to what extent the national participation in 
 his measures is to be admitted, would be the time to ask by 
 what means, he obtained that assent and goodwill. I do not 
 flatter myself that I am going to answer the question or to 
 solve the problem, either to yom- satisfaction or to my own. 
 Far too many considerations are concerned in both, far too 
 many facts of doubtful interpretation, and certainly too many 
 historical theories. All that I can undertake to do is to pre- 
 pare the clearing of the way for some later and more fully 
 equipped investigator ; more fully equipped, I say, because, 
 as you will see, there is every reason to hope that in a few 
 years, owing to the labours of the scholars employed in 
 calendaring the State papers, many of the facts which are 
 now capable of contradictory interpretations will be set forth 
 in their true light and relation to one another. 
 
 In the former lecture I confined myself to such illustrations 
 of the subject as belong to the royal character of Henry VIII 
 himself; and you will not have mistaken my provisional 
 conclusion that the great factor in the whole complication 
 is the strong, intelligent, self-wUled force of the king; that 
 that alone seems to give purpose and . consistency to the 
 eventful policy of the period ; that Henry VIII is neither 
 
XII.] Parliamentary History. 267 
 
 the puppet of parties, nor tlie victim of cu-eumstances, nor 
 the shifty politician, nor the capricious tyrant, but a man of 
 light and leading, of power, force and foresight, a man of 
 opportunities, stratagems, and surprises, but not the less of 
 iron will and determined purpose ; purpose not at once 
 realised or systematised, but widening, deepening, and 
 strengthening as the way opens before it ; a man accordingly 
 who might have been very great, and could under no circum- 
 stances be accounted less than great, but who would have 
 been infinitely greater, and better, and more fortunate, if he 
 would have lived for his people, and not for himself. 
 
 But the subject of the present lecture is the parliamentary 
 history of the reign ; and I will keep back any general or 
 personal remarks until that has been treated as it can be 
 treated in a public lecture. It helps to answer the question 
 and problem which I have stated, for it is through the Parlia- 
 ment that Henry inquires of the goodwill and support of the 
 nation, as it is through the Convocation he inquires of the 
 goodwill and support of the clergy. If we believe the Acts of 
 Parliament, we shall find the nation not merely acquiescing 
 in but petitioning for measures, some of which had no import- 
 ance except as ftdfiUing the wishes of the king, others of 
 which were in strong opposition to all that is known of 
 national feeling both in and out of parliament ; if we look 
 at the early ecclesiastical measures we find the same acqui- 
 escence in great constitutional changes, abdications of power 
 which could not be spontaneous, and acknowledgements of 
 the truth of statements and principles which, if true at all, 
 were far too novel to have been accepted without discussion. 
 We may, if we please, admit the conclusion that the nation 
 accepted the king's action as that of a divinely constituted 
 dictator ; a theory which involves the assumption, which 
 is altogether groundless, that the nation saw, or thought 
 they saw, the existing circumstances to be such as demanded 
 a dictatorship. I do not think they did, and I am persuaded 
 that the theory is based on that process of reading history 
 backward, which it has been my fate, in this Chair, to have 
 constantly to struggle against. 
 
268 National Participation. [xii. 
 
 There was nothing in the circumstances of Europe during 
 the whole life of Henry VIII, such as there was under Queen 
 Elizabeth, which might persuade people then living of the 
 need of such an extraordinary oflScer. We, looking back on 
 the time, may see how dangerous a time it was, how fuU of 
 pitfalls and snares, and how, in the result, a great advantage 
 was gained by England having had such a hand as even the 
 blood-stained hand of Henry to guide her through : but the 
 critical character of the time was not apparent to the time, 
 or to the leading men of England during it ; and the later 
 reading of it cannot be made to account for the condition of 
 feeling and action that we are now contemplating. 
 
 The opposite view, that Henry and his advisers concocted 
 the parliamentary acts and manifestos in such a way as to 
 make them embody a national adhesion, sympathy, and even 
 enthusiasm, by the simple process of falsification, is, on the 
 other hand, too arbitrary, too shameful, for us to contemplate 
 with equanimity : history may be, and ought to be, tested at 
 every turn ; acts of parliament, when they are tested, may, 
 and often do, turn out very unsound and unsatisfactoiy in 
 their statements of fact, and disputable and inconsistent in 
 their statements of law ; but, if we could believe in such a 
 wholesale perversion of evidences as this theory involves, we 
 must resign all theories of history at once, and relegate the 
 inquiring world to a combination of natui-al laws with his- 
 torical novels. The fact of the matter, I take it, we may 
 accept : that the nation and the Church accepted, acquiesced 
 in, and petitioned for, in parliament and in convocation, 
 the things which the acts of parliament and convocation 
 declare that they accepted, acquiesced in, and petitioned for ; 
 but the question remains how we are to interpret that co- 
 operation, and by what means the conceivable measure of 
 co-operation was obtained. With so much preface, more 
 than I intended, let us approach this branch of the subject, 
 the history, modifications, and alterations of the government 
 by parliament and convocation, as it appears to be modified 
 and altered or maintained during the great changes of the 
 reign. 
 
xn.] Constitution of Parliaments. 269 
 
 I have already mentioned that Henry VIII held nine 
 parliaments in his thirty-eight years, and that of those one 
 was extended over the best part of seven years, that is the 
 great organic parliament, which began in 1539 and ran on to 
 the spring of 1536 : a parliament which, both on account of 
 its length and for the importance of its acts, may deserve the 
 title of the Long Parliament of Henry VIII. Of the other 
 eight parliaments, two, that summoned in 151 3 and that 
 summoned in 154a, ran over three years with short sessions ; 
 the others are all shorter, of one or two sessions. All these 
 parliaments were held in London, either at Westminster or, 
 in one instance and possibly an occasional sitting, at Black- 
 friars, and in the old places of assembly ; the convocation of 
 Canterbury met at S. Paul's, and so continued to meet, as it 
 still does on the first day of the session. In 1533 Wolsey 
 summoned it to Westminster ; and, after the Submission in 
 1533, it was frequently adjourned from S. Paul's to West- 
 minster for the convenience of the bishops, whose hands were 
 full of business in both chambers. The House of Lords 
 continued to meet in the parliament chamber, and the 
 Commons sat in the chapter-house or refectory of the 
 Abbey until the end of the reign ; Edward VI, in his first 
 parliament, took the Commons to S. Stephen's Chapel. The 
 parliament chamber, or the chamber of the Holy Cross, the 
 situation of which is unknown to me unless it was the Painted 
 Chamber under a new name, was the place of opening the 
 session under Henry VII and Henry VIII. 
 
 Our first question, however, is concerned with the personal 
 composition of the assembly. The House of Lords is the 
 chamber that undergoes the greatest modifications during the 
 period. We take the lords spiritual first ; the parliaments of 
 Henry VII had contained two archbishops, nineteen bishops, 
 and twenty-eight abbots ; Henry VIII added three abbots, the 
 abbot of Tewkesbury in 151 3, the abbot of Tavistock in 1514^ 
 and the abbot of Burton in 1534 ; and after the foundation of 
 the new bishoprics, he added the six new bishops of Oxford, 
 Peterborough, Gloucester, Bristol, Chester, and Westminster : 
 but before that was done the abbots had disappeared from par- 
 
270 House of Lords. [xii. 
 
 liament ; so at the beg-inning of the reign the number of spiri- 
 tual peers was 49 ; at the maximum in 1534 it was 5 a, and, after 
 the dissolution of the monasteries, it fell to %6. The nupoiber 
 of lay peers varied little, for there were few new creations except 
 where an old peerage had been extinguished. The minimum 
 number was called in 1523, being only a8, several of the 
 peers being that year employed in military affairs abroad ; 
 the maximum was in 1536, in the parliament called to approve 
 of the destruction of Anne Boleyn, and the number was 51. 
 In the other parliaments it varied between ^fi ^'^^ 4^- It 
 will be thus observed that, until the dissolution of the monas- 
 teries, the spiritual lords were always in a numerical majority, 
 but that the tendency was decided towards an equalisation ; 
 a tendency which is ocularly perceptible in the journals where, 
 in the list of attendances which from 15 15 onwards are 
 marked daily, the two bodies arean-anged in parallel columns. 
 It would, however, be wrong to infer from this that there 
 was an equality of voting bodies, for of the clerical members 
 the attendance was throughout the reign veiy irregular; 
 and the proportion, on most critical occasions, seems to have 
 been about ao bishops and abbots to 30 lay lords. It is 
 true they both had the power of giving proxies, but the 
 irregulai'ity of attendance does not seem to be compensated 
 by the proxies : the prelate who is attendant one day is 
 absent the next, doubtless without proxy ; and some are absent 
 for whole sessions. 
 
 Convocation during the whole reign sits at the same time 
 with the parliament ; and generally the Friday in each week, 
 sometimes the Tuesday also, is marked by adjomnment that 
 the prelates may attend convocation, the Wednesday in some 
 cases being likewise surrendered for the session of the Star 
 Chamber. No doubt the .business of the Upper House of 
 Convocation engi-ossed the time of most of the absent bishops 
 and abbots, for that assembly was, before the dissolution, a 
 very large body, nearly as large as the House of Commons ; 
 it included, as is seen in the great divisions on the divorce, 
 between two and three hundred abbots and priors ; and much 
 of the business undertaken in it was of a fai* more critical 
 
XII.] House of Commons. 271 
 
 character than that which was gone through in the Parlia- 
 ment. 
 
 The House of Commons was a little, only a little, so far as 
 concerns England proper, modified by Henry VIII : Preston, 
 Lancaster, Thetford, Orford, Berwick, and possibly one or 
 two more towns, gained the privilege of representation ; but 
 by bestowing representation on the towns and counties of 
 Wales, Calais, and Chester, Henry added in 1543 thirty-two 
 members, knights and burgesses, to the old number. 
 
 The suffrage, as we know from the case of Leicester, was 
 in the corporate towns being altogether appropriated by the 
 councillors and other officers who constituted the corpora- 
 tion. This loss of distinctly representative importance is 
 accompanied by a certain rise in the position of the borough 
 members. Up to this time the office of Speaker has been 
 engrossed by the knights of the shire, and the only names of 
 men who have taken a prominent part in the debates of the 
 Commons have been those of county members. In this reign, 
 however, Humfrey Wingfield, member for Yarmouth, was 
 chosen Speaker in succession to Audley; and the only persons 
 who axe found taking a leading part in the discussions of the 
 Long Parliament of 1529-153'^ are Thomas Cromwell, mem- 
 ber for Taunton, who before he placed himself in the king's 
 service had succeeded in throwing out the bill of attainder 
 against Wolsey, and Mr. Temys, the member for Westbury, 
 who had proposed that the king should, be asked to give up 
 his plan for divorce. 
 
 Still we do not possess journals of the proceedings of the 
 Commons before the year 1547. Those of the Lords begin 
 in 1509, and furnish us with much of the information that 
 we have looked for in vain in the older Rolls of Parliament. 
 From them we learn to how large an extent the use of proxies 
 prevailed in the House of Lords, notwithstanding the careful 
 way in which it was limited and tested ; a usage which shows 
 how it was so easy for the king, by dealing with one or two 
 of the more prominent prelates, generally to secure an eccle- 
 siastical majority in parliament, and even in convocation. 
 In the Lower House the Speaker of the Tudor reigns is in 
 
272 The Speakers. [xii. 
 
 very much the same position as the Chancellor in the Upper 
 House ; he is the manager of business on the part of the 
 crown, and probably the nominee either of the king himself 
 or of the chancellor. Although the forms of election, apology 
 and protest, of address to the king and royal admission, were 
 maintained and developed, we know both from Sir Thomas 
 Smith and from Coke that the king appointed the Speaker : 
 even in the House of Lords the sovereign exercised the same 
 right when the chancellor was not a peer ; in 1539, as we 
 learn from Chapuys' dispatches, that Warham was elected, 
 but set aside as too old. The result was that the Speaker, 
 instead of being the defender of the liberties of the house, 
 had often to reduce it to an order that meant obsequious 
 reticence or sullen submission. Happily it was not every 
 Speaker that was like Rich, whose extant addresses to the 
 king are nauseous compliments on his majesty's gifts of 
 natm-e, fortune, and grace, the beauty of his person, the 
 felicity of his enterprises, the perfect virtue of his character ; 
 compliments which the king deprecates with a modest refer- 
 ence to the Giver of all good gifts, but with a conscious 
 acquiescence as ridiculous as the mock humility of the Speakei'. 
 But where even More himself had the greatest difficulty in 
 behaving with decent independence, so poor a creature as 
 Rich may stand excused. 
 
 The Speakers of the reign were Sir Thomas Englefield, M.P. 
 for Berks ; Sir Thomas Sheffield, for Lincolnshire ; Sir Thomas 
 Nevill, probably for Kent ; all men of dignity and simpHcity. 
 The Speaker of 1523 was Sir Thomas More ; he was succeeded 
 in the parliament of 1529 by Audley, who succeeded him also 
 as Chancellor in 1533. Humfrey Wingfield, whom I have 
 mentioned, succeeded Audley ; Rich was Speaker in 1536, Sir 
 Nicolas Hare in 1539, and Sir Thomas Moyle in 1542. 
 Moyle's speeches were formed on the model of Rich's ; Hare's 
 speech in 154O) although scarcely less compHmentary, was 
 better put together; he congratulated the realm on the 
 felicity of having such a king as Henry, who had won, a boon 
 which had fallen to the lot of no other Christian common- 
 wealth, the distinction that under him, without any single 
 
XII.] speaker Hare, 273 
 
 calamity, the land had not only flourished but had been re- 
 stored to her perfect freedom. These words had a meaning ; 
 no doubt the absence of external calamity was a feature of 
 Henry's reign, and was one cause of his influence with the 
 people : on the other hand, the recovery of what seemed to 
 the age to be spiritual liberty from Rome was a real thing in 
 Hare's mind, not the mere compliment that was designed in 
 the comparison by which Rich equalled Henry with Solomon, 
 Samson and Absalom ; or with the sun itself, as drying up 
 noxious vapours and cherishing the growth of all good seeds. 
 Hare, however, had a difiicult part to play, for, just before he 
 made this speech, he had been sent to the Tower for offending 
 against the king's prerogative ; he had regained his Kberty 
 and his appointment as Speaker by a complete submission. 
 There is no evidence, so far as I know, that the Commons had 
 treated this imprisonment as a matter of privilege. 
 
 It would be easy to parallel from the speeches of the 
 chancellor the fulsome compliments of the Speakers, but I 
 must hasten on to the more important questions of the direct 
 dealings of the king or his prime ministers with the two 
 houses ; and as it would be impossible to go into any thorough 
 details on this, I must content myself with occasional illustra- 
 tions. Henry was generally present at the opening and 
 closing of the sessions, but he did not, in his later years, scruple 
 to interpose from time to time in the deliberations of either 
 house, and influence the voting. The first sensational event of 
 the kind is Wolsey's adventure in the parliament of 1523, 
 when More was Speaker. The great chancellor had in the 
 usual way come down to the Commons and told them that 
 the king's needs amounted to a sum of .^'800,000, and to 
 raise that amount a subsidy of a fifth would be required, pay- 
 able in five years. After the Cardinal's departure a discussion 
 arose on particulars, which is amusingly described by Cromwell 
 as a communing on war, peace, strife, contention, debate, 
 murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, 
 justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, force, activity, 
 temperance, treason, murder, felony, and how a commonwealth 
 might be edified and continued in our realm. But the eeo- 
 
 T 
 
2 74 Wo Isey and the Commons. [xii, 
 
 nomical discussions were pulled up by the announcement of 
 another visit from the chancellor. Then arose the question, 
 how is he to come ; is he to come as chancellor, or as cardinal 
 iu state ; let him come as cardinal, for then, if there should be 
 a riot, the blame can be laid on his attendants. So he comes 
 in state, and asks an answer about the subsidy. He is met 
 with sullen silence ; not even Mr. Marney, who is just going 
 to be made a baron, and whom Wolsey applies to directly, 
 win utter a word. Then poor More, on his knees, has to re- 
 present to the cardinal, who had made him Speaker, that this 
 manner of coming, on which, you observe, he and the House 
 had aheady calculated, was not expedient or in conformity 
 with ancient liberties. So the cardinal had to go away in a 
 rage ; the Commons were willing to listen to him, but would 
 not debate in his presence. Still the visit was not in vain ; 
 the deliberation was resumed, and a very heavy impost was 
 agreed to, when Sir John Hussey, the member for Lincohi- 
 shire, who also was made a peer soon after, proposed a sub- 
 stantial addition on the tax from land ; only eleven or twelve 
 members voted for it, but, notwithstanding the abstention of 
 the majority, it was allowed to be added ; then the session was 
 prorogued. After the vacation it was proposed by the knights 
 of the shu'e to extend to goods the tax which Hussey had 
 fixed on the land ; a division took place with the curious re- 
 sult that all the county members voted one way and all the 
 burgesses the other ; yet, notwithstanding the enormous 
 majority against the tax. More in his capacity of the king's 
 agent, prevailed on the House to pass the bill. 
 
 Here you have a very illustrative ease of the way in which 
 even a most unpopular measure could be forced through par- 
 liament ; well might Cromwell conclude the letter in which 
 he describes the session, 'after seventeen weeks of discussion 
 we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that 
 is to say as well as we might, and have left ofi" where we 
 began.' I do not think that any of the fourteenth century 
 parliaments would have stood this ; Wolsey can have been no 
 believer in parliaments, for this is the only one that was held 
 whilst he was chancellor. 
 
XII.] The Session of 1^2^. 275 
 
 I pass on to the Long Parliament of 1539-1536, of the 
 early doings of which, thanks to the chronicle of Hall and 
 the reports of the Imperial ambassador, we know more minute 
 detail than we do of any preceding session. Cromwell's de- 
 fence of Wolsey in the first session, which prevented the 
 passing of the bill of attainder in the House of Commons, is 
 a fact which rests on historical testimony too good to be 
 rejected ; but the circumstances in which it took place are 
 obscure ; there can be little doubt that Henry acquiesced in, 
 perhaps prompted the rejection ; and it is quite certain that 
 to have forced it through parliament would have made a 
 serious addition to his already awkward complications. 
 
 There were two other pieces of debateable policy in the short 
 session of 1539 : the remittal of the loans of 1533-8, and the 
 opening of the attack on the minor privileges of the clergy. 
 The convocation passed the bill of remittal, and it was likewise 
 read three times by the Lords ; the Commons however were 
 sorely perplexed by it ; hitherto the royal receipt and promise to 
 repay had been regarded as good security ; new debts had been 
 incurred on the strength of it and men had left it to their 
 children as an adequate and safe provision. Now it was pro- 
 posed to deprive pay, receipts and bonds, of all validity ; the 
 Commons refused to pass the bill without conditions^ and 
 the only condition to be got was a general pardon, out of 
 which the penalties for praemunire, which had been so fatal to 
 Wolsey, were omitted : the nominal victory was with the 
 Commons, the substantial fruits were with the king, who saw 
 his way to the great exaction from the clergy obtained in the 
 next session. 
 
 The other contest involves more interest and more ques- 
 tions. Already Henry was beginning to feel his way against 
 the clergy ; the clergy themselves were discussing points 
 of reform, and these points were even hinted at in the 
 opening speech of the Chancellor More. The points raised 
 seem to us, in the light of the later history, only small 
 points ; the expenses of probate and mortuaries, non-residence 
 and pluralities, and the interference of the clergy as farmers 
 and tanners with the trade of the laity. But unfortunately^ 
 
 T 3 
 
276 A nti-clerical A cts. [xii . 
 
 they were points that divided the ecclesiastical interest : the 
 bishops were willing to enforce discipline on the lower clergy ; 
 the lower clergy were willing to reduce the profits of probate 
 which went to the officials of the bishops ; but the lower 
 clergy wotdd defend their trade and their benefices, and the 
 bishops could not allow the profits of their courts to be 
 touched. Both would have agreed in strong measures against 
 heresy ; and both agreed in regarding the discussion of these 
 things in parliament as an attack, as indeed they were, on 
 the Church itself. Bishop Fisher, in his apprehension, pro- 
 claimed that lack of faith ruins the country in which it pre- 
 vails, as it was ruining Bohemia. This imputation roused the 
 spirit of the faithful Commons ; the Speaker Audley and thirty 
 other members were sent to complain to the king, and the 
 bishop had to explain that he meant only to refer to Bohemia. 
 Archbishop Warham and six other bishops attesting this 
 apology, the king accepted the excuse and reported it to the 
 Commons. Fanning the flame of dissension, he then sug- 
 gested that the Commons should pass the two most obnoxious 
 bills, strike a blow at the bishops by the bill on probate, and at 
 the parochial clergy by the bill against mortuaries. This was 
 done. The other points, non-residence, pluralities, and trading, 
 were decided likewise : the lords spiritual by their majority in 
 the upper house rejected the bills ; the Commons insisted on 
 pressing them ; the king suggested a conference, in Star 
 Chamber, of eight members from each house ; the lay lords on 
 the committee voted with the Commons, and by this con- 
 trivance the biUs were passed. This Little trick shows that it 
 was not by force alone that the parliament was manipulated to 
 pass the king's bills. More as chancellor must, in this business, 
 as in 1533, when he was Speaker, have acted as the king's 
 agent, but the burden was already too heavy for his back. 
 
 If I were now tracing the progress of the Reformation, I 
 might say more on the antagonism thus established between 
 the clergy and the commons ; it is enough however to observe 
 that Henry had clearly got a parliament on which he could 
 depend ; and that every point he now gained became a fresh 
 vantage-ground from which he could grasp at more. 
 
XII.] Recognition of Supremacy. 277 
 
 In 1530 there was no parliamentary session ; the king- and 
 his agents were busily collecting opinions about the divorce ; 
 and the constitutional struggle begins again in i53i- Not 
 even now did the king think matters ripe for discussion of 
 the divorce in parliament ; and, in the council which was held 
 preparatory to the session, it was determined that the queen's 
 business should not be brought forward ; the chief thing pro- 
 posed was the exaction of money from the clergy under the 
 threat of praemunire. The Duke of Norfolk, who was to 
 all intents and purposes the prime minister, was negotiating 
 with the emperor, and is said to have sworn that nothing in 
 that parliament should be done against Katharine ; Anne 
 Boleyn and her father were drawing to the Protestants, but 
 their time was not yet come. All the important business 
 was done in convocation. Parliament, as the imperial envoy 
 remarked, were employed on nothing more serious than cross- 
 bows and hand-guns. But in the convocation matters were 
 important indeed ; the king was the only person who had the 
 skill to understand, or the will to define, the doctrine of 
 praemunire, and it was not by praemunire alone that he could 
 manipulate the clergy ; he tried to tamper with Warham, 
 threatened intrigue with the German Protestants, or the 
 restraint of mortmain, or the appointment of a council of 
 heresy which would take that question out of the hands of 
 convocation, and other things which, vague threats at first, 
 became realities of oppression as soon as they were familiarised 
 to his mind. By threats and blandishments he obtained the 
 Recognition of his headship of the Church, and the payment 
 of .^100,000. It was not done all at once ; the clergy kicked 
 against the pricks very hard : they offered 160,000 ducats, the 
 king insisted on 400,000 ; the papal nuncio was pressed into 
 the service, and even forced his way into the lower house of 
 convocation : but the clergy, following the example of the 
 commons of 1533, stopped their ears, and bade him nego- 
 tiate in the right way through the Archbishop : as yet there 
 was no breach with Clement VII, and in the delay of the 
 divorce both parties were for the moment at peace. At last 
 the clergy granted the king's terms ; but they did not like 
 
278 The Pardon (t/" 1 5 3 1 . [xir. 
 
 the form of Eeeognition, and in the end it was passed by an 
 evasion for which Warham must answer. He proposed the 
 form suggested by Lord Eoehford, and, in putting it to the 
 vote, added, ' qui tacet consentire videtur.' The clergy by an 
 anticipation of Jesuitic subterfuge, and by a practical Irish 
 bull, cried out, ' Itaque tacemus omnes.' By this levity the 
 great act was consummated, which was to be the fulcrum for 
 the whole ecclesiastical policy of the future ; the Recognition 
 was understood to be passed unanimously. 
 
 But not even here were matters completely arranged ; the 
 king now haggled about the prsemunire ; the clergy threatened 
 to withdraw their promise to pay unless this mysterious mon- 
 ster were defined as well as remitted. It ended however as I 
 have said ; the clergy voted the money and the king promised 
 the pardon. But the pardon must be secured by the con- 
 firmation of parliament ; and, when the biU came before the 
 Commons they soon saw that it did not comprise the laity, and 
 refused to pass it. The king's agents urged that this opposi- 
 tion would damage the clergy and not benefit the Commons ; 
 that the king could not be compelled to pardon, and that, 
 without their consent, he could pass the pardon under the 
 great seal. The Speaker and a committee attended the king, 
 and, getting no other answer, went away sorrowing and de- 
 claring that Cromwell had betrayed their proceedings to 
 Henry. Then there was some bitter talking about the exac- 
 tions and the remittal of the loan ; but at last the king issued 
 the pardon, and the Commons, knowing that something would 
 be taken for the boon, sulkily accepted it. 
 
 The next day the chancellor laid before them the documents 
 touching the divorce, and the Commons were enlightened by 
 speeches on the subject from the Bishops of London and Bath. 
 But they remained sulky ; whether it was that the king was 
 not prepared to go further, or that the attitude of parliament, 
 still faithfiil to the queen and indisposed to quarrel with the 
 Pope, dismayed him, there the matter stayed, and the Com- 
 mons were ordered to carry down to their constituencies the 
 information laid before them. So the session ended, and the 
 convocation, which had engaged on the reform of grammar 
 
XII.] Session of \^i2. 279 
 
 schools and tlie publishing of a uniform Latin grammar, in 
 addition to the restoration of discipline and the translation 
 of the Scriptures, was prorogued at the same time. The same 
 measures which passed the Canterbmy Convocation were like- 
 wise adopted at York ; that is the clergy remitted the loans, 
 paid ,^18,840 for the pardon, and acknowledged the supre- 
 macy. Bishop Tunstall however made a protest against the 
 form of Recognition, and proposed that for fear of misinter- 
 pretation by heretics, the words in temporalibus post Christum 
 should be inserted ; but this had only the effect of offending 
 the king, who directed that the bishop's house at Auckland 
 should be searched for heretical books ; and also, according to 
 Chapuys, omitted to summon him to the next session of 
 parliament. 
 
 I go on now to that third session of the Long Parliament ; 
 it opened on the aand of January 1532. Its events are ex- 
 tremely important, and fortunately are illustrated fairly well 
 by contemporary evidence. It was understood, says the im- 
 perial resident, to have been called for two purposes, money and 
 the divorce. The king wanted 2,000,000 ducats ; Rochford and 
 Anne Boleyn were apparently given carte Manche as to their 
 dealing with the clergy for the divorce ; Henry, however, 
 keeping watch, and ready to make the most of an opportunity. 
 The clergy were now having their eyes opened ; a bold 
 attempt made by the Boleyns to ' suborn,' that is, I suppose, 
 to bribe Archbishop Warham, at last shook the old man's 
 faith in the stability of things. Norfolk and Rochford, who 
 were now acting together, proposed that matrimonial causes 
 should be declared a matter of temporal jurisdiction. Warham, 
 as an old lawyer, protested in a formal document against all 
 legislation which might be enacted against ecclesiastical or 
 papal power. This protest seems to have had the effect of 
 deterring any further procedure on the divorce itself during 
 the archbishop's life, but to have provoked the king to more 
 trenchant action against the constitutional aiTangements 
 which Warham and his party now saw to be assailed. 
 
 The history of the session falls into two sections, divided by 
 a short recess at Easter for about a fortnight. The first portion 
 
, 28o The Annates Bill. [xii. 
 
 was devoted to the question of supplies, the second to that of 
 Church refonn : convocation sat dui-ing the whole time. The 
 measm'es proposed by the king with a view to increase the 
 royal revenue were fair enough, and were, as it seems to me, 
 in strict analogy with the policy of his greatest ancestor, 
 Edward I. The first was the bill for the withdrawal of 
 Annates from the pope ; a measm'e intended to secure for 
 the king the profits and firstfruits on all appointments to 
 bishoprics ; the act allowed the king to compound with the 
 pope for all reasonable payments, and also provided for the 
 confirmation and consecration of bishops without recourse to 
 Rome. As a companion to this measure the king introduced 
 bills of the same purport affecting the laity ; just as on the 
 transmission of ecclesiastical property the firstfruits went to 
 Rome, so, on the transmission of lay property in land, by the 
 operation of the doctrine of wills and uses, the king lost 
 his reliefs and primer seisins ; accordingly he proposed two 
 measures, or one measm-e with double purpose, — a statute of 
 wills, allowing a man to devise half his land by will, pro- 
 vided the other half, left to the heii-, secured the king in 
 his feudal rights ; and a statute of uses, intended to take the 
 force out of the old practice of feoffment to uses. Both these 
 statutes ultimately passed in a modified form, the Statute 
 of Uses in 1536 and the Statute of Wills in 1540. By that 
 time it would seem it was discovered that they might be 
 accepted as boons, now they were vehemently objected to, and 
 the opposition they excited threw the Commons for the mo- 
 ment on the side of the pope, and into opposition to the 
 Annates Bill. The latter bill was presented to the Commons 
 as a measure of their own : the king protested and pretended, 
 sending Norfolk to assure the imperial ambassador that the 
 Commons had called for it ; that he himself was borne on and 
 overpowered by their zeal for reform ; the prelates had refused 
 their consent, but the people willed to have it ; at last by the 
 19th of March, after two personal visitations, the king forced 
 it through the Lords ; all the bishops and two abbots voted 
 against it ; of the lay peers only one lord, Arundel, had the 
 courage to support them ; thirty lay lords formed a majority 
 
XII.] Conflict ^1532. 281 
 
 for the bill and it went down to the Commons. There also 
 the king's presence was required ; in the house the noes had 
 it. Then Henry insisted on a division ; a taking of single 
 votes which, from some other illustrations which it would be 
 tedious now to refer to, we infer to have been as yet an 
 exceptional method of ascertaining the sense of the house. 
 Partly by promising that there should be no more acts against 
 the pope, partly by the terror of his majestic eyes, he obtained 
 a majority ; men could not comfortably vote in the presence 
 of the definer of all praemunires. This much was accom- 
 plished before the Easter adjournment ; the Statutes of WiUs 
 and Uses passed the Lords but were rejected by the Commons, 
 and the king did not press them at the time. 
 
 The question of the Annates had opened his eyes to his power 
 of obtaining further concessions. In the beginning of March, 
 by the contrivance of Rochford, the parliament was discussing 
 the possibility of transferring to the king all the power and 
 authority of the archbishops and bishops : the divorce question 
 was simmering in both houses ; and Warham had plucked up 
 spirit to speak up for the queen. This was not to be endured. 
 Accordingly the old antagonism of the Commons to the 
 spiritual courts was utilised, and an address drawn up by the 
 king's secretaries was put in their hands to be delivered to the 
 king as the prayer of the Commons. Audley, as Speaker, and 
 a number of his own servile party presented it ; it contained 
 a bitter attack on the canon law and ecclesiastical jurisdictions 
 generally, and, in twelve clauses, some of greater and some of 
 less importance, singled out points for reform. The king re- 
 ceived it on the 18th of March, and, as soon as Easter was over, 
 it was laid before convocation for an answer. Both Houses of 
 convocation discussed it in detail ; the Upper House prepared 
 an answer on the points that touched the bishops ; the Lower 
 on those touching the parochial clergy: both agreed in de- 
 manding a specific statement instead of general charges. The 
 answer was sent to the king about the a7th of April ; and 
 the king was of course prepared to fi.nd it unsatisfactory. 
 
 On the 30th his Majesty sent for the speaker and showed 
 him the answer, referring it, as a very slender production, to 
 
282 Submission of the Clergy. [xii. 
 
 the consideration of that ' grete sorte of wise men to be found 
 in the House of Commons.' There were indeed both wise 
 men and foolish in that assembly ; and both had the divorce 
 business in their minds. They were again busy on the 
 supplies : Henry wanted money to fortify the border and the 
 coast : they offered a tenth and fifteenth, ^''38,000 ; that was 
 not enough; the Statutes of Wills and Uses were again 
 broached and rejected. Independent members went further, 
 Mr. Thomas Temys, M.P. for Westbury, proposed, and found 
 a seconder, that the king should be asked to take back his 
 wife ; ' if he would, there would be no danger from the 
 emperor ; if he would not, fortification would be useless.' 
 The king could not stand that : he sent for Audley, and 
 through him explained to the Commons what a horrible 
 conscience a man had who married his brother's wife. The 
 question of the divorce was not before them : if they would 
 mind their own business he would help them against the 
 clergy ; if not, not. 
 
 Whilst this was going on in Parliament convocation was 
 asked for a grant : the clergy discussed the subject, and deter- 
 mined to send to the king a supplication for help. They were 
 in a strait ; the Commons were insisting on severer measures 
 against heresy, and still were impugning the laws and courts, 
 by which only heresy could be extirpated. Rochford and 
 Cromwell were intriguing with the heretics ; Henry himself, 
 pretending to stand aloof, was watching every point of 
 vantage. But they got little comfort : in answer to their 
 supplication, the king sent down to them in a bill the three 
 points of submission, the abdication of the right to legislate 
 in convocation, the consent to the reform of ecclesiastical law, 
 and the sufierance of existing canons only under the king's ap- 
 proval. The day after this bill was sent to the clergy, Henry, 
 still intent on exciting the Commons against them, summoned 
 Audley and his friends, and put before him the oath taken by 
 the prelates to the pope on appointment ; an oath which he 
 declared incompatible with their allegiance to himself That 
 was something for the Commons to consider : the Lords were 
 consulted on the points which had been laid before convoca- 
 
XII.] Resignation of More. 283 
 
 tion. The imperial ambassador was on the watch for results : 
 the king was proposing, he heai'd, to abolish synods and 
 synodal legislation, and to take into his own hands all co- 
 ercive jurisdiction on heresy; the bishops might have the 
 souls of the sinners, he would have their bodies ; it was a 
 strange thing ; priests would be of less account than shoe- 
 makers, who at least might regulate their own trade. The 
 Venetian ambassador foresaw a new praemunire, and fixed the 
 amount of money that the king would take, 400,000 crowns 
 from the clergy, a vote of a fifteenth, and a year's income as 
 succession duty. Evidently a storm was rising. The royal 
 propositions were, however, on the 15th of May, accepted by 
 convocation, after brisk discussion and several significant 
 divisions. In the House of Lords the chancellor and the 
 bishops opposed them, and prevented them from becoming law 
 as yet. The great Lion was nearer a defeat than he had ever 
 been before : and, when More resigned the great seal, which he 
 did on the day that the Submission was presented, the king 
 became very sulky. On the day of prorogation he would not 
 show himself : as for the grant of money, the fifteenth, he did 
 not care about it ; he would neither accept nor refuse, and the 
 clergy would not now grant more ; as a matter of fact no 
 subsidy was granted. But the clergy were brought to their 
 knees, and the king lost his wisest and most faithful adviser. 
 The session ended on the 14th of May ; convocation was 
 prorogued on the 15th, and on the i6th More resigned. His 
 successor was the Speaker Audley ; a change indeed. 
 
 After losing More, Henry seems to have acted more and 
 more on the counsels of the Boleyns ; and circumstances 
 rapidly accelerated the~ course of events. Gardiner, who was 
 probably his near kinsman and who certainly had helped him 
 in every way \mtil now, left the court, and was in disgrace for 
 refusing to preach in favour of the divorce. Warham's death, 
 in the following August, removed the last of the old party 
 whose advice had any chance of being listened to. A visit 
 to Francis I in the next month seems to have determined the 
 king to cut the knot by peremptory action. Immediately on his 
 return he is said to have married Anne Boleyn. As each old 
 
284 Session of i<)^2)- I^^^- 
 
 friend dropped off Cromwell rose a step, and the royal deter- 
 mination increased. Cranmer was designated for the primacy ; 
 Audley from being Lord Keeper was raised to the Chancellor- 
 ship ; the parliament, which had been prorogued to November, 
 was adjourned to January, and in January both Houses and 
 convocation met. 
 
