AT THE C 20 IO Longitude West io° of Greenwich angie ^-^ H la 26 ^Hamburg H a\ oye r0 With Drake in the Tropics To face page 134 Prince Rupert at Oxford, going to battle . ,, ,, 156 Waterloo, 7 p.m., June 18, 1815 .... „ ,, 217 A Glimpse of the Future ,, 248 LIST OF DRAWINGS PAGE The Landing of the Romans 17 The Building of the Wall 23 St. Augustine preaching to Ethelbert 34 The Murder of Becket . . .67 King John signs the Great Charter 74 Edward I's Wars with the Welsh — how the King shared the hardships of his men 84 English Archery wins at Agincourt 101 How Henry VIII had the Monks turned out of the Monasteries 119 Henry VIII sees that England has a good Fleet . . .122 At the time of the Armada — Elizabeth reviews the Troops at Tilbury 135 Brown Bess . . . 1 78 Nelson shot at the Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1S05 . . 213 LIST OF MAPS Britain, to illustrate history from the Coming of the Romans to the Norman Conquest 25 France 93 Great Britain, to illustrate history from the Norman Conquest to the present day 142 Ireland . .152 British Colonial Empire after the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713 . 187 Western Europe The World, showing the British Empire ... J \End papers CHAPTER I FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE DEPARTURE OF THE ROMANS The River's Tale. Twenty bridges from Tower to Keiv Wanted to know ichat the River knew, For they were young and the Thames teas old. And this is the tale that the River told: — 1 1 walk my beat before London Town, Five hours up and seven down. Up I go and I end my run At Tide-end-town, which is Teddington. Down I come with the mud in my hands And plaster it over the Map] in Sands. But I'd have you know that these waters of mine Were once a branch of the River Rhine, When hundreds of miles to the East I went And England was joined to the Continent. I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds, The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds, And the giant tigers that stalked them down Through Regent's Park into Camden Town. And I remember like yesterday The earliest Cockney who came my way, When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand, With paint on his face and a club in his hand. He was death to feather and fin and fur, He trapped my beavers at Westminster, He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer, He killed my herons off Lambeth Pier ; He fought his neighbour with axes and swords, Flint or bronze, at my upper fords, 10 The British Islands While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin The tall Phoenician ships stole in, And North Sea war-boats, painted and gay, Flashed like dragon-flies Erith way ; And Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek, And life was gay, and the world was new, And I was a mile across at Kew ! But the Roman came with a heavy hand, And bridged and roaded and ruled the land, And the Roman left and the Danes blew in — And that s where your history books begin ! ' The land This is to be a short history of all the people who we live m. ^ aYe jj ve( j j n B r fti s h Islands. I have just counted up over a hundred of these islands on the map, some of them mere rocks, some as big as small counties ; besides England with Scotland, and Ireland. But when first there were men in Britain it was not a group of islands, but one stretch of land joining the great continent of Europe, which then reached out into the Atlantic Ocean more than fifty miles west of Ireland. The English Channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea were then land through which ran huge European rivers. The land was covered with forests and swamps, and full of wild beasts, some of which have now vanished from the earth, while others, such as the tiger and the elephant, have gone to warmer climates. As for wolves, the land was alive with them. Indeed, the last wolf in Scotland was killed only 240 years ago ; the last in Ireland about 180 years ago. The beaver was one of the commonest animals of those early times, and perhaps helped to make our flat meadows by the dams he built across the streams. Biit Ave know almost nothing about the first men who lived here, except that they were naked and very hairy ; » The Cave Men 11 they slept in trees and lived on raw flesh or fruit, or dug Perhaps for roots with crooked branches. After a long while, pro- ye'ars°ago. bably thousands of years, the climate got gradually colder, The first and great sheets of ice covered all Northern Europe. Then these first men either died out or went away south- wards. Again thousands of years passed, and the west end of Europe got freed of ice and sank several hundred feet, and the sea flooded over the lower parts. So Britain became an island or a group of islands. Then the second race of men came, perhaps in some Perhaps kind of boats made