 For the session of 1533 we have no journals, and the 
 reports of the Venetian ambassador do not supply the gap 
 caused by the imperfect continuation of the Austrian dis- 
 patches. Two subjects, however, alone occupied both the 
 secular and the ecclesiastical assemblies : the divorce and the 
 abolition of appeals to Rome. In parliament the divorce busi- 
 ness proceeded slowly; the king visited it more than once 
 with a view to expediting that, and the provision of an army 
 against the Scots ; but the month of Februaiy passed over 
 without any real business being done. At last Henry re- 
 sumed the plan by which he had succeeded in 153*) putting 
 the initiation of his own measures in the mouth of a private 
 member of the Commons ; on the 15th of March a London 
 member was fiaund to propose that the judges of the divorce 
 should be appointed in England. Immediately after this 
 Cranmer was consecjated, and he undertook to deal with 
 convocation. In convocation the two questions on which 
 the divorce turned were debated in the manner of University 
 disputations ; the theologians disputed as to the dispensability 
 of a marriage with a brother's widow, the canonists on .the 
 facts of Arthur's marriage with Katharine : there were formal 
 divisions, but the conclusion was foregone, the bishop of 
 Rochester was the only steady opponent. In the same way 
 the York convocation was dealt with by Archbishop Lee. 
 
 Notwithstanding the acquiescence of convocation, the Com- 
 mons as late as April 10 were still reluctant. We are told 
 that one of the members for London offered to raise j6'aoo,ooo 
 if the king would refer the question of the divorce to a general 
 council. But in vain. The servility of Cranmer and Lee 
 had provided a short and easy method ; on the 33rd of May, 
 at Dunstable, Cranmer, on the strength of the opinions thus 
 obtained, pronounced in favour of the divorce and Boleyn 
 
xii.] Stahite of Appeals. 285 
 
 marriage ; and on the 1st of June Anne Boleyn was crowned ; 
 parliament having adjourned from April la to June 7. 
 
 The other great act of the year was the statute of Appeals, 
 of the discussion of which we have few data. On the 14th of 
 March, according to Chapuys, it was proposed in parliament 
 to make a statute declaring that the pope has no authority in 
 this kingdom ; the king was set upon it and was an-anging 
 all his policy to that end. On the 30th it is mentioned in 
 the Venetian dispatches as being then pushed in convocation. 
 The next day the imperial envoy announces that the convo- 
 cation has passed the Divorce Billj but the House of Commons 
 has refused to pass the Statute of Appeals, mainly on the 
 ground that, if the pope were offended, he might injure the 
 wool trade. But before the loth of April he has to record 
 that the opposition has given way before the king's threat to 
 enforce the penalties of prsemunire against the laity. A week 
 later he reports that he has remonstrated with Henry and put 
 him in a rage. Yet raging, still he was not without hope ; 
 he had sent to tell the pope that if, even now, he would send 
 a dispensation for the second marriage, he would undo all 
 that, in his wish to please his people, he had done against 
 Eome. It is no doubt an exaggeration of Chapuys when 
 he says that the nation would have welcomed the emperor as 
 a deliverer, but there can be no reason to question his state- 
 ments as to the sincerity of the opposition. The work of the 
 year ended there ; no business session was again attempted ; 
 the question of supplies, which had been brought forward in 
 February, dropped and no grant was made. 
 
 The next session, that of January i534j was a heavy one : 
 we have the Lords' Journals, but very scanty details about 
 convocation, which is unfortunate as the most important 
 business was ecclesiastical. We know, however, from the 
 Lords' Journals, that the clerical assembly sat on regular days, 
 every Friday and sometimes on Tuesdays, the lords adjourning 
 on those days for the convenience of the prelates, and on the 
 Wednesdays for the session of Star Chamber. The attendance 
 of prelates in the House of Lords was very scanty, and they 
 were generally outnumbered two to one by the lay lords : 
 
286 Sessions ^1534 and 1536. [xii. 
 
 ttere were discussions and differences of opinion between the 
 Lords and Commons ; a Bill on the consecration of bishops 
 sent up from the Commons was rejected by the Lords, and a 
 new Bill drawn by the Lords was passed by the Commons. 
 The Submission Bill or second Statute of Appeals was pre- 
 sented by the Commons in a body on the 37th of March, and 
 passed on the 30th. In convocation, on the 31st, the question 
 that the pope has no more power than any other bishop was 
 determined; this being probably regarded as their formal 
 judgment on more than one of the statutes which had 
 passed the Commons. We look in vain for any more deter- 
 mined or resolute action on either side. And again the 
 session passes without a money grant. A second session was 
 held in November mainly for this purpose ; and a second 
 meeting of convocation, in which the king was petitioned to 
 expedite the authoritative translation of the Bible. I enu- 
 merated I think in the last lecture the important acts of these 
 sessions. 
 
 There was no session in 1535. The Long Parliament 
 came to an end in 1536. Of its last session we have no 
 definite details, simply the Acts which it passed : the Journals 
 of Convocation deal only with the question of the subsidy. 
 Heniy had, we may presume, quelled all opposition in Par- 
 liament ; and, if contemporary annotators had been minded 
 to preserve particulars, they were lost in the grand and 
 tragic interest of public events. The dissolution of the 
 monasteries, the death of Queen Katharine, the awful tragedy 
 that closed the career of the Boleyns, the pilgrimage of grace, 
 and mutterings of rebellion in north and south, fill the pages 
 of the annalists. 
 
 For the second Parliament of i^'^G, that newly elected 
 after the fall of Anne Boleyn, we have much material: it 
 sat for six weeks, and has left full jom-nals, as has con- 
 vocation also. There is no reaction traceable in either. 
 If the Seymours inherited the influence of the Boleyns, 
 they were even more zealous for change and plunder 
 than their predecessors : but the real hero of the hour is 
 Cromwell, doing his master's work with zeal. CromweU, as 
 
XII.] The Six Articles. 287 
 
 the king's vicegerent, claims for himself or his deputy the 
 presidency of Convocation, and by his presence there invests 
 the proceedings of that body with an importance that Cranmer 
 could not have given. All that he proposes in the way of 
 change is passed without show of division ; and, even in the 
 direction of doctrinal reform, he carries things as far as the king 
 allowed. The legislation in parliament likewise is mainly 
 ecclesiastical ; and the jom-nals record nothing but assents. 
 
 I must pass on very rapidly now. The session of 1539, in 
 which the dissolution of the greater monasteries was accom- 
 plished and the Bill of Six Ai'ticles passed, was likewise held 
 under the predominating power of Cromwell, who had, how- 
 ever, learned to sink his protestant tendencies before his 
 master's stern orthodoxy. Convocation again worked with 
 the Parliament, and there are traces also that the clergy 
 attended under the prsemunientes clause ; but the new pre- 
 lates of Henry's nomination now outnumbered the old, and in 
 both assemblies the abbots and priors knew that they appeared 
 for the last time. 
 
 Yet abject as was the condition of a parliament which 
 could pass the Proclamation Act, there were still two parties 
 at work in it. The secret history of the Six Articles, 
 when it is known, will show that Cromwell's influence 
 was already shaken. The king proposes to abolish the 
 diversities of religion ; Cromwell, the two archbishops, and 
 six bishops, are named as a committee on the 3rd of May. 
 On the 1 6th the Duke of Norfolk announces that the com- 
 mittee cannot agree, and proposes that the Six Ai'tieles be 
 discussed in parliament. After some delay two committees 
 are, on the a3rd, appointed to draw up alternative schemes for 
 the king's approval on the following Sunday; the king 
 approves apparently that which is subsequently chosen. It 
 goes down in Cromwell's hand to the Convocation and is ac- 
 cepted there on June a. Between June 7 and June 16 it 
 passes the Lords, and the Commons also adopt it before the 
 28th, on which day the session ends. Of the other important 
 acts of the session that which empowered the king to create 
 new sees was passed through the whole of its stages in both 
 
288 Later Parliaments. [xii. 
 
 houses in one day : the Proclamation Act and another for the 
 rehabilitation of the religious, were, on the other hand, re- 
 jected by the Commons, redrawn and passed after several 
 days' discussion. 
 
 I must now pass very briefly over the incident of the 
 remaining parliaments. In that of 1540 the king's matri- 
 monial relations with Anne of Cleves were, by petition 
 of parliament, referred to and discussed in the convoca- 
 tions : the abbots finally disappeared from parliament ; the 
 House of Lords agreed that Mondays, Wednesdays, and 
 Fridays should be devoted, by the Royal Commissioners 
 appointed for the purpose, to the preparation of measures of 
 religious reform. Bishop Tunstall is bold enough to draw up 
 a protest against the subsidy, but this is the only trace of op- 
 position. Cromwell's fall was sudden and without sympathy ; 
 the Bill of Attainder for ti-eason passed the House of Lords 
 without an opposing vote ; the Commons added attaint for 
 heresy as well as for treason ; not a voice seems to have been 
 raised for him. Nay, in the House of Lords not a single 
 measure of the king's was opposed at all, and it is left on 
 record in the most unsentimental of all registers, the Journals 
 of the Lords, that not a single division occurred during the 
 whole session. In 1543, in the same way, no protest is made 
 against the sacrifice of Catherine Howard. But the king is 
 not satisfied with silent acquiescence ; he does not hesitate to 
 lU'ge both houses to work harder at that and other public 
 business ; again we find Tunstall protesting alone against 
 some minor measure :, the most remarkable event, from our 
 point of view, is the withdrawal from the House of Lords, at 
 the request of convocation, of a bill allowing laymen to act as 
 ecclesiastical judges ; a measure which, though withdrawn 
 now, became law in 1545. The convocation itself was very 
 busy in the matter of the translation of the Bible and Scrip- 
 tural formulae of prayer and belief. The same work occupied 
 the session of i543i in which we find Lord Mountjoy voting 
 by himself against the amplification of the Proclamation Act ; 
 and four bishops opposing the BiU for Collectors and Receivers. 
 Clearly the independent spirit, has nearly evaporated. The- 
 
XII.] Scraps. 289 
 
 ecclesiastical bills pass witliout a protest, but the Lords are 
 not reduced so low as they were in i540' The remaining 
 sessions, those of 1544, i545, and 1546, furnish nothing' that 
 illustrates our subject: the journals record no opposition or 
 protest ; the king has his own way in everything. 
 
 Time would fail me if I were to attempt to go into the 
 minor parliamentary cases of privilege, or to clothe or colour 
 the dry facts that I have been retailing to you ; or I might 
 describe how, when the Duke of Suffolk opened parliament, all 
 the members, every time the king's name occurred, bowed 
 until their heads all but touched the ground ; or how Henry 
 himself closed the session of 1545 with a sermon on charity; 
 how in 1515 parliament and convocation were so com- 
 fortably at one that Taylor, the clerk of the parliament, 
 was prolocutor of the Lower House of Canterbury : or how 
 ecstatically Hai-e and Moyle praised the beauty of their royal 
 master ; or how, when he brought the news of the king's 
 death, the rough old Wriothesley could not speak for tears : 
 or how weary the clerk of the pai'liament was of Audley's 
 speeches, which took such a long time to deliver, and so much 
 more to write out and read. 
 
 All our authorities, even the dry journals themselves, fur- 
 nish matters of amusement to inquiring minds. But time 
 has failed me already, and I must wind up with a few words 
 of sentiment. 
 
 I think, that after what I have said, you will allow me 
 to say that I have grounds for believing that Henry VIII 
 was the master, and in no sense the minister, of his 
 people: that, where he carried their good will with him, 
 it was \y forcing not by anticipating or even educating it. 
 I am obliged altogether to reject the notion that he was the 
 interpreter in any sense of the wishes of his people : the 
 utmost that he did in this direction was to manipulate and 
 utilise their prejudices to his own purposes. I allow fully the 
 truth of the theory that one great principle of his policy was 
 to obtain for his measui-es, for all his measures, the acqui- 
 escence of his people, and thus to invest them with a safe, 
 irrefragable authority ; but I must add that he knew how to 
 
290 Conclusion. [xli, 
 
 turn opposition into acquiescence, or to take acquiescence for 
 granted. Further, I am convinced, as I said in the last 
 lecture, that he was his own chief, I might say sole, counsellor, 
 not one of his other advisers, after the fall of Wolsey, succeed- 
 ing in becoming anything more than the instrument of a 
 grand, imperious, ever encroaching will. 
 
 And now let me confess that I do not think so hadly of 
 Henry VIII as the received views of either his advocates 
 or his enemies would suggest. The unhappy, most unhappy 
 history of his wives, has brought upon him an amount of 
 moral hatred which is excessive. Nine kings out of any 
 ten whom you may pick out of the list would have saved 
 their character for humanity by simple self-indulgence. No 
 absolutely profligate king could have got into the miser- 
 able abyss in which we find Henry VIII struggling during 
 the latter half of his reign. I do not believe that he was 
 abnormally profligate : in this region of morality he was not 
 better perhaps than Charles V, but he was much better than 
 Francis I, and Philip II, and Hemy IV, But he was cruelly, 
 royally vindictive ; there was in him an ever-increasing, ever- 
 encroaching self-will, ever grasping and grasping more and 
 more of power : a self-will guided by a high intellect, and 
 that sort of sincerity which arises from a thorough belief in 
 himself. I am not prepared to deny that deep, cunning, 
 unscrupulous men, like Cromwell, traded on their knowledge 
 of his character ; but not one of those who tried to work 
 their own ends through Henry escaped the doom to which 
 false friends and open foes alike found their way. 
 
 Well, you say, you would not wish to see him worse cursed. 
 I do not condemn him. God forbid, in whose hand are 
 the heai-ts of kings. I do not believe him to have been 
 a monster of lust and blood, as so many of the Roman 
 Catholic writers regard him. I cannot accept at all the 
 picture which Mr. Froude has drawn. I think that even 
 Lord Herbert's estimate of him is deficient in the perception 
 of his surpassing self- wilfulness. I do not attempt to pourtray 
 him after my own idea ; but I seem to see in him a grand 
 gross figure, very far removed from ordinary human sympa^ 
 
XII.] What. Henry was. 291 
 
 thies, self-engTossed, self-eonfident, self-willed ; unscrupulous in 
 act, violent and crafty, but justifying to himself, by his belief 
 in himself, both unscrupulousness, violence, and craft. A man 
 who regarded himself as the highest justice, and who looked 
 on mercy as a mere human weakness. And with all this, 
 as needs must have been, a very unhappy man, wretched in 
 his family, wretched in his friends, wretched in his servants, 
 most wretched in his loneliness : that awful loneliness in which 
 a king lives, and which the worst as well as the best of 
 despots realises. Have I drawn the outline of a monster? 
 Well, perhaps ; but not the popular notion of this particular 
 portent. A strong, high-spirited, ruthless, disappointed, soli- 
 tary creature ; a thing to hate, or to pity, or to smile at, or to 
 shudder at, or to wonder at, but not to judge. 
 
 T! 3 
 
XIIL 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE CANON LAW IN 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 (AprU 19, 1882.) 
 
 IT requires no small amount of moral courage to approack 
 a subject of legal history without being either a lawyer 
 or a philosopher. A lawyer, no doubt, would make short 
 work of it, and pronounce a definitive judgment, without mis- 
 giving, on any subject, historical or other, human or divine, 
 ■on which he had evidence before him ; and a philosopher 
 woidd systematise to his own satisfaction any accumulation 
 of details that could possibly be referred to the categories of 
 cause and eflfect. The student of history has not, ex officio, 
 any such privilege of infallibility ; the highest point to which 
 he can rise is the entire conviction of his own ignorance and 
 incapacity before the vast material of his investigation ; the 
 highest approach to infallibility is the willingness to learn 
 and correct his own mistakes. If he wishes to learn some- 
 thing of a subject his best policy is to write a book upon it, 
 or to deliver two public statutory lectures. Here then you have 
 my motive ; wanting to know something of the history of 
 Canonical Jurisprudence, I undertake to lectm-e upon it. 
 I shall be wiser, that is, more convinced of my own ignorance, 
 before I have done. 
 
 If I were a philosopher I should begin thus : The legal 
 history of a nation or institution must be the history of the 
 successive stages by which it develops or adopts laws, ac- 
 cording to the stages of its social, or moral, or political, or 
 religious development ; or thus : As a nation develops in 
 civilisation, or foreign policy, or in specialised ambitions, or 
 in consciousness of nationaUty, or in peculiar constitutional 
 
xiii.] Development of Law. 293 
 
 identity, it has to develop new branches or systems of law, 
 or to borrow them ready-made from nations whose polity is 
 in advance of its own, who have made themselves repre- 
 sentative nations in the particular branch of sociology in 
 which it desires to regulate itself. Hence, in England, on 
 the original superstructure of ancient popular law is super- 
 induced, in the age of the Conquest, the jus honorarium of 
 the royal courts ; and, when the royal courts have become 
 the courts of common law, on their rigour is superinduced 
 the moderating influence of Equity and Appeal: on the 
 conversion of the nation to Christianity a religious discipline 
 is a necessity, and on that religious discipline, as the frame- 
 work of the Church is built up, there is based a canonical 
 jurisprudence ; if the nation is in close communication with 
 foreign churches or a great Catholic religion, it naturally 
 adopts, from them or it, its religious legislation ; if not in 
 such close intercourse, it develops a system of its own, and, 
 when the intercourse becomes closer, modifies its own until it 
 is more or less in harmony with that of the nations round it, 
 always retaining more or less of its own home growth. Or 
 again, still as the philosopher, I might say: Religion, Law 
 and Morality cover the area of human action with rules and 
 sanctions, and, with different origins, motives, and machinery, 
 regulate regions of common energy, a number of acts that fall 
 within reach of each or aU. The fact that they spring from 
 different sources necessitates the formation of distinct systems ; 
 the fact that they cover the same ground accounts for the 
 possibility of conflicting operation ; the fact that, whUst 
 they overlap one another, their proper areas nowhere coincide, 
 necessitates some sort of definition and limitation of the 
 scope and system of each, which definition and limitation 
 must be supplied either by a concordat between them or by 
 the subordination of one to the other. And once more : 
 within the region of religious activity itself there are pro- 
 vinces which demand varying degrees of distinctness in 
 definition and graduation of discipline ; there ai-e matters of 
 doctrine, of discipline proper, of property and of judicature ; 
 there are legislation, jui-isdiction, administration ; there are 
 
294 Materials of Church Law. [xiii. 
 
 functions for the theologian, the casuist, the canonist, and 
 the civilian ; questions of doctrine for the theologian, of 
 morals for the casuist, of discipline for the canonist, of pro- 
 cedure for the civil lawyer. 
 
 Well, philosophical or not, these considerations seem to 
 give us a clue to the method of our investigation, and suggest 
 a division into two heads : first, the tracing of the growth of 
 the ecclesiastical law, including both the material and the 
 scientific study ; and secondly, the history of its working in 
 competition with and in general relations to the other 
 systems of law. In such a cursory attempt to examine 
 these heads as is possible in such a lecture as this, it is 
 necessary to limit the field of survey as much as possible. 
 I shall therefore restrict myself chiefly to the history of 
 ecclesiastical jurisprudence in England, taking liberty, where 
 it is necessary, to go beyond, but not attempting any general 
 treatment. I have, you wiU observe, coupled together four 
 topics under two heads ; I propose to take the two heads 
 separately, but to discuss the two topics that fall under each 
 conjointly. 
 
 The first head is the growth of ecclesiastical law, and its 
 two branches are the materials and the study. The materials 
 arrange themselves thus : the New Testament contains not 
 only all doctrine necessary to salvation, but aU necessary 
 moral teaching, and as much social teaching as was needed 
 for the age in which it was propounded, and for the society 
 which in the first instance was embodied under apostoKc 
 government. But in the very nature of things, and you 
 must here recollect that I am trying to look at the subject 
 rather as a philosopher than as a divine, Christianity, as a 
 growing religion, was certain to require an expansion, in 
 expanding circumstances, of the principles which were clearly 
 enough stated in the Gospel, but the application of which 
 had to be regulated by some other process than the wiU of 
 the individual. The moral teaching had to be expanded 
 authoritatively, the dogmatic teaching had to be fenced by 
 definitions, the administrative machinery had to be framed 
 with some attempt at uniformity, so that, whilst the Christian 
 
XIII.] Canons and Penitentials, 295 
 
 society remained a simple voluntary society with no power 
 of enforcing its own precepts by material sanctions, it should 
 have a common jurisprudence recognised by the conscience 
 of its members and by their general consent. Hence from 
 the days of the apostles there were councils, and canons, and 
 constitutions, and books of discipline ; at first the canons, 
 councils, and books of discipline covered all the ground of 
 which I have spoken — doctrine, discipline, and administration, 
 although some councils may be more famous for their de- 
 cisions on one point than on another. Not perhaps to speak 
 of the Apostolic Constitutions, take the council of Nicea for 
 an example, and remember that we owe to it not only a 
 formulated creed, but directions about consecration of bishops 
 and ordination of priests, and likewise rules for the treatment 
 of the lapsed and apostates, and the prohibition of usury. 
 The legislation of Constantino added a new element which 
 worked itself into all these three ; giving a coercive and 
 material force to rules which had been hitherto matters of 
 conscience and consensus ; the church was empowered to 
 enforce her doctrinal decisions, her rules of discipline, and 
 her frame of administration ; and that so completely that 
 from this date the ecclesiastical administration in Christian 
 countries under the empire became so wedded to the secular 
 administration as to be at times almost indistinguishable 
 from it except on close investigation. From this date then 
 our materials begin to sort themselves : the doctrinal defi- 
 nitions are embodied in the Creeds, and need not be pursued 
 further than the fom-th, or, at the outside, the sixth general 
 council : but the canons of discipline and administration are 
 worked into great detail for a long period and in many 
 countries. And here I must take a new point : the coercive 
 authority given to the churches in matters of morals becomes 
 henceforth a branch of jurisdiction, hut there still remain 
 branches of moral discipline which depend on voluntary 
 obedience, in which a powerful offender, or a man who does 
 not choose to confess, may defy law and order. For the 
 latter were invented what may be called manuals of casuistry. 
 the Penitentials ; for the jurisdiction proper there remained 
 
296 Rules of Penance. [xiii. 
 
 the canons of the councils, now possessing cogent authority, 
 and the laws of the empu-e, now framed on a strict conformity 
 between church and state. 
 
 Here then we reach the historical materials on which is 
 based the later canon law ; and almost at the same time the 
 date at which the conversion of England began. In the 
 middle of the sixth century Dionysius Exiguus, a Roman 
 abbot, compiled the collection of canons which was the germ 
 and model of all later collections. Nearly at the same time, 
 both in the Eastern Church under John the Faster, and in 
 the extreme West under the Irish and other Celtic mis- 
 sionaries, began the compilation of Penitentials ; and in the 
 same century the emperor Justinian completed the great body 
 of the civil law. Thus you get the three conjoint systems 
 of jurisprudence : not distinct in fact from each other ; over- 
 lapping everywhere, and even containing much common 
 matter, but distinct in basis. Take the Penitential first: 
 that was in reality a list of sins and their penances ; sins so 
 ticketed and valued as to please even the most abstract 
 philosopher ; permutated and combined to mathematical pre- 
 cision. This sort of literature, belonging especially to ages 
 and nations brought into close contact with heathen abomina- 
 tions, was very important in the last converted countries 
 of East and West ; Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, the 
 Venerable Bede, Egbert of York, and among the Celts Colum- 
 banus, Cummian, Vinniaus, and Adamnan, founded the 
 penitential system here : from them the Frank and German 
 churches adopted their rules, and by and by, when Anglo- 
 Saxon literature was borrowing from the Continent, our 
 scholars translated back with interest the developed systems 
 which their predecessors had sent abroad. These rules of 
 penance continue to be elaborated in England to the time 
 of the Conquest ; and bear some analogy to the early laws 
 of the Anglo-Saxon kings, which consist so largely of de- 
 finitions of crimes and penalties. It is to be remembered, 
 however, that the Penitentials were private compilations, the 
 authority of which depended on the estimation or dignity 
 of their authors, and not on any legislative sanction ; but, 
 
XIII.] Irish Canons. 297 
 
 notwithstanding that, there is sufficient harmony amongst 
 them to show that they incorporate the rules on which the 
 episcopal jurisdiction pure and simple generally proceeded ; 
 they ■ were a sort of customary church law for their own 
 province. But over and above these there were the canons, 
 or authorised church law, and of these also there was a 
 series of important collections. I am unable to say how far 
 the collection of Dionysius Exiguus was received in England 
 and Ireland at first : but from the beginning of the Church 
 History of United England, a series of new canons began 
 to be added to the early collections : Theodore himself added 
 the decisions of Roman and Byzantine councils to the re- 
 solutions of his own national synods : a great and important 
 succession of Anglo-Saxon councils issued canons which were 
 received with great respect in all the Western churches, as 
 we know from S. Boniface's letters and the remains of the 
 canons themselves. From Ireland likewise proceeded a great 
 collection of canons — the famous CoUatio Hibemica, which, 
 beginning with the edicts of S. Patrick, went on to embody 
 the results of ecclesiastical legislation in West and East, and, 
 by the time of Dunstan, whose copy of it we possess in the 
 Bodleian, had added by successive accretions all that was 
 thought worth preserving even in the capitularies of the 
 Frank kings. The Anglo-Saxon Chm-ch possessed no such 
 comprehensive collection of its own ; but abroad the codi- 
 fication of chm'ch law proceeded rapidly. I have seen in 
 the National Library at Paris some invaluable MS. collections 
 earlier than the date of the forged decretals ; and the forged 
 decretals themselves were probably not the work of one man 
 or one generation. Not however to tread again this well- 
 trodden path, pass on to the collectors of genuine or less 
 suspected canons : of whom the most important is Burchard 
 of Worms. He, at the beginning of the eleventh century, 
 got together and arranged systematically all the materials 
 he could find : borrowing authoritative determinations from 
 the penitentials, the canons of councils, articles of the civil 
 law as known to him by the Theodosian code, and the 
 capitularies of the emperors. A century later, bishop Ivo of 
 
i298 Religious Laws. [xiii. 
 
 Chartres produced the Pannoilnia, a similar collection, im- 
 proved on that of Burchard by the use of the Digest and 
 Code of Justinian. Ivo was a contemporary of Henry I of 
 England, and his date carries us past the Norman Conquest 
 and the Hildebrandine period. 
 
 We must revert to the third element of church law, the 
 religious laws of the kings. Of these the history in England 
 is straightforward enough. The Anglo-Saxon sovereigns, 
 acting in the closest union with their bishops, made eccle- 
 siastical laws which clothed the spiritual enactments with 
 coercive authority, and sometimes seemed to ignore the lines 
 which separate the two legislatures ; such sacred laws of 
 Alfred, Canute, and Ethelred only affect our subject so far as 
 they operated on the common law of the country in such 
 matters as tithes, observance of holy days, and the like ; they 
 do not become by themselves a part of the later church law. 
 On the Continent there is this difference : — the Theodosian 
 code had to a great extent won its way over Western Europe ; 
 it enters into the codes of the barbarians, into the law of the 
 Pays du droit ecrit, and into the canon law of France ; the 
 capitularies of Charles the Great and his successors, even to 
 a greater extent than the Anglo-Saxon laws, combine eccle- 
 siastical with secular dooms ; and such of them as are accepted 
 find their way into the Church law. But, over and above 
 this infiltration, comes the necessary requirement of deve- 
 loping jurisprudence. The New Testament, the canons of 
 the General Councils, the Penitentials, the Decretals, did not 
 invent new systems of procedure. Where the Koman courts 
 existed they became the model of the Church courts, and 
 where they did not the ecclesiastical procedure followed the 
 lines of the national and customary tribunals. Hence, wherever 
 the Theodosian code spread, it carried the Roman procedm-e as 
 a part of church administration ; where, as in England, only 
 feint seintillse of the civil law were to be found, the Church 
 courts must have proceeded on much the same rules as the 
 popular courts. And this is a matter to be seriously noted 
 as we reach the critical point of the Norman Conquest. It 
 is true we know veiy little about ecclesiastical procedure 
 
XIII.] Anglo-Saxon Courts. 299 
 
 before this date, and what we do know is not very clear ; 
 we may however aiErm pretty confidently that there was, 
 over and above the strictly private discipline of the Con- 
 fessional, a system of church judicature with properly desig- 
 nated judges, and a recognised though not well-defined area 
 of subject-matter in persons and things. To put it very 
 briefiy, sacred persons and sacred things, men in orders, monks 
 and nuns, sacred places, churches and churchyards, sacred pro- 
 perty, lands, books and the fumitm-e of churches, were under 
 the special protection, and, as protection implied jurisdiction, 
 under the jm-isdietion of the bishops, who likewise had autho- 
 rity in matrimonial and like causes. There was a territorial 
 episcopate, and the bishops exercised their judicial powers 
 with the help of archdeacons and deans. But, it would 
 appear, these judicial matters were transacted in the ordinary 
 gemots of the hundred and the shire. Just as the court 
 baron, court leet, and court customary of a manor are held 
 together, so the court spiritual and the hundred or county 
 court Were held together ; and the proceedings were probably 
 in strict analogy. Just as suretyship was the rule in the 
 hundred com-t, it was in the bishop's court ; so also com- 
 purgation and ordeal, the law of witness, and the claim of 
 the mundborh over the person of the litigant. I am not 
 prepared to say that through intercourse with the French 
 Church some portions of the Roman procedure may not 
 already have crept in, but, so far as I can see, I am inclined 
 to the belief that, whilst there was a customary canonical 
 law and a substantially canonical judicature, the character of 
 the procedure was customary and primitive, and diflfered in 
 nothing materially from the lay procedure. The bishop de- 
 clared the ecclesiastical law as the ealdorman did the secular, 
 the assessors determined the point on which evidence or oaths 
 were to be taken, and the suitors were technically the judges. 
 Of course all this is stated subject to correction : but this 
 I suppose to be the case at the Conquest, and more or less 
 the case until the close of the reign of Henry I, for the 
 changes introduced by the Conqueror were not instantaneous 
 in their effects. 
 
300 The Norman Changes. {xiii. 
 
 And we come now to the consideration of the effects of the 
 Conquest on this branch of our constitutional system. Here 
 we have to remember two things : first, that the Norman 
 Conquest coincided in time with the Hildebrandine revival ; 
 and secondly, that the Conqueror carried through his most 
 important measures of change by the work of Norman eccle- 
 siastics, many of them lawyers rather than theologians ; of 
 whom Lanfranc, the representative of a family of Lombard 
 lawyers, was the chief. These two points enable us at once 
 to estimate the importance of the act by which William 
 separated the work of the bishops' courts from the work of 
 the sheriffs' eom-ts, and promised the assistance of the royal 
 or secular justice in carrying into effect the sentences of the 
 episcopal laws. In the first place he had substituted for the 
 native bishops, used to national law and customary procedure, 
 foreign bishops learned in the Hildebrandine jurisprudence 
 and the Roman procedure ; and in the second he had libe- 
 rated the Church judicature from its association with the 
 popular judicature. But, you will observe, much still re- 
 mained to be done ; for not yet had either Ivo or Gratian 
 collected the Deeretum, nor had Irnerius and the Bolognese 
 lawyers begun to leetui-e on the Pandects ; there was not 
 as yet a recognised canon law or a complete civil law 
 procedure. 
 
 One immediate result more I will notice, the breaking up 
 of the dioceses into archdeaconries ; for up to this time the 
 bishops had done most of their own work. Dunstan had sat 
 at the south door of Canterbury Cathedral and had ad- 
 ministered supreme justice ; and one archdeacon, generally in 
 deacon's orders, had been a sufficient eye for the bishop where 
 he could not be personally present. The Norman bishops 
 wanted more than one eye, and, almost immediately after 
 the Conqueror's legislative separation of the courts, we find 
 that the archidiaconal service is formed on the plan of that of 
 the sheriffs ; the larger dioceses, such as Lincoln and London, 
 being broken up into many archdeaconries ; and the smaller 
 ones, such as Norwich, following the example. There was 
 a vast increase in ecclesiastical litigation, great profits and 
 
XIII.] Civil and Canon Law. 301 
 
 fees to be made out of it ; a craving for canonical juris- 
 prudence and reformed judicature analogous to the development 
 of constitutional machinery ; and with it the accompanying 
 evUs of ill-trained judges and an ill-understood system of 
 law. This continued to be the case throughout the twelfth 
 century, and very conspicuously so in the earlier part of it. 
 The archdeacons were worldly, mercenary, and unjust ; the 
 law was uncertain and unauthoritative; the procedure was 
 hurried and irregular. The evils were not confined to England, 
 although they were here intensified by the fact of the novelty 
 of the system. 
 
 On this condition of thiags a new light arose in the 
 middle of the centuiy ; the resuscitation of the jurisprudence 
 of Justinian and the codification of the canons by Gratian. 
 The one supplied the necessary procedure, the other the ne- 
 cessary law. I place them together, because their operation 
 reaches England nearly at the same time ; more minutely, 
 the civil law revival precedes the canon law revival by about 
 forty years. I must say also that, when I speak of the civil 
 law as remodelling procedure, I do not mean that it intro- 
 duced any sudden changes, but that it supplied principles and 
 precedents for the due development of the older Roman 
 procedure, which had become as much a matter of custom 
 as that of the popular jurisprudence was. The real founder 
 of the medieval canon law jurisprudence in England was 
 Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was consecrated in 
 1139 and ruled the Church until 1161 ; he is best known 
 popularly as the rival of Henry of Blois, Bishop of Win- 
 chester, and as the patron of Thomas Becket ; but his real 
 importance is irrespective of personal matters. He saw the 
 mischief which the maladministration of the archdeacons was 
 doing, and instituted a nearer official of greater authority 
 and more direct responsibility. John of Salisbury, the philo- 
 sopher and historian, was, as secretary to Archbishop Theobald, 
 the ancestor of the diocesan chancellors, officials and vicar- 
 generals, who begin to execute with more regularity and 
 intelligence the law of the Church. Henry of Blois when 
 legate had, as we are told, greatly encouraged the practice of 
 
302 Digest and Decretum. [xiii. 
 
 appeals ; and an immense proportion of John of Salisbury's 
 letters, written in the name of Theobald, are concerned with 
 questions of appeal, on the rights of advowsons, and other 
 branches of clerical discipline. But that was not all. In 
 the year 1149 Theobald brought from Lombardy and settled 
 at Oxford as a teacher Master Vaearius, who had given him- 
 self to the study of the Code and Digest, and drawn up 
 handbooks of procedure suiEeient to settle all the quarrels 
 of the law schools. Stephen, the reigning king, set himself 
 stedfastly against this new teaching and expelled Vaearius ; 
 he had on his side the unintelligent dislike of foreign manners, 
 the prudent conservatism of the elder prelates, and the per- 
 sonal jealousies of his brother Henry, whose opponent ia 
 political matters Theobald was. Accordingly the civil law 
 was for the time banished. In the year 1151 Gratian com- 
 pleted the Decretum, the concordance of the canon laws ; and 
 they shortly found their way to England, where however 
 they were scarcely more warmly received than the civil laws 
 had been, but were not directly banished. It is curious that 
 both Prynne and Selden, not to mention Coke, have con- 
 founded the teaching of Vaearius with the attempt to intro- 
 duce canon law. It is certain that what Vaearius taught was 
 the Corpus Juris of Justinian ; but the two systems are thus 
 closely joined together both in time and in essential character. 
 And from this time dates in England that extremely close 
 connexion between the two systems which is recognised in 
 the ' Utriusque juris doetoratus ' and in the fact that every 
 great canonist throughout the middle ages in England was 
 also a great civilian. 
 
 The first result perhaps of these novelties, so far as English 
 law is concerned, was the improvement in legal education. 
 Although Bologna and Pavia could not be suffered to come 
 to England, England might go to Bologna ; and a stream of 
 young archdeacons, at the age at which in England a boy is 
 articled to an attorney, poured forth to the Italian law schools. 
 Many and varied were their experiences ; but invariably they 
 get into debt and write home for money ; some of them fall 
 in love and become the quasi-husbands of Italian ladies ; some 
 
xin.] Henry II. 303 
 
 get a bad character for learning the Italian art of poisoning ; 
 some are killed in frays with the natives ; some remain abroad 
 and become professors ; all more or less illustrate the scholastic 
 question which John of Salisbury propounds, Is it possible for 
 an archdeacon to be saved ? There are some few exceptions, 
 but they seem to be generally of the men who stuck to 
 theology and went for their education no further than Paris. 
 The scrapes of the archdeacons however I have spoken of 
 before ; they are a really amusing feature of the epistolary 
 correspondence of the time. I pass on to something more 
 important. 
 
 Great as the advantages might be of an improved code of 
 laws and system of procedure, neither the canon law nor the 
 civil law was accepted here ; they were rejected not only by 
 the stubborn obscurantism of Stephen, but by the bright and 
 sagacious intellect of Henry II. Now, considering the close 
 political connexion between Theobald and the Plantagenet 
 party, it is not at all impossible that Henry II may have 
 been among the pupils of Vacarius : certainly he was more of 
 a lawyer than mere empirical education could make him, and, 
 as certainly, he was awake to the difficulties to which too 
 ready acceptance of the reformed jurisprudence would expose 
 him. How great a lawyer he was I need not tell you ; how 
 directly his difficulties were owing to the new doctrines of the 
 canon lawyers we know from the history of Becket. I will 
 only mention two points that illustrate his permanent relation 
 to the subject : first, his Assize of Darrein Presentment re- 
 moved all questions of advowsons and presentations from the 
 ecclesiastical courts where they were the source of constant 
 appeals .to Rome ; and secondly, by the Constitutions of 
 Clarendon he did his best to limit the powers of the ecclesi- 
 astical lawyers in criminal matters and in all points touching 
 secular interests. Against this must be set the fact that to 
 his days must be fixed the final sliding of testamentary juris- 
 diction into the hands of the bishops, which was by the legis- 
 lation of the next century permanently left there, in a way 
 which, however accordant with the policy of the papacy, was 
 an exception to the rule of the rest of Christendom. Henry, 
 
304 Common and Canon Law. [xiii. 
 
 although not by any known assize or constitution, must have 
 restrained the ecclesiastical judicature from interfering in 
 secular matters, except in the two points of matrimony, which 
 was closely connected with a saci-amental theory, and of tes- 
 tamentary business. These two, however, furnished matter 
 sui&ciently remunerative for a school of church lawyers ; and 
 the more distinctly ecclesiastical jurisdiction over spiritual 
 things and persons provided much more. A thoroughly 
 learned class of civil and canon lawyers is required over and 
 above the thoroughly learned class of common law and (to 
 anticipate a little) chancery lawyers of the royal courts. 
 
 Here then we begin to mark signs of increasing divergence. 
 The common lawyers of England, the men who tread in the 
 steps of Glanville, who are closely allied with the baronage and 
 with the customary theories of prerogative, are opposed to the 
 introduction of either branch of the Roman law. Glanville, 
 antieipatiag the decision of the Statute of Merton on the 
 question of legitimisation of children by the subsequent mar- 
 riage of their parents, speaks of the ' canones legesque 
 E-omanorum' with the same tone of aversion. The eccle- 
 siastics who followed the common law were as adverse to the 
 Roman law as were the knights and barons who learned 
 secular juiisprudence in the discharge of executive office : and 
 very rarely do we find a great judge of the courts of West- 
 minster taken from the ranks of canonists or civilians. Yet 
 the educational influence of these two great systems was 
 making itself felt very early indeed. Not only does Glanville^ 
 in the preface to his manual, cite from the Institutes the lan- 
 guage in which he addresses his master, but large importations 
 from the civil law procedure must have come in as the juris- 
 prudence developed ; and Bracton, who wrote a centmy after 
 Glanville, makes direct citations from the compilations of Jus- 
 tinian. If I were not afraid of the lawyers, I should venture 
 to say that the whole theory of Appeals and the whole subject 
 of Equity are strange to the national growth of the common 
 law, and, although widely differing in details, far more akin to 
 the civil law, the practice of which in ecclesiastical causes was 
 steadily before men's eyes whilst they, were developing the 
 
XIII.] Legal Education. 305 
 
 new systems. But I daxe not venture to say this without 
 more authority. 
 
 As we proceed, however, we are struck more and more with 
 the prominence of the scientific element in legal education. 
 The great compilations are not received as having any 
 authority in England, but they are the sole legal teaching 
 which is to be obtained in the schools where Englishmen go 
 to learn law. The common law judges may not be canonists 
 or civilians, but the statesmen, in many cases at least, are ; 
 certainly archbishops Langton and Boniface and Peckham 
 and Winchelsey. And even of the common lawyers it must 
 be affirmed that their teaching, such as they had, was not 
 merely empirical, not the mere knowledge of customs and the 
 few statutes that were as yet incorporated in the common law 
 code ; but scientific, that is, learned from the writings of 
 jm'ists who treated not merely of the letter or the case, but of 
 the spirit and reason of legislation. GlanviUe's is indeed but 
 a book of procedure, but Bracton, Fleta, and Britton are 
 jurists, and whilst they illustrate and explain the common 
 law, bring to the interpretation an intelligence and authority 
 that look to something far higher than precedent. We see 
 how long the old doctrine of the authority that is in the 
 mouth of the judge stands out against the new doctrine that 
 is in the letter of the law. Like the 'decretum,' like the 
 ' responsa prudentum ' of the Pandects, the work of Bracton is 
 a scientific rather than an authoritative text-book. But I am 
 anticipating what I ought to put in proper order somewhat 
 later. 
 
 Whilst the study of these foreign systems was becoming 
 increasingly important and increasingly common, the popular 
 dislike of foreign law was not in the least diminished. I 
 must here couple the two Roman systems together, for to all 
 purposes of domestic litigation they were inseparable : the 
 'canones legesque Eomanorum' were classed together and 
 worked together, mainly because it was only on ecclesiastical 
 questions that the civil law touched Enghshmen at all, but also 
 because without the machinery of the civil law the canon law 
 could not be worked ; if you take any well-drawn case of litiga- 
 
 X 
 
306 London Law Schools. [xiii. 
 
 tion in the middle ages, such as that of the monks of Canterbury 
 against the archbishops, yon will find that its citations from 
 the Code and Digest are at least as numerous as from the 
 Decretum. Moreover the accretions of the Decretum, the 
 Extravagants as they were called, that is the authoritative 
 sentences of the Popes which were not yet codified, were 
 many of them conveyed in answers to English bishops, or 
 brought at once to England by the clergy with the same 
 avidity that lawyers now read the terminal reports in the Law 
 Journal. The famous decision which Glanville quotes about 
 legitimation is embodied in what then was an Extravagant of 
 Alexander III, delivered to the bishop of Exeter in ii72j 
 founded no doubt on a Novel of Justinian but not tiU now 
 distinctly made a part of church law. And this point further 
 illustrates what I was saying : for it is the point on which 
 the great dictum of the council of Merton turns in 1236. 
 The English hatred of the foreigners was in that year fanned 
 to white heat by the importation of the king's half-brothers 
 and the new queen's uncles : it was an unlucky moment for 
 Grosseteste and the bishops to press that the English law of 
 bastardy should be altered to suit the canon and civil law of 
 Rome. The murmurs were already rising that William of 
 Valence was going to change the constitution. Notwith- 
 standing the influence of Grosseteste, the king and the barons 
 declared 'Nolumus leges Angliae mutari.' That is a well- 
 known story ; but it is perhaps not equally well known that 
 the king had just a year before issued an order which stands 
 in close parallelism with the banishment of Vaearius. By a 
 letter to the Lord Mayor of London, dated Dec. 11, 1234, he 
 had directed that no one should be allowed to hold law schools 
 in the city of London or teach the Laws. What laws were 
 these ? Coke thought that the king referred to Magna Carta 
 and the Carta de Forestis ; but Selden, and Prynne after him, 
 pointed out that this was inconceivable ; and that doubtless 
 the Laws were the canon laws. I think that under the term 
 Leges both civil and canon law were intended, but certainly 
 at the moment the danger from the canon law was greater. 
 In the year 1330 Gregory IX had approved of the five books 
 
XIII.] Olho and Othobon. 307 
 
 of Decretals codified by Raymund of Pennafort from the 
 Extravagants of the recent Popes and added to the Decretum 
 of Gratian. In 1335 Matthew Paris tells us the Pope was 
 urging the adoption of them throughout Christendom. But 
 they were not received in England, although they continued 
 to be the code by which English causes were decided at Rome, 
 and began to be an integral part of the education of English 
 canonists. And here again we have to distinguish between the 
 scientific or implicit and the explicit authority of these books. 
 Great as the influence of Justinian's code has been, there are very 
 few countries in Europe where it has been received as more than 
 a treasury of jurisprudence ; the ' Siete partidas ' of Alfonso the 
 Wise was a book of jurisprudence, not a code of law ; the in- 
 dependence of the Gallican Church turns, as a historical 
 question, on the non-reception of Roman decrees, the accept- 
 ance of the council of Basel, and the non-reception of portions 
 of the Tridentine canons, the incidental working of which 
 must, notwithstanding, have been irresistible and undeniable. 
 So in England neither the civil law nor the canon law was 
 ever received as authoritative, except educationally, and as 
 furnishing scientific confirmation for empiric argument ; or, in 
 other words, where expressly or accidentally it agrees with the 
 law of the land. Nay, the scientific treatment itself serves 
 to confuse men's minds as to the real value of the text ; and 
 in both laws the opinions of the glossers are often cited as of 
 equal authority with the letter of the law or canon. 
 
 But this same date 1236 brings me to another point; the 
 begiiming of the Codex receptus of Canon Law in England ; 
 in spite of the Council of Merton and the closing of the law 
 schools of London. Since the Conquest most of the arch- 
 . bishops had held provincial synods and issued provincial 
 canons ; but many of these were acts of a temporary character 
 only, and, even when they received support and confirmation 
 from the kings, seldom amounted to more than the enforce- 
 ment of discipline which had previously been authorised by 
 papal or eonciliar decrees. These canons are extant in the 
 pages of the annalists, but remain rather among the Responsa 
 Prudentum than as materials for a code. Just, however, as 
 
 X a 
 
3o8 English Constitutions. [xiii. 
 
 the statute law of England begins with the reign of Henry III, 
 so does the codification of the national canon law. Archbishop 
 Langton's Constitutions may be set first, but next in order, 
 and even of greater authority, come the Constitutions of the 
 legate Otho, which were passed in a national council of 1 337; 
 After these come Constitutions of the successive archbishops, 
 especially Boniface of Savoy and Peckham, which were drawn 
 up in a very aggressive spirit ; Boniface taking advantage of 
 Henry Ill's weakness to urge every claim that the English 
 law had not yet cut down, and Peckham going beyond him in 
 asserting the right of the Church against even the statutable 
 enactments of the state. Between Boniface and Peckham in 
 the year ia68 come the Constitutions of Othobon, which were 
 confirmed by Peckham at Lambeth in 1381, and which, with 
 those of Otho, were the first codified and glossed portions of 
 the national church law. In the reign of Edward III, John 
 of Ayton, canon of Lincoln, an Oxford jurist it is said, col- 
 lected the canons adopted since Langton's time and largely 
 annotated the Constitutions of Otho and Othobon. Contem- 
 poraneously with this accumulation of national materials, the 
 Corpus Juris of the Church of Rome was increasing ; Boniface 
 VIII added the sixth book to the five of Gregory IX, and 
 John XXII added the Clementines in 131 8 ; and his own de- 
 cisions, with those of the succeeding popes, were from time to 
 time added as Extravagants unsystematised. The seventh 
 book of the Decretals was drawn up under Sixtus V as late as 
 1588 ; so that practically it lies outside our comparative view. 
 Of course very much of the spirit of both the Sixth and the 
 Clementines found its way into England, but the statute law 
 was increasing in vigour, the kings were increasing in vigil- 
 ance, and after the pontificate of Clement V the hold of the 
 papacy on the nation was relaxing. Occasionally we find an 
 archbishop like Stratford using the papal authority and assert- 
 ing high ecclesiastical claims against the king, but the 
 age of the Statutes of Prasmunire and Provisors was come, 
 and no wholesale importation of foreign law was possible. 
 Not to multiply details, I wiU summarily state that in the 
 reign of Henry V William Lyndwood, the Dean of the Arches, 
 
XIII.] Lyndwood's Provinciale. 309 
 
 collected, arraaged, and aniLotated the accepted Constitutions 
 of the Church of England in his Provinciale, which, with the 
 collections of John of Ayton generally found in the same 
 volume, became the authoritative canon law of the realm. It 
 of course was proper in the first instance to the province of 
 Canterbury, but in 146a the Convocation of York accepted 
 the Constitutions of the southern province as authoritative 
 wherever they did not differ from those of York, and from the 
 earlier date the compilation was received as the treasury of law 
 and practice. Nor were any very material additions made to 
 it before the Reformation ; for although the Church of 
 England was deeply involved in the transactions of the 
 Council of Basel, and might, if the matter had been broached 
 as distinctly as it was in France, have formally accepted its 
 canons, no such incorporation of those canons ever took place 
 here as was accomplished in the Pragmatic Sanction of 
 Bourges in 1438. 
 
 Still, authoritative as Ljmdwood's code undoubtedly was, it 
 was rather as the work of an expert than as a body of statutes 
 that it had its chief force. The study of the canon law was a 
 scientifie and professional, not merely mechanical study ; and 
 just as much was the study of the civil law also. I think that 
 I am right in repeating that it was mainly as a branch of 
 church law that the civil law was studied at all ; but I do not 
 mean that it was so exclusively. In the infancy of inter- 
 national law and the administration of both admiralty and 
 martial law, the English jurists had to go beyond their insular 
 practice, and to no other source could they apply themselves ; 
 hence the association which to the present day has subsisted 
 between the curiously unconnected departments of maritime 
 and matrimonial jurisdiction. It is really owing to the dis- 
 tinction between scientifically and empirically trained lawyers. 
 Of the indirect influence of scientific jurisprudence on the 
 common law and chancery I have spoken already. 
 
 England has then for at least two centuries before the 
 Reformation a body of law and a body of judges, for eccle- 
 siastical and allied questions, quite apart from the law and 
 judicial staff of the secular courts ; and, with the growth of 
 
3IO Canon Law in England. [xiir. 
 
 the Universities, she begins to have educational machinery for 
 training- her lawyers. In this department of work, however, 
 the scientific study has a long- start and advantage over the 
 empirical. The common law has to be learned by practising 
 in the courts, or by attending on their sessions. The appren- 
 tices and Serjeants of the Inns of Court learn their work in 
 London ; their study is in the year books and the statute 
 book, a valuable and even curiously interesting accumulation 
 of material, but thoroughly insular, or less than that, simply 
 English. The canonists and civilians have also their house in 
 London, the ' Hospitium dominorum advocatorum de areubus,' 
 but they are scarcely less at home at Rome and Avignon. 
 The canonist and civilian learn the legal language of entire 
 Christendom; the London lawyer sticks to his Norman- 
 French. The Norman-French of Westminster is unintelligible 
 beyond the Channel and beyond the border. Scotland, the 
 sister kingdom, is toiling vrithout a common law system at aU 
 until, in the sixteenth century, James V introduces the law of 
 Justinian as her treasury of common law, and thus gains Uni- 
 versity training and foreign experience for her lawyers : but 
 England has an ancient system and is content with her own 
 superiority ; her common law is of native growth, strengthen- 
 ing with the strength of her people ; she sees the nations 
 that have accepted the civil law sinking under absolutism ; as 
 distinctly as ever ' non vult leges Anglise mutari.' But she 
 has ceased to banish the skilled jurist. Oxford and Cambridge 
 have their schools of both the faculties. The civil law at 
 Oxford had its schools from the fourteenth century in Cat 
 Street, on the north of S. Mary's, in Schidyard Street, and in 
 the great civil law school in S. Edward's parish where Arch- 
 bishop Warham learned law. The canon law school was in 
 the neighbourhood of S. Edward's church also, and was rebuilt 
 in 1489 by subscription of the canonists. Wood enumerates 
 no less than seven distinct sets of Scholse Legum, the majority 
 being for civil law. In the colleges legal study has its proper 
 endowments. At Merton the study of the canon law is by 
 the founder's statutes permitted to four or five of his scholars, 
 that of the civil law is allowed to the canonists as subsidiary 
 
XIII.] In Oxford. 3 1 1 
 
 to their proper study, pro utilitabe ecclesiastici regiminis. At 
 Oriel five or six fellows, with consent of the seniors, might 
 read the canon law, and by dispensation of the provost, the 
 civil law also. At Exeter, one of Stapledon's fellows was to 
 study Seriptui-e or the Canon Law. We learn from Mr. Mul- 
 linger's invaluable book on Cambridge, that at Gonville Hall, 
 founded about seventy years after Merton, each fellow was 
 allowed to study canon law for two years. It might be pos- 
 sible to trace in the successive foundations vestiges of the old 
 subsisting and often revived jealousy of the studies ; for 
 Merton was founded at a time when, as Roger Bacon tells us, 
 the civil law was looked on with jealousy as a mere pro- 
 fessional or money-making study, whilst before the foundation 
 of Gonville Hall the conflict between John XXII and Lewis 
 of Bavaria had made the political tendencies of these studies 
 more important and obvious. At Trinity Hall, which was 
 nearly of the same date as GonviUe, ten civilians and seven 
 canonists were seventeen out of the twenty statutory fellows. 
 At New College, out of seventy there were to be ten civilians 
 and ten canonists, but these were reduced by Waynflete to two 
 civilians and four canonists. At All Souls, sixteen out of 
 forty were to be lawyers ; at King's College, Cambridge, out 
 of seventy, two civilians and four canonists ; while at Catharine 
 Hall both the canon and civil law were excluded. These 
 variations depend no doubt on the special intentions of the 
 founders to promote scientific study, or to insure the worldly 
 advancement of their pupils, and, to some extent, on the 
 varying relations between theology and law of which I must 
 speak in the next lecture. It is however clear, at the lowest 
 estimate, that abundant encouragement and opportunities for 
 the study could be found in both the seats of learning. 
 Closely allied as the canon and civil laws were, they composed 
 two faculties ; with regular schemes of lectures, fees, and exer- 
 cises ; the doctor of the civil law had to prove his knowledge 
 of the Digest and the Institutes ; the doctor of the canon law 
 must have worked three years at the Digest and three at the 
 Decretals, and studied theology also for two years. It is, you 
 observe, not the national church law, but the universal or 
 
312 Canonists and Civilians. [xiii. 
 
 scientific material, on whicli lie is employed. In a great 
 number of cases the degrees were taken at the same time, but 
 as the era of the Reformation approaches the canonists become 
 more numerous than the civilians at Cambridge, and probably 
 at Oxford also. But these points belong to a view of the sub- 
 ject on which I cannot pretend to enter now ; and indeed it is 
 in the conflict of laws rather than the conflict of studies that 
 the present interest of the subject lies. In the next lecture 
 I shall have to recur for some points to the ground which I 
 have attempted to cover in this, for the struggles and jealousies 
 of the rival and allied systems of jurisprudence do not date 
 from the Reformation only. Here, however, I stop now, 
 having in a cursory way traced the history of the materials of 
 the canonical jurisprudence so far down. We shall have to 
 begin by looking at the later history from the theological as 
 well as from the legal side, and to follow it through the Refor- 
 mation period, steering clear, as much as possible, of questions 
 of modern controversy. 
 
XIV. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE CANON LAW IN 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 (April 20, 1882.) 
 
 IN the first of these two public lectures I attempted to give 
 a sketch of the growth of the Canon Law ; its origin and 
 materials, its introduction into England and the limits of 
 authority which it attained here, its relation to the civil law 
 of Rome, and the distinction between the scientific study of 
 the Decretals in the Universities and the professional use of 
 the Provinciale in the Ecclesiastical Courts. The second 
 branch of the subject, as I proposed to treat it in opening the 
 lecture, is the history of its working in competition with and 
 in general relations to other systems of law : a branch of the 
 discussion which compels us at once to go back to the very 
 root of the subject. Canon law as a code, and the civil law of 
 Rome as a treasury of procedure, working together in the 
 hands of ecclesiastical lawyers, may be for the moment looked 
 at together ; and the first aspect which our subject then takes 
 is the attitude of the system towards theology on the one 
 side and to the national, or, as lawyers would perhaps call it, 
 municipal law on the other. From the Conquest to the 
 Reformation canon law, proceeding by civilian method, and 
 being able to call on the municipal executive to put its 
 sentences in force, is a strong Hnk between theology and 
 national discipline ; but a link with so much intricate work- 
 manship employed upon it as to be offensive in many ways 
 both to theology and to the common law. The theologian 
 saw the great commandments of God, and the statutes of the 
 Chui'ch, and the voice of conscience, lowered by being made 
 dependent for their cogency on an elaborate system of human 
 
314 Secularity of Canon Law. [xiv. 
 
 invention which fettered freedom of action, and in some 
 respects freedom of thought also ; which reduced moral ohli- 
 gations to a system of penances, pecuniary commutations, 
 monitions, and excommunications, and which made use of the 
 sacraments of the Church as the mere means and appliances 
 of a coercion to external good behaviour, which ought to be a 
 free-will offering and the instinctive product of a sincere 
 heart. Do not think that I am exaggerating the attitude of 
 repulsion in which the pure theologian and the pure moralist 
 stood to th,e ecclesiastical lawyer who was making money out 
 of the practice of the Courts Christian. You remember how 
 John of Salisbury had doubted whether an archdeacon could 
 be saved : Roger Bacon declares that the study of the civil 
 law, attracting the clever men among the clergy, threw the 
 study of theology into a second place, and secularised the 
 clerical character, making the priest as much a layman as 
 the common lawyer ; while Richard of Bury, the author of 
 the Philobiblion, and Holcot the great scholastic, declared, 
 the one that the civilian, although he gained the friendship of 
 the world, was an enemy of God ; the other, that under exist- 
 ing relations the handmaid Hagar, despising the true wife, 
 was in apt analogy to the contempt under which neglected 
 theology sank in the estimation of the world as compared with 
 the law. It is trae that these remarks have a primary 
 reference to the civil law, but, as I showed, the civil law was 
 learned chiefly as the executive of the canon law, and it was 
 by its relations to the canon law that it became practical and 
 remunerative. I need not go into much detail about this, 
 but, if I am speaking to any who attended my lectures on 
 Oekham and Marsilius, they will remember how not only 
 those great writers, but a crowd of minor ones, attack the 
 canon law and its professors as the great enemies, not only of 
 civil government but of vital religion: an exaggeration no 
 doubt, but founded on a true principle. ' Who,' says John of 
 Salisbury, himself a canonist, ' ever rises pricked at heart from 
 the reading of the laws, or even of the canons ^ ? ' The 
 practice of these studies stood to theology, stood to religion 
 ' Joi. Salisb. i. 196, epist. 138. 
 
XIV.] Conflicts and Jealousies. 315 
 
 itself, in the relation in which the casuistry of the confessional 
 stood to true moral teaching. 
 
 When however we turn, as we must do, to consider the 
 attitude of the national law and the national lawyers, we see 
 more distinctly how incompatible were the systems which, for 
 four hundred years, from the Conquest to the Reformation, 
 stood side by side, with rival bodies of administrators and 
 rival or conflicting processes. Look first at the area of matters 
 with which the canon law assumed to deal : it claimed juris- 
 diction over everything that had to do with the souls of men, 
 and I think there is scarcely a region of social obligation into 
 which, so defined, it would not claim to enter. It claimed 
 authority over the clergy, in matters civil and eriminalj in 
 doctrine and practice, in morals and in manners, education and 
 dress, in church and out. It claimed authority over all suits 
 in which clergymen were parties, or in which ecclesiastical 
 property was involved ; I say, mark you, claimed, rather than 
 exercised, for some of these are the points in which the struggle 
 with the national law arises. It claimed authority over the 
 belief and morals of the laity, in the most comprehensive way. 
 The whole of the matrimonial jurisdiction, the whole of the 
 testamentaiy jurisdiction was, we know, specially regarded as 
 a branch of canon law ; but by its jurisdiction for correction 
 of life, ' pro salute animae,' it entered into every man's house ; 
 attempted to regulate his servants, to secure his attendance 
 at church, to make him pay his debts, to make him observe 
 his oaths, to make him by spiritual censures, which by the 
 alliance with the State had coercive force, by the dread of a 
 writ of capias excommunicatum, to keep all the weightier 
 matters of the law, not only judgment, mercy, and truth, but 
 faith, hope, and charity also. Now the common law of the 
 land was quite competent to deal first with ecclesiastical 
 property, temporalities, advowsons, and the right to tithes ; 
 the canon law dealt with the qualifications of presentees and 
 the exaction of tithes : the common law was competent to 
 deal with matters of debt or theft ; the canon law claimed to 
 deal with matters of credit or dishonesty in legal and moral as 
 in spiritual obligations : the common law dealt with dower, 
 
3 1 6 Concurrent Systems. [xiv. 
 
 the eanon law with matrimony ; the common law with suc- 
 cession to property, the canon law with legitimacy. So over 
 great regions of property law, and over the whole domain of 
 moral delinquency, the medieval world had two sets of courts 
 at which they might sue, and two sets of lawyers to keep 
 alive with fees and retainers. The canonists affirm that a 
 suit may be brought in the ecclesiastical court for every 
 matter which is not cognisable in the courts of secular law, 
 and for a great many matters which are so cognisable. There 
 is sm-ely an ample claim. I do not want to go into detail, but 
 I will just point out one particular ; the commissary of the 
 Bishop of London entertained suits exactly analogous to those 
 of the trades unions of the present day, turning on the ques- 
 tion how far it is a breach of oath for the sworn member 
 of a guild to impai't the arts and mysteries of his guild to 
 outsiders. 
 
 Here then you see the elements of a pretty conflict ; between 
 the jurists as a matter of scientific or empiric lore, between 
 the praxitising lawyers a conflict for practice and for profits ; 
 and you can see how degrading the practical part of the pro- 
 fession was to the theological student, or to the parish priest. 
 Over and above this, there was the natural jealousy of the 
 crown and the parliament. If the canon law had restricted 
 itself to really spiritual questions, matters of belief or of morals 
 for which the national code had no provision, it is not Hkely 
 that the kings would have been jealous of papal or ai'chi- 
 episcopal enactments, or would have stood on their rights 
 when the exact line was occasionally overstepped. But the ex- 
 travagance of ecclesiastical claims provoked them to opposition 
 and justified it. When the archbishops of Henry Ill's reign 
 claimed exclusive jurisdiction in suits of advowsons, the right to 
 exact personal tithes, and to try all questions of credit granted 
 ' fide interposita,' even so gentle a worm as the king turned 
 again ; and we find among his letters, and still more among 
 those of his son, constant cautions to the primates and their 
 convocations not to attempt anything to the prejudice of the 
 crown and customs of the land, as well as innumerable pro- 
 hibitions to ecclesiastical judges against their trying other 
 
xrv.] Confusion of Functions. 317 
 
 civil suits than those which, touch testamentary or matri- 
 monial matters. Edward II had to prohibit the employment 
 of imperial notaries. In the spiritual matters proper, the kings 
 seldom interfered ; only where a political motive was sus- 
 pected, or where a servant of the crown was attacked, or where 
 the spiritual judge had clearly gone beyond his discretion. 
 The Church history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 
 is full of cautions and prohibitions, and of struggles between 
 the officers who had thus to interfere with one another ; and 
 the definitions of the ' Articuli Cleri ' under Edward II which 
 prescribed the points on which prohibitions were to be granted, 
 and the Statute of Praemunire under Edward III, which for- 
 bade the multiplication of appeals to Rome, did little to 
 ameliorate relations. When however heresy became a matter 
 of litigation, the two systems deliberately worked together ; 
 and, although there were many hitches, during the whole of 
 the Lancastrian period there was more definite co-operation 
 and less conflict. The common law was really becoming more 
 a matter of scientific treatment, and the greatest judges were 
 men who had had scientific education on both sides. Sometimes 
 there was, as was natural, a little inconsistency and awkward- 
 ness ; the bowsprit got mixed up with the rudder ; as when 
 Morton, at once archbishop and chancellor, allowed his judg- 
 ment on a fraudulent executor to be modified by the reflexion 
 that he would be ' damnee in heU.' But this may have been 
 exceptional. 
 
 It must not however be supposed that the fault in this 
 rivalry was altogether to be ascribed to the canonists. The 
 English -trained lawyer was as infallible in that age as in this ; 
 and when we find him, and his brethren in the parliament, 
 constantly hampering the legitimate work of the church, we 
 see that there were two sides to the question ; when in the 
 fourteenth century the Commons petition that the clergy may 
 not make in their convocation canons to bind the laity, it is 
 rather a relief to find that the canons in question relate to 
 tithe of underwood: but when in 1446 we find the clergy 
 remonstrating that the professional lawyers ' pretended privi- 
 lege, by what right,' they say, ' we know not, to interpret 
 
3 1 8 The Reformation. [xrv. 
 
 acts of parliament and explain the mind of the legis- 
 lature, and by thus practising upon the statutes sometimes 
 ground their opinion on mysterious and unintelligible reasons, 
 and so wrest the laws contrary to the meaning and inten- 
 tion of parliament ; ' or petitioning that the judges who 
 showed such strong bias should no longer issue prohibitions, 
 but, when questions arose concerning the limits and juris- 
 diction of the rival courts, indifferent persons should be 
 pitched upon to judge them; or the lawyers, on the other 
 hand, striking at the root of all ecclesiastical jmisdiction. as 
 if it were a transgression of the Statute of Prssmunire ^, — 
 well, when we look at these things, we shall see that there 
 were questions unsettled even before the Council of Trent, 
 and hear opinions and complaints that sound like echoes 
 beforehand of voices with which in these days our ears are 
 too familial". 
 
 I must, however, now proceed to the Reformation, and 
 endeavour to determine, as strongly and as clearly as I can, 
 the bearing of that most critical era on our subject. Henry 
 VIII had, as early as 1515, seen a struggle between the 
 secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in Standish's case, in 
 the course of which he is said to have expressed himself as 
 determined to endure no division of sovereignty in his own 
 realm. Whether that was really said or merely put into his 
 mouth afterwards, I cannot say ; but certainly no scheme of 
 change in the relation between Church and State was set on 
 foot for nearly seventeen years. Then the business of the 
 divorce at Rome, and the discontent of the king with the 
 half-hearted support of the clergy at home, completed his 
 disgust, and he set out in the com-se of radical change. 
 Having in 1531 compelled the clergy by the threat of prse- 
 munire to recognise him as supreme head 'quantum per 
 Christi legem licet,' he induced the Commons in 1533 to 
 present a petition or remonstrance against the whole theory 
 and practice of the canon law. They attacked the power of 
 the clergy to make canons in convocation, they protested 
 against the exaction of fees and mortuaiies, and deliberately 
 
 ' WJlkins, iii. 555 (1447); Parker's Antiquitate?, 429. 
 
XIV.] Szibmission of ike Clergy. 319 
 
 impugned the honesty and purity of the episcopal courts in all 
 their branches and with reference both to jurisdiction and to 
 procedure. This petition had two results ; the parliament 
 passed bills to limit the benefit of clergy and forbid feoffments 
 to the use of churches. An earlier session in 1529 had 
 attempted to deal with probate and mortuaries ; this, by the 
 Statute of Citations, cut down the power of the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury to entertain suits from other dioceses except by 
 appeal or on request, and so struck at the root of the universal 
 jurisdiction enjoyed by the Court of Arches and its advocates. 
 The same term — the second result of the king's policy — the 
 Convocation was compelled to surrender its right of meeting 
 and legislating, and to consent to a revision of the canon law 
 to be earned into execution by a mixed body of clergy and 
 laity whom the king should appoint. This last concession 
 sealed the fate of the old scientific study of the canon law, 
 which, as we have seen, was a distinctly popish study ; and, if 
 it had not been accompanied by a limiting clause, allowing 
 the old canons, so far as they were not opposed to the law of 
 the land, to stand until the revision was published, there 
 would have been an entire abolition of ecclesiastical jurisdiction 
 of any kind. In i535 Cromwell, as the king's vicegerent, 
 visited the two Universities, ancj in both issued injunctions, 
 that both the old scholastic teaching of the Sentences should 
 cease, and that the teaching in the Decretals and the con- 
 ferring of degrees in canon law should be abolished. What 
 the exact legal force of ■ Cromwell's legal injunctions was has 
 never been determined ; but in these points they were obeyed : 
 the Universities ceased to teach the systematic theology of the 
 Schools and the systematic jurisprudence of the Decretals ; 
 and the ancient degrees of bachelor and doctor of the canon 
 law are known, except during the reign of Mary, no more. 
 How did this affect the civil law ? you ask : well, just as it 
 might be expected ; the scientific study was abolished, the 
 old canons were in abeyance, but the courts continued to 
 practise, the civil law procedure was as lively as ever ; and 
 students who intended to practise as advocates took degrees in 
 civil law instead of in both. Oxford dropped the canon law 
 
320 Civilian-Canonists. [xiv. 
 
 degree altogether; Cambridge, by adopting a more general 
 form, retained a sbadowy presentment of the double honour. 
 
 And now we come again to an Act which shows the con- 
 tinuity of the inherent rivalry between two systems which, 
 for the sake of mutual profit, had so long worked together. 
 In 1 541 a bill was introduced into parliament which enabled 
 married D.C.L.'s to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction as chan- 
 cellors and commissaries ; it did not pass in that year, being 
 withdrawn on the request of CJonvocation, but was reintro- 
 duced and passed in i545' ^o long as the two degrees were 
 granted together the D.C.L.'s were, as doctors of decrees, 
 bound by the canon which forbade a married man to act as an 
 ecclesiastical judge ; but now the right of the D.C.L. simple, 
 both to marry and to act as a judge, was secured : as the civil 
 doctors of Bologna had done in the thirteenth century, their 
 successors in England now married ; before this they were 
 probably, as a rule, in minor orders. 
 
 I must pass over the more important of Henry VIII's other 
 acts, especially the Statutes of Appeals and Submission, 
 except just to recall the fact that in the preamble to the 
 former of those Acts passed in 1533 he had expressed himseK 
 confident that the realm of England would, as it always had 
 done, provide a sufiicient number of spiritual men to decide 
 spiritual questions, and of secular men to decide secular ques- 
 tions, under his own supreme authority and to the exclusion 
 of any foreign jurisdiction. The other matters in which those 
 statutes affected ecclesiastical jurisdiction lie somewhat deeper 
 than our present speculations. 
 
 We are not however to suppose that, when the king practi- 
 cally abolished the canon law, he intended to hand the clergy 
 over to the common lawyers. The procedure was, as we have 
 seen, still kept in the hands of the civilians ; but the theo- 
 logians were a body of men whose functions had been to 
 some extent usurped by the canonists, and who now for some 
 years, under Tudor and Puritan and Laudian influences, were 
 to come to the front. The theologians or divines divided 
 with the canonico-civilians the authority of the ecclesiastical 
 jurisdiction : the character of a bishop ia itself was that of a 
 
XIV.] The Reformatio Legum. 321 
 
 divine, not of a lawyer, and we might almost say that whilst 
 questions of application of law and procedure belonged to the 
 lawyer, the interpretation was claimed for the divine. In 
 cases of heresy, for instance, the theologians formulated the 
 definition, whilst the canonists and civilians examined the 
 teaching of the accused and determined how far he had con- 
 travened the definition. So in the question of Henry's 
 divorce, the divines had been called on to define ' Can the 
 pope dispense with a marriage with a deceased brother's 
 wife ? ' the canonists had to determine whether the marriage 
 between Arthur and Katharine was such a marriage as pre- 
 cluded the dispensation. This rule of combining theologians 
 with canonists or civilians for commissions on ecclesiastical 
 suits continued long after the Reformation, and ought never 
 to have been disused. 
 