of skins stretched over bent poles, years°ago. About this race we do know something. They were Tne Cave men. jolly, cunning, dark little fellows with long black hair. At first they lived high up on the hills, so that they could see their enemies from a distance. They could cook food, they dug out caves to live in, they made arrows and axes of sharp stones, and so stood a very fair chance of killing the wild beasts. Their brains, though perhaps small compared to ours, were worth all the strength of all the beasts that ever howled at night. No doubt they had still something of the beast in them ; they could run very swiftly ; could climb trees like monkeys ; could smell their enemies and their prey far off. They grew up early and died young. Most of their children died in infancy. They clothed themselves in skins, and at first lived Life of the entirely by hunting and fishing. Their whole time Cavemen - was devoted to getting food for themselves and their families. But just think what a lot of things they had to make for themselves. How long it must have taken to polish a piece of flint until it was sharp enough to cut down a tree or to cut up a tough old wolf ! How long to make a fish-hook or a needle of bone ! How clever and hard-working these men must have been ! 12 The British Islands No doubt there were a few sneaks and lazy wretches then, as there are now, who tried to beg from other people instead of fighting for themselves and their wives. But I fancy such fellows had a worse time of it then than they have now. A man who wouldn't work very soon died. No doubt there were holidays, too, after a successful hunt ; or long lazy summer days, when it was too hot to go out after deer or bison, and when even the women laid aside their everlasting skin-stitching and told each other stories of their babies ; and the babies toddled about after butterflies, larger and brighter than the peacocks and tortoiseshells of to-day. I don't suppose that these men thought of Britain as their 6 country ' ; but they thought of their family or their tribe as some- thing sacred, for which they would fight and die ; and the spirit of the good land took hold of them, the smell of the good damp mother-earth, the hum of the wild bees, the rustle of heather and murmur of fern ; they made rude songs about it, and carved pictures of their fights on the shoulder-blades of the beasts they had killed. As time went on they grew still more cunning, and began to tame the young of some of the beasts, such as puppies, lambs, calves and kids ; and they found out the delights of a good drink of milk. And so to the hunting trade they added the shepherd's trade, which is a much more paying one. Then some wonderful fellow discovered how to sow seeds of wheat, or some other corn ; and that these, when ripened, gathered and ground to powder, made a delicious food, which we call bread. When that was found out real civiliza- tion began ; for a third trade was added, that of agriculture, the most paying of all. The Cave Men 13 So one by one the earth gave up her secrets to our Their forefathers, and, like Adam and Eve, they went forth tribes ' to subdue and replenish this Isle of Britain. Each century that passed, they lived longer, were better fed, better housed, used better weapons, killed off more wild beasts. They quarrelled of course, and even killed each other ; family often fought with family, tribe with tribe, for they were always breaking the Tenth Commandment. But such quarrels were not perpetual ; tribe might often join with tribe, and so begin to form one nation or people. How they were governed, what their laws and customs were, what their religious ideas were, we can only guess. Perhaps the eldest man of the tribe Their was a sort of king and declared what were the 1 customs ' km s s - which the tribe must keep ; said ' this would make the gods angry 1 and that would not ; settled the dis- putes about a sheep or piece of corn-land ; led the tribe to fight in battle. Perhaps this king pretended to be descended from the gods, and his tribe got to believe it. Who w r ere the gods ? Sun, moon, stars, rivers, trees, Their lakes ; the rain, the lightning, the clouds ; perhaps cer- gods * tain animals ; dead ancestors, if they had been brave men, would come to be counted gods. But all round you were gods and spirits of some sort, whom you must appease by sacrifices, or by absurd customs. 