 These measures of change, sufiiciently drastic one would 
 think, had in this department satisfied Henry VIII ; the 
 scheme for revising the canon law hung fire ; the powers 
 granted to the king in 1534 were renewed for three years in 
 1536, and again for his life in 1544, but nothing was done 
 in the matter during the remainder of the reign. But what 
 had sufficed Henry VIII did not suffice Somerset or North- 
 umberland, or the poor boy-king who succeeded him. The 
 second statute of the first year of Edward VI went as near 
 as possible to extinguish the episcopate ; there were still to 
 be bishops, but they were to be nominated by the king 
 without any form of election ; they were as a matter of fact 
 appointed during good behaviour ; and their jurisdiction was 
 henceforth to be exercised in the ting's name. In him all 
 ecclesiastical authority was vested, they were to be his minis- 
 ters, their writs were to be issued in his name, their seals 
 were to bear the royal arms; and it was only to such of 
 them as he pleased that even such authority was to be 
 intrusted. It was proposed, though not passed, that a Court 
 of Chancery should be erected for ecclesiastical causes. The 
 revision of the canon law was to be urged on, and the Uni- 
 versities were to be further purged from the old leaven. All 
 this was done : in vain the Protestant bishops pleaded in the 
 
 T 
 
32 2 Codification a Failure. [xiv. 
 
 House of Lords that their position was intolerable and their 
 dignity a mere mockery, that the moral discipline of clergy 
 and people was entirely broken down ; no act for rehabi- 
 litating them was got through parliament ; the dominant 
 interests were opposed to it. The injunctions sent to the 
 Universities prescribed some renewal of studies ; the poor 
 canonists of course were left out in the cold, although not 
 treated as if they were illegal or irregular : the civilians were 
 authorised to read the Institutes, and the D.C.L., when he 
 had reached that dignity, was exhorted to devote himself 
 more zealously to the study of the king's laws, both temporal 
 and ecclesiastical. And work was to be found for him : bills 
 were introduced to lodge ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the 
 hands of students of the Universities, who were admitted by 
 the archbishop. By these, however, all special privileges of 
 the advocates were endangered and the bills dropped after 
 passing most stages : four bills on this point were before the 
 parliament of i55°- ^'^ again the revision of the canons 
 was dragging behind. The king's power of nominating 
 revisers was asserted by an act of 1550 to last for three 
 years, and an abortive attempt was made in the session of 
 1552 to renew or enlarge it ; but whether it was that Cranmer 
 found it impossible to obtain skilled assistants, or that the 
 division of parties prevented a joint effort, it was not until 
 near the end of the reign that the project was carried on : 
 in 1 55 1 and 1552 Edward issued two commissions of thirty- 
 two, composed of equal numbers of bishops, divines, civilians, 
 and common lawyers ; the number thirty-two was reduced 
 to eight ; practically the work was done by Peter Martyr, 
 the Oxford Professor of Divinity, under Cranmer's eye, and 
 the result was the compilation known as the Reformatio 
 Legum; a curious congeries of old and new material which 
 really pleased no party ; showing too much respect for 
 antiquity and divine ordinance to please the Pmitan, and 
 too little to satisfy the men who had guided the Reforma- 
 tion under Henry VIII and those who were to do so under 
 Elizabeth. 
 
 The legislation and policy of Mary were directed to uproot 
 
XIV.] The Marian Reaction. 323 
 
 everytMng that Edward VI had originated; his bishops 
 appointed ' quamdiu se bene gesserint,' were dispossessed 
 without a struggle ; his laws were repealed, many of them 
 never to be revived ; his advisers, where they would not comply, 
 were exiled or burned : but the efforts to reinstate the old 
 system were not successful ; the monastic property could not be 
 restored ; the ranks of the lower clergy, reduced to a fraction 
 by the abolition of chauntries and private masses, could not 
 be recruited ; and all the restored fabric hung on the life of a 
 woman and a few worn-out old men. For the moment the 
 canon lawyers lifted up their heads, and a few civilians took 
 the doctorate of decrees at Oxford and Cambridge ; but the 
 complete extinction of reactionary forces, on Mary's death, 
 showed that the Papal system, with all that was dangerous 
 to national life contained in it, was, so far as England was 
 concerned, practically extinct : six years of blood and fire, of 
 tears and prayers, of cruel jealousies and heartbreaking divi- 
 sions, wrought this ; and Elizabeth for some years after her 
 accession had before her a task, not certainly easy, but not 
 encumbered with insuperable difficulties. 
 
 The subject which we are treating now contracts its limits ; 
 for to attempt anything like circumstantial discussion of the 
 legal history of a period into' which ecclesiastical quarrels so 
 largely enter, would be to lose oneself at once in a wilderness 
 of controversy. I must content myself with a few generalisa- 
 tions and a few significant facts. The Elizabethan settle- 
 ment in Church and State was a compromise, satisfactory to 
 no party, and very unsatisfactory indeed to the constitutional 
 lawyer or historian ; but, possibly, the best arrangement com- 
 patible with circumstances. She began her reign, of course, 
 by a reversal of her sister's legislation ; but she did not 
 restore the Edwardian system ; she did not revive the Act of 
 Henry VIII which had asserted the king's headship of the 
 Church, or the Act of Edward which deprived the bishops 
 of all original jurisdiction : the doctrine of the headship was 
 opposed both by the Puritans and by the Catholic party ; the 
 abolition of all the high functions of the episcopate which 
 was aimed at by Edward's advisers was a measure which 
 
 ■y a 
 
324 Policy of Elizabeth. [xiv. 
 
 contemporary history was showing to he dangerous. But, 
 whilst she minimised the definition of authority, she retained 
 the virtual exercise of it : her explanation of her supreme 
 governorship might have satisfied every one hut the most 
 Tiidentine papist, but she re-enacted the most stringent part 
 of her father's act of supremacy; and, whilst she allowed 
 the continuance of the church jurisdiction, she kept all con- 
 trol over the religious discipline of clergy and laity under 
 the hands of the Court of High Commission. The Court of 
 High Commission, consisting of a large number of lawyers 
 and laymen and a small number of bishops and divines, 
 stands to the Church in much the same relation as the Court 
 of Star Chamber stands to the Courts of Common Law, and 
 the Court of Requests to Chancery, a legal but most uncon- 
 stitutional relation, and one which, however long it might 
 be tolerated, was sure in the long run to endanger the whole 
 fabric. As for legislation, Elizabeth acted, as we know, on 
 a high principle of supremacy; such measures of church 
 discipline as required coercive authority she allowed the 
 pai'liaments to pass, but she forbade any interference whatever 
 where that authority was not necessary. As for the eccle- 
 siastical legislation in Convocation, she exercised her veto, 
 i. e. she granted or withheld the consent which would make 
 it valid, according to her own views of high policy. The 
 rulers of the Church, who were not free from the same humi- 
 liating bondage of adulation that influenced all around the 
 great queen, tolerated a system which gave them the sub- 
 stance of power, although in an unpopular and unhistorical 
 shape. Their legislative authority was paralysed, but they 
 could exercise a real authority as the queen's advisers ; and 
 the jurisdiction, which they had difiiculties in enforcing through 
 their own courts, they could enforce as members of the High 
 Commission Court. But the ecclesiastical law — how did it 
 fai-e under the circumstances ? In the first place the forms 
 of the courts were maintained, and were enough to sustain 
 the civilians who worked in them ; the Prerogative Court 
 and the consistory courts lived on the testamentary and 
 matrimonial jurisdiction ; and before the spiritual courts were 
 
XIV. j The Puritans. 325 
 
 tried tke smaller eases of discipline which were not important 
 enough for the High Commission Court. Doctors' Commons, 
 which had dwelthefore in Paternoster Row or at the Queen's 
 Head, under the auspices of Dr. Henry Harvey, built itself 
 a new home, with hall and library and plate and privileges 
 for importing wine. Knowledge of canon and civil law was 
 in parliament, as in 1585, regarded as a special qualification 
 for service in the House of Commons on committees. In the 
 parliaments of 1559 and 1563 were introduced bills to make 
 a University degree necessary for ecclesiastical judges. And 
 the canon law, as drawn up by Lyndwood, and the civilian 
 procedure, subsisted, for the revision which had been com- 
 pleted by Edward's commissioners did not approve itself to 
 Elizabeth or her advisers, and after an abortive attempt to 
 carry it through the parliament of i559j took its place on 
 the shelf of broken projects. Even the Court of High Com- 
 mission, novel as its functions were and unfettered as it was 
 in the exercise of them, condescended to borrow from the 
 canonical jurisprudence some of its most offensive details, 
 its ex officio oath and the censures by which it would enforce 
 its sentences. 
 
 It was a strange composite system, perhaps the only one 
 possible consistently with the retention of historic continuity, 
 but obviously and most certainly tolerable only for a time. 
 What was the attitude of theologians, of common lawyers, 
 and of canonists towards this critically-balanced structure ? 
 To the true theologians, whether Catholic or Puritan, the 
 whole was repulsive : we see this in the half-hearted, almost 
 despairing adhesion of Archbishop Parker, and in the strong 
 and justifiable protests of the Puritans ; and I mention them 
 with respect here, because this opposition to unconstitutional 
 tyranny is the only point in which I have any sympathy 
 with them ; their tenets I hold to be untenable, and their 
 methods of promoting them by calumny, detraction, and 
 coarse ribaldry I think entirely detestable ; but I do think 
 they were right in denouncing the Com-t of High Commis- 
 sion and aU its works. Even conservative churchmen like 
 Hooker, in their defence of the ecclesiastical system, are 
 
326 Cawdrey's Case. [xiv. 
 
 hampered by the consciousness that much of what existed 
 was indefensible. The bishops saw their position as bishops 
 ignored, and the Puritans saw the power which they thought 
 should be exercised by their own ministers exercised through 
 a royal commission : the bishops however had the power 
 and endured the ignominy, the Puritans suffered and waited 
 for their turn to persecute. 
 
 The lawyers were not all of one mind ; Coke the great 
 lawyer was himself of two minds ; he liked the crown better 
 than the episcopate, but he loved the common law better 
 than the crown ; and his inconsistency produces some curious 
 results on his teaching. This leads us to two or three facts. 
 From 1587 to 1591 the famous Cawdrey's case drew its 
 grievous length along. The High Commission had deprived 
 Cawdrey for nonconformity; the question arose, had the 
 Commission under the terms of the Act of the queen's first 
 year exceeded its authority? The resolution finally adopted 
 by all the judges, and recorded and approved by Coke, 
 afiirmed that the ecclesiastical prerogative of the crown was 
 such that the powers of a commission issued by it were not 
 limited by that statute, but covered the whole range of 
 ecclesiastical jurisdiction ; and therefore the sentence was 
 good. The judgment in Cawdrey's case, full of bad law and 
 worse history, is often referred to even now by lawyers with 
 a respect which it does not merit ; here it is useful as showing 
 to what lengths the common lawyers under Elizabeth would 
 go in support of the authority of the crown over things 
 ecclesiastical. It stimulated the Puritans in and out of the 
 Church to bitterer action, and disabled the hands of the 
 bishops who, like Andrewes, would rather have taken the 
 responsibility of their own acts. Twenty years later Coke 
 himself declared against the constitutional character of the 
 Court of High Commission, and, by refusing to act upon it, 
 paved the way for its downfall. But Coke was then in 
 opposition to the king's advisers, and made it his account to 
 be an independent judge. But I am anticipating. 
 
 The change of Elizabeth for James I was a critical event 
 in English Church history. James's dealings with the Church 
 
XIV.] James I and the Puritans. 327 
 
 are not among tte strongest, but are perhaps among tlie 
 least reprehensible parts of his administration. He willingly 
 confirmed the canons of 1604, which make a substantive 
 addition to the canonical lore of the clergy. He failed to 
 secure co-operation between the House of Commons and the 
 Convocation, or between the bishops and the Puritan divines. 
 But this is no wonder. A House of Commons which could 
 listen to Sir Herbert Crofts declaring that the Church had 
 declined ever since doctors began to wear boots ; or could 
 expel Mr. Sheppard, M.P. for Shaftesbury, for explaining 
 that ' dies Sabbati ' meant not the Sabaoth as they called it, 
 but Saturday, and suggesting that as David danced before 
 the ark, the legality of dancing was a question on which 
 the bishops might decide before it was altogether forbidden, 
 — such a House of Commons was not likely to impress men 
 like Hooker or Andrewes with respect, or King James either. 
 It is clear I think that, if the Puritan party had been well 
 represented at the Hampton Court Conference, James would 
 have seen justice done to them ; but he saw their intolerance 
 and their frivolity, and the balance remained unredressed. 
 One of their minor complaints, against the issuing of eccle- 
 siastical sentences by lay chancellors, touches directly on our 
 subject : their idea was to give all the disciplinary power to 
 the clergy, but to their own clergy : the prelates of the time 
 chose to maintain the status quo which left the power where 
 it was. On this point the civilians were peremptory. Some 
 of the 'prelates, either wishful to promote their sons or willing 
 to lodge Church discipline in clerical hands, appointed clergy- 
 men to be chancellors. The doctors took umbrage at this, 
 petitioned King Charles I in 1625, and obtained from him 
 an order to remove the intruding ofScials and to substitute 
 qualified civilians. 
 
 Another interesting point aiises at James's accession. In 
 the hurry of his first parliament the Act of Mary which re- 
 pealed the I Edw. VI. c. 3, by which the conge cFeslire and 
 the independent jurisdiction of the bishops were abolished, 
 was itself repealed ; and the lawyers, or some of them, 
 held that the Edwardian law was revived, that the whole 
 
328 Argument on Prohibitions. [xiv. 
 
 episcopate was intrusive, and the whole of the Church courts 
 illegal. This was long in controversy^ and it was only in 
 1637 that the judges finally resolved that the law of Edward, 
 as contravening a law of Henry VIII which had been 
 formally re-enacted, was not revived by the repeal of the 
 Marian statute. If that resolution had not been accepted, 
 the whole existing fabric of the Church must, so far as 
 secular interests were concerned, have fallen to the ground. 
 
 But the opening of James I's reign is important for a 
 third critical question. In 1605 Archbishop Bancroft pre- 
 sented from Convocation a series of articles against the 
 proceedings of the common law judges in issuing prohibitions 
 and claiming the exclusive right to interpret acts of parlia- 
 ment touching the Church. The long argument on this 
 subject, which is to Coke's Second Institute what Cawdrey's 
 case is to the Reports, is of considerably greater weight ; no 
 doubt there was much to be said on both sides, and the voice 
 of the Convocation of 1605 was in harmony with that of 
 1559 and 1446, where the claims of the theologians to inter- 
 pret acts that touched theology were fairly stated ; but Coke 
 embellishes the report with words that have an amusing 
 cogency even in the present day ; ' for judges expounding of 
 statutes that concern the ecclesiastical government or pro- 
 ceedings, it belongeth unto the temporal judges, and we 
 think they have been expounded as much to the clergy's 
 advantage as either the letter or intention of laws would or 
 could allow of : and when they have been expounded to their 
 liking then they could approve of it, but if the exposition be 
 not for their purpose then they wiU say as now they do 
 that it appertaineth not unto us to determine of them.' 
 Anyhow the judges agreed that they were the proper inter- 
 preters of the acts of parliament ; and as the whole liturgy, 
 and indeed the Bible also, might be brought under those 
 terms, there was practically no limit to their assumption of 
 infallibility; for the common law judges could not, like 
 theologians, afford to leave any question unsolved. 
 
 Well, Coke was right as to the bishops, as was proved in 
 161 2, when the common lawyers allowed bishops King and 
 
XIV.] Persecution. 329 
 
 Neill to burn two heretics under a common law writ, for 
 which Coke's authority might be pleaded, although all the 
 earlier legislation against heretical pravity had been ab- 
 rogated. The invulnerability of the common law which had 
 maintained the High Commission in Cawdrey's case, now 
 treated the issue of the writ ' de heretico comburendo ' as a 
 matter of its own, and brought equal shame on theology 
 and jurisprudence. The heretics who were bm-ned were men 
 whom the Puritans did not care to defend ; they would have 
 burned them as willingly as they would have done the 
 bishops. 
 
 And here let me say by the way, great as the horrors of 
 religious persecution are, they cannot be properly estimated 
 without some consideration of the value set upon human 
 life both at the period in which they occur and at other 
 times : I believe that I could show that all the executions 
 for religious causes in England, by all sides and during aU 
 time, are not so many as were the sentences of death passed 
 in one year of the reign of George III for one single sort of 
 crime, the forging of bank-notes. 
 
 But I must pass on, leaving the Laudian period altogether 
 out of sight : and indeed it is not, for our purpose, so im- 
 portant as the earlier portion : Laud and Charles were, 
 neither of them, men who were satisfied with such things as 
 the High Commission Court, and the sinking of ecclesiastical 
 discipline in the state administration ; but they did not 
 make their way to any better system, and supported that 
 which was to them for the time the only possible system. 
 With the opening of the struggle in 1641 the Court of 
 High Commission fell to the ground, and at the Restora- 
 tion its abolition was confirmed by the first parliament of 
 Charles II. 
 
 During the Elizabethan and Jacobean period the study of 
 church law had not been neglected ; for it had shared the 
 benefit of the great historical and antiquarian revival of which 
 Parker was the first leader, to which Spelman belonged, and 
 which reached its climax in Selden and Prynne. Both of 
 these eminent writers studied canon law from antagonistic 
 
33° 
 
 Law Degrees. [xiv. 
 
 grounds: Selden regarded it as a pHlosoplier ardent for 
 liberty; Prynne as an enthusiast, who had his own perse- 
 cution to avenge and the thesis of royal prerogative to de- 
 fend with all the zeal and learning of a convert. Selden 
 was a real jurist ; Prynne an indefatigable searcher of 
 records. But, when at the Restoration the removal of the 
 incubus of the High Commission, and the political education 
 which the Caroline divines had gone through, enabled them 
 to restore the old ecclesiastical jurisdiction with some hope 
 of honest and successful issue, the canonists and civilians 
 showed that life was still in them. The old black-letter 
 Lyndwood was taken down from the shelf, rebound, and 
 annotated. Dr. Sharrock in 1664 abridged the Provincial 
 for the use of students, and in 1679 the Oxford edition, which 
 rapidly displaced the black-letter, was published with all 
 Lyndwood's commentaries and Ayton's work on the Con- 
 stitutions. The study of the civil law needed no revival ; 
 it had been kept up by the antiquaries and admiralty in the 
 worst times ; and, in the Universities, the faculty fellowships 
 secured at least a languid succession of law degrees. The 
 D.C.L. of Oxford too had achieved the dignity which now 
 belongs to the honorary degrees at Commemoration ; and in 
 1649, at what Antony Wood calls the Fairfaxian Creation, 
 both Fairfax and Cromwell were made doctors of the civil 
 law. According to Wood, in 1659 Nicolas Staughton, of 
 Exeter College, was admitted doctor both of civil and canon 
 law; and it is not impossible that there were other attempts 
 to revive the canon law doctorate as an adjunct to the degree 
 in civil law. Cambridge had always retained the shadow of 
 the double degree, for the Leges or LL. to which she admits 
 her doctors ai'e a possible survival of the ' Utrumque Jus ' of the 
 old University system ; and in 1669, Richard Pearson, brother 
 of Bishop Pearson the commentator on the Creed, claimed to be 
 admitted in distinct terms to both faculties. The Archbishop 
 of Canterbury also, under the Dispensation Act, has the un- 
 questioned right to make a doctor of canon law, although 
 I am not sui-e that it has ever been exercised. But at Oxford 
 the designation of the degree had latterly come to be restricted 
 
XIV.] The Eighteenth Century. 331 
 
 to civil law; and when in 1715, or thereabouts, Mr. Charles 
 Browne of Balliol College applied to the Viee-Chancellor, 
 Dr. Gardiner, for leave to proceed as bachelor and doctor of the 
 canon law, he was told that he could not be prevented from 
 doing so if he wished it, but that it would give the Univer- 
 sity a great deal of trouble ; and the poor man died before he 
 achieved the object of his ambition. 
 
 These notes are, however, of little importance, except as 
 illustrating the revival of the ancient study, and the attention 
 which the ecclesiastical questions of the day were calling to 
 ancient practice. In point of fact, the whole of the second 
 and last act of the Stewart dynasty was full of ecclesiastical 
 questionings and excitements, which, though they did not 
 directly touch our subject, stimulated the studies most closely 
 connected with it. The struggle under James II, the position 
 of the Nonjurors, the relation of Convocation to Parliament, 
 the Whistonian and Bangorian controversies, all drew in 
 lively partisans to the investigation of legal and ecclesiastical 
 problems. The names of Hody, Kennet, Atterbury, Wake, 
 and Gibson, all leading Oxford men, and men of deep re- 
 search and minute if not accurate reading, are conspicuous in 
 this regard ; and, as for constitutional purposes it may be said 
 that the very dust of their writings is gold, it would be 
 ungrateful indeed to speak of their earnestness in the main 
 object as misplaced. Gibson stands out more distinctly than 
 any of the others as a great canonist, and his Codex or 
 Collection of English Chm-ch Statutes is still the standard 
 work and treasury of all sorts of such lore. There were too 
 Johnson, Wilkins, and many other honest and subordinate 
 workers on the theological as well as on the legal side. But 
 the history of this department of law draws quickly to an 
 end. The Hanoverian policy with regard to the Church and 
 Convocation fell on all politico-ecclesiastical life as a blight. 
 The Nonjurors were left out of the pale of the recognised 
 laity, the common lawyers edged the theologians out of the 
 court of delegates, the Convocations were silenced, and the 
 bishops, almost as much as in Elizabeth's time, made their 
 position in the House of Lords the fulcrum of all the force 
 
332 
 
 Recent Changes. [xiv. 
 
 they ventured to exercise. Except for testamentaiy causes, 
 and rare occasions of matrimonial and slanderous causes, the 
 Church jurisdiction ceased to exist, and so continued dormant 
 until in our times, in 1849 and in 1850, the Gorham case 
 roused the attention of both lawyers and clergymen to the 
 fact that without knowing it they had let the centre of 
 ecclesiastical gravity become seriously misplaced. Into this 
 region of discussion, for many reasons, I must not attempt 
 now to make my way. 
 
 A few years after the Gorham controversy, a change or 
 series of changes set in from another quarter : the matri- 
 monial jurisdiction was remodelled when the facilities for 
 divorce were increased, and the whole testamentary jurisdic- 
 tion was withdrawn from the nominal superintendence of 
 the archbishops. The Courts, the profits and privileges 
 of which had so long maintained the close corporation of 
 Doctors' Commons, and had caused the study of canon law 
 in some at least of its branches to be languidly pursued, were 
 radically and fundamentally changed ; and, although it was 
 difficult at once to improvise new forms and rules of procedure 
 to take the place of the ancient forms and those which had 
 grown out of them, these forms also were doomed. In the stiU 
 more recent remodeUiug of the whole judicial system further 
 changes have forced themselves in ; and where the lawyers 
 could find it their policy to acquiesce in the consoKdation of 
 the common law and chancery, they could without the slightest 
 reluctance throw the ecclesiastical and admiralty law into the 
 same cauldron. Out of that cauldron arises a new supreme 
 judicature, which requires, every two or three years, to be 
 amended and strengthened. It is supposed that thereby 
 justice is quickened and law made so cheap, that any man, 
 poor or rich, may ruin himself with a light heart. It yet 
 remains to be seen whether this amended system, easier and 
 less intricate than the old, supplies as good material for 
 training or provides as sound schools of lawyers. It is no 
 doubt philosophically more capable of perfection. The lore 
 of Coke and Selden, like the lore of Eldon and StoweU, is 
 for the present at a discount. Of course looking on aU this 
 
XIV.] Conclusions and Warnings. 333 
 
 ■with a historical eye, one is apt to be a little disconsolate ; 
 but time will avenge them, and the neo-legal jurisprudence 
 will soon have an array of reports and decisions that will 
 outweigh, physically at least, the Year-books and Institutes. 
 As for the ecclesiastical law, which by its very nature, if it 
 loses continuity, loses identity, in the present changing aspect 
 of the world's politics, I for my part do not intend to pro- 
 phesy. No one can investigate the letter and working of 
 the canon law without being struck by the marvellous mixture 
 of lofty and eternal principles of right, with arbitrary and 
 disingenuous evasions of obligation : it reads as if the jurists, 
 finding that the Church could not be ruled by the true 
 principles, were determined to rule by special pleadings and 
 artful circumventions. For the future the theologians must 
 look to the true principles, and let the canonists and civilians 
 pass with their evasions and circumventions into the twilight 
 of archseology. Whether that will be so or not, or how soon, 
 we may some of us live to see. 
 
XV. 
 
 THE REIGN OF HENRY VH. 
 
 (April 24, 1883.) 
 
 MY kindest friends will hardly be able tbis year to charge 
 me with having chosen the subject of my public 
 statutory lectures with a view of attracting an audience. 
 I never, in the course of a long historical experience, met 
 with any one who wished to attend a second course of lectures 
 on Henry VII, or indeed with any one who expressed any 
 interest in him at all. It is just possible that I may be 
 suspected of a design to attract the admirers of the lady 
 Margaret, by advertising a discourse upon her son ; but, 
 although the idea did occur to me, I set it aside as feeling 
 it my duty to guard against any over-sanguine expectations. 
 No ; I chose the subject because I have to lecture, and, after 
 sixteen successive ceremonies of humiliation, I thought that 
 I had a right to throw some part of the imputation of dulness 
 oif myself upon my subject. If the men will not come, let 
 it be as much Henry VII's fault as mine. 
 
 Yet, to begin with, it is a curious thing that the subject 
 should be so dull ; and perhaps my first point should be to 
 account for that. I do not question the,- fact. It is so ; 
 but why ? The period is full of interest : it is the beginning 
 of modern as distinguished from medieval history ; it exhibits 
 to us, in their first definite and specialised forms, the forces 
 which constitute the dramatic elements of the state of society 
 in which we are living ; the great powers in their newly 
 consolidated condition, the balance of which makes up Euro- 
 pean history ever since. It is the age of the discovery of the 
 
XV.] The New Age. 335 
 
 New World, the age of the birth of modem commerce and 
 colonisation ; it is the eve of the Reformation, and of that 
 wonderful renaissance which I believe exists at the present 
 day, in prize essays and schools examinations, much more 
 vividly, and alas in much greater solid bulk than it ever had 
 in the most flourishing days in rerum natura. And it is a 
 period too in which we begin to have, more distinctly and 
 more numerously than before, representative men as they are 
 called ; that is, men whose greatness and prominence consists 
 not in their being exceptions to or protests against, or glories 
 or shames to the age in which they lived, but in concentrating 
 in themselves and giving force to the ideas, the accomplish- 
 ments, the hopes and aspirations, the greatnesses and little- 
 nesses of their own times. In the play of character also 
 there should be somethinginteresting in a period which 
 embraces Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, the delightful 
 old Frederick III, and the still more charming Maximilian ; 
 the age of Charles VIII and Philip the handsome, not to 
 speak of the Borgias, the Medici, and the Farnesi. 
 
 Yet the reign of Hemy VII is dull. Look at it in relation\ 
 to English history ; there also it should be important ; there ' 
 also it comes between the ancient and the modem ; bridges 
 over the strait between the Wars of the Eoses and the Reforma- 
 tion, between England isolated and England taking a first place 
 in the counsels of Europe, between England weak and England 
 strong. The reign itself may be almost exactly divided 
 between fifteenth century influences and sixteenth century 
 influences ; the one series winding up in final bloodshed, the 
 other opening with initial intrigue. We are really able to 
 trace the last links of the chain of political murders which 
 had begun when Warwick and Lancaster slew Piers Gaveston, 
 and which ends or almost ends with the sacrifice of Edward 
 of Warwick and the de la Poles ; and we trace the first links 
 of the policy which grew and strengthened in intensity to 
 the days of Waterloo. 
 
 But still it is duU : we do not much care about the effete 
 stmggles of the dynastic parties, and we cannot get up a 
 lively interest in the negotiations for the Scottish or Spanish 
 
336 Parchment or Paper. [xv. 
 
 marriag'e. It is our own fault perhaps that we want more 
 sensationalism. But there is a lack of it notwithstanding. 
 
 One reason I will shortly dismiss. I verily believe that 
 one reason why this period is duU is that it was the period 
 of the discovery and development of printing, and of the use 
 of paper instead of parchment. Men began to write freely 
 and to destroy freely ; instead of writing for private purposes 
 of record, they wrote for other men to read ; they wrote not 
 what was worth writing, but what would catch readers ; they 
 wrote what it was safe to write when every one could read ; 
 they wrote because they could write, not because there was a 
 necessity for them to write ; that is, anybody wrote, and few 
 wrote what was worth preserving. One popular book de- 
 stroyed a thousand chances of having invaluable records of 
 timid private annals. And, when destruction began, it found 
 paper more easy to dispose of than parchment : the age that 
 could make tailors' measures out of Magna Carta, lighted its 
 fires with State papers. Growing criticism, careful public 
 administration, even before the age of destruction began, 
 had not learned to be careful as to what should be preserved 
 and what should be destroyed. And when the age of de- 
 struction did come, it was divided between the Koman 
 Catholic force that destroyed everything new, and the Puritan 
 force that destroyed everything old. So it is not so much a 
 wonder that we have so little documentary remains of Henry 
 VII's reign, as that we have anything at all. The only 
 strictly contemporary account of the king's life and character 
 is to be found in a few half-rotten, half-legible paper sheets 
 in the Cottonian Library. All the more circumstantial parts 
 of the history have to be worked out of the annalists of the 
 next generation. 
 
 But there must have been a deeper cause. "Why should 
 a king with a good character and a romantic career subside 
 into a historical fogey ? Look closely at Frederick III, the 
 splendid old gipsy, in name governor of the world, ever 
 august, and increaser of the empire, yet owning no more 
 territory tha,n an English alderman ; sitting in his study 
 elaborating a horoscope with destiny of universal dominion 
 
XV.] The Magi of the Renaissance. 337 
 
 for his grandchildren unborn, inventing the motto of empire 
 for an Austria that was yet in embryo : honourable, perhaps, 
 and careless about selfish gains, but a dreamer, about whom 
 the strange thing is that so many of his dreams came 
 true. Look at Maximilian, the most delightfully unprin- 
 cipled hero of the age of transition ; always in every 
 feast and every fray, always wanting money and selling him- 
 self for promises, and never getting the money and never 
 keeping his engagements ; a good deal of the rake and a 
 good deal of the knight-errant ; to himself a portentous 
 politician, a reformer of Church and empire, yet willing to 
 set Church and empire to sale, and himself to retire from the 
 CsBsarship, to accept the chair of S. Peter, and provide before 
 his death for his own canonization ; yet with all that the 
 founder of one of the great powers of modern history, grand- 
 father of Charles V, and contriver of the scheme which 
 placed half Christendom under his grandson's sceptre. I 
 have often thought of Maximilian in contrast with Henry 
 VII ; all the balance of real goodness, what measure there is 
 of politic honesty, purity of life, reality of character, straight- 
 forwardness in religion, intelligent appreciation of his people's 
 needs, every moral consideration is in favour of Henry Tudor : 
 yet we like Maximilian better. With all his undeniable faults, 
 his absurd dishonesty which did more harm to himself than to 
 any one else, his grotesque pretensions, the astounding incon- 
 sistency between his undertakings and his fulfilments ; there 
 is an attractiveness about him which there is not about Henry 
 VII. We will not stay to compare him with Charles VIII 
 or Ferdinand the Catholic ; I do not know that we can care 
 much for either, but we do care very little for Henry VII. 
 
 Yet, again, here is the uniter of the Eoses, the founder of 
 the Tudor dictatorship which steered England through the 
 age of the Reformation, which projected and secured the union 
 with Scotland, which started England in the race of com- 
 mercial enterprise ; here is the hero of romance, in whom the 
 prophetic eye of the saintly Henry of Lancaster had seen the 
 Joash of the British Zion ; the child of exile, hunted, like 
 David, as a partridge on the mountains ; the knight-errant 
 
 z 
 
338 The Labours of Hercules. [xv. 
 
 coming to rescue the distressed lady, as Perseus to Andromeda ; 
 the avenger of blood at Bosworth field ; the Hercules of the 
 twelve labours ; who overcame the Nemean lion in Edward IV ; 
 the Erymanthian boar in Richard III ; the Arcadian stag in 
 John of Lincoln ; the Cretan bull in James of Scotland ; the 
 mares of Diomedes in Martin Swai't ; whose hydra had been 
 the civil wars ; who had put down the Stymphalian birds by 
 the agency of the Star Chamber ; had thwarted in Margaret 
 of York the host of the Amazons ; and found the three 
 heads of Geryon in Maximilian, the archduke Philip, and 
 the dowager of Burgundy ; who had beaten Cacus in Perkin 
 Warbeck, and Cerberus in three stiU more insignificant 
 enemies, and by overcoming Max's opposition to the French 
 alliance had lulled the dragon and made his way into the 
 garden of the Hesperides. It is not every Hercules who 
 answers so precisely to the archetype. 
 
 And then think of him as the eligible parti of Europe ; 
 the young pretender of fifty looking out for a wife ; think- 
 ing of the queen of Naples as very practicable, and at all 
 events worth very minute inquiries as to teeth and stay- 
 laces ; or perhaps Margaret of Austria, who could make him 
 arbiter of the Netherlands, and possibly of Spain ; or Johanna 
 of Castile, if she could have been consoled for the death of 
 the archduke ; or that delightful duchess of Angouleme, 
 Louise of Savoy, the mother of Francis I, and destroyer 
 of the Constable of Bourbon ; or last, but not least, Ka- 
 tharine of Aragon, his own daughter-in-law, if the pope, 
 whose conscience was elastic enough to dispense a mar- 
 riage with a brother's wife, could so far stretch a point 
 of infallibility as to connive at such a politic enormity. 
 Well, the lady Margaret, poor thing, had four husbands, 
 and Henry VIII had six wives ; matrimony was clearly 
 a feature in the germinating policy of the Magians of the 
 renaissance. And then, did ever EngKsh king receive, like 
 Henry VII, three caps and swords from three successive 
 popes,— from Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, and Julius II? 
 And last, but not least, Francis Bacon for a biographer ! And 
 yet we want something more t 
 
XV.] Lack of Historic Interest. 339 
 
 But it is time to be serious. If it is fair to estimate the 
 importance of a reign by the contrast which may be drawn 
 between the two that precede and follow it, the reign of 
 Henry VII should be regarded as one of the most important, 
 and in some respects the most important reign in English 
 History. But to argue thus would really be a mistake ; really 
 much of the importance that does attach to it is not its own, 
 but arises from the general character of the age in which it 
 fell, the criftical, transitional age, which would have been very 
 much what it was whatever sort of king was on the throne 
 of England. 
 