6 Do not cut your hair by moonlight, or the goddess of the moon will be angry/ 6 If you are the king, never cut your hair at all.' i Luck ' perhaps was the origin of many of such customs ; some famous man had once cut his hair by moonlight, and next day he had been struck by lightning. Then there were priests, or c medicine- men 9 of some kind. These would generally support the 14 The British Islands king ; but they would often bully him also, and try to make him enforce absurd customs. Their And so the ages rolled along, and these 1 Cave men 9 buildings. Qr < gtone Age men , began tQ thin the foregts a little? or took advantage of the clearings caused by forest fires. They began to come down from the hill-tops, on which their earliest homes had been made, into the valleys. They began to come out of their caves, and began to build themselves villages of little wooden huts ; they began to make regular beaten track-ways along the slopes of the downs ; they began, perhaps, to raise huge stone temples to their heathen gods. Was it they who built Stonehenge, whose ruins, even now, strike us with wonder and terror ? Their Tribe began to exchange its goods with tribe ; the foreign- 1 ^ 1 flints of Sussex for the deer horns of Devon, for deer ers » horns make excellent pickaxes. Foreign traders came too, to buy the skins of the wild animals, also perhaps to buy slaves. Our ancestors were quite willing to sell their fellow men, captives taken in war from other tribes. What these foreigners brought in return is not very clear ; perhaps only toys and ornaments, such as Ave now sell to savages ; perhaps casks of strong drink ; perhaps a few metal tools and weapons. For in Southern Europe men had now begun to make tools and weapons of bronze ; the day of stone axes was nearly over. So by degrees the Stone Age men of Britain learned that there were richer and more civilized men than them- selves living beyond the seas, who had things which they lacked ; and, as they coveted such things, they had to make or catch something to buy them with. Therefore they bred more big dogs, killed and skinned more deer, caught more slaves. So trade began in 4 The Celts 15 Britain, and its benefits came first to those dwellers of the southern and south-eastern coasts who were nearest to the ports of Europe. But the foreign traders also took home with them Perhaps the report that Britain looked a fertile country, and ^ 0years was quite worth conquering. And so, perhaps about Comin<* a thousand years before Christ, a set of new tribes of the Celts began to cross the Channel, and to land in our islands, not as traders, but as fighters. Terrible big fellows they were, with fair hair, and much stronger than the Stone Age men. They were armed, too, with this new-fangled bronze, which made short work of our poor little bows and flint-tipped arrows and spears. Those of us who were not killed or made slaves at once, fled to the forests, fled ever northwards or westwards, or hid in our caves again. But many of us were made slaves, especially the women, some of whom afterwards married their conquerors. The Celts, for that was the name of the new people, seized all the best land, all the flocks and herds, and all the strong places on the hill-tops, and began to lead in Britain the life which they had been leading for several centuries in the country we now call France. From these Celts the Scottish, Irish and Welsh people are mainly descended. They rode on war-ponies, and, like the Assyrians in Life of the the Bible, they drove war-chariots ; they knew, or were Celts - soon taught by foreign traders, how to dig in the earth for minerals, and they soon did a large trade in that valuable metal, tin, which is found in Cornwall. They were in every way more civilized than the Stone Age men ; their gods were fiercer and stronger ; their priests, called Druids, more powerful ; their tribes were much larger and better organized for war. Their 16 The British Islands methods of hunting and fishing, of agriculture, of sheep and cow breeding, were much better ; their trade with their brothers in France was far greater. Before they, in their turn, were conquered, they had found out the use of iron for tools and weapons. Flint had gone down before bronze ; so now bronze, which is a soft metal and takes time to make, rapidly went down before the cheap and hard grey iron. He who has the best tools will win in the fight with Nature ; he w r ho has the best weapons will beat his fellow men in battle. Meanwhile, far away in the East, great empires had been growing up and decaying for six or seven thousand years. Each contributed something to civilization, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece ; each in turn made a bid for conquering and civilizing the 'known world \ But the world that they knew stretched little beyond the warm and tideless Mediterranean Sea. After all these arose the mighty empire of Rome, the heiress and conqueror of all these civilizations and empires. Home brought to her task a genius for war and govern- ment which none of them had known. The Roman armies had passed in conquest into Spain, into France, and from France they passed to Britain. The greatest of Roman soldiers, Caius Julius Caesar, who was conquering the Celts in France, landed somewhere in Kent, about fifty years before Christ's birth. He found it a tough job to struggle up to the Thames, which he crossed a little above London ; tough, almost as much because of the forests as because of the valiant Britons, although in the open field these were no match for the disciplined Roman regiments called 1 legions It is this Caesar who wrote the first account of our island and our people which has come down to us. The Roman Invasion 17 He was very much astonished at the tide which he found in the Channel ; and his book leaves us with the impres- THE LANDING OF THE ROMANS sion that the spirit of the dear motherland had breathed valour and cunning in defence into the whole British people. 