 If the points which English History has thus in common 
 with general European History during this period be left out 
 of consideration, both the interest and the real significance 
 of the actual events of the history of England fall into 
 the background. Such interest as it has becomes a dreary 
 and commonplace interest ; its dramatic action, if it can be 
 said to have any, is extremely slow ; there is little that 
 calls for sympathy in men or institutions, and the pages 
 of the annalist are dry and jejune to an exceptional degree. 
 And what interest it has in the nature of personal incident, is 
 apart from the life of the nation. With the single exception 
 of that part of the incident which concerns the conspii'acies 
 and pretensions of the Yorkist faction, which again derives 
 its interest from the tragedy of the preceding reign, the 
 pages of the annalist, where there are any, are so dull that we 
 scarcely complain of their jejuneness. We have no temptation 
 to foUow the humdrum movements of the court as we trace 
 the military itinerary of Edward I or the judicial itinerary of 
 Henry II ; and it is by an eflPort that we have to remind 
 ourselves what great things, irrespective of political events, 
 were going on in England during these years ; how it was 
 the period of the great activity of Caxton and his early fol- 
 lowers, the period of the foundation or development of colleges 
 in Oxford and Cambridge, of the renewal of old studies, of the 
 friendship of Erasmus and More ; of discovery of a new world, 
 and of unexampled development of commercial enterprise. 
 
 It is cuiious how little notice is taken of these things 
 
 z % 
 
340 
 
 A Busy Age. [xv. 
 
 in the contemporary annals ; they lie, for the most part, 
 outside of the limited area that we are wont to take for 
 constitutional history. But we do not doubt that an im- 
 mense part of the life of the next age was wrapped up in 
 these things. Certainly the invention of printing, not less 
 than the agglomeration of the new factors of the European 
 balance, was a starting-point of a new stage of History ; and 
 the freedoms and jealousies of commerce and conquest in the 
 New World were factors in the new drama second only in 
 importance to the accumulations of power and tenitory in 
 Europe. But they are both of them events of a class which 
 finds for contemporaries too much work to allow of much talk 
 or many contemplative jottings. Few very busy men keep 
 minute or accurate diaries ; few very busy ages possess very 
 picturesque or very circumstantial chronicles. The early 
 printers and the early discoverers left material enough for the 
 next generation to dispute about, but did little in record of 
 their own exploits. Many navigators lived and died and 
 perished from memory before Columbus, and even the con- 
 tinent which he discovered is not called by his name. The 
 inventor of printing is still unknown, and we cannot tell 
 when, or very distinctly where, even Caxton set up the first 
 English press ; they were too busy. 
 
 And yet more might be expected in the way of history. 
 Caxton himself was a compiler of history ; the old monas- 
 teries, like Crowland, still contained men capable of writing 
 annals, and of combining annals into chronicles, and of draw- 
 ing out of chronicles the lessons of History. There is no a 
 priori reason why the English history of the age should be 
 sought in Bernard Andreas of Toulouse, or in Polydore Vergil 
 of Urbino, or from the relations of foreign ambassadors. We 
 conclude that the really important things, in which the critical 
 change was, were things that did not come easily into his- 
 torical contemporaneous exposition. Perhaps too it was hardly 
 safe to write history when the printing-press might diffase it 
 to distances that would be dangerous ; kings and courts would 
 read, and woe to those who wrote what would not please 
 them; or perhaps the revival of ancient literatui'e engrossed 
 
XV.] England's Needs. 341 
 
 the minds of those who, without such employment, might 
 have continued the roll of ancient scholars. 
 
 It was not history alone, but theology and science also, that 
 languished under the sudden revival of classical learning; 
 men lost themselves in the history of early Rome who might 
 have told us something worth knowing about their own 
 England ; or satisfied themselves with simple attempts to write 
 fine Latin, not troubling themselves much as to whether they 
 had anything to say ; or with pronouncing eulogistic orations 
 fit for kings and chancellors to read. But you will be thinking 
 that is just what I am doing now ; it is too obvious that a 
 public statutory lecture is not a labour of love. {/ 
 
 It is clear, then, not from the distinct enunciations of the 
 time, but from the lessons of preceding and following reigns, 
 what England wanted, and what it got in Henry VII. 
 England did not want to become territorially one, as France, 
 Spain, and Germany did before the new drama of politics 
 began. England had long been territorially one ; but it 
 required constitutional and governmental consistency. It L 
 required an equability of the execution of law, the abolition of 
 local partisanships, the abeyance of political questionings and 
 controversies, thorough concentration in the hands "of strong 
 kings and able ministers. Such a king Henry VII was ; such 
 a king Henry VIII was during the better part of his reign, and 
 to some extent Elizabeth was a successor of the same kind ; 
 strong in will, strong in wealth, strong in definite personal 
 aims, but even stronger in the way in which their absolute 
 power could be manipulated. It wanted too such things as, 
 first, the vindication of a dynastic title to the throne by the 
 victory of the king over the Yorkist party, by the union of 
 family titles in his marriage, by the securing of every possible 
 lawful guarantee to the succession, so that there might be no 
 more Wars of the Roses ; and consequent upon this, the enrich- 
 ing of the crown to such an extent as to make the Bang 
 almost, if not entirely, independent of taxation for purposes of 
 ordinary expenditure : or, secondly, the humiliation of the 
 baronage by exhaustion, impoverishment, and reduction of 
 numbers, leaving scarcely a trace of the divisions of party 
 
342 Constitutional Exhaustion. [xv. 
 
 \betweeii the adherents of the two Eoses, extinguishing the 
 hereditary politics of the great houses and almost extinguish- 
 ing the constitutional powers of the House of Lords. The 
 concentration of power in the hands of a royal council of 
 nominees was another result of the abject condition of the 
 smaller and southern nobles. Even the greatest magnates 
 were content to serve in the council as ministers and advisers, 
 rather than to act up to their position constitutionally as 
 members of a great estate in parliament. 
 
 Or, thirdly, the humiliation of proper ecclesiastical indepen- 
 dence, which resulted from the isolation of Church power in 
 the face of the throne. The papacy, which might have lent 
 strength to the clerical estate, was itself weak, and changing 
 its front, becoming more of an Italian power and less of an ecu- 
 menical arbitrator and influence, just at the moment when in 
 England the clergy alone remained united enough to withstand 
 the royal will. The clerical estate did not at first feel what was 
 happening to it ; for Henry VII had no quarrel with it, and 
 possibly had no design of secularising the powers that should 
 have been, first of allj moral and spiritual : he chose his 
 ministers from churchmen, and made bishops of his ministers ; 
 until the bishops forgot that they were anything but ministers ; 
 sadly to the depression of religion, and sadly to the depression 
 of learning, as the revival showed when it threw the learning 
 of the country into the party of innovation, notwithstanding 
 the influence of such men as Morton, More, Warham, Colet, 
 and even Wolsey. The Church was sitting at the foot of a 
 dynasty which ere long was to kick it over and to trample 
 on it. 
 
 And fourthly, there was the people, weary of dynastic 
 parties and politics, and set on a new pursuit of money- 
 making, loving peace and hating taxation, and willing to 
 endure anything from kings who would so far humour them : 
 not altogether content, but discontented in a way that showed 
 that heart and treasure went together: for, true as some of 
 the charges of financial chicanery against Henry VII are, they 
 owe their real practical weight to the fact that the people who 
 groaned under them were rapidly growing in acquisitive power 
 
XV.] Division of the Reign. 343 
 
 and economic wisdom ; they knew they had something worth 
 conserving. 
 
 Thus England, witli her once turbulent baronage depressed 
 and silent, her Church kept subservient by the bestowal of 
 political influence to the loss of religious power, her people in 
 good humour so long as they were not overtaxed, was, under 
 kings with determinate views, rich and ambitious, collected 
 enough and manageable enough to enter as an eflS^cient actor 
 into the international drama. If she wanted leaders, guides, 
 dictators in the coming struggle, she found them in the race 
 which Henry VII founded and impressed with a strong will, 
 a strong policy, and a strong energetic activity that gave her 
 Dnmistakeably her place in modern history. 
 
 It would be very difBcult, more difficult than in the case of 
 a reign which has a plot, or a dramatic complexity or unity, 
 to attempt a chronological account of the development of 
 any principle or principles in this reign. I have said it is 
 naturally divided into two great sections ; and those two are 
 subdivided in their turn. 
 
 I am afraid that, having spent all my generalisations in the 
 preamble, I must in the remainder of this and the following 
 lecture descend to the level of tabular computations, pedigrees, 
 acts of parliament, and treaties. But we will hope for the 
 best. As I am not aware that there is anything in the 
 statute under which I am lecturing which makes it incum- 
 bent on me to offer on these occasions a substantive original 
 contribution to history, I shall not apologise for taking my 
 hearers over well known and well trodden ground. 
 
 The first point, of course, that occurs to us in a survey 
 of the reign is the nature of Henry VII's title to the 
 throne. On this no little controversy has been raised, and 
 yet very trenchant opinions are given. We are not un- 
 commonly told that Henry VII had not in his own person a 
 shadow of hereditary right ; that is a view not uncommonly 
 taken in the schools ; it is concise, and not hard to remember. 
 But it is not exactly true. The whole question of the title of 
 the house of Lancaster is a matter of dispute ; and the title 
 of the house of York has always, curiously enough, been a 
 
344 Question of Title. [xv. 
 
 point on which extreme legitimists and extreme advocates 
 of popular right have agreed. Edward IV was heir general 
 of Edward III, therefore he pleases the legitimists ; he came 
 to the throne by a revolution, therefore he satisfies their 
 extreme opponents. From a legal point of view it is 
 different ; Henry VI was the heir, in the male Hne of succes- 
 sion, of Edward III, and also, by descent from Henry IV, 
 was heir male of a new purchaser under a new and parlia- 
 mentary title. Henry VII's title was of coui-se very 
 debateable. With relation to Edward III, he was not heir 
 general, for that place belonged to the daughters of Edward 
 IV : nor was he heir in the male line of succession, because 
 the line was broken in the person of his mother. With 
 relation to John of Gaunt, accepting the legitimation of 
 the Beauforts by king, pope, and parliament, he was heir 
 general ; whilst with reference to Henry IV, he can hardly be 
 said to have been heu- by collateral descent or heir at all. 
 
 But a question arises, on what analogy does the royal suc- 
 cession proceed. If on the analogy of a private estate, then 
 Henry VII, as the nearest kinsman to Henry VI on the side 
 of the purchaser Henry IV, had a claim to succeed : that 
 claim was ba,rred, it is said, by reason of the half-blood ; and 
 to that the answer is given that the doctrine of the half-blood, 
 does not affect the royal succession. If, on the other hand, 
 we take for analogy the descent of peerages limited to heirs 
 male, there can be no question that the Earl of Warwick was 
 the right heir through the line of York, irrespective of the 
 line of Clarence; but Warwick's claim and that of all the 
 line of York was crossed by attainder : so also was the claim 
 of Lancaster. 
 
 Well, all this argument serves not to prove that Henry 
 VII had a hereditary claim, but to explain what he meant 
 when he said he had. And, although not very important, 
 it is as well to try to understand it. In truth, the law of 
 royal succession, except where it has been settled by parlia- 
 ment, has never been very certain. Mary I and Elizabeth 
 were akin by the half-blood only to Edward VI, yet they 
 claimed hereditary right : disputable, perhaps, in itself, that 
 
XV.] Settlement of the Succession. 345 
 
 position was strengthened by Henry VIII's will and acts 
 of settlement. But Edward VI's will was set aside, and, 
 although conflicting opinions did conflict, the crown de- 
 scended in the natural and legal order to James I. There 
 can, I think, be no doubt that Henry VII was legitimately 
 Duke of Lancaster, if we suppose that such a title could pass 
 through a female, notwithstanding the half-blood. It is 
 quite possible to maintain that he was king of England by 
 hereditary right. 
 
 Anyhow, he said he was. In his first address to the 
 collected parliament, Nov. 9, 1485, he declared that he had 
 come to the crown by just title of inheritance, and by the 
 true judgment of God in giving him the victory over his 
 enemy : the parliament accepted the fact, and passed a statute, 
 in avoiding all ambiguities and questionings, ordaining, 
 establishing, and enacting that the inheritance of the crowns 
 of England and France, and so on, be, rest and remain, in the 
 person of our now sovereign lord and in the heirs of his body. 
 You may think that this was enough, but the pope clenched 
 the matter in a bull of March 27) 1486! declaring that Henry 
 was king not only by the right of war, and by the notorious 
 and undoubted nearest title of succession, but also by the 
 choice and vote of all the prelates, peers, magnates, nobles, and 
 of the whole realm of England, and by ordinance, decree, and 
 statute of the three estates of the realm called the parliament, 
 for this purpose publicly and generally held. Perhaps the 
 good old man swore a little too hard ; the accumulation of 
 reasons may show that Innocent VIII had some misgiving. 
 
 Trebly certain, however, as all this was, by a scale of verdicts 
 rising from the king's own assertion, to the parliament, to the 
 pope, and to the judgment of the Almighty, the king would 
 make assurance doubly sure by marrying the equally undoubted 
 heiress of the rival line. He was espoused to Elizabeth of 
 York on the 1 8th of January, i486. He had not waited for 
 her to be crowned with him ; he himself had been crowned on 
 the 30th of October : and he was in no great hurry to admit 
 her to a share of his dignity. She was not crowned until the 
 35th of November, 1487, and a great deal had happened in 
 
346 The two Mothers. [xv. 
 
 the meantime. I am not sure that the marriage was a very- 
 happy one. A priori, there was no reason why it should, 
 although I believe it is certain that husband and wife were 
 faithful. But Elizabeth was a silly woman, and Henry was 
 not a sympathetic man. It was said she would have married 
 her uncle, and certainly her marriage with Hemy was a 
 marriage of convenience. Their family polities must have 
 been very much opposed ; that is if we suppose them to have 
 had any family affections at aU, which is rather a strong effort 
 to suppose in the case of kings and queens in the fifteenth 
 century. But it is stiU more certain that they both had 
 mothers alive, and there would be, according to all analogies, 
 no love lost. Henry was an affectionate and obedient son to 
 a pious and noble mother : Elizabeth had a mother who had 
 not much sense or discretion, and was constantly in disgrace. 
 The lady Margaret was strict and stately, and a woman of 
 great experience, of many husbands and good advisers : the 
 queen dowager may have learned, in the romantic seclusion to 
 which her son-in-law consigned her, some lessons that would 
 counteract the influences of the court in which she had reigned 
 during her false, fair husband's lifetime, and she may have 
 profited by the sweet uses of adversity ; but she inherited the 
 characteristic features of her mother Jacquetta, and her own 
 early career was one of vanity and foolish ambition. Any 
 how, the lady Margaret had the upper hand ; she kept her 
 son straight and the court fairly pure, both during his wife's 
 life and after her death, when the discipline was so close that 
 poor Katharine of Aragon had to write home to her father that 
 she could not get a mouthful of meat in Lent. 
 
 The history of the first half of the reign is the story of the 
 struggle with which this trebly attested title to the throne 
 was maintained ; a bloody story, it is true, but, take it all in 
 all, scarcely to be compared with what goes before and follows. 
 The struggle is not altogether dynastic ; it is not in all its 
 details a contest of competitors ; and, in fact, each of the in- 
 cidents in it has a shade of its own, common as the colouring 
 seems at a distance. There were dynastic rivabies, there were 
 personal intrigues and party blood feuds that made use of the 
 
XV.] Roots of Bitterness. 347 
 
 dynastic rivalri€S to secure their victory or revenge, and 
 there were administrative diificulties emerging in discontents 
 which had little to do with either dynastic or hereditary 
 struggles, but lent aid to both and borrowed pretext from 
 both. 
 
 It is hardly necessary for me perhaps to recall to your minds 
 what roots of dynastic bitterness still subsisted : but for the 
 sake of clearness I will enumerate them. There was the 
 Dowager Margaret of Burgundy, ready to say or do or believe 
 anything for the sake of revenge ; there was the son of 
 Clarence, a prisoner in the king's hands ; there were the De 
 la Poles, the five sons of John, Duke of Sufiblk, by Elizabeth 
 of York, the eldest of whom had been recognised by Richard 
 III as his presumptive heir ; and there was the doubt that 
 hung over the death of Edward V and his brother Richard. 
 It is curious to trace the intertwining of these really incom- 
 patible and inconsistent interests, and yet the only conclusion 
 at which we can fairly arrive is the utterly desperate and un- 
 principled character of the Yorkist intrigues. 
 
 The first rising is perhaps the most desperate ; in April 
 i486 the Viscount Level, and Humfrey and Thomas Staflbrd, 
 rose in Worcestershire ; the king, as Bacon tells us, thought 
 it a mere rag of Bosworth : although at one time it seemed 
 to be becoming formidable, it collapsed before the king's ofier 
 of pardon. Level escaped to the Duchess Margaret, Humfrey 
 Stafibrd was executed, and Thomas was pardoned. "Whether the 
 original motive of the rising was the despair of the attainted 
 leaders, or an intrigue of the as yet unreconciled Yorkist remnant, 
 it is, by the agency of Lord Lovel, linked on with the second 
 rising, that of 1487, in the name of Lambert Simnel. The 
 idea of dethroning the new king by setting up as claimant a 
 person, who pretended to be another person, who was well 
 known to be a prisoner in the king's hands, is not only 
 desperate but unprincipled, and, if I can say it without 
 offence, not only unprincipled and desperate, but Irish. 
 Lambert Simnel, a boy of twelve years old, the son of an 
 organ-maker at Oxford, educated by a clever priest named 
 Symonds, a name stiU known here, was presented to the 
 
348 Dynastic Risings. [xv. 
 
 world as Edward Earl of Warwick ; was received in Ireland 
 in February 1487, crowned at Dublin in May, brought to 
 England in June, and taken prisoner at Stoke near Newark 
 on the 1 6th of that month. In this most extravagant im- 
 posture the Yorkist remnant was thoroughly implicated: 
 the Duchess Margaret was represented by Martin Swart and 
 his men ; the Earl of Lincoln, the cousin of Warwick, was 
 slain fighting for Simnel ; the Lord Lovel, ' the dog' minister 
 of Richard, disappeared on the field, and Henry's suspicions 
 were so strongly excited against his mother-in-law that he 
 had to send her to a nunnery, and her son Lord Dorset to 
 the Tower. The third rising, that in Yorkshire in 1489, was 
 not directly connected with the dynastic quarrel, but was pro- 
 voked by the taxation voted in the preceding parliament : 
 Egremont, however, the leader of the rioters who killed the 
 Earl of Northumberland at Thirsk, was a Yorkist partisan, 
 and found a refuge in his exile with the intransigent Duchess 
 of Burgundy. After this we get on for three years without 
 overt trouble. The year 149a is marked by another Yorkshire 
 battle, that of Acworth, between the Earl of Surrey and cer- 
 tain rebels, whose occasion of rising is not known ; and it 
 would therefore be of little use to argue whether or no it was 
 connected with the imminent conspiracy for Perkin Warbeck, 
 or a result of local discontent of which there may have been 
 other eases not recorded at aU. 
 
 Next comes the grand episode or tragedy of Perkin, which 
 covers seven years of disturbance, and connects the Yorkist in- 
 trigues with the social discontents in a way more striking than 
 any of the previous outbursts. I will only just indicate the dates 
 and points of contact. Perkin, whose prompters, wiser than 
 Lambert Simnel' s, identified him vdth a claimant who could be 
 more easily counterfeited, and who is said to have been educated 
 by the Duchess Margaret to appear as her nephew Richard of 
 York, lands at Cork probably in 1491, certainly by February 
 149a. According to Bacon, he himself was not at first quite 
 sure who he was, a sort of doubt that has afiected the minds 
 of his adherents ever since ; but, if there was any hesitation on 
 his part, it must have been assumed for the purpose of ascer- 
 
XV.] Per kin War beck. 349 
 
 taining under what title lie would be most likely to make a good 
 start. After kaving exhibited himself for some time in Ireland 
 and France without much affecting the political feeling of 
 England, he returned to Flanders in August 1493, ^^"^ ^i^ 
 supporters for a while had to content themselves with intrigue. 
 So thoroughly, however, was the scheme worked, that in 1494 
 the Yorkist lords in England sent over Sir Robert Clifford to 
 ascertaia the truth of the story that was put in Perkin's 
 mouth ; and Clifford, after having familiarised himself with 
 the conditions of the party at home, was brought over to the 
 king's side, turned against his employers and gave np their 
 names to the government. Several of these were of the old 
 Yorkist connexion, and were executed in the autumn of 1494 ; 
 the greatest victim, however, was Sir William Stanley the 
 chamberlain, brother of the lady Margaret's husband, the Earl 
 of Derby, and one of the most able of the adherents who had 
 placed Henry of Richmond on the throne. He had, from some 
 idea apparently that his own services were ill ' requited, 
 entangled himself in the plot, and, although he must have 
 been undeceived' as to the identity of the impostor, was not 
 therefore spared ; he perished in February 1495- 
 
 The increasing severity of the king's proceedings, and the 
 success of his counter intrigues, thus warned the rest of the 
 plotters that no time must be lost. In July of this year Perkin 
 attempted a landing at Sandwich ; this failing, he went again 
 to Ireland, and then to Scotland, where he obtained full recog- 
 nition and a noble wife. Henry was now pursuing the course 
 which Edward IV had adopted with regard to himself in his 
 boyhood, and endeavouring to obtain by diplomatic agencies the 
 expulsion of the claimant from the territories of the neighbour 
 princes. Early in 1496 he concluded a treaty with Burgundy, 
 which forbade the entertainment of Perkin there ; and in 1497, 
 on the approach of a peace with Scotland, he negotiated for 
 his surrender. The king of Scots, who in November 1496 had 
 made a raid into the north in his behalf, was still prepared to 
 support him and refused to betray him ; but he thought it 
 best to be rid of him : sent him to Ireland in July, and, after 
 another invasion and defeat, concluded in September a truce 
 
350 Per kin War beck. [xv. 
 
 for seven years, with which any overt suppoa-t of the Pretender 
 would have been incompatihle. 
 
 Before the truce was actually sig-ned Perkin's career was over. 
 In its last act the plot connects itself with the social discontent. 
 In the January parliament a new subsidy had been voted, and 
 this, when it came to be collected, provoked a rising in Corn- 
 wall. The men of Cornwall rose under the local hero Flam- 
 mock, who, declaring the law on his side, and insisting on 
 delivering a petition to the king, started them for London. 
 Picking up as their leader a disaffected nobleman. Lord Audley, 
 on the way, they pushed on to Blackheath, where they were 
 defeated with great loss on the 22nd of June. The king's 
 severity was somewhat arbitrary, but the effect was to quicken 
 Perkin's movements and to point to the part of England where 
 he was most likely to win support. He landed near Penzance 
 in September, pushed to Taunton where he was put to flight, 
 took sanctuary at Beaulieu, and on the 5th of October was 
 surrendered to the king. Henry was inclined to spare him, 
 possibly having some doubt as to his real identity; he 
 was however imprisoned, and his escape in June 1498, his 
 recapture, and further involvement in the plot which was 
 made an excuse for implicating the Earl of Warwick, ended in 
 the execution of the two in November 1499 : a cruelty for 
 which other motives and other influences besides the sense of 
 actual danger, are probably accountable. 
 
 After the extinction of these two, the false and the true 
 competitors, the king had only the De la Poles to doubt 
 about. The eldest of these, Edmund, who after his brother's 
 death at Stoke had been the head of the branch, and who 
 after his father's death in 1491 had been allowed to sur- 
 render his estate of Duke and subside into Earl of Suffolk, 
 quitted England with his brother Richard, in August 1501. 
 What intelligence they may have had of the means by which 
 Ferdinand the Catholic was likely to insure the succession of 
 his son-in-law Arthur; or whether Edmund, who had been 
 fairly well treated by the king, but had taken offence at a 
 humiliation which he had, so far as it was real, brought upon 
 himself, acted on mere impulse and carried his brother with 
 
XV.] Edmtmd de la Pole. 351 
 
 him, we cannot decide ; — they fled together to their aunt Mar- 
 garet and constituted the dynastic bugbear for the rest of the 
 reign. It was not the first escapade. Edmund had been in- 
 dicted for murder in 1498 ; he had been pardoned, but notwith- 
 standing had run away to Flanders. He had, however, then 
 returned, apologised, and been received into favour. Just before 
 the celebration of the marriage of Arthur he made this second 
 flight ; on the invitation of Maximilian, who was engaged in 
 one of his unaccountable intrigues, he went from Flanders and 
 joined him in Tyrol ; the emperor offering to put him at the 
 head of a large force to secure his rights, but really playing 
 him as a card in his diplomatic game with Henry and 
 Ferdinand. In 150* he was jilanning an invasion of England 
 to start from Denmark, and was implicated in the attempt 
 on Guisnes which brought Sir James Tyrrell to the block. 
 The same year Henry, by promising Maximilian 10,000 marks 
 for his war against the Turks, prevailed on him to expel the 
 English malcontents, whilst Ferdinand and Isabella as well as 
 Lewis XII j oined in urging the proscription. Edmund fled then 
 to the Count Palatine, and in 1504, venturing into Guelders, 
 was taken prisoner by the duke. The same year he was 
 attainted with fifty-two of his adherents. The next year the 
 duke gave him up to the Archduke Philip, under whose care 
 he made some very brave show of claims against Henry VII 
 for the estates and dignities of his father. Unfortunately for 
 him, when the archduke, in 1506, was forced by the weather 
 to land in England, Henry made a point with him that 
 Edmund should be surrendered. Philip, who like his father 
 was quite equal to playing a game of the sort that Henry 
 loved, was on this occasion at the mercy of his host. He 
 promised to sun'ender the prisoner on the strict understand- 
 ing that his life should be spared. He was surrendered and 
 his life was spared, so long as Henry VII lived. He came 
 to the Tower in March 1506. In 1513 he was beheaded by 
 Henry VIII. According to Lord Herbert, Henry VII had 
 left it in charge to his son that, although he had sworn not 
 to execute him, his successor should and would be wise to do 
 it. Whether or no this is true, Henry VIII's cruelty was no 
 
352 Extinction of the Yorkists. [xv, 
 
 doubt stimulated by finding Richard De la Pole, the younger 
 brother, fighting in the army of Ei'ance against him. Richard 
 continued to be a thorn in the side of England — the White 
 Rose of York as he was called — until in 15*5 ^® ^^^ killed 
 fighting for Francis I at Pavia. 
 
 Margaret of Burgundy lived until 1503, but her power and 
 wealth as well as her zeal had diminished, and after the failure 
 of Perkin she had been almost innocuous. This finishes the 
 dynastic complications of the reign of Henry VII. In the 
 next lecture I shall devote myself chiefly to the constitu- 
 tional points of impoi-tance in connexion with domestic and 
 foreign history. 
 
XVI. 
 
 THE REIGN OF HENRY VH. 
 
 (April 25, 1883.) 
 
 IN the first of these two public statutory lectures, I opened 
 my subject with some vain remarks on the want of attrac- 
 tiveness which may be said to characterise the personal and 
 political history of Henry VII : and then, having divided the 
 reign into two portions, nearly coinciding with the change of 
 century, I very briefly marked the series of dynastic quarrels, 
 struggles, and distui-bances, the interest of which belongs 
 mainly to the first half of the reign. There remains to us 
 some investigation of the constitutional and diplomatic his- 
 tory of a period which falls between two great constitutional 
 periods, and lays the foundation of a great diplomatic, political, 
 and commercial fabric ; or rather I should say opens a great 
 •diplomatic, political and commercial period, which constitutes 
 modern history in its general acceptation. 
 
 With regard to the constitutional histoiy proper, nearly the 
 same line may be drawn as in the other case, for, as only one 
 parliament was called between the year 1497 and the end of 
 the reign, the greatest part of what little constitutional histoiy 
 there is belongs to the earlier half. It cannot however be said 
 that, with the exception of two or three very distinct pieces of 
 legislation, and a very distinct purpose of raising and storing 
 money, there is much constitutional material to deal with. 
 There is a great poverty of record. The Rolls of the Parlia- 
 ments tell us scarcely anything more than the dates of open- 
 ing, the subject of the chancellor's address, the name of the 
 Speaker, and the titles of the Acts passed, including the 
 subsidies. There are no details of deliberation, or discussions 
 on petitions. There are no Journals of either House ; there 
 is nothing in the shape of writs or returns to indicate the 
 
 A a 
 
354 Ministers of Henry VII. [xvi. 
 
 composition of the House of Commons ; and little, if indeed 
 anything, to show how the composition of the House of Lords 
 was able to influence legislation or administration, Not that 
 we are entirely in the dark as to these matters : we know 
 from the character of the Acts passed, and from the nature of 
 the political measui'es of the reign, what sort of influences 
 must have been at work : but we have no documentary details, 
 nothing of personal or sensational import. 
 
 The ministerial changes of the reign are not in themselves 
 important : the chancellorship, after having been held for a few 
 months by Bishop Aleock, early in i486 devolves upon Arch- 
 bishop Morton, who is the minister of the reign : he retains 
 the great seal as long as he lives, and during the rest of the 
 reign it is held only by Dene and Warham, successively ai'ch- 
 bishops of Canterbury. The treasury in the same way sees few 
 alterations ; whilst Aleock is chancellor. Sir Reginald Bray is 
 treasurer; under Morton, Lord Dynhamj and from 1500 to 
 1509 Thomas Howard, who, as Earl of Surrey and Duke of 
 Norfolk, remains at the head of finance during his life and 
 leaves the position to his son, who holds it until 1546. 
 
 The tenure of these great ofiiees by prelates and magnates of 
 this sort, of course, implies that a great deal of the business of 
 the country was conducted by means of subordinate officials ; 
 it also means that the king and. his council took such direct 
 part in it, that the nominal ministers had a somewhat 
 diminished responsibility; and it probably means further, 
 under Henry VII at least, that the king dealt directly with 
 the subordinate officials without much concert with his 
 nominal ministers. This is especially the case as the reign 
 proceeds ; during the first half Archbishop Morton, who was 
 both a distinguished lawyer and, in popular opinion, a too 
 active financier, really did ministerial work. After his death 
 the king seems to have employed men like Empson and 
 Dudley for measures which men like Archbishop Warham 
 and the Earl of Surrey could certainly not have approved, but 
 which they were helpless to prevent, and perhaps without 
 courage to remonstrate about. There is not then much to be 
 said about ministerial history. 
 
XVI.] The Peerage. 355 
 
 The next point to note is the composition of the House of 
 Lords. We are open to some risk of exaggeration in relation 
 to this, because of the slaughters and proscriptions connected 
 with the Wars of the Eoses. But, great as were the effects of 
 those quarrels on the personality of the baronage, the effect was 
 far greater on the political status and influence of the peerage. 
 It was attenuated in power and prestige rather than in num- 
 bers. Even the bloodshed and attainder fall within a narrow 
 circle ; generation after generation perishes out of a few great 
 houses ; the majority continue in succession and either escape 
 ruin or soon recover. It is as well to be particular as to this, 
 because it has a real bearing on the character of the Tudor 
 despotism or dictatorship ; and we are liable to be misled both 
 by striking catastrophes and by untested generalisations. If 
 we compare the last parliament of Edward IV with the first of 
 Henry VII, we find a great difference on the face of it : in 
 1483 there are forty-five lords summoned to parliament ; in 
 1485 there are only twenty-nine. But for this diminution 
 the recent change of dynasty is only very partially the cause : 
 only six peers are attainted as yet, three of whom, the late 
 King Richard, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Lord Ferrers, 
 had fallen at Bosworth field ; and a fourth was Surrey, the son 
 of the Duke of Norfolk. Of the other missing lords, some 
 had perished under Richard's own tyranny, some two or three 
 were now represented by minors, and about half-a-dozen seem 
 to have had their summons suspended during either the whole 
 reign or a great part of it. Of these suspended peers, who all 
 reappear either in the later parliaments or in the first parlia- 
 ment of Henry VIII, the chief iire the Ogle, Daere, and 
 Scrope lords, who mle in the north country, and whose ab- 
 sence, which is not necessarily to be accounted for on political 
 grounds, is a point that has not been satisfactorily investi- 
 gated. In this way, however, not by proscription or execu- 
 tion, the list is diminished. In the later parliaments not 
 only do many of these suspended peerages revive, the empty 
 places being fiUed by the restoration of the heirs of Richard's 
 victims, but even the attainders of 1485 are cancelled; the 
 Howards return to favour and power in 1489, Ferrers in 1487, 
 
 A a 2 
 
356 The Parliaments. [xvi. 
 
 Zouch in 1495 ; Lovel perishes, the viscount himself who fell 
 at Stoke leaving t)nly coheiresses^ 
 
 A proof of what I have been saying is seen also in the fact 
 that dui'ing the whole reign only five new peerages were 
 created ; one of these, the earldom of Bath, held by a foreigner, 
 does not seem to have entitled its possessor to a summons ; 
 another is an Irish earldom, Ormond ; the other three are 
 Daubeny, Cheney, and Buxgh. Yet notwithstanding this 
 economy and the later attainders of the reign, the subsequent 
 parliaments contain a lay peerage of forty members, which is 
 not below the average of the century and was not increased 
 materially until Henry VIII brought up the number of lay 
 lords to that of the spiritual lords, before he finally reduced 
 the latter to half their tale by getting rid of the abbots. 
 
 This point, like that of the composition of the House of 
 Commons, on which we have no information, would be more 
 important if we knew anything of the parliamentary history. 
 As we do not, and find that the king in that august assembly 
 had things very much as he pleased, we conclude, as we have 
 other reasons for concluding, either that the assembled estates 
 were cowed into complaisance, or else that they were too busy 
 about other matters to care for the excitement of a quarrelsome 
 debate. 
 
 There were seven parliaments during .the reign of twenty- 
 four years ; and of these seven, one had three sessions and 
 another two; six of them fall before the close of 1497, aud 
 before the end of Archbishop Morton's life. I think that, if we 
 had nothing else to judge by, we should infer from this, that so 
 long as Morton was minister the king retained the Lancastrian 
 idea of ruling mainly through parliaments ; whilst, dming the 
 nine years that followed the archbishop's death, he reigned 
 chiefly through councils and held but one parliament. Mor- 
 ton was indeed a thorough Lancastrian, though not of the 
 type of Archbishop Arundel. He had been the mainstay of 
 "bhe party in evil times, and the leader of intrigue under 
 Edward IV and Richard III ; but the old political game of 
 Lancaster had long been played out, and, although Morton 
 probably retained the attachment to forms which marked it to 
 
XVI.] Henry s Economy. 357 
 
 the last, he, either as a politician or as overborne by the king, 
 was not in his financial administration faithful to the con- 
 stitutional principle. This matter touches, however, a point of 
 character in which master and minister alike suffer. Henry 
 VII is constantly accused of avarice, and Morton to the 
 popular mind is best known as the inventor of the fork, Mor- 
 ton's fork, the dilemma by which he proved the necessity of 
 the benevolences, to the great dissatisfaction of the payers : if 
 you spend much you have plenty ; if you spend little you 
 must have saved ; out of your plenty, or out of your savings, 
 you must pay. 
 
 I do not know that I am concerned to defend Morton, who 
 was certainly not an avaricious man himself, and who, if he 
 incurs a part of his master's shame, incurs it as a too faithful 
 servant ; but it is worth while speculating on Henry's own 
 character for avarice. He was a man who had a fair intelli- 
 gence and a fair knowledge of history : he had been very poor 
 himself, and he had learned that poverty and want of eco- 
 nomic governance had ruined the great house to which 
 Henry V had imparted so much glory. He knew, from the 
 first, that he must save in order to get on at all ; and when 
 he had begun to save, and when, by the forfeitures of the 
 early years, he had managed to save to some purpose, not only 
 did the love of money increase as the money itself accumu- 
 lated, but he found it pleasant to rule without having to ask 
 parliament for money ; and finally found it pleasant, through 
 Empson and Dudley, both to rule and to gather money with- 
 out the trouble of parliament. However that may have been, 
 the seven parliaments each had a subsidy or a budget ; and 
 the financial history is capable of a brief summary. 
 