1134 B 18 The British Islands Second Roman Invasion A.D. 43. The Roman Conquest. The Peace that Rome gave. For ninety years after his raid no Roman armies came to the island. But Roman traders came and Romanized Celts from France, who laughed at the ' savage ' ways of the British Celts. Men began to talk, In the wooden or wattle huts of British kings (hitherto believed by the Britons to be the most magnificent buildings imaginable), of the name and fame of the great Empire, of streets paved with marble, and of houses roofed with gilded bronze ; of the invincible Roman legions clad in steel and moving like steel machines ; of the great paved roads driven like arrows over hill and dale, through the length and breadth of Western Europe, of the temples and baths, of the luxurious waterways of the South. Rome attracted and terrified many peoples, even before she conquered them. The Roman Emperor seemed to men who had never seen him to be a very god upon earth. But the Roman conquest began in earnest in the year 43, and within half a century was fairly complete. At first it was cruel ; Roman soldiers were quite pitiless ; for those who resisted they had only the sword or slavery. The north and west of Britain resisted long and hard and often. Once under the great Queen, Boadicea, whose statue now stands on Westminster Bridge in London, the Britons cut to pieces a whole Roman legion. Then came cruel vengeance and recon- quest ; but after reconquest came such peace and good government as Britain had never seen before. The Romans introduced into all their provinces a system of law so fair and so strong, that almost all the best laws of modern Europe have been founded on it. Every- where the weak were protected against the strong ; castles were built on the coast with powerful garrisons in them ; fleets patrolled the Channel and the North The Roman Conquest 19 Sea. Great roads crossed the island from east to west and from north to south. Great cities, full of all the luxuries of the South, grew up. Temples were built to the Roman gods; and country-houses of rich Roman gentlemen, of which you may still see the remains here and there. These gentlemen at first talked about exile, shivered and cursed the * beastly British climate heated their houses with hot air, and longed to get home to Italy. But many stayed ; their duty or their business obliged them to stay : and into them too the spirit of the dear motherland entered, and became a passion. Their children, perhaps, never saw Rome ; but Rome and Britain had an equal share of their love and devo- tion, and they, perhaps, thought something like this : — The Roman Centurion speaks : Legate, I had the news last night. My cohort 's ordered A Roman home soldier By ship to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome. Britain 68 I've marched the companies aboard, the arms are stowed below : Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go ! I've served in Britain forty years, from Yectis to the Wall I have none other home than this, nor any life at all. Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here. Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done, Here where my dearest dead are laid — my wife — my wife and son ; Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love, Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how shall I remove ? B 2 20 The British Islands For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice. What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies, Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze, The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long- lighted days ? You'll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean To Arelate's triple gate ; but let me linger on, Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon ! You'll take the old Aurelian Road through shore- descending pines Where, blue as any peacock's neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines. You'll go where laurel crowns are won, but will you e'er forget The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet ? Let me work here for Britain's sake — at any task you will— A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to drill. Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border keep, Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates sleep. Legate, I come to you in tears — My cohort ordered home ! I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome? Here is my heart, my soul, my mind — the only life I know. — I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go ! Rome's Failure 21 And peace was imposed all over Southern Britain ; Mixture and the legions came to be stationed only on the frontier, ancP ntlS and hardly ever moved. No doubt at first these legions Roman were recruited from all the regions over which Rome ruled ; and she ruled from Euphrates to Tyne, from Rhine to Africa. Soon, however, they must have been recruited in Britain itself and from Britons. Celtic mothers bore British sons to Roman fathers, and crooned Celtic songs over the cradles of babies, who would one day carry the Roman flag. The beautiful Latin tongue, which the Romans had brought with them, was enriched with many Celtic words. It was, however, a misfortune for Britain that Rome What never conquered the whole island. The great warrior, to Agricola, did, between a.d. 79 and 85, penetrate far do. into Scotland ; but he could leave no traces of civiliza- tion behind him, and Ireland he never touched at all. So Ireland never went to school, and lias been a spoilt child ever since ; the most charming of children, indeed, full of beautiful laughter and tender tears, full of poetry and valour, but incapable of ruling herself, and im- patient of all rule by others. Then there was always a i Scottish frontier ' to be guarded, and along this frontier the Emperor Hadrian, early in the second century, began the famous Roman Wall. His successors improved on it The until it became a mighty rampart of stone, eighty miles ^i} an long, from Tyne to Solway, with ditches in front and behind and a strong garrison kept in its watch-towers. To the north of the wall roamed, almost untouched, certainly unsubdued, the w ilder Celts whom the Romans called ' Picts ' or painted men ; the screen of the wall seemed a perfectly sufficient defence against these. But prosperity and riches are often bad for men ; they lead 22 The British Islands to the neglect of defence. I fear that Roman Britain went to sleep behind her wall, recruiting fell off, the strength of the legions became largely a 6 paper strength'. And not only in Britain. The greatest empire that the world has ever seen was slowly dying at the heart, dying of too much power, too much prosperity, too much luxury. What a lesson for us all to-day ! There were pirates abroad, who smelt plunder afar off, land-thieves and sea-thieves. They began to break through the frontiers. One fine day the terrible news came to York, the capital of Roman Britain, that the Picts were over the wall. Where was the commander-in-chief? Oh ! he was at Bath, taking the waters to cure his indiges- tion. Where was the prefect (the highest representative of the Emperor) ? Oh ! he lived at Lyons in Southern France ; for he governed France as well as Britain. Quite possibly he was actually in rebellion against the Emperor of Rome, and was thinking of marching down to Italy to make himself Emperor ! If so, he would be for withdrawing the few soldiers that were left in Britain instead of sending more to defend it. 6 A few barbarians more or less over the wall ' mattered very little to a man who lived by neglecting his duties in Southern France ; i they could easily be driven back next year.' But it soon came to be less easy, and the barbarians soon came to be more than a few. An officer, called the * Count of the Saxon Shore \ was created to w atch against the pirates. The cities of Britain, hitherto undefended by fortifications, hastily began to run up walls for them- selves. One day even these walls were in vain. Rome, Britain and civilization were equally coming to an end, and it would be long before they revived. Half a century had completed the Roman conquest of the THE BUILDING OF THE WALL 24 The British Islands island ; two and a half centuries of happy peace had followed, in another half-century it was all over. Long before the last Roman legions were withdrawn in 407, pirates had been breaking down all the walls and The defences of Britain. Celtic Picts from the North, Celtic pirates 1 Scots from Ireland ; worse than all, dozen the north- fram east ivind came terrible 6 Englishmen ' Saxons from Germany, the shores of North Germany and Denmark. Rome had aboU orn forced the wolf and the eagle to content themselves a. d. 350- . G 450. with rabbits and lambs ; now they were going to feast once more upon the corpses of men. 25 54 5* BRITAIN to illustrate History from the coming of the Romans i to the Norman Conquest Lindisfaroe English Miles Holy I.q o to 20 jo 40 50 100 Uplands over 600 feet Forests _ Marshes m m Roman Roads . ^ Roman Cities and Forts in Capital letters .LONDiNiUM A0-/5jV r^rrTV 6atarac7oniIt MONA [Anglesey I 4 so Stow LINDUM incoln RlCONIUMi.