 In the first parliament Henry succeeded in obtaining a 
 revenue for life ; Bishop Aleock had made a moving speech on 
 the text, ' Good luck have thou with thine honour, ride on ; ' in 
 which he adduced the fable of the belly and members, the pro- 
 perties of bees, Isidore on the virtues of royalty, S. Ambrose in 
 the Hexaemeron, and Ovid on the Golden Age ; with the usual 
 application. After the approval of the Speaker, the king ad- 
 dressed the Commons with a declaration of his title and pro- 
 
358 Taxation under Henry VII. [xvi. 
 
 mises of good govemment : and they responded with a liberal 
 vote of tunnage, poundage, and the custom on leather for 
 life ; apportioning £14,000 to the household, i6io,ooo odd to 
 Calais, and £%\o^ 19s. ii<^. to the wardrobe ; there was like- 
 wise an act of resumption. 
 
 In the session of 1487 Morton preached on ' Cease to do evil, 
 learn to do well : ' a wonderful sermon in four heads, subdivided 
 each into three arguments, illustrated from Cicero and other 
 gentile philosophers, the moral of which was the vote of two 
 tenths and fifteenths, and a poll-tax upon aliens, payable at 
 the next Easter. In 1489 the text was ' The eyes of the Lord 
 are over the righteous ; ' the sermon a miracle of subdivision : 
 the demand a lump sum of j8ioo,ooo. To meet this, by a 
 curious departui'e from the rule which is always supposed to 
 have been long established, the Lords, by themselves, grant 
 a tenth of their income from land ; the Commons, with the 
 advice and consent of the Lords, ofier to raise £75,000 by a 
 tenth on lands not belonging to the lords, and twenty-pence 
 on every ten marks of goods. This must have been seen to 
 be a dangerous experiment. An attempt to coUect the tax 
 caused the outbreak at Thirsk, in which the Earl of Northum- 
 berland was slain ; the sums collected from the Commons only 
 reached the amount of £'i'],ooo, and in the third session early 
 in 1490 the grant of a tenth and fifteenth was substituted for 
 the balance. The object of the budget was the maintenance 
 of the army, which was being raised for the defence of 
 Brittany against France, a design which culminates and 
 terminates in the expedition to Boulogne in October 1493. 
 Before this expedition took place another parliament in the 
 autumn of 149 1 and January of 149a was asked for a vote. 
 Moi-ton chose his text from Jeremiah, and his illustrations 
 from Sallust on the war with Jugm-tha ; the bill was two 
 entire tenths and fifteenths, and a third if the king himself 
 should go to the war. He did go to the war and made peace. 
 And this carried him on to 1495. 
 
 I should say here that the parliamentary grants were each 
 year supplemented by ecclesiastical grants made in the Con- 
 vocations of the two provinces, and generally consisting of one 
 
XVI.] Parliaments and Taxes. 359 
 
 entire tenth from each ; the tenth of the Southern province was 
 about £10,000 and that of York about £3,000, I think. In 
 1489, when the estates, as we have just seen, proposed separate 
 grants, the share of the Canterbury clergy was fixed at 
 £35,000, about the same sum as that offered by the House of 
 Lords ; but it finally took the form of two entire tenths. 
 
 Well, the grants of 149 1, which extended over a year, 
 proved insufficient for the king's needs, and he had recourse to 
 the exaction of a benevolence ; indeed the commissions for the 
 benevolence were issued before the parliament sat, and are. 
 supposed to have been authorised by a Great Council which 
 sat in the June previous. This must have been a very liberal 
 contribution, if the subscriptions of the country bore any pro- 
 portion to the sum raised in London, which was £9682 
 i7«. 4<?. But I am not aware that any exact account of it 
 exists. No doubt the commissions were executed in the usual 
 way, but the authority given to the commissioners is only 
 that they should intimate the king's purpose to the subjects, 
 and move, exhort, and require them to assist him, in contem- 
 plation of the war with France. The commission was 
 worked to some purpose, for the short expedition did not cost 
 so much as might have been expected, and it was not until 
 1495 that the king found it necessary to call a parliament. 
 It is then to this period that we must fix the application of 
 Morton's fork, and to it Lord Bacon assigns the beginning of 
 the penurious or saving habits which later on grew so strong 
 in the king. I will just add that, as it was the subsidy of 
 1489 that provoked the riot at Thirsk, it was in aU probability 
 the subsidy of 149 T and the exaction of the benevolence that 
 caused the struggle at Acworth in 149a. ^ 
 
 In the parliament of 1495 no new tax was asked for ; the 
 archbishop's sermon was a lecture on law, which he divided 
 into the law of Nature, the law of Nations, the Mosaic, Civil, 
 Evangelic, and Canon law, with an application of the subject to 
 the regulations of trade and commerce. These have a visible 
 outcome in the sixty-five Acts that the parliament passed. 
 For our present point but one of these is important ; the tenth 
 statute, on the Benevolence : divers persons have granted 
 
360 Financial History. [xvi. 
 
 benevolences for the expedition to France ; some have paid 
 what they promised, some have not ; the crown is empowered 
 to enforce the fulfihnent of the promises. There can be little 
 doubt after this as to the gi-eat value of the benevolence ; no 
 further demand is made of the parliament, but the clergy 
 grant an entire tenth. 
 
 The next session was not so happy. It was in January, 
 1497 ; the archbishop lectured this time on Roman history, 
 Scipio, Cm-tius, Sceevola, Regulus, Julius Csesar and S. 
 ■Augustine : the occasion was really pressing : the Scots king 
 was making a succession of raids, and the invasion by Perkan 
 was impending. And a very exceptional grant was made, two 
 fifteenths and tenths first, and then another sum of the same 
 amount, reaching, according to Lord Bacon, to sSiao,ooo, and 
 no doubt contributing to the disaffection which brought the 
 Cornishmen to Blackheath and encoui'aged Perkin to land at 
 Penzance. The clergy are asked for j640,oo6, of which the 
 king remits j6i 0,000. This is the last great tax of the reign : 
 peace is practically insured, and the king finds other ways of 
 enriching himself. Nevertheless, in 1503 the clergy pay a 
 tenth, or thereabouts, for the expedition against the Turks, 
 that is to say, the subsidy promised to Maximilian for his 
 expulsion of Edmund de la Pole ; and in 1504 the parliament 
 granted £40,000 as an aid on the knighting of the king's 
 eldest son and marriage of his eldest daughter. This was the 
 last session of the reign. Morton had died four years before ; 
 and archbishop Warham opened the parliament with a discourse 
 on moral philosophy from Aristotle and Cicero, of a much more 
 florid and less scholastic tjrpe than the sermons of his prede- 
 cessor, and probably in better Latin. 
 
 This closes the financial history of the reign except in one 
 point. Henry VII is said to have left behind him £1,800,000 
 sterling, a great part of which must have been the result of 
 savings from royal demesne and forfeitures, but which was 
 partially, and in popular belief principally, accumulated by 
 exactions made by Empson and Dudley. These two men, 
 acting as members of the royal council and under the direct 
 control of the king, had reduced to a system the extraction of 
 
XVI.] Empson and Dudley. 361 
 
 money on false or exaggerated charges. They had revived old 
 sentences and ancient worn-out claims, and had the king's 
 connivance in exacting the pettiest sums. In the year 1504 
 so great was the outcry against them that the king, suffering 
 at the time from illness and taking a spell of penitence, issued 
 letters ordering that all who had any reason to complain of 
 injmy inflicted in the king's name, should come forward and 
 have a hearing. But no real good was done, and the abuses 
 continued to the end of the reign : the culprits had imprisoned 
 men without chance of hearing until they had paid their fines ; 
 they had compelled others to recognise themselves as tenants in 
 chief and so liable for feudal aids ; they had refused livery of 
 seisin to wards, except on payment of enormous reliefs ; 
 exacted two years' income from outlaws before they could sue 
 for pardons ; they had heard and • disposed of matters that 
 belonged to the courts of law, and had imprisoned and fined 
 a jury. These charges against them are in exact parallel 
 with the abuses practised by William Rufus and remedied by 
 Henry I and in Magna Carta. Yet they pleaded royal 
 authority and the letter of the law, and, when the time of 
 vengeance came, as it did at the very opening of the next 
 reign, they perished on a charge of conspiring to govern the 
 king and council, very much analogous to that which had 
 been brought against the Despensers two centuries before, not 
 on the ground of their real offences. 
 
 The next point to take is the legislation of the reign, on 
 which I do not propose to say much, as it would be very 
 tedious to repeat the dates and occasions of the parliaments, 
 whilst to go into the social questions touched by the new laws 
 would be impossible. I will, however, take the principal 
 measures in the order of time. It is not necessaiy to recm- to 
 the acts of attainder and restoration, which occupy so large 
 a part of the pages of the statute book, fm-ther than to rerhark 
 that, although it was doubtless a piece of legal pettifogging 
 to antedate the beginning of the reign by a day in order to 
 include Richard's supporters at Bosworth under the title of 
 rebels, it can scarcely be said to have been an unreasonable 
 proceeding in the new Conqueror to treat them as such. The 
 
tl 
 
 362 The Star Chamber. [xvi. 
 
 large number of forfeitures, and the large sums exacted as 
 fines on restoration, show that scarcely any amount of political 
 guilt was beyond forgiveness, if the repentance were accom- 
 panied by a handsome sum down. On the whole, where 
 society was just recovering from a condition in which nothing 
 was certain for two days together, and nearly every household 
 was divided against itself, anything like settled peace was 
 worth paying for, and the people generally justified by 
 acquiescence in fact, however much and rightly they might 
 in words complain of the mercenary policy of the court. 
 Parliament itself acquiesced without complaint. 
 
 Leaving then these acts out of sight, I will mention the 
 most important laws of permanent interest. In the session of 
 1485 were passed the act of succession, establishing the king's 
 title, an act which allowed the Hshops to imprison incontinent 
 clergy without applying to the sheriff's to arrest them, and an 
 act against unlawful hunting. In 1487 the act which founded 
 the Court of Star Chamber was passed, as a remedy for the 
 evils of maintenance, the misconduct of sheriffs, and riots and 
 unlawful assemblies. The court so founded was to consist of 
 the chancellor, treasurer and privy seal, taking to themselves a 
 bishop, a lord temporal and the two chief justices. This tribunal, 
 which took its name from the Camera Stellata, the chamber 
 in which the council generally sat, subsequently developed 
 into a judicial meeting of councillors and peers which has a 
 great history of its own ; bat there is no reason to question 
 its historic identity throughout, or that this was the occasion 
 of its foundation. This is the great judicial measure of the 
 reign, and was intended to meet acknowledged evils. 
 
 Blackstone has recorded his impression tbat every act of the 
 reign was intended for the benefit of the exchequer ; perhaps 
 we may allow that, under certain conditions, there is no price too 
 heavy to pay for peace and order. The chief acts of 1489 and 
 1490 are commercial ; cap. 13 limits the benefit of clergy, which 
 is to be allowed only once to persons not in holy orders ; 
 mm-derers are to be marked with an M., other felons with a T. ; 
 and a second claim is not to be admitted unless the Letters of 
 Orders are produced. Cap. 19 forbids the pulling down of 
 
XVI.] Laws of Henry VII. 363 
 
 ' towns,' and laying to pasture lands previously in tillage and 
 tittable : church and realm are alike . impoverished by the 
 devastation that is going on ; owners of farm-houses, to which 
 a holding of ao acres is attached, are bound to keep them in 
 repair or forfeit half the profits to the king. The great im- 
 portance of this matter is the burden of the History of John 
 Rous, the Warwick historian, who does not otherwise add to 
 our knowledge of the reign. These two statutes are of gi'eat 
 social significance ; signs of the times of which men like 
 Morton and More took heed. Cap. 24, the statute for 
 proclamation of fines, has had a reputation of greater im- 
 portance than \\ deserves, being supposed formerly to have 
 given the power of alienating entailed lands, and so allowing 
 the great landowners to ruin themselves. This Hallam shows 
 to be a mistake, and the statute accordingly becomes a minor 
 legal detail. 
 
 Most of the acts of the year 149 1-2 are connected with 
 the expedition to France, which came off in the latter year ; 
 the securing of the rights of absentees who took part in 
 it, and a number of restorations from attainder. Those of 
 1495 have a greater reputation in the law books, and espe- 
 cially cap. I, which enacts that persons going with the king 
 for the time being to war are not to be attaint of treason 
 therefore ; an act passed in a true spirit of equity, but, I fear, 
 quite inadequate to secure its end in critical times. Perhaps 
 as a historical landmark and as enunciating a principle of 
 public law it has its chief importance ; anyhow, it shows that 
 the king felt himself so secure that he need not speculate for 
 a fall. Cap. 3 is a law on the disposal of ' vacabunds and 
 beggars,' who are to be sent to their hundreds ; if a university 
 nian is found begging he must produce a letter of the 
 chancellor identifying his status, or else must go as a ' vaca- 
 bund.' Cap. 17 forbids the taking of pheasants and partridges 
 on other men's lands, an early definite game law on which I 
 will simply observe that a popular error makes the introduction 
 of pheasants much more modern than it was ; the canons of 
 Waltham had pheasants in the eleventh centuiy, by Harold's 
 ordinance, every [^festival day from Michaelmas to Lent. 
 
364 Legislation of Henry VII. [xvi. 
 
 Another act, cap. %%, settled servants' wages, and that at a rate 
 which it would not be wise to mention to modern economists, 
 unless we presume there was a handsome margin for per- 
 quisites ; the wages, for instance, of a bailiff are 26s. 81^. a year ; 
 and those of the agricultural labourer i^d. or '>/l. a day according 
 to the season, his meat and drink being assumed to be worth 
 %dj. or x\d. a day : perhaps the proportion was not so bad. 
 Most of the other acts of 1495 are what we should call private 
 acts ; the exceptions dealing with dishonesty in tradesmen, 
 sheriffs, officers and jm-ors. 
 
 The acts of 1497 are few and not important ; cap. 3 repeals the 
 wages act of the session of 1495 ; cap. 6 relieves the merchant 
 adventurers of England from the fines imposed by the mer- 
 chant adventurers of London, who claimed, under colour of a 
 fraternity of S. Thomas of Canterbury, to tax them for dealing 
 in foreign marts : the most significant acts concern the money 
 grants. 
 
 This brings us to the last parliament, that of 1504. This 
 assembly passed forty statutes, some of them comprehensive 
 and historical enough, as cap. 34, which enumerates with names 
 and dates the successive revolts and conspiracies which had been 
 visited with attainder ; others are acts of reconciliation and 
 restoration. The more important statutes I can only name 
 now ; cap. 14 is on maintenance and livery, increasing penalties 
 and extending the power of the Star Chamber ; cap. 15 is on 
 Uses, a step in the growth of the doctrine afterwai'ds fully 
 enunciated in the statute of Henry VIII ; cap. 27 settles the 
 custom on wool taken at Calais for the payment of the gar- 
 rison, to the amount of £10,032 4s. id. for the next sixteen 
 years. 
 
 Other statutes are interesting mainly in relation to details 
 of trade and to minute points of legal proceedings, and do 
 in their particulars throw light on a few social questions on 
 which light is much needed. Still, on the whole, the sur- 
 vey of the legislation of the reign does not much impress 
 us ; in spite of the one or two reaUy important notes we 
 have marked, there is no trace of a grand or constructive 
 genius such as might be looked for in the opening of a new 
 
XVI.] Foreign Politics. 365 
 
 era ; it is really business-like and humdrum, the work of men 
 who welcomed legislation only just so far as it helped them 
 to get on steadily in the course, the quiet course which they 
 had marked out for themselves. There is nothing, more- 
 over, in the record, either of the financial or legal proceedings, 
 that suggests any political struggles in the parliament itself ; 
 the story that Sir Thomas More in a parliament in i^ori, pre- 
 vented the Commons from granting an aid for the marriage 
 of Margaret, although told on good authority, falls to the 
 ground, for the good reason that no parliament was held in 
 150a and that in 1504 the grant was actually made. More 
 probably was instrumental in limiting the sum. Outside of 
 the circle of attainders and restorations very little was done 
 which was likely to excite opposition or obstruction ; and as 
 to the little that was done at all, it seems that Lord Bacon's 
 dictum is too much to say for it : that such was the excellency 
 of the king's laws that he may be justly celebrated for the best 
 Lawgiver to this nation after King Edward I. It is not well 
 to analyse the words of an express panegyric, but Bacon's 
 theory of government must have been, to say the least, 
 peculiar, if he overlooked the great statutes of Edward III on 
 taxation and on church liberties, not to speak of the elaborate 
 legislation of the next reign. Richard II was, however, no 
 great lawgiver, and Edward Ill's good laws were rnainly con- 
 cessions to popular demands ; if the words I have quoted refer 
 to the king's possible personal agency in legislation, they may 
 have a meaning, otherwise not. I have already mentioned 
 Blackstone's very different opinion, that all the laws were 
 calculated for the benefit of the exchequer. 
 
 I must now pass on to the foreign transactions and negotia- 
 tions of the reign, which are most important and most tedious ; 
 most important because they are closely connected with the 
 opening of the new drama, the equipment of England for her 
 part on the stage ; most tedious because they go on without 
 crisises and without issues, like a game at chess which has a 
 charm only for an adept, or a well contested game at croquet 
 which never comes to an end. If I cannot help being tedious 
 about this, I will at all risks be brief. 
 
366 Brittany and Burgundy, [xvi. 
 
 At the opening of the reign of HenryVII there were, I think, 
 only two points at which English foreign politics touched the 
 interests of the continent, Brittany and Burgundy. Brittany 
 Henry was, for substantial reasons of personal gratitude, bound 
 to help ; and a marriage with the heiress Anne, supposing that 
 he was not obliged to marry Elizabeth of York, was a con- 
 ceivable contingency. Burgundy under Maximilian was like- 
 wise involved in the alliances of Brittany ; both were hostile 
 to, or afraid of France which, under Anne of Beaujeu and 
 Charles VIII, was rather preparing for than actually engaged 
 in her scheme of aggrandisement. From 1485 to 1491 
 Brittany is the point round which English diplomacy moves. 
 Maximilian is unable to go to war : Henry is unwilling to go 
 to war ; France is able and willing ; but it requires at least two 
 combatants to fight a respectable battle. Duke Francis, who 
 had been Henry's friend in his exile, had been constantly 
 opposed to Lewis XI, and was intent on securing the succes- 
 sion for his daughter. By receiving Orleans and Dunois in 
 1485, he had set himself against Anne of Beaujeu; in i486 he 
 had prevailed on the estates to settle the succession ; in 1487 
 he had been openly attacked by Charles VIII, and had be- 
 trothed his daughter to Maximilian. Henry had not as yet 
 moved ; he was busy in negotiations all round, but he did 
 allow Edward Wydville to collect volunteers for a campaign 
 in 1488 against the French, followed, as Henry's few cam- 
 paigns always were, by an immediate truce. That year Duke 
 Francis died. For the three following years Henry talked of 
 war, and war really went on occasionally as if it was stimulated 
 by the little peaces that interrupted it. In 1489, Charles and 
 Maximilian made peace at Frankfort, and Brittany joined. In 
 1490, Henry made a league with Maximilian and the Catholic 
 Sovereigns to defend Brittany if it were attacked ; in 1491 it 
 was attacked and they did not defend it. That year Charles 
 VIII took Nantes and married Anne of Brittany. Then, in 
 fulfilment of his engagements, as well as in compliance with 
 the wish of the nation, Henry, in good time, made his expedi- 
 tion to Boulogne in the Autumn of 1493, which ended in the 
 peace of Etaples concluded in November, 
 
XVI.] England and Scotland. 367 
 
 The peace of Etaples is an epoch in more senses than one ; 
 it was the most definite peace that had been made between 
 England and France since the reign of Edward I. It was the 
 closing of the Brittany business which had been the door by 
 which England entered the arena of the new polities ; and it 
 allowed Charles VIII to begin his Italian expedition, which 
 usually is regarded as the starting-point of the new drama. 
 Henry, moreover, made a great deal of money by it. It was 
 to last during the lives of both hings, and practically did so. 
 Eor, in 1498, after Charles' death it was renewed with Lewis 
 XII, and notwithstanding jealousies, intrigues and counter 
 intrigues, remained unbroken until the next reign. 
 
 Scotland, which had been and was still to be the faeUe tool 
 of France, had a policy of her own during these years. 
 James III, who recognised in Henry VII a friend and 
 kinsman representing the Lancaster interest, which he had 
 always supported, perished in 1488, and from that year to 
 1498 the relations of the two countries consisted of an uneasy 
 succession of truces broken by inroads of the Scots into the 
 north, ^hich, dm-ing the period of the activity of Perkin 
 Warbeck, threatened to develop into active warfare. 
 
 In 1 49 1, we find Henry intriguing to get the young king 
 James IV into his own hands, as Henry IV had James I : in 
 1493, a treaty for seven years was concluded but not kept : in 
 1495, the marriage of James with the king's daughter Mar- 
 garet was proposed. In 1498, by the good offices of the 
 Spanish ambassador, a treaty for seven years was concluded 
 which was shortly turned into a peace for life, cemented by 
 the marriage which really came off in 1503. Thus, about the 
 same time, although by a difierent process, the king secured 
 himself, so far as negotiations could secure him, in peace for 
 life with his two national and ancestral foes. In 1502 was 
 made a treaty of perpetual peace with both. 
 
 The direct negotiations between England and Spain, which, 
 like those between Henry and Maximilian, arose on the Brit- 
 tany business, beg^n, in 1489 and 1490, with the alliance for 
 the defence of the duchy, and so early comprised a purpose of 
 marriage between Arthur and Katharine of Aragon. The 
 
368 The Netherlands. [xvi. 
 
 marriage itself was not concluded until i^oi j S'^'^j oii Arthur's 
 death early in 1502, the scheme for her marriage with Henry- 
 was set on foot ; out of which so great results were to come. 
 The design was not, however, carried into efifect until the 
 next reign ; and the intervening years are full of correspon- 
 dence on points connected with dowry and dispensation. 
 The earlier years of the Spanish negotiations contain no in- 
 cidents independent of the general action of Europe^ in which 
 Henry, like Ferdinand and Isabella, was content to play a 
 waiting game. 
 
 I have left to the last the negotiations with Flanders, first 
 under Maximilian, and after the year 1494 under his son 
 Philip. These, so far as they concerned the dynastic quarrels, 
 are so closely interwoven with the French and Breton 
 relations, that I need not recur to them. 
 
 In 1496, was concluded the great commercial treaty called 
 Intercursus magnus, which was intended to secure the freedom 
 of trade intercourse between England and the Netherlands, as 
 well as the exclusion of Perkin Warbeck. The peaceful re- 
 lations were not broken even whilst Maximilian and Philip 
 were lending questionable support and making promises to 
 Edmund de la Pole. The network of the family alliance, by 
 which Ferdinand and Maximilian were uniting the great in- 
 heritances, might have led to a wavering of the balance under 
 a more energetic hand than that of Henry ; but, even if it had 
 been endangered, the danger would have been averted by the 
 arrangement concluded by the archduke on his forced visit to 
 England in 150*5 ; this, besides some advantage gained in 
 the way of commerce which led the Flemings to call it Inter- 
 curms malus, not only secured the surrender of Edmund de la 
 Pole, but opened a series of fresh marriage schemes, which 
 entertained the king during the short remainder of his Hfe. 
 The most important of these was the engagement of the lady 
 Mary to the archduke Charles ; but the king himself, who had 
 lost his wife in 1503, was in the matrimonial market, and his 
 adventures contribute the one semi-comic element to this 
 severely business-like reign. 
 
 The death of the archduke Philip in 1506, the advanced 
 
XVI.] Social and Religious Matters. 369 
 
 years of Ferdinand, and the proved impracticability of Maxi- 
 milian, seemed to be opening out a career for a new leader in 
 Europe ; and many eyes were turned on Henry. He was 
 willing enough, to marry, perhaps the queen dowager of 
 Naples ; perhaps the archduchess Margaret ; the latter mar- 
 riage would have given him a direct hold on the Nether- 
 lands and a possible claim on the regency of Castile, especially 
 if the young Charles should become his son-in-law. With two 
 such coinpetitors, however, as Ferdinand and Maximilian the 
 diplomatic game was slow and cautious. And in the midst 
 of it Henry died, on April 31st, 1509. 
 
 I cannot now presume to enter upon two remaining 
 aspects of the reign, the social and the religious, although 
 both of them furnish us with details not less important, and 
 scarcely more entertaining than those which we have now 
 gone through. As for the social history, I can only say that 
 it must be read chiefly in the Statutes concerning trade, 
 labour, and agriculture, and the slightly increasing store of 
 such letters as we have in the Paston and Plumpton collec- 
 tions : the letters of Erasmus and the scholars of the time, 
 More's Utopia, and a very few other sorts of materials, add a 
 little to the light that is beginning to shine towards the close 
 of the reign. Ecclesiastically Archbishop Morton's design of 
 visiting and reforming the monasteries was a partial anticipa- 
 tion of the much greater scheme of Cardinal Wolsey. There 
 is little or no religious persecution; there is little or no 
 literary or ecclesiastical activity, although there are, now and 
 then, small flashes of anticipation of what is coming : the 
 reign of Henry VIII would not in any respect have been 
 what it was, if he had not had a predecessor like Henry VII ; 
 but, such as it was, it gathers up and concentrates in itself all 
 the interest that would properly belong to that of his father. 
 
 I have said enough about the political importance of the 
 reign, and perhaps in the last lecture more than enough about 
 personal incidents and characteristics. To the last, however, 
 Henry VII remains somewhat of an enigma to us. Was he a 
 great king ? If it be enough to constitute a great king, to 
 have reigned twenty-four years without a single important 
 
 Bb 
 
370 Henry s claim to Greatness. [xvi. 
 
 war, and to have united in apparent peace a number of 
 dynastic forces that had been struggling- for a century ; to 
 have found England wea;k and poor, and divided against her- 
 self and isolated in Europe, drenched in blood and impotent in 
 internal government ; and to have left her rich, and at peace 
 with herself, and growing in contentment, and well adminis- 
 tered ; having a place in the councils of Europe second to 
 none, courted on every side and able to make her weight felt 
 perceptibly in the balance ; to leave a full treasury and an 
 uncontested title to his successor, and a reputation stained by 
 nothing that in the eyes of his contemporaries bore the guilt 
 of crime ; then the reign of Henry VII was a gi'eat reign, and 
 perhaps Henry VII himself was a great king. 
 
 If we look rather on the moral of the reign we may some- 
 what modify our opinion. We look in vain for anything that 
 would constitute him a hero or a benefactor. We find no great 
 fault except his avarice, but even that cannot be regarded as 
 the vulgar appetite for hoarding : and avarice, in a king who 
 keeps within the letter of the law and the constitution, is per- 
 haps really, and certainly in a land which had suffered from royal 
 prodigality for three centuries, a less fault than extravagance. 
 Even avarice is not always fatal to the heroic character, if 
 there be the rudiments of the true heroic character there 
 at all. Henry VII was a virtuous man, sober, temperate, 
 and chaste, withstanding great temptations to vice and an 
 abundant store of loose example. His household was kept 
 frugally and severely ; all his advisers, except Empson and 
 Dudley, were men of character unstained, if not energetic for 
 good. For one better or greater king, there are in European 
 history fifty smaller and worse. But still — is there any of 
 
 \ that self-denying devotion which gives itself for the people ? 
 
 \Is there any true conception of the duty of a shepherd of the 
 host ? Is there any impulsive well-doing ? I can see none. 
 I see a cold, steady, strongly-purposed man, patient, secret, 
 circumspect ; with not many scruples, yet not regardless of 
 men's opinions ; very clear sighted ; very willing to wait for 
 reconciliation where there is a chance, and not hasty where 
 vengeance is the only course ; but ruthless where his own 
 
XVI.] Conclusion. 371 
 
 purpose is directly, endangered, and sparing neither friend nor 
 foe where he is not strong enough to rely on himself alone. 
 It may have been a nature too cold to care for popular love ; 
 or too self-contained to condescend to court it ; there is no 
 evidence that Henry VII ever dreamed of winning it. In his 
 domestic life there is little that calls for remark. He cannot 
 have cared much about his wife or any of her relations : he 
 honoured and trusted his mother, and may have been in 
 some matters guided by the advice which natural acuteness 
 and varied experience helped her to give him. But this is 
 a minor matter, and would count for little in the picture of a 
 man of whose real character we knew enough to enable us to 
 judge of him. I said in the former lecture there is nothing 
 attractive about him, with all his virtues and all the great 
 consequences of his work. There is surely always something 
 attractive about either greatness or goodness, unless they fall 
 in an age so lost to itself as to be unable to appreciate either. 
 And the opening century, whilst to some extent it shared 
 the king's character, was scarcely so lost as that. 
 
 I conclude : like many other things on which it has been 
 my lot all these years to give public statutory lectures, this 
 reign and this king, the more we study them, give the more 
 ground for questioning our own judgments, and the extent 
 and character of our knowledge : the Cheshire cat in 
 Alice's adventure faded away into a grin ; we grow more 
 and more impatient of generalisations and idealisations, and 
 more and more intolerant of dogmatic assumptions, the longer 
 we study them. Perhaps this may be the whole lesson, and 
 if it is, it is a lesson that can never be too thoroughly learned 
 or too often repeated. 
 
 B b a 
 
XVII. 
 
 A LAST STATUTORY PUBLIC LECTURE. 
 
 (May 8, 1884.) 
 
 A LAST statutory public lecture ought, I suppose, to 
 combine the characteristics of an Apologia and a 
 Symposium ; or perhaps, in more modem fashion, as befits a 
 Professor of Modern History, the qualities of an after-dinner 
 speech, of the defence and confession of a penitent, of the last 
 will and testament of one who has something to leave. I do 
 not know that, in what I am going to say, I shall strike 
 exactly on any one of such notes ; but there are some things 
 that I ought to say, some that I wish to say, and some that 
 I can say to fill up the prescribed three-quarters of an hour. 
 I will ask for your tolerance and sympathy for what I have 
 to say, whether in jest or in earnest ; for you will believe 
 me when I say that even the last statutory public lecture 
 is a matter which mingles pleasure with pain, in no slight 
 measure of both. 
 
 Seventeen years ago, in the address which I delivered in 
 this room by way of inaugural lecture, and eight years ago, 
 when I was approaching the end of my first decade of office, 
 I ventured to make the statutory public lecture an opportunity 
 of stating what seemed to me to be points of interest touch- 
 ing the study of History, in relation to persons, subjects and 
 methods of teaching. The inaugural lecture contained, as 
 was very natural, some crude and carelessly treated material ; 
 I said some things which were misunderstood, and some 
 which I had better not have said at all ; probably both are 
 forgotten by this time. But, as to the main object of the 
 lecture, the stating of the proper part which the teaching of 
 History has in mental education, I have not changed my 
 
XVII.] Retrospect. 373 
 
 mind, nor am I inclined to do so now. I still think that the 
 aim of Historical teaching is the training of the judgment to 
 be exercised in the moral, social and political work of life ; 
 and that, as an instrument of education, such teaching will 
 seek its fittest material in those portions of History which 
 have enough of living interest to stimulate research, but have 
 not enough of immediate practical importance to rouse 
 political partisanship ; that accordingly we do best when we 
 begin at the beginning of the history of the forces and 
 materials out of which modern life has grown, and that, in so 
 doing, we have a distinct advantage over those who start to 
 work backward from the immediate interests of to-day. I do 
 not now wish to enter on controversy about this ; I know that 
 it is not uneontroverted ; I state it, however, as a principle 
 on which I have taught, and have believed myself justified 
 by results. As I stated it in my first, I stand by it in my 
 last lecture. 
 
 The lectures of 1876 were given after several years of 
 experience, during which I had learned my own weakness, 
 and begun to find the way in which I trusted that I might 
 be really helpful : years during which the study of History 
 had greatly developed here, and in which we had tried to 
 frame, and I think had succeeded in organising a method of 
 combined teaching, which brought into play the ability of a 
 considerable number of enthusiastic and laborious tutors, and 
 which resulted not only in enlarged and improved schemes of 
 reading, and enlarged and more highly valued distinctions in 
 the way of class and prize, but also in very valuable and im- 
 portant work done for History in the way of research and in 
 the production of books. At that time too, the University 
 was engaged in taking stock of its means and requirements, 
 in preparation for meeting the Commission which was under- 
 stood to be impending, and which has since worked changes 
 in our constitution, collegiate and academic, which are now 
 only beginning to develope results. I attempted, in the two 
 lectures which I delivered then, to take a comprehensive 
 survey of the condition of Historical Study, so far as it affected 
 our own material and method, both within and outside of our 
 
374 
 
 Excuse for Egotism. [xvii. 
 
 own borders, and to express certain views which I hoped 
 might find favour in the expected reforms. 
 
 Without following the same plan, I propose now to take 
 up, and, in the desultory way which is almost necessary under 
 the circumstances, to remark upon some of the more im- 
 portant points which have varied our own history, as academic 
 and historic workers, since that time. If I speak too much of 
 myself, I will ask you to believe that it is not because I set 
 an especially high value on my own services, for none knows 
 or feels better than I do how much more I ought to have 
 done, or how little my share has been in what has been done ; 
 still less because I undervalue the labours of my fellow- 
 workers, who have had far more personal anxiety and more 
 direct and more measurable responsibilities than I have had ; 
 it is mainly because the retrospect of my own work is forced 
 upon me by the circumstances of my departure from Oxford ; 
 also because, not only as Professor, but in several other capa- 
 cities, as Delegate of the Press, Curator of the Bodleian, 
 a Member of Council, and as having a share too of the repre- 
 sentation of our Oxford School of History before the outside 
 world, I have had work to do and a place to fill which it 
 would be very mock humility on my part to leave out of 
 sight now that I am parting from such a home as this. 
 You will pardon me, I hope and trust, because it is the 
 last time. 
 
 A word first on our losses and our gains : and our losses 
 and gains are so intimately bound together that I must take 
 them in the order in which they most naturally occur to me, 
 balancing one another by a law of compensation inseparable 
 from all progress : it is surely a matter of congratulation that 
 since 1876 we have so much enlarged the number of our 
 students that our class lists contain nearly double the tale of 
 names, and that, as a road to an honourable degree in arts, our 
 study is now followed by nearly, if not quite, as large a body 
 of pilgrims as any of the other honour schools. This is the 
 result of no lowering of the standard of the History Ex- 
 amination, but of the greater educational vivacity of the 
 University, of the increased interest felt in the country at 
 
XVII.] Gains and Losses. 375 
 
 large in historical work, of the efforts of some of the Public 
 Schools to make a beginning of such work a part of ele- 
 mentary education, but chiefly I think to the zeal, and self- 
 denial, and labour, and personal sympathy of the History 
 tutors. The work is, so far as it is the bringing to bear of 
 historical influences, interests, and inducements on the indi- 
 vidual students, entirely their work ; and their work also 
 mainly in the other beaiings of our common design, in which 
 professorial teaching or other professorial working could be at 
 all utilised. I wish to say this distinctly, and shall say it 
 again before I close ; all the more distinctly, because I, for 
 my part, am well aware that, in many details of organisation 
 and division of labour, my opinions have difiered from theirs, 
 and I would like them to remember that, where we have 
 dififered, it has not been for want of sympathy on my part, or 
 for any wish to spare myself 
 
 Since 1876 in the body of tutors we have had some few 
 losses ; our dear friend the Dean of Winchester has left us for 
 a place of more dignity, and more freedom for the working of 
 his unrivalled and peculiar gifts : we are sure that he will 
 never be idle, and whatever he does will be done well. 
 Mr. Jayne has left us, also for a place of honour and re- 
 sponsibility, where his presence will be to us the earnest of 
 sound work in our own as well as in the other departments 
 of clerical education, and where he has already enlisted the 
 help of one of the most successful and zealous of the younger 
 men who have followed oiu' line here. Of our dear friend 
 Laing, whose absence we feel more and more every term, 
 what can I say, but that we trust and hope that one day 
 he may be restored to us and to the studies that he was so 
 wonderfully qualified to develope and adorn? Well, with 
 these home losses we have counterbalancing gains in the 
 enlisting of new men. The continued vigour of our veterans 
 is hardly to be called a gain, but it is a matter of profound 
 congratulation : I rejoice to think that the Chichele Pro- 
 fessor, Mr. Owen, and Mr. Boase are as young, and zealous, 
 and kind, and sympathetic as they ever were, and that is as 
 much as the best and kindest of men can be; seventeen 
 
376 The ^Seminar! [xvii. 
 
 years of a veiy trying Regius Professor have not worn out 
 their goodwill. 
 