-' £6 5-1 ^ERU.lAMI.UM .jfcAMULOOUNUM ,-+f»vi(C^!chester) J ROB C« - 2 i3^d Or Ov ERNU Mr r*oig(ean^ter6tir/S jtfRichborough) fSai andwicb l^JS-'-^M' I" V^DUBRIS (Dover) ,. Tortus V-^oHp u.X^ie GESfeORIACUM V ^Boulogne) ENGLISH CHANNEL Longitude West 4° of Greenwich Meridian o of Greenwich I mcry Walkct K> CHAPTER II SAXON ENGLAND The Pirates in England. When Rome was rotten-ripe to her fall, And the sceptre passed from her hand, The pestilent Picts leaped over the wall To harry the British land. The little dark men of the mountain and waste, So quick to laughter and tears, They came panting with hate and haste For the loot of five hundred years. They killed the trader, they sacked the shops, They ruined temple and town — They swept like wolves through the standing crops Crying that Rome was down. They wiped out all that they could find Of beauty and strength and worth, Rut they could not wipe out the Viking's Wind, That brings the ships from the North. They could not wipe out the North-East gales, Nor what those gales set free — The pirate ships with their close-reefed sails, Leaping from sea to sea. They had forgotten the shield-hung hull Seen nearer and more plain, Dipping into the troughs like a gull, And gull-like rising again — The painted eyes that glare and frown, In the high snake-headed stem, Searching the beach while her sail comes down, They had forgotten them ! The British Christians 21 There was no Count of the Saxon Shore To meet her hand to hand, As she took the beach with a surge and a roar, And the pirates rushed inland. Early in the fourth century the Roman Empire had The become Christian. And among the benefits Rome had Qhris Sh brought to Britain was the preaching of the Gospel, tians. We know very little about the old British Church, except the names of several martyrs who died for the faith before the conversion of the Empire. One of these was the soldier, St. Alban, to whom the greatest abbey in England was afterwards dedicated. It is probable, however, that, as in other parts of the Roman Empire, Britain was divided into bishoprics, churches were built, and heathen temples pulled down. Our English and Saxon friends, when they first landed The in Kent and Eastern Britain, were violent — you might g^omT almost say conscientious — heathens. They feared and and English hated Christianity and all other traces of Roman civiliza- & tion ; and they rooted out everything Roman that they could lay hands on. Other provinces of the Empire, Italy, France and Spain, Mere also being overrun by bar- barians, but none of these were as remorseless and destructive as the Saxons. Therefore, in Italy, France and Spain, the ' re-making 9 of nations on the ruins of Rome began fairly soon, but not in Britain. The Saxons made a clean sweep of the eastern half of the island, from the Forth to the Channel and westwards to the Severn. An old British chronicle gives us a hint of the awful thoroughness with which they worked. 6 Some therefore of the miserable remnant (of Britons) being taken in the mountains were murdered in great 28 Saxon England numbers, others constrained by famine came and yielded themselves to be slaves for ever to their foes, running the risk of being instantly slain, which truly was the greatest favour that could be offered them : others passed beyond the seas with loud lamentations/ The Saxons brought their wives and children with them, though it is difficult to believe that they were so stupid as to kill all the Britons instead of enslaving them and marrying their wives. Yet, if they had not done this, surely there would have been some traces left of Latin or Celtic speech, law and religion. But there were practically none. When, in the eighth and ninth centuries, we begin to see a little into the darkness, we find that England has become a purely English country, with a purely English and rather absurd system of law, and a purely English language ; while, as for religion, the people have to be converted all over again by a special mission from the Pope at Rome. Probably the British made a very desperate defence, and were only slowly beaten westwards into Wales, Lancashire, Devon and Cornwall. Something like two centuries passed before the English were thorough masters of the eastern half of the island. And all that while Roman temples, churches, roads and cities were crumbling away and grass was growing over their ruins. Studying the history of those days is like looking at a battle-field in a fog. As the fog clears we get some notion of our dear barbarian forefathers. The Saxon Englishman was a savage, with the vices and cruelties of an overgrown boy ; a drunkard and a gambler, and