 Another point I will mention, though I need not tell too 
 much of the secrets of the Seminar : there is a great gain to 
 us in the spontaneous working of the little clubs of Historical 
 debate which have sprung up within the last few years, 
 collegiate and inter-coUegiate. I will not talk of comparing 
 great things with small, but I rejoice to see in these a con- 
 tinuity, with differentiation, of the old circles which I re- 
 member when I was an undergraduate and a bachelor : 
 I was always proud of having been for a little time secretary 
 of the Hermes, which Archdeacon Palmer, and, alas ! how few 
 besides, must recollect as a very small and earnest and affec- 
 tionate literary brotherhood, well to be remembered as a 
 seed-bed in the sowing time, not only of germinating ideas 
 that spring and die with or without fruit-bearing, but of 
 high sympathies and dear friendships that grow stronger 
 and immortal by age. I would augur for our little History 
 clubs as fair a future. 
 
 Another ^ain, which is still perhaps a matter for augury, is 
 the formation of the Oxford Historical Society ; if the choice 
 of subject, singularly and universally attractive, rich in mate- 
 rials and full of varied interest, if the zeal, ability and 
 perseverance of the promoters, and the sympathy of all 
 historical students, can secare success, the Society has a most 
 happy future in prospect. 
 
 But the mention of it suggests irrepressibly the memory 
 of the man whose genius inspired the idea, and of whom 
 the Society is in this place the fittest possible monument. 
 John Richard Green, the dear friend of many amongst us, 
 has left behind him a name which cannot soon be forgotten. 
 His books are by themselves the warrant of the fame which 
 he so widely gained ; the extent of his reading, the power of 
 his grasp, the clearness of his insight, the picturesque reality 
 of his narration, are patent to all who are capable of judging. 
 We, who knew him better than the world of his readers, 
 know too of his unwearied industry, his zeal for truth, and 
 the inspiring force of his conversation. For twenty years he 
 
XVII.] John Richard Green. 377 
 
 and I were close friends ; with countless differences of opinion, 
 we never quarreled ; with opposite views of the line of his- 
 tory and of the value of character, we never went into con- 
 troversy ; his letters were a delight and honour to me ; 
 I believe that my visits were a pleasure and in some way 
 a comfort to him. In the joint dedication of his book I con- 
 fess that I received a compliment which I place on a level 
 with the highest honours I have ever received. 
 
 I am tempted to modify the excessive dryness, as the 
 Edinburgh Reviewer puts it, of my discourse, by telling the 
 story of our first introduction to one another, chiefly because 
 it has been made the subject of a myth which has made us 
 both a little, or not a little ridiculous. Some of you I dare 
 say remember a paragraph that went the round of the Sep- 
 tember papers years ago ; and told how two persons, a stout 
 and pompous professor and a bright ascetic young divine, 
 met in a railway carriage ; how the burly professor aired his 
 erudition by a little history lecture (an anticipation of the 
 informal instruction of the Commissioners) on every object of 
 interest that was passed on the road, and how each of his 
 assumptions and assertions was capped by an answer from the 
 ascetic divine which showed that he knew it all and knew it 
 better. The professor at last, exasperated by the rejoinders, 
 broke into a parody of the famous address of Erasmus, ' aut 
 Morus aut diabolus,' substituting for Morus ' Johnny Green.' 
 Could this be true ? It was in 1863 that we met ; I was not 
 yet a professor, he had not begun to wear the air of an 
 ascetic. We were invited to Wells, to a meeting of the 
 Somerset Archaeological Society, to stay with a common 
 friend whom you will have no difficulty in identifying. I 
 was told, ' if you leave the station at two you will meet 
 Green, and possibly Dimock,' the biographer of S. Hugh 
 whom I knew already. I knew by description the sort of 
 man I was to meet ; I recognised him as he got into the 
 Wells carriage, holding in his hand a volume of Renan. 
 I said to myself, ' if I can hinder, he shall not read that book.' 
 We sat opposite and fell immediately into conversation. 
 I dare say that I aired my erudition so far as to tell him that 
 
378 Other Losses. [xvii; 
 
 I was going to the Arehaeologieal meeting and to stay at 
 Somerleaze. ' Oh then,' he said, ' you must be either Stubbs 
 or Dimock.' I replied, ' I am not Dimoek.' He came to 
 me at Navestoek afterwards, and that volume of Renan found 
 its way uncut into my waste-paper basket. That is all ; a 
 matter of confusion and inversion ; and so, they say, history- 
 is written. Well, perhaps a friendship between two historical 
 workers may be called a historic friendship and, to be his- 
 torical, should gather some of the mist of fable about its 
 beginning : anyhow it was a friendship that lasted for his 
 life, and the loss of which I shall never cease regretting. 
 
 Mr. Green's death is one of our greatest losses, but not the 
 only one. In Sir Thomas Hardy the whole world of histori- 
 cal students lost a leader, a counsellor, and a friend ; whose 
 services it is impossible to overrate. Practically the founder 
 of the series of national Chroniclers to which I at all events, 
 and our school here, owe so much ; a man fiill of carefully 
 stored and readily imparted knowledge ; full of business and 
 as full of kindliness, to every Oxford student, of record or of 
 chronicle, he was a most willing and ready helper. Soon 
 after him we lost Mr. Brewer, who shared wibh him some of 
 the most important sections of his work, and who added to 
 his labours as a collector and arranger of record, those of an 
 indefatigable writer and faithful, energetic, and stimulating 
 teacher. Then we lost Dr. Pauli, the man who made English 
 History a living study on the continent ; the most faithful 
 and fair-minded of investigators, bound to me by peculiar 
 bonds of friendship, and to Oxford by a number of ties ; an 
 honourable recognition on our part, and a grateful affection on 
 his. In Dr. Guest we have lost not indeed an Oxford man, 
 but an Oxfordshire scholar, whose devotion to our studies, and 
 whose only half completed labours, are well deserving to be 
 had in remembrance. If I were able now to go beyond our 
 immediate limits, I should say a word about Mr. Carlyle, but 
 it would take me too far afield, and it is perhaps even a 
 presumption in me to name him at all, or to claim for History 
 a champion whose exploits are in all the regions of literary 
 life. 
 
XVII.] New Books. 379 
 
 But, altiough we grieve over personal and special losses, 
 the work in whieli we are engaged goes on without flagging. 
 The accumulation of historical literature since 1876, within 
 and without our own particular, range, has been remarkable 
 for extent and interest. I cannot attempt to enumerate even 
 the more conspicuous additions to our store, and it would be 
 invidious to make a selection except in reference to our own 
 share in the work. The Government publications, however, 
 I may say, continue to maintain and even increase their value 
 and interest : Mr. Gairdner, who has succeeded to Mr. 
 Brewer's position, is giving us annual instalments of the 
 history of Henry VIII, full of extraordinary revelations : 
 before the year 1 900 it may be possible that some one of us, 
 gifted with strength, sight and perseverance, may write a com- 
 plete history of the most critical of all reigns. Mr. Rawson 
 Gardiner, a man who should be claimed and must be reclaimed 
 for Oxford, is working, like a great constructive historian as 
 he is, at the next most critical epoch. Mr. Creighton, even 
 more entirely our own, has given us a splendid instalment of 
 a great work which places him at once in the forefront of our 
 phalanx. Mr. Freeman has completed his History of the 
 Norman Conquest by the addition of the History of William 
 Rufus. Mr. Fyffe has begun what will be a standard book 
 on later history. I myself have finished my contributions, in 
 a third volume, to Constitutional History ; have edited six 
 stout volumes of Chronicles in the Rolls series ; and in the 
 Appendices to the Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Com- 
 mission have put together a mass of matter, which, whether 
 or no it is worth the paper on which it is printed, is both 
 true history and the result of hard work : of other designs, 
 the accomplishment of which my removal from Oxford will 
 probably prevent, I can scarcely speak : but I hope that I 
 may find time to complete two or three things on which I 
 have made considerable progress, a fourth volume of Councils, 
 an edition of WilUam of Malmesbury, a second series of 
 Select Charters, and possibly a sketch of the Constitutional 
 History of the Reformation. I am, as I warned you, running 
 off into my own concerns. Mr. Tozer's beautiful edition of 
 
380 Foreign studies on England. [xvii. 
 
 Finlay's Greece, Mr. Hodgkin's Italy and her Invaders, Pro- 
 fessor Rogers' Extracts from Gascoigne, and two new volumes 
 of the History of Agriculture, the collections and comments 
 of Dr. Vigfusson and Mr. York Powell, Mr. Kitchin's third 
 volume of French History, Mr. Sidney Owen's Selection of 
 Wellesley and Wellington Dispatches, not to speak of the 
 works in which History claims an equal share with Language 
 or Law, testify to the zeal which the Delegates of the Press 
 have encouraged in the same direction. Outside of our lines, 
 time would fail me to tell of Mr. Skene's completed labours 
 on Early Scotland, of the interesting aud suggestive work of 
 Mr. Seebohm, of Mr. Elton's searching and comprehensive 
 examination into the history of Primitive Britain ; or going 
 further ahead, of the immensely valuable editions and re- 
 publications of the Laws and Chronicles of Germany, now 
 proceeding under the management of Dr. Waitz, and full of 
 illustration of the history of the common institutions of the 
 German races. 
 
 It is most gratifying to a student of the institutions of 
 England to find that in the literature of more distant nations 
 the study of our constitution is taking an important place. 
 I cannot refrain from expressing the great pleasure which it 
 gives me to receive, from time to time, heavy volumes and 
 light pamphlets of dissertations on the subjects at which we 
 have been at work here, from scholars in Germany, Russia, 
 Denmark, France, Italy and America, who read and criticise 
 and utilise our books. From Berlin we hear of Dr. Gneist, re- 
 issuing and rewriting on his old subject ; from Muniehj of Dr. 
 Liebermann re-editing the Anglo-Saxon Laws for the Bavarian 
 Academy ; from Vienna we have Dr. Budinger's lectures on the 
 Englische Verfassungs-Geschichte ; from Parma Signer Car- 
 don's Svolgimento Storico ; from Wiirzburg Dr. Schanz's Han- 
 delspolitik ; Sickel doing the same work at Gottingen ; Bronner 
 at Berlin; Kovalefski and Vinogradojff in Russia; Steenstrup 
 in Denmark ; and in America, where our study has taken root 
 with remarkable and most promising vigour, the clusters of 
 searchers, such as the men of the Johns Hopkins University, 
 and to specify particularly, Mr. Bigelow, the author of the work 
 
XVII.] Professorial Ideas. 381 
 
 on Anglo-Norman Procedwe, and the collector of the Placita 
 Anglo-Normannica. Well, and let me confess — I hope that I 
 have not been guilty of dishonestly receiving honours meant 
 for other people — let me confess, that it has been exceedingly 
 pleasant to me to receive from the Academies of Germany 
 their recognition that the labours of the Oxford school have 
 not been thrown away. I am very proud to be the recipient 
 of diplomas signed by Dbllinger and Giesebrecht, by Curtius, 
 Pauli, Ritschl, and Dove, and to be numbered among the 
 members of the American Academy. 
 
 But it is time that I should go on to another point. Since 
 1876 we have gone through the throes of a Commission and 
 begun the struggles of a reorganisation. There is no reason 
 why I should either speak or be silent about the general 
 conduct of the Commission or the probable working of its 
 results, except in relation to our own study and to the 
 character of Professorial work as likely to be affected by the 
 changes that are coming or come. I could have wished that 
 the Commission had had more sympathy with literary and 
 historical studies, that it had shown more appreciation of the 
 true character of Professorial teaching, that it had seen, more 
 distinctly than the new statutes seem to show that it did see, 
 the imprudence of arranging the duties of Professors, the num- 
 ber and character of their lectures, not according to the nature 
 of the subject but according to the amount of stipend forth- 
 coming in the several cases. It surely was not necessary to 
 treat the idle Professor as the typical Professor ; it surely 
 might have been enough to take the best means to secure 
 a good Professor and have left him to work, not nominally 
 but really, in the way in which he knew he could do the most 
 good. Surely the idle professor, the chimaera lomlinans in 
 vacuo comedens secundas intentiones, should have been caught 
 before he was tortured. No man has a greater capacity for 
 idleness than I have, nor a greater desire of rest ; sometimes I 
 think the love of idleness is the greatest spur to exertion : 
 anyhow I have been made to work, even without the Visita- 
 torial Board. But what I want to say is this : it is possible 
 in certain subjects to carry on research and elementary teach- 
 
382 Lectures and Lectures. [xvii. 
 
 ing together ; it must be so in logic and grammar ; in mathe- 
 matics, possibly, although there it must be more difficult ; in 
 language, if the pupils are forward, it must be feasible : but 
 in abstruse philosophy and in minute historical research it is 
 not possible to do both things easily and at once. An arrange- 
 ment of occasional epideictic lectures, ordiaary elementary 
 teaching in class, and informal instruction out of class, is 
 symmetrical enough and useful enough where it can be ap- 
 plied, but it is not of universal application, or suited to 
 Professors of all calibres. Eestrieting my remark to my own 
 study, I will say, if an Oxford Professor of History is to be a 
 man to be trusted to maintain the reputation of his Uni- 
 versity, to keep abreast with foreign scholars, and to conduct 
 research on his own account, he ought to have been left with 
 some discretion as to the management of his teaching. I have 
 often felt, when I was busy with some matter that required 
 concentration of thought and continuity of investigation, that 
 I would rather have broken into my line of work by going 
 and giving a lecture in Euclid or Algebra, than by coming 
 down to an elementary discourse, in which, from the very 
 affinity of the subjects, I should be constantly tempted to 
 revert to the minute point on which my special labours in my 
 study were fixed, to the confusion of the class and to the 
 damage of the subject that I had to treat before them. It 
 was in order to avoid this that for some years I wrote out my 
 lectures before term began ; a plan which has obvious draw- 
 backs, chiefly in what is called losing touch with the class. 
 Afterwards I lectured on texts rather more freely ; latterly, as 
 my classes regularly diminished, I took up more out-of-the- 
 way subjects, and very nearly succeeded in getting rid of my 
 classes altogether ; in the end I have reverted to my first plan. 
 Well, perhaps I never was fit for the place ; anyhow, on the 
 now stereotyped plan of the Professoriate, it is as well that I 
 should go. I am told that the great historical works of the 
 great foreign professors have been accomplished by men who 
 have done much elementary lecturing and much informal 
 instruction. That is true, but it is to be remembered that the 
 great German professors have the power and the right to 
 
XVII.] My Predecessors. 383 
 
 direct the studies of their pupils, classes and individuals, to 
 the specialised and differentiated details of their own subject, 
 not merely to general class examinations in which all the candi- 
 dates are expected to show the same sort of knowledge derived 
 from the same sort of books. What I wanted from the Com- 
 mission was not less work but more liberty ; what I succeeded 
 in getting was a little more elasticity of tether. But I will 
 not grumble any more : it is over ; both the evidence, volu- 
 minous and appreciative^ the formal audience, so redolent of 
 sympathy and profound attention on the part of the Commis- 
 sioners, the lively meetings of council and committee, and the 
 truly charming debates of the professors and tutors : let them 
 have the light that never was on sea or land, in the sweetness 
 of memory, — a consecration, a professor's dream ; at aU events 
 we have a system of faculties, informal instruction, and a 
 visitatorial board. 
 
 But let us go on to more serious things than these. I have 
 spent nearly eighteen very happy years in Oxford : holding 
 the ofBce for a longer period than any of my predecessors 
 except Spence, who was professor for twenty-six years. Dr. 
 Nowell, who was professor for thirty years, and Dr. Nares, who 
 occupied the chair for twenty-eight years. The principal 
 event that touches the constitutional position of the Professor- 
 ship during my occupation is its final and complete connexion 
 with Oriel College. Of the professors before me, three. Dr. Beeke, 
 who was in office during the early years of this century, and 
 two better known men. Dr. Arnold and Mr. Halford Vaughan, 
 had been fellows of Oriel. The Ordinance of 1857, passed 
 nearly at the end of Mr. Vaughan's tenure of office, allowed 
 Oriel College to undertake the payment of a considerable sum 
 in augmentation of the annual income provided by King 
 George II, which augmentation might be exchanged for a 
 fellowship of the College : and by a University Statute of 
 1859 a new body of regulations was provided for the conduct 
 of the professor. Under these Mr. Goldwin Smith and I have 
 held office ; he being, as fellow of University, ineligible for 
 the Oriel Fellowship, became by election after his resignation 
 an honorary fellow, and I was in 1868 elected to the fellowship 
 
384 My Successor. [xvii, 
 
 which I still hold : henceforth the Regius Professor will, 
 under the Commissioners' Statutes, be a Professor Fellow. 
 Whilst I look back with pride and gratitude on the honour 
 which the College conferred on me so early in my career as 
 professor, and with a lifelong pleasure on the friendships that 
 my connexion with Oriel enabled me to form, I fear that 
 I have been a very unprofitable member of governing body 
 and educational staff: I console myself with the reflexion that 
 there are some minds, which, in some situations, acquit them- 
 selves of their responsibilities most satisfactorily by never 
 getting in the way. Non-obstructiveness is not the highest 
 degree of efficiency, but there are worse faults. Anyhow my 
 successor will have a chance in this line of work of approving 
 his superiority to what has gone before. 
 
 The fact that two of my predecessors are alive and well 
 is a matter of congratulation : Mr. Halford Vaughan and 
 Mr. Goldwin Smith have both conferred on the Professorship 
 an honour which I am glad to recognise. Both, eminent as 
 scholars and political thinkers, lectured during the sixteen 
 years of my absence from Oxford ; there are some, however, 
 left who remember Mr. Vaughan's lectures under the old 
 system, the soundness and learning displayed in them and the 
 stimulus which they supplied to the study of Modern History 
 at the moment that it was taking its place among the recog- 
 nised subjects of the Schools. It was whilst Mr. Vaughan 
 was Professor that the School of Law and History was 
 organised ; Mr. Goldwin Smith, as I said, lectured under the 
 new arrangements of 1859 ^^^ ^^® examiner ia i86a. I 
 rejoice to know that on neither of these gentlemen has the 
 study of the subject, that I have lived and worked for, pro- 
 duced any exhausting or debilitating effects ; ajid, when I 
 consider the ease of my successor designate, ' the Regius Pro- 
 fessor elect,' and think how many books he has written, and 
 in how many fields he has shown his prowess, and how now, 
 some few years my senior in standing, he is preparing to take 
 my work on his shoulders, to go on writing, to give public 
 statutory lectures, ordinary lectures, informal instruction, and 
 to faoe the Board of Faculty and the Visitatorial Board, I 
 
XVII.] Parting Words. 385 
 
 flatter myself that tlie energy with which he will go to work 
 will not be damped with the reflexion that his predecessors 
 ever broke down. I am very glad to welcome him back to 
 Oxford, to the home and the studies that he has loved so well, 
 as the great champion and representative of that branch of 
 historic literature on which I believe the success of the study 
 here to depend. Not that he is eminent in this alone. But 
 I am now flattering myself and not him. 
 
 And so I come to my parting words. I am going to leave 
 Oxford, not for a place of rest, but for a post of work. I 
 frankly confess that I have always worked towards an ideal of 
 rest ; my own anticipations have been, after a few years more 
 here, during which I might see some of my boys started in 
 the world, I might have retired, we will say to the Parks, and 
 have given no more lectures. But I have always believed, in 
 the case of other people, that the reward of good work is to 
 have more work given you ; and I do trust that it may be so 
 with myself. If the gifts that I have done my best to make 
 useful here are such as can for a little time be made useful 
 elsewhere, I am grateful and hopeful in the change, although 
 it is so very diflerent from anything that I thought I was 
 working for.. 
 
 I am going to leave with Oxford many, veiy many friends ; 
 to leave but not I trust to lose them. I hope that I have 
 made no enemies, I have more dread of making enemies than 
 is at all consistent with a properly constituted moral courage. 
 I hope that I have succeeded. At all events I have never re- 
 viewed the books of ally or opponent, or any one else, I have 
 never given pain or incurred hostility in that way. I have 
 abstained from controversy, religious, political or historical, 
 for I have tried to live up to my own ideal of a strong 
 position, that it consists far more in proved confidence in 
 your own cause, in the vigilant maintenance of your own 
 defences, in the thorough realisation of your sources of 
 strength and weakness, than in the most adroit use of 
 weapons or the most energetic tactics of aggression. I have 
 never scrupled to correct my own mistakes, and I have never 
 made a captious use of the mistakes of other men. I trust 
 
 c e 
 
386 Last Confessions. [xvii. 
 
 that I have never plucked a candidate in the Schools without 
 giving him every opportunity of setting himself right. I hope 
 that I have never intrigued or bullied : I do not say this mth 
 any wish to imply that such things are ever done here; 
 although the popular idea of the professorial character might 
 suggest the need of a disclaimer ; but, if there was temptation 
 to do so, I claim to have resisted it. So much I trust that you 
 will let me take credit for. I know that I have great faults ; I 
 have a good deal of sympathy but too little zeal : sometimes 
 I have feared that, in my lack of zeal, my fellow- workers have 
 detected or suspected a lack of sympathy : somehow the adage 
 'melior est conditio prohibentis' does come to be confused 
 with or to be interpreted into the policy of ' How not to do it ' : 
 perhaps I have tried to work too much in my own way and 
 too little in theirs. Then too, I have never been able to 
 reconcile myself with smoking, late hours, dinner parties, 
 Sunday breakfasts, or University sermons : nor is Joe Pullen's 
 tree such a land-mark in my life as it might very well be to 
 the benefit of my constitution. I wiU say no more about 
 informal instruction ; I think that need not be remembered 
 against me ; if I am not mistaken, I have read over many 
 proof-sheets and my name appears as the name of a helper in 
 many prefaces. 
 
 Well so much for my apologia and confession ! for want of 
 zeal, for weakness of temper, for occasional absence of dis- 
 cretion, I do ask pardon of all whom I may have offended, or 
 disappointed or misunderstood. I do not mind under the 
 circumstances being called sentimental ; I feel sentimental. 
 I confess that I do hope that you will remember me kindly ; 
 and I wish to be judged, as I have tried to judge other 
 historical personages, according as I have acted or have not 
 acted up to my lights. I know that I have not been much of 
 an organiser ; I dislike to organise for other people, I still 
 more dislike other people to organise for me ; I have a great 
 dislike of hard and fast rules, I would not so rule other 
 people, I should stiU more dislike to have such rules made for 
 me. If there is any virtue in this love of freedom, do not 
 think that I am blind to the drawbacks which beset it. Only 
 
XVII.] Good-dye. 387 
 
 all men have not the same gifts, and happily all men are not 
 set to the same tasks, even Professors under schedules. Please 
 to think of me as of one who, very conscious of his own short- 
 comings, and wanting, consciously wanting, in many of the 
 instincts of the successful Academic administrator, still tried 
 to do his duty ; tried to maintain for History its proper place 
 among the studies of Oxford, and to maintain the reputation 
 of Oxford as a nursery of historical study among the Academies 
 of Europe ; tried and worked hard to do honour to the 
 University, to Christ Church, and to the Colleges, to which 
 he owes, humanly speaking, all that he has and is, and his 
 capacity for doing better. 
 
 c c 2 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abbots, 269, 270 ; disappear from 
 
 parliament, 259, 269, 287, 288, 
 
 356. 
 Abelard, 138. 
 Accursi, Francesco, 179. 
 Acre, history and capture of, 161, 
 
 164,171, 177, 179 822., 186,187, 
 
 190. 
 Acworth, battle of, 348, 359. 
 Adam of Petitpont, 138, 139. 
 Adamnan, 296. 
 Adrian IV, pope, 125. 
 Albericna GentUis, 67. 
 Alcock, bishop, 354, 357. 
 Alcuin, the letters of, 62, 127. 
 Alexander II, czar of Russia, 86. 
 Alexander III, pope, 125, 306. 
 Alexander IV, 167, 186. 
 Alexander VI, 338. 
 Alexandria, captured by Peter I, 
 
 194. 
 Alexius Angelus, 160. 
 Alfonso the "Wise, 123, J68, 210, 307. 
 Alice, queen of Cyprus, 171 sqq., 175. 
 Alison, sir Archibald, 60. 
 Amalric I, 119, 144, 163-165, 170, 
 
 171, 173. 178. 179- 
 Ambrose, French poem of, 154. 
 America, study of history in, 69 sq., 
 
 116, 380. 
 American War of Independence, 336. 
 Andrew, king of Hungary, 172. 
 Andrewea, bishop, 326, 327. 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the, 79. 
 Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical courts, 
 
 298 sq. 
 Annates Bill, the, 256, 257, 280, 
 
 281. 
 Anne of Beaujeu, 366. 
 Anne of Brittany, 366. 
 Anne of Cleves, 260, 288. 
 Anselm, S., 135, 144. 
 Antioch, 181, &c. 
 Antiocheis, the, 68, 146, 151. 
 Apostolic Constitutions, the, 295. 
 Aquinas, S. Thomas, 90 ; De Eegimine 
 
 Frindpum, 178, 212. 
 
 Archdeacons, 132, 133, 139,300*2., 
 
 302*2., 314- 
 Arches, Court of, 310, 319. 
 Armenia, the Greater, 159. 
 Armenia, the kingdom of, 158 sqq., 
 
 182, 186, 187-190, 197-199, 204. 
 Armenian Church, the, 160. 
 Arms of Cyprus and queen Elizabeth, 
 
 204 *2- 
 Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 7, 383. 
 Arnulf of Lisieux, 128. 
 Arsaoidae, 159. 
 Arthur, prince of Wales, son of 
 
 Henry VII, 350, 351, 367-368. 
 Arthur of Brittany, 126. 
 Articles of 1536, 258 ; of 1539, 260, 
 
 287. 
 Arundel, archbishop, 356. 
 
 lord, 280. 
 Ascelin, bishop of Rochester, 132. 
 Assize of Darrein Presentment, 303. 
 Assizes of Jerusalem, 166-170, 173, 
 
 178, 179, 187. 
 Atterbury, bishop, 6, 331. 
 Audley, lord, 350. 
 Audley, speaker and chancellor, 
 
 244, 248, 271, 272, 276, 281- 
 
 284, 289. 
 Augmentations, court of, 259. 
 Augustine, S., on Researchers, 114. 
 Austria, the House of, 215, 228- 
 
 230, 337- 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 246, 247, 338, 347, 
 
 348. 369. 360, 365- 
 Bacon, Roger, 311, 314. 
 Bagdad, khalifate of, 1S8. 
 Bagratidae, the, 159. 
 Bakei', Thomas, 6. 
 Balance of power, 225, 334. 
 Baldwin, archbishop, 120, 131, 144, 
 
 146. 
 Baldwin of Boulogne, 159. 
 Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem, 
 
 119. 
 Balliol, John, 219. 
 Bancroft, archbishop, 328. 
 
390 
 
 Index. 
 
 Bangorian controversy, 331. 
 Bartholomew, bishop, 134, 146. 
 Basel, Council of, 309. 
 Bath, earldom of, 350. 
 Bavaria, the House of, 215. 
 Beaufort, cardinal, 151, 185. 
 Becket, archbishop, 78, 117, 120, 122, 
 125-127, 128, 130, 134, 139, 
 
 143. 144, 145. I47> 152, 154. 
 
 183, 301, 303. 
 Bede, 8, 150, 296. 
 Beeke, Dr. H., 383. 
 Benedict of Peterborough, i2o, 125, 
 
 148. 
 Benedict of S. Maur, 154. 
 Benefit of clergy limited, 319, 362. 
 ' Benevolences,' 359, 360. 
 Berengaria, queen, 161. 
 Bernard, S., 132, 133, 138. 
 Bernard Andreas of Toulouse, 340. 
 Berytus, 171, 174 sq., i8i sj. 
 Bigelow, Mr. M., 380. 
 Bishoprics, new, under Henry VIII, 
 
 269, 287. 
 Blackfriars, parliament at, 269, 
 Blacketone, sir W., 362, 365. 
 Blount, Bessie, 245, 254. 
 Boase, C. W., 375. 
 Boccaccio, 190, 195. 
 Bohemond III, 161. 
 BohemondIV, 177, 179. 
 Bohemond V, 173. 
 Bohemond VI, 179. 
 Boleyn, Anne, 245, 254, 256, 257, 
 
 260, 270, 277, 279, 283, 285, 286. 
 Bologna, University of, 138, 139 s^., 
 
 300, 302, 320. 
 Boniface of Savoy, archbishop, 305, 
 
 308. 
 Boniface, S., 297. 
 Boniface VIII, pope, 186, 189, 216, 
 
 308. 
 Bosworth Field, battle of, 338, 347, 
 
 355. 361. 
 Boucicault, marshal, 199. 
 Boulogne, expedition to (1492), 358, 
 
 363,366. _ 
 
 Bourges, Pragmatic Sanction of, 309. 
 Boutario, E., 66. 
 Bracton, 304, 305. 
 Brady, Dr., 67 sq^. 
 Bray, sir Eeginald, 354. 
 Breakspere, Nicolas, 125, 132. 
 Brewer, J. S., 57, 378. 
 Brittany and Henry VII, 358, 366, 
 
 367- 
 Britton, 305. 
 Brown, Master Thomas, 120, 133 *J., 
 
 147. 
 
 Browne, C, applies for leave to pro- 
 ceed as Bachelor and Doctor of 
 the Canon Law at Oxford (1715), 
 
 331- 
 Brunner, Dr., 63, 380. 
 Brunswick, House of, in relation to 
 
 literature, 3. 
 Bryce, prof., 10, 39. 
 Budinger, Dr., 380. 
 Burohard of Worms, 297 sq. 
 Burgundy, treaty of Henry VII with, 
 
 349. 366. 
 Burrows, prof. M., 10, 30, 52^ 375. 
 Burton, Bobert, 153. 
 
 Csesarea, 177. 
 
 Calais, garrison of (1504), 364. 
 Cambridge, Bp. More's MSS. pre- 
 sented to, 4. 
 
 begins the study of Modern 
 History, 6. 
 
 Civil and Canon Law at, 311. 
 
 degree of LL.D. at, 320, 330. 
 Camden, W., 6. 
 Campegio, cardinal, 254. 
 Camville, Bichard, 162, 
 Canons of 1604, 327, 
 Canterbury Letters, the, 128 sj. 
 Canterbury under Henry II, 145. 
 Capgrave, 191. 
 Caraman, the grand, 202. 
 Cardon, Signer, 380. 
 Carlyle's Frederick the Cheat, etc., 
 
 60, 81, 92, 116, 378. 
 Catherine Howard, 288. 
 Catholicate, the Armenian, 159. 
 Cawdrey's case, 326, 328, 329. 
 Caxton, William, 339, 340. 
 Celestine III, pope, 166. 
 Chancellors, lay and clerical, 327. 
 Chancery, Court of, 321. 
 Chaplains, domestic, of noblemen, 
 
 143- 
 Chapuys dispatches, 272, 279, 285. 
 Charles I, king of England, 109, 327, 
 
 329- 
 Charles II, 329. 
 Charles IV, emperor, 193, 211. 
 Charles V, 227, 228, 235, 254, 290, 
 
 337. 368 sq. 
 Charles VI, king of France, 197, 199. 
 Charles VII, 226. 
 Charles VXII, 228, 335. 337. 36*. 
 
 367- 
 Charles of Anjou, 179-181, 186, 204. 
 Charlotte of Bourbon, queen, 200. 
 Charlotte of Lusignan, queen of 
 
 Cyprus, 203 ; marries Lewis, 
 
 Count of Geneva, ib. 
 
Index, 
 
 391 
 
 Chester, colonel J. L., 70. 
 Chiolieater under Henry II, 146. 
 CTvromqne cCOutremer, 154, 163-165. 
 Civil and Canon Law, 301 sc[q., 319 
 
 Clement V, pope, 308. 
 
 Clement VI, 197. 
 
 Clement VII, 277. 
 
 Clementines, the, 308. 
 
 Clifford, sir Eobert, 349. 
 
 Cobden on Thuoydidea, alluded to, 86, 
 
 106. 
 Coke, sir E., 272, 302, 306, 326, 328, 
 
 329- 332- 
 
 Colet, John, 342. 
 
 Columbanus, 296. 
 
 Columbus, 340. 
 
 Committees of the House of Com- 
 mons, 325. 
 
 Comneni, the, 221. 
 
 ComposteUa, 127. 
 
 Confirmation of Charters, 1 79. 
 
 Cong^ d'ealire, 327. 
 
 Constantine, legislation of, 295. 
 
 Constantino Monomachus, 159. 
 
 Constantius, king of Armenia, 189, 
 197. 
 
 Constitution, the English, medieval 
 growth of the, 223. 
 
 Constitutions of Clarendon, 303. 
 
 Convocation under Henry VII, 359, 
 360; under Henry VIII, 277 
 *??•) S'^P ; silenced under the 
 House of Hanover, 311. 
 
 Comaro, Caterina, 203 sq. 
 
 Cosaok, Dr., 38. 
 
 Coulanges, Eustel de, 66. 
 
 Court of High Commission, 324-326, 
 
 329. 33°- 
 
 Court of Eequests, 324. 
 
 Coxe, archdeacon, 61. 
 
 Cramer, Dr., 7. 
 
 Cranmer, archbishop, 244, 245, 249, 
 . 256, 357. 261, 284, 286, 322. 
 
 Creighton, prof. M., 379. 
 
 Crimean War, the, 59, 104, 238. 
 
 Crofts, sir Herbert, 327. 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 109, 330. 
 
 Cromwell, Thomas, 244, 245, 248, 
 249, 256-260, 271, 273-275, 278, 
 282, 284, 286-288, 290, 319. 
 
 Crowland Abbey, 148, 340. 
 
 Crusades, their character and results, 
 157, 221 sqq., 226; turn of the 
 tide which had led them on, 1 7 7 ; 
 their last days, 181. 
 
 Cyprus, the Latin kingdom of, 160 
 sqq.\ Church of, 163, 166; con- 
 quered by the Turks (1570), 204. 
 
 Damietta, 190. 
 
 ' Dark Ages,' the, 81. 
 
 David, Master (canon of S. Paul's), 
 
 139- 
 Decretals, the, 312, 319 ; forged, 297, 
 
 298. 
 Deoretum, the, 300, 302, 305-307. 
 Degrees in Canon Law, abolished by 
 
 T. Cromwell, 319; cf, 323. 
 ' De heretico combureudo,' the writ, 
 
 329- 
 De la Poles, the, 335, 347, 350-352. 
 Dene, archbishop, 354. 
 Derby, earl of, 349. - 
 Despensers, the, 361. 
 Dialogus de Scaccario, 133, 150, 152. 
 Dicey, prof. A. V., 38. 
 Dionysius Exiguus, 296, 297. 
 Dissolution of Monasteries, 258-259, 
 
 261, 270, 286, 287. 
 Doctors' Commons, 325, 332. 
 Doctors of Civil Law, legislation of 
 
 1545 with regard to, 320; 325, 
 
 330- 
 ' Domesday, the New,' 46. 
 Dorset, lord, 348. 
 Dover and its Chronicle, 145. 
 Draco I^ormannicus, 68, 147, 151. 
 Drake's Ehoracum, 64. 
 Dugdale, sir W., 8. 
 DUmmler, prof., 62. 
 Duns Scotus, 212! 
 Dnnstan, 79, 297, 300. 
 Durham under Henry II, 149. 
 Dynham, lord, 354. 
 
 Earle, prof. J., 79. 
 