very stupid. But he was a truth-teller, a brave, patient, and cool-headed fellow. A Roman historian describes him as a free-necked man married Life of the Saxons 29 to a white-armed woman who can hit as hard as horses kick He honoured his women and he loved his home ; and the spirit of the land entered into him, even more than into any of those who lived before or came after him. He never knew when he was beaten, and so he took a lot of beating. He was not quarrelsome by nature, and, indeed, when he had once settled down in Britain, he was much too apt, as his descendants are to-day, to neglect soldiering altogether. He forgot his noble trade of sailor, which had brought him to Britain, so completely that within two centuries his coasts were at the mercy of every sea-thief in Europe ; and down the north-east wind the sea-thieves were always coming. England should always beware of the north-east wind. It blows her no good. Tilling the fields was the Saxon's real job ; he w T as The a plough-boy and a cow-boy by nature, and like a true plough- and cow-boy he was always grumbling. He boy. 0 hated being governed ; he always stood up for his 6 rights ', and often talked a lot of nonsense about them. He obeyed his kings when he pleased, which was not often, and these kings had very little power over him. But he loved his land, and he grubbed deep into it with his clumsy plough. In the sweat of his brow he ate the bread and pork and drank the beer (too much of the beer) which he raised on it. Every English village could keep itself to itself, since a Sax< it produced nearly everything its people wanted, except Vllla s e salt, iron and millstones, which could only be found in certain favoured places. In most villages there was a sort of squire called a c thegn who pafd some- tliing, either a rent or a service of some kind, to a king or to a bigger thegn, and owned much more Saxon England land than the ordinary freemen. Probably also he owned a few slaves, whether of English or British birth. There was also a smith and a miller, a swineherd to take the village pigs into the forest to feed, a shepherd and a cowherd, and a doctor who would be more or less of a wizard. After the conversion to Christianity in the seventh century there was also in most villages a priest. Of the freemen, every head of a family owned certain strips of land on which he grew corn, and each helped his neighbour to plough the land with teams of oxen. There was also a great common on which all freemen could pasture their cattle, and a wood wherein the pigs fed. There were few horses — there was no hay to feed them on — cows were only killed for food when they were too old to draw the plough, sheep were chiefly kept for wool, and so the pig was the real friend of hungry men. The small There was in each district some sort of rude govern- kfng- n nient by some sort of rude king, whose ancestor may have doms. been a leading pirate of the first ship-load of Saxons who landed near that place. No doubt many tiny ' kingdoms ' sprang up, as ship-load after ship-load of pirates ex- plored and settled inland. Probably the first ' king- doms ' extended as far as an armed man could walk before a days honest fighting, but these would naturally melt into, or be conquered into larger territories. In the seventh century there were at least seven little king- doms, but, by the eighth, only three of any importance remained. The three Northumbria, stretching from the Forth to the S^ixoi Humber, and westwards to the hills that part Cumber- king- land and Lancashire from Yorkshire and Northum- doms. berlanci Saxon Government 31 2. Mercia, or Middle England, reaching from the Humber to the Thames and westward to the Severn. 3. Wessex, comprising all south of the Thames and as far west as Devon. When they were tired of fighting the Britons the kings of these small kingdoms constantly fought each other. There were laws, or rather deeply-rooted 6 customs Their mostly connected with fighting, or cows or ploughing, men™" There were rude courts of justice, which would fine their r -i • o gods. a man so many sheep or so many silver pennies tor murder or wounding or cow-stealing. The king had a council of ' wise men', who met in his wooden house to advise him, and to drink with him afterwards at his rude feasts. There were gods, called Tiu and Woden and Thor and Freya, from whom our Tuesday, Wednes- day, Thursday and Friday are derived. They lived in a heaven called Valhalla, where, our ancestors thought, there was an endless feast of pork and strong ale with no headaches to follow. All this, as you see, was a barbarous business, after A barbar- the well-organized, civilized Roman life ; but at least it don/.