 Ecoard, J. G., 3. 
 
 Edward I, king of England, 5 1, 118, 
 151, 164, 179, 180, 183, 185-188, 
 190, 210, 212, 219, 255, 280, 339, 
 
 365- 
 Edward II, 186, 188, 220, 317. 
 Edward III, 151, 190, 194, 197, 219, 
 
 317, 344> 365- 
 Edward IV, 338, 344, 349, 355, 356. 
 Edward V, 347. 
 Edward VI, 234, 269, 321 sqq., 
 
 344 «?■ 
 Egbert of York, 296. 
 Egremont heads a riot at Thirsk, 348. 
 Eleanor, queen of Castile, 123. 
 Eleanor of Aragon, queen of Peter I 
 
 of Cyprus, 196. 
 Eleanor, queen of Henry II, 121, 178. 
 Elizabeth, queen of England, her 
 
 ancestry, 205, 234, 268, 322 ; her 
 
 ecclesiastical policy, 323-326. 
 
 331, 34I1 344- 
 
392 
 
 Index. 
 
 Elizabeth, queen of Edward IV, 204, 
 
 346, 348. 
 Elizabeth of York, 345, 366. 
 Elton, C. I., 380. 
 Ely, chronicle of, 148. 
 Empire, the, in the Middle Ageg, 
 
 214 so^, 
 Empson and Dudley, 248, 354, 357, 
 
 360 sq., 370. 
 Encomium JEmmae, 68. 
 Episcopate, the, under Edward TI, 
 
 321-323. 327-328- 
 Erasmus, 260, 339, 369. 
 Etaples, peace of, 366-367. 
 Executions for religious causes in 
 
 England, 329. 
 Exeter under Henry II, 146. 
 Extravagants, the, 306-308. 
 Eystein, archbishop, 124*2'. 
 
 Faculties of the Canon and Civil 
 
 Laws at the Universities, 311. 
 Eairfax, sir T., 330. 
 Eamagosta, 162, 164, 166 sqq., 187, 
 
 193. I9S> 196; i99> 200, 201, 
 
 203. 
 Eantosme, Jordan, 154. 
 Fell, bishop, 6. 
 Female education, a suggestion for, 
 
 circa 1303, 185 sq. 
 Ferdinand and Isabella, 335, 337, 
 
 36°, 361, 368,-369- 
 
 Ferrers, lord, 355. 
 
 Feudal polity in Cyprus, 163-165. 
 
 Fisher, bishop, 258, 276, 284. 
 
 Fitz-Neal, Richard, 120. 
 
 Fitz-Stephen, William, 147, 152. 
 
 Flammock heads » rising in Corn- 
 wall, 350. 
 
 Fleta, 305. 
 
 Flodden, battle of, 244. 
 
 Foliot, Gilbert, 120, 128, 139, 146. 
 
 Foliot, Robert, 143, 147. 
 
 Fortescue, Sir John, 178. 
 
 Fountains Abbey, 124. 
 
 Fox, Bishop Richard, 248. 
 
 France, historical activity in, 65. 
 
 Francis, duke of Brittany, 366. 
 
 Francis I, king of France, 228, 283, 
 290. 352- 
 
 Frederick I, Barbarossa, 125. 
 
 Frederick II, emperor, 164, 166, 172, 
 174, i75> 210. 
 
 Frederick III, 212 sq., 335, 336. 
 
 Frederick the Great, 231. 
 
 Freeman, prof. E. A., 57, 58, In, 
 
 117, 133. 379. 384- 
 French Revolution, the, 237. 
 Froisaart, 192, 193. 
 
 Froude's Bistori) of Sngland, &e., 
 
 57, "7. 290. 
 Fulk the Good, quoted, 1 19. 
 Fulman, W., 6. 
 Fyffe, C. A., 379. 
 
 Gairdner, J., 379. 
 
 Gaisford, dean, 8. 
 
 Gale, T., 6. 
 
 Game Law, an early, 363. 
 
 Gardiner, bishop Stephen, 244-245, 
 
 249, 261, 283. 
 Gardiner, Samuel R., 57, 379. 
 Gamier of Pont S. Maxenee, 154. 
 Gaveston, Piers, 335. 
 Genealogical study, its importance, 
 
 SO. 
 Genoa and Venice, their rupture and 
 its effects, 177, 180 sq., 185, 192, 
 196, 200 sq. 
 
 decline of, 199. 
 Geoffrey of Brittany, 123. 
 George I, king of England, his reign 
 
 and character, 2 sqq. 
 George II, 4. 
 George III, 4, 329. 
 George IV, 4, 245. 
 George V, king of Hanover, 4. 
 Gerard la Pncelle, 143. 
 Germany, medieval, 214, 220. 
 Gervase of Canterbury, 145. 
 
 of Chichester, 146. 
 
 of Tilbury, 122, 144, 147, 151. 
 G-esta Segis Benrici, 147. 
 
 „ „ Ricardi, 154. 
 
 „ „ Stephani, 151. 
 Gibson, bishop, 6, 331. 
 Gilbert of la Porr^e, 138. 
 Giraldus Cambrensis, 68, 120, 139, 
 
 141, 144, 147, 152. 
 Giustiniani, 251. 
 Glanville, Gilbert, 144, 146. 
 Glanville, Ranulf, 144, 147, 150, 304- 
 
 306. 
 Gneist, Dr., 380. 
 Godfrey of Bouillon, 167, 222. 
 Golden Bull, the, 211, 
 Gorham cage, the, 332. 
 Gratian, 300, 301, 302, 307. 
 Great S. Bernard, a glimpse of the, 
 
 128. 
 Green, J. R., 57, 58, 377 sq. 
 Gregory IX, pope, 306, 308. 
 Gregory XI, 197. 
 Grey of Codnor, John lord, 194. 
 Grim, Edward, 145. 
 Grimm's collection of Weisthnmer, 64. 
 Grosseteste, bishop, 118, 306. 
 Guest, Dr. E., 378. 
 
Index. 
 
 393 
 
 Gustavus A-dolplius, 230. 
 
 Guy of Lusignan, 162, 166, T^o, 173, 
 
 178. 
 Guy of Lusignan, king of Armenia, 
 
 197. 
 
 Hallam as a historian, 109. 
 
 on the Statute for Proclamation of 
 
 Fines, 363. 
 Hampton Court Conference, 327. 
 Hanse Towna, German Scholars and 
 
 history of the, 64. 
 Hapsburg, the House of, 227, 228. 
 Hardy, sir T. Duffus, 378. 
 Hare, sir Nicolas (Speaker), 272 sg., 
 
 289. 
 Hayton I, king of Armenia, 187 ajg. 
 Hayton II, 189. 
 Hayton the Monk, author of Flower 
 
 of the Histories of the East, 188. 
 Heame, Thomas, 6, 8. 
 Heeren and XJckert, 61. 
 Helena, queen of John III of Cyprus, 
 
 202 sq. 
 Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I, 
 
 108. 
 Henry I, king of Cyprus, 173-177. 
 Henry II, 180-182, 187. 
 Henry I, king of England, 119, 151, 
 
 361. 
 Henry II, Ms descent, character, 
 
 literary culture, Sec, 118 sqq.; 
 
 diplomatic activity, 124-127, 
 
 210, 303. 339- 
 Henry III, 178, 186, 210, 2ig, 308, 
 
 316. 
 Henry IV, 198 sq., 367. 
 Henry V, 185, 357. 
 Henry VI, 151, 337, 344. 
 Henry VII, 227, 248, 251, 252-253, 
 
 264, 269, 334-371. 
 the Hercules of the twelve labours, 
 
 338- 
 his courtships, 339. 
 his title to the throne, 343 sqq. 
 his marriage, 345, 
 dynastic complications, 346-352. 
 constitutional history, 353-365. 
 scanty materials for history of, 
 
 353- 
 his ministers, 354. 
 House of Lords in his reign, 355. 
 new creations, 356. 
 his avarice, 357. 
 his parliaments, 357 sqq. 
 his savings, 360. 
 legislation of his reign, 36 1 sqq. 
 his foreign policy, 365-369. 
 his character, 369-371. 
 
 Henry VIII, 205, 227, 228, 241-291. 
 
 military events of his reign, 243. 
 
 his character, 244 sqq. 
 
 his person and abilities, 247. 
 
 his ministers and council, 247-249. 
 
 his finance, 249-253. 
 
 the divorce, 253-255. 
 
 supreme head, 255, 318, 323. 
 
 ecclesiastical measures, 256-258. 
 
 defender of the faith, 259 sq. 
 
 ecclesiastical policy, 261-263. 
 
 legislation, &o., 262-265. 
 
 political executions, 264. 
 
 practically abolishes Canon Law, 
 318 sqq. 
 
 hia parliaments and their constitu- 
 tion, convocation, &c., 269 sqq. 
 
 his dealing with the two Houses, 
 273-274. 
 
 the 'Long Parliament' of 1529- 
 1536, 275-286. 
 
 later Parliaments, 286 sqq. 
 
 general view, 290-291, 322, 341, 
 
 351. 356, 356, 369. 
 Henry II, king of France, 228. 
 Henry IV, 229, 290, 344. 
 Henry VI, emperor, 160, 164, 171, 
 
 174. 
 Henry de Jacea, 139. 
 Henry of Beaumont, 130. 
 Henry ofBlois, bishop of Winchester, 
 
 144, 146, 301, 302. 
 Henry of Huntingdon, 152. 
 Henry of Lancaster, 185, 191. 
 Henry Plantageuet, son of Henry II, 
 
 121 sq. 
 Henry the Lion, 3, 125 sq. 
 Herbert, archbishop of Compsa, 1 34. 
 Herbert of Bosham, 143, T46. 
 Herbert of Cherbury, lord, 290, 351. 
 Hildebrand, pope, 300. 
 Historic Monuments, preservation of, 
 
 .so- 
 Historical MSS. Commission, 50, 64. 
 
 Historical Eeview, a, suggested, 54. 
 
 History, ancient and modem, com- 
 pared, 14 sqq. 
 
 Hodgkin, Thomas, 380. 
 
 Hody, H., 331. 
 
 Hohenstaufen,the, 125, 181, 214,220. 
 
 Holcot, E., 314. 
 
 Holland, prof.T. E., 35, 67. 
 
 Honorius III, pope, 167. 
 
 Hooker, Eiohard, 325, 327. 
 
 Hook's lAves of the Archbishops of 
 Canteriiiry, 57. 
 
 Hospitallers, the, 170, 171, 177, 180 
 sqq., 195. 
 
 Howden, 148. 
 
394 
 
 Index. 
 
 Hubert, Walter, archbishop, 131, 
 
 144. 
 Hiihner, Dr., 62. 
 Hugeson (legate), 150. 
 Hugh of Nonant, 143. 
 Hugh, S., of Lincoln, 120, 144, 148. 
 Hugh I, king of Cyprus, 167, 171, 
 
 172. 
 Hugh II, 177. 
 Hugh III (the Great), 166, 176, 177 
 
 Hugh rV, 187, 190-192. 
 Hugh de Puiset, 136, 149. 
 Hugh of Lusignan, 192. 
 Huasey, prof. E., 8. 
 Husaey, sir J., 274. 
 
 Ibelin, the House of, and its members, 
 165, 167, 170-175, 179, 180, 
 200. 
 
 Ingulfs Sistory of Crowlmid Alley, 
 a forgery and its results, 46. 
 
 Innocent III, pope, 137, 216. 
 
 Innocent IV, i'!S sq. 
 
 Innocent VIII, 338, 345. 
 
 Intercarms magnuB, 368. 
 „ mains, 368. 
 
 InTestiturea, the struggle of the, 220. 
 
 Ireland, poem on the conquest of, 
 
 IS4- 
 
 Imerius, 300. 
 
 Isaac Comuenus, 160-163, I7°- 
 
 Isabella of Anjou, 171, 173. 
 
 Italy, opportunities for historical re- 
 search in, 67 sqq, 
 
 Ito, bishop of Chartres, 297-298, 
 300. 
 
 Ja.m, Ph., 62. 
 
 James I, king of Cyprus, 198 «}. 
 
 James II, 164, 203. 
 
 James III, 203. 
 
 James I, king of England, 326-328, 
 
 345- 
 James II, 331. 
 
 James I, king of Scotland, 367. 
 James III, 367. 
 James IV, 338, 349, 360, 367. 
 Jamea V, 244, 310. 
 Jayne, F. J., 375. 
 Jeruaalem, kingdom of, 164, 176, 179, 
 
 204. 
 Jocelin, biahop of Salisbury, 143. 
 Johanna, queen of Castile, 338. 
 Johanna, queen of Sicily, 123, 126, 
 
 161, 197. 
 John, king of Castile, 197. 
 John I, king of Cyprus, 180. 
 John II (Janua), 199 sq., 202. 
 
 John III, 202. 
 
 John, king of England, 121, 123, 218. 
 
 John, king of France, 193 sq. 
 
 John XXII, pope, 190, 217, 308, 311. 
 
 John of Ayton, 308, 309, 330. 
 
 John of Gaunt, 191, 344. 
 
 John of Hexham, 133, 149 sq, 
 
 John of Luaignan, 197. 
 
 John of Oxford, 127, 146. 
 
 John of Poictiers, 130 sq. 
 
 John of Portugal, 203. 
 
 John of Salisbury, 68, 120, 128-133, 
 
 137 «?-. 143, 144-146, 152, 
 
 153 s?-, 301-303, 314- 
 John the Faster, 296. 
 Johnaon, John, 331. 
 Jordan of Chicheater, 146. 
 Joaeph (of Exeter), author of the An- 
 
 tiocheis, 68, 146, 151, 152. 
 Journals of the Lorda and Commona, 
 
 271. 
 Julius II, pope, 338. 
 Justinian, 296, 301, 302, 304, 306, 
 
 310, 322. 
 
 Katharine of Aragon, 245, 254, 277, 
 
 284, 286, 321, 338, 346, 367, 
 
 368. 
 Kennet, bishop White, 6, 331. 
 King, bishop, 328. 
 King de facto, adherents to, not to 
 
 be attaint of treason, 363. 
 Kinglake's War in the Crimea, 59. 
 Kington, T. L., 10. 
 Kitohin, dean G. W., 58, 114, 375, 
 
 380. 
 Kovalefski, prof., 380. 
 
 Laing, Kobert, 375. 
 Lambeth, college at, proposed . by 
 archbishops Baldwin and Hubert, 
 
 131- 
 Lambeth degrees, 330. 
 Lancaster, Houae of, 151. 
 Lanfranc, archbiahop, 135, 144, 300. 
 Lanfrey's History of Napoleon, 60. 
 Langton, archbiahop, 151, 305, 308. 
 Lappenberg, Dr., 62. 
 Lardner'a GyclopiBcLia, 61. 
 Latin, the, of the twelfth century, 
 
 152 sqq. 
 Laud, archbiahop, 329. 
 Laurence, abbot of Westminster, 147. 
 Law Schools of London, 306, 307. 
 Lee, archbishop, 284. 
 Leibnitz, 4. 
 Leo or Livon, 160. 
 Leo I, king of Armenia, 187. 
 Leo II, 189. 
 
Index. 
 
 395 
 
 Leo III, 189. 
 
 Leo IV, 189 sq^. 
 
 Leo V, 197 s^. 
 
 Leopold, duke, 170. 
 
 L'Estrange, sir Hamo, 165. 
 
 Lewis VI, king of France, 226. 
 
 Lewis VII, 125. 
 
 Lewis IX, 176, 187, 210, 212, 219. 
 
 Lewis XI, 226, 366. 
 
 Lewis XII, 351, 367. 
 
 Lewis XIV, 230 sq^. 
 
 Lewis of Bavaria, 210, 217, 311. 
 
 Lihellus de Heciiperatione Terrm 
 
 Sanctis, 185. 
 Liebermann, Dr., 38, 380. 
 LigMfoot, Hannali, 108. 
 Limasol, 161, 174, 182, 200. 
 Lincoln, John, earl of, 338, 348. 
 Lincoln under Henry II, 148. 
 Locusts, a plague of, 186. 
 Lombardus of Piaoenza, 143. 
 London, merchant adventurers of, 
 
 364- 
 London under Henry II, 146 sg. 
 Longohamp, "William, 126, 137. 
 Lothian Prize, the, at Oxford, 37 
 
 sqq. 
 Louise of Savoy, 338. 
 Level, viscount, 347, 348, 356. 
 Ludolf of Suchen, 184, 191. 
 'Lues rehabilitandi,' the, no. 
 Lnsignan, the house of, 163 sqq., 
 
 177. 178. 190. 204, 205. 
 Luther, Henry VIII against, 247. 
 Luxemburg, House of, 215. 
 Lyndwood's Provinciate, 308-309, 
 
 325, 330. 
 
 Macaulay as a historian, 108. 
 
 Magna Carta, 361. 
 
 Mai, cardinal, and the Draco H'or- 
 
 mannicus, 68. 
 Maine, sir H. S., 35. 
 Mandeville, sir John, 196. 
 Manorial and spiritual courts in 
 
 Anglo-Saxon times, 299. 
 Manorial map of England, a, 51, 64. 
 Manuel Oomnenus, 160-162, 168. 
 Manx Church, the, and Dr. Munch, 
 
 67, 124. 
 Map, Walter, 139, 144, 148, 152. 
 Marco Polo, 188. 
 Margaret, daughter of Henry VII, 
 
 365, 367- 
 Margaret, the Lady, mother of Henry 
 
 '^n, 334, 338, 346, 349, 371. 
 Margaret of Austria, 338, 369. 
 Margaret of Burgundy, 338, 347, 
 
 348, 36°) 352- 
 
 Maritime and matrimonial jurisdic- 
 tion, why associated, 309. 
 Marney, H., 274. 
 Marsilius, 314. 
 Martyr, Peter, 322. 
 Mary, the Lady, daughter of Henry 
 
 vn, 368. 
 
 Mary I, queen of England, 234, 319, 
 
 . 322-3. 344- 
 Matilda, daughter of Henry II, 123, 
 
 125. 
 Matthew, dean of Chichester, 146. 
 Matthew of London, 120. 
 Matthew Paris, 79, 307. 
 Maud, empress, 147. 
 Maurer, G. L. von and K., 62, 63. 
 Maximilian, emperor, 211, 227, 262, 
 
 335. 337. 338, 351. 360, 366- 
 
 369- 
 Mazzeriis, Philip de, 192, 195. 
 Melrose Abbey, 149. 
 Merlin, Prophecies of, 68. 
 Migne's Patrologia, 65. 
 Molesworth's History of the Period 
 
 of Parliamentary Reform, 59. 
 Monasteries, historical activity in, 
 
 under Henry II, 148 sqq. 
 Montfort, Simon de, 78, 118, 219. 
 Monumenta QermaniiB Historica, 
 
 4, 28. 
 More, sir T., 244-246, 248, 253, 256, 
 
 258, 272-275,277, 283,339, 342. 
 
 363. 365, 369- 
 Morton, archbishop, 317, 342, 354, 
 
 356; his 'fork,' 357, 358, 359, 
 
 36°, 363. 369- 
 Mosheim, J. L. von, 3. 
 Mountjoy, lord, 288. 
 Moyle, sir T. (Speaker), 272, 289. 
 Mullinger, (J. B.) 's tfniversity of 
 
 Cambridge, 311. 
 Municipal and local history neglected 
 
 in England, 64. 
 Muratori, 4. 
 
 Naples, the queen of, and Henry VII, 
 
 338, 369- 
 Napoleon I, 237. 
 Nares, Dr., 6, 383. 
 Nationality, the idea of, 235 sqq. 
 Neill, bishop, 329. 
 Neophytus de Calamitatiius Cypri, 
 
 160-162. 
 Netherlands, revolt of the, 229, 235. 
 Nicea, council of, 295. 
 Nicephorus Phocas, 160. 
 Nicholson, bishop, 5. 
 Nioopolis, battle of, 202. 
 
396 
 
 Index. 
 
 Nicosia, 161-164, l^S> l^7> I7^> l?^) 
 174. 175. i85> 187, 192, 199, 
 
 200, 202. 
 
 Church of S.Nicolas, 185. 
 
 Nigel of Canterbury, 144, 145. 
 
 Nonjurors, the, 331. 
 
 Norfolk, dukes of (temp. Henry VII 
 and VIII), 245, 248, 249, 261, 
 277, 279, 280, 287, 364, 356. 
 
 Norman Conquest, the, 78, 217, 218. 
 its effects on ecclesiastical system 
 of England, 300 sqq^. 
 
 Norman-French of Westminster, 310. 
 
 Normans and English, amalgamation 
 of, 129 sqq. 
 
 North-country lords, Ogle, Daore, 
 and Scrope, do not appear in the 
 earlier parliaments of Henry VII, 
 
 356- 
 Northumberland, John Dudley duke 
 
 of, 321. 
 earl of, killed at Tbirsk, 348, 368. 
 Norway and Sweden, kings of, send 
 
 embassies to Henry II, 124. 
 NoweU, T., 383. 
 
 Ockham, 314. 
 
 Odo, prior of Canterbury, 145. 
 Oissim, king of Armenia, 189. 
 Order of the knights of S. Thomas of 
 
 Acre, 182-186, 2°5- 
 Ormond, earl of, 356. ' 
 Otho, constitutions of, 308. 
 Othobon, constitutions of, 308. 
 Owen, S., 43, 375, 380. 
 Oxford, civil and canon lawat, 3lo«g'. 
 
 drops the canon law degree, 319. 
 
 study of history at, from the Re- 
 formation to George I, 6 sq^q^. 
 
 under Henry II, 141 sy. 
 
 ungracious reception of George the 
 first's benefaction at, 6. 
 Oxford Historical Society, the, 376. 
 
 Painted chamber, 269. 
 
 Paleologi, 202. 
 
 Palmer, archbishop Richard, 134. 
 
 Palmer, archdeacon E., 376. 
 
 Pandects, the, 300, 305. 
 
 Papacy, the, of the Middle Ages, 215 
 sq. 
 
 Paper, effects of the use of, instead of 
 parchment, 336. 
 
 Paris, archdeacon of Rochester, 133, 
 145 sq. 
 
 Paris, University of, 138, 139, 150. 
 
 Parker, archbishop, 6, 325, 329. 
 
 Parliaments of Henry VIII, anec- 
 dotes of, 289. 
 
 Paston Letters, Mr. Gairdner's edi- 
 tion of, 56, 369. 
 
 Pasture land and tillage, 363. 
 
 Patrick, S., 297. 
 
 Pauli, Reinhold, 62, 68, 378. 
 
 Pavia, 302. 
 
 Pearson, prof. C. H., 116. 
 
 Pearson, R., claims to be admitted 
 Doctor of Civil and Canon Law 
 at Cambridge (1669), 330. 
 
 Peckham, archbishop, 305, 308. 
 
 Penjtentials, the, 296 sq., 298. 
 
 Percy, Henry lord, 193. 
 
 Percy, sir Henry (Hotspur), 198. 
 
 Pertz, Dr., 28, 68, 146- 
 
 Peter I, Idng of Cyprus, 169, 192- 
 197, 200. 
 
 Peter II, 196-198. 
 
 Peter de Helie, 138. 
 
 Peter des Roches, bishop of Win- 
 chester, 183. 
 
 Peter of Blois, 119, 120, 122, 127, 
 128, 136 sj., 143, 144, 147-149, 
 
 151. 153- 
 Peterborough under Henry II, 148. 
 Petrarch, 195, 200. 
 Pheasants, date of their introduction, 
 
 363- 
 Philip II, king of Spain, 229. 
 Philip IV, king of the French (the 
 
 Fair), 182, 219, 335. 
 Philip VI, 219. 
 
 Philip, archduke, 338, 351, 368. 
 Philip Augustus, 218, 219. 
 Philip of Antioch, king of Armenia, 
 
 187. 
 Philip the Chancellor, 195. 
 Philippa, Queen of Edward III, 193. 
 Philosophy, scholastic, its aim, 211. 
 Picot, G., 66. 
 
 Pilgrimage of Grace, the, 253, 286. 
 Pisa and England, 201. 
 Plague in Cyprus, 191, 199, 200. 
 Plantagenet kings, long-suffering of, 
 
 213. 
 Plumpton Letters, the, 369. 
 Pocock's Swrntt and IRecords of the 
 
 Reformation, 57. 
 Poland, partition of, 2j, 236 sg;. 
 Powell, F. York, 380. 
 Prsemunieutes clause, the, 287. 
 Prffimunire, statute of, 261, 253-255, 
 
 275.277,278,283,285,308,317, 
 
 318. 
 Prerogative Court, 324. 
 Printing, effects of the invention of, 
 
 336, 34°- 
 Prizes, historical, at Oxford, 36-39. 
 Proclamation Act, 287, 288. 
 
Index. 
 
 397 
 
 Provisions of Oxford, 178. 
 
 Proxies in the House of Lords, 270, 
 
 271. 
 Prynne, W., 8, 302, 306, 329 sq^. 
 Puritans, the, and the Court of High 
 
 Commission, 325 sjg. 
 
 Ralph de Diceto, 122, 126, 131, 139, 
 
 140, 147, 153, 182. 
 Ralph de Serris, 131, 143. 
 Ramsey, chronicle of, 148. 
 
 Ranke, Leopold von, his place in 
 historical literature, &c., 57, 58, 
 62. 
 
 Raymund of Pennafort, 307. 
 
 Recognition of Henry "VTII, as su- 
 preme head, 277, 278, 279. 
 
 Record Commission, the, 12. 
 
 S^eformatio hegum, the, 322. 
 
 Reformation, the, 228, 231, 252-262, 
 277, 318 sjg. 
 
 Reginald of ChatUlon, 161. 
 
 Reginald the Lomhard, 143, 146. 
 
 Remittal of Loans Bill (1529), 275. 
 
 Renaissance, the, 335. 
 
 Rend of Anjou, 179. 
 
 Research, endowment of, 41 sj. 
 
 S. Augustine on the advocates of, 
 114. 
 
 Bevne Historique, the, 66. 
 
 Rhodes, knights of, 190 sj., 193, 196, 
 199, 202, 203, 205. 
 
 Rich, sir Richard (Speaker), 272 sj. 
 
 Richard, canon of S. Paul's, 147. 
 
 Richard I, king of England, 121 sqq., 
 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 170. 
 his Latin biogxapher, 68, 152. 
 
 Richard II, 197, 198, 220, 365. 134, 
 
 152- 
 Richard HI, 151, 338, 347, 355, 
 
 356, 361. 
 Richard I'Eveque, 138. 
 Richard of Bury, 314. 
 Richard of Cornwall, 176, 185. 
 Richard of Devizes, 146. 
 Richard of Hexham, 149. 
 Richard of Hchester, 127, 128, 146. 
 Richmond, Henry Fitz-Boy, duke of, 
 
 254- 
 Right or rights, the idea of, in the 
 
 Middle Ages, 210. 
 Robert of Gloucester, uncle of Henry 
 
 II, 120. 
 Robert of Melun, 138, 139. 
 Robert of ' Salesby,' 133. 
 Robert of Toulouse, 193. 
 Bobertus Pullus, 132 sq., 138, 139, 
 
 141, 145. 
 
 Robinson, J., bishop of Bristol, 5. 
 
 Rochester under Henry II, 145. 
 Rochford, lord, 278, 279, 281, 282. 
 Roger, bishop of Salisbury, 144. 
 Roger Niger, 147. 
 Roger of Hoveden, 120, 125, 139, 
 
 147, 148, 149, 150. 
 Roger of Pont I'Eveque, 130. 
 Rogers, J. E. Thorold, 57, 380. 
 Rolls Series, the, 11, 28, 379. 
 Rome, medieval, vast importance of, 
 
 67. 
 Roos of Hamlake, John lord, 198. 
 
 Thomas lord, 198. 
 
 William lord, 191. 
 Roses, Wars of the, 219. 
 Rotrou, archbishop, 122, 130. 
 Rous, John, of Warwick, 363. 
 Bupin of the Mountains, 159 sq. 
 
 S. Albans, 148. 
 
 Saladin, 160 sq., 165, 170, 171. 
 
 Salian Law, the, 64. 
 
 Salisbury under Henry II, 146. 
 
 Sanuto, Marino, 177, 180, 186. 
 
 Sardinia, kings of, 205. 
 
 Satalia, sack of, 193. 
 
 Savile, sir H., 6, 
 
 Savoy, Lewis of, and his House, 200, 
 203, 204. 
 
 Schanz, Dr., 380. « 
 
 Schmid's edition of the Anglo-Saxon 
 Laws, 62. 
 
 Scott {siiW .),IvarAoe siai The Talis- 
 man, 47, 92, 114. 
 
 Seebohm, F., 380. 
 
 Selden, J., 6, 302, 306, 329 sq., 332. 
 
 Seljuks, the, 158, 159. 
 
 Sembat (historian), 188. 
 
 Sembat, king of Armenia, 186, 189. 
 
 Seneca, study of in the twelfth cen- 
 tury, 153 s?. 
 
 'Sentences,' the, 319. 
 
 Sforza Pallavicino, 200. 
 
 Sharrock, Dr., 330. 
 
 Sheppard, T., 327. 
 
 Shirley, Dr., 10, 24. 
 
 Sickel, Dr., 62, 380. 
 
 Simeon of Dui-ham, 150. 
 
 Simnel, Lambert, 347 sq. 
 
 Simon of Apulia, 137. 
 
 Simon of Poissy, 138. 
 
 Sis, 159, 182, 189. 
 
 Sixtus Y, pope. Book of the Decre- 
 tals drawn up under, 308. 
 
 Skene, W. P., 380. 
 
 S Tng.11 States in the Middle Ages, 
 213. 
 
 Smith, prof. Goldwin, 7, 383, 384. 
 
 Smith, sir Thomas, 272. 
 
398 
 
 Index. 
 
 Smyraa, captured (1344), 191. 
 Societies, the Camden and Surtees, 
 
 50, 65- 
 the Harleian, 51. 
 Sohm, E., 63. 
 Someraet, Edward Seymour, duke of, 
 
 261, 321. 
 Spanish succession, war of the, 230 
 
 Speakers, tem-p. Henry VIII, 271- 
 
 274. 
 Spelman, sir Henry, 329. 
 Spence, J., 383. 
 Spiritual courts, attack on (1532), 
 
 281. 
 Stafford, Humfrey and Thomas, 347. 
 Standish's case, 318. 
 Stanley, sir WiUiam, 349. 
 Star Chamber, 270, 276, 285, 324, 
 
 338- 
 its foundation, objects, and history, 
 
 362, 364. 
 Statute against heresy, 260. 
 
 of Appeals, 257, 263, 285, 286, 
 
 320. 
 of Citations, 319. 
 of Morton, 304, 306, 307. 
 of Submission, 286, 320. 
 of Uses, 255 sq., 280, 281, 282. 
 of Wills, 255^2- 
 Staughton, N., admitted Doctor of 
 
 Civil and Canon Law (1659), 
 
 330- 
 Stephen, king of England, 137, 302 sq. 
 Stratford, archbishop, 308. 
 Struve, B. G., 3. 
 Succession, Act of (1485), 362. 
 Suffolk, Charles Brandon, duke of, 
 
 246, 249, 289. 
 Suffolk, Edmund de la Pole, earl of, 
 
 350, 351. 360, 368. 
 Suffrage under Henry VIII, 271. 
 Surrey, Thomas Howajd, earl of, 
 
 348. 
 Swart, Martin, 338, 348. 
 Swerre Birkbain, 125, 148. 
 Sybel, H. von, 60. 
 
 Tanner, bishop, 5, 6. 
 Tartars, the, 186, 188 sj. 
 Templars, the, 162, 165, 177, 180 
 
 Temys, T. (M.P. for Westbury), 271, 
 
 282. 
 Teutonic knights, 182, 183, 206. 
 Theobald, archbishop, 120, 130, 138 
 
 sq., 142, 144, 301, 302, 303. 
 Theodore, archbishop, 296. 
 TheodoBian code, the, 297, 298. 
 
 Thirsk, riot at, 348, 358, 359. 
 Thirty Years' War, the, 229, 235. 
 Thomas, Peter (legate), 192-5. 
 Thoros, king of Annenia, 189. 
 Titian, 204. 
 
 Tours, the schools of, 138, 139. 
 Tozer, H. E., 379. 
 Trades unions anticipated, 316. 
 TricoVu/mwls, the, 120, 147, 151. 
 Tunstall, bishop, 279, 288. 
 Turcopoliers of the Knights Hospi- 
 tallers, 185, 205. 
 Turnham, Eobert of, 163. 
 Tyrrell, sir James, 351. 
 
 TJberto of Milan, 144. 
 
 Universities, the, under Henry VII, 
 
 339- 
 under Edward VI, 321 sq. 
 under Mary, 323. 
 University Extension Scheme, the, 
 
 113- 
 Urban III, pope, 144. 
 
 ' Vacabunds and beggars,' 363. 
 Vaearius, Master, 120, 136 sj., 139, 
 
 141. 302, 303. 306. 
 Vasa, GustavTis, 228. 
 Vatican, the treasures of the, 67 sq. 
 Vaughan, H. Halford, 383, 384. 
 Venetians, the Pope, and the knights 
 
 of Ehodes, their alliance, 190, 
 
 195, 196. 
 rupture between them and the 
 
 Genoese, 196, 201. 
 annex Cyprus, 203 iq. 
 Vergil, Polydore, 340. 
 Vigfusson, Dr. G., 69, 380. 
 Vinogradoff, prof., 380. 
 Vinsauf, GeoflErey, 152. 
 Visitation of the two Universities by 
 
 T. Cromwell, 319. 
 
 Wages in 1495, 364. 
 
 Waitz, Dr., 28, 63, 380. 
 
 Wake, archbishop, 6, 331. 
 
 Walpole, sir K., 5. 
 
 Walter, archbishop of Palermo, 134. 
 
 Walter, Hubert, 144, 149. 
 
 Walter of Coutances, 126, 137. 
 
 War, private and public, in the Mid- 
 dle Ages, 217 sqq. 
 
 Warbeok, Perkin, 338, 348-50, 352, 
 360, 367, 368. 
 
 Wardship of heir to the throne, 173, 
 177. 
 
 Warham, archbishop, 244, 245, 248, 
 256, 272, 276-79, 281, 283, 310, 
 342, 354. 360. 
 
Index. 
 
 399 
 
 Warwick, Edward earl of, 335, 344, 
 
 347. 348, 350. 
 
 Warwick, Thomas de Beauohamp 
 earl of, takes prisoner a son of 
 the king of Lithuania, 194. 
 
 Wattenbach, W., 62. 
 
 Waynflete, bishop, 311. 
 
 Welfe, the, 125, 220. 
 
 Westphalia, the Peace of, 233. 
 
 Wbistonian controversy, 331. 
 
 WUkina, D., 331. 
 
 William, king of Sicily, 123, 134, 
 
 137- 
 William I, king of England, 166, 300. 
 William II, 361. 
 William of Champagne, archbishop, 
 
 131- 
 
 William of Conches, 138. 
 William of Malmeabury, 149, 379. 
 William of Newburgh, 125, 149. 
 
 William of S. Mere I'Eglise, 137. 
 William of Soissons, 138. 
 William of Tyre, 119. 
 William of Valence, 306. 
 William, sub-prior of Canterbury, 
 
 145- 
 
 Winchelsey, archbishop, 305. 
 
 Wolsey, cardinal, 234, 242-46, 248- 
 49. 252-54. 258-59, 263, 269, 
 271. 273-75. 290, 342, 369. 
 
 Wood, Antony, 310, 330. 
 
 Wriothesley, chancellor, 244, 248. 
 
 Wydville, Edward, 366. 
 
 Yonge (Miss), Cha-plet of Pearls, and 
 
 Dme in the Eagle's Nest, 47. 
 York in the twelfth century, 149. 
 York, Richard duke of, 347, 348. 
 
 Zouch, lord, 356. 
 
 THE END.