™ 6 was a life with a good deal of freedom in it. Rome had stifled freedom too much ; the Saxons went to the other extreme. It is quite possible to have too much freedom, and you will see what a price these Saxons, before the end of their six hundred years of freedom, had to pay for theirs. After the sack of the City when Rome was sunk to The a name > I a un°da. In the years when the lights were darkened, or ever tionsof St. Wilfred came, England. Low on the borders of Britain (the ancient poets sing) Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a Saxon King. 32 Saxon England Stubborn were all his people from cottar to overlord, Not to be cowed by the cudgel, scarce to be schooled by the sword, Quick to turn at their pleasure, cruel to cross in their mood, And set on paths of their choosing as the hogs of Andred's Wood. Laws they made in the Witan, the laws of flaying and fine — Common, loppage and pannage, the theft and the track of kine, Statutes of tun and of market for the fish and the malt and the meal, The tax on the Bramber packhorse, and the tax on the Hastings keel. Over the graves of the Druids and under the wreck of Rome, Rudely but surely they bedded the plinth of the days to come. Behind the feet of the Legions and before the Normans' ire, Rudely but greatly begat they the bones of state and of shire ; Rudely but deeply they laboured, and their labour stands till now, If we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their eight-ox plough. Growth of There was no king really powerful enough to rule fand- whole island. In a land of forest and swamp, where owners. roads hardly exist for eight months of the year, it must always be difficult for armed men, judges or traders to pass from place to place, except on horseback ; and the Saxons were no great horse-soldiers. I think we shall see that it was the knight and his horse, who, from the eleventh century onwards, first made the rule of one king possible over the whole island. Meanwhile, The Saxons become Christian 33 the 6 great men ' of the Saxons, ' thegns ', 1 aldermen % 6 earls', or whatever they were called, took most of the power, and naturally began to oppress their poorer neighbours. They got the courts of justice into their own hands ; they grabbed the land, they exacted rents and services from the poorer landowners ; they made what is called a ' feudal ' state of society. In the year 600 a free Kentish farmer might own 120 acres of land ; in the year 1000 he seldom owned more than 30, and for this he probably had to pay a heavy rent and to labour on some great man's land. The first rudiments of civilization were brought back The to this barbarous England by the Christian missionaries become whom Pope Gregory sent thither in the year 597. Christian St. Augustine came and preached in Kent and became 597. the first Archbishop of Canterbury. From Canterbury missionaries spread all over the island, and, in a century, the heathenism, that had rooted out Christianity two hundred years before, was quite gone. It seems that the fierce Saxon gods made a very poor fight of it. The Bishops old Roman capital of York recovered its importance j^^g and became an archbishopric. Some seventeen other bishoprics arose all over the country, and, even more important than the bishoprics, great abbeys and monas- teries full of monks and nuns. A monk is a person who retires from the world in order to devote himself to prayer with a view to saving his own soul. Besides preaching the true Gospel of Our Lord, these Gifts of missionaries preached the worship of saints, and every landtotno 1 . monks. church was dedicated to some particular saint, who was believed to watch over its congregation. A gift of land to a monastery was called ' a gift to God and His saints If you were not holy enough to go into the monastery, 1131 C 34 Power of the Pope 35 the next best thing you could do, said the monks, was to give your land to the saints. But this meant that you neglected your worldly duties, such as defending your country, tilling your fields, providing for your wife and children. The world, in fact, was painted to our Saxon ancestors by the monks as such a terribly wicked place, that the best thing they could do was to get out of it as quickly as possible. The Popes of Rome, who had about Power of this time made themselves supreme heads of all Western tlie Pope - Christendom, encouraged this view ; and the monks were always devoted servants of the Popes. But there were other priests who were not monks, and these usually served the parish churches, which gradually but slowly grew up in England ; they were always rather jealous of the monks. Human love and common sense were too strong to be Life of the taken in altogether by this new unworldly spirit. Even mon s ' the monks themselves soon became very human, and, as they had to eat and drink, they had to cultivate their fields to raise food. Indeed, they soon began to do this more intelligently than most people ; and so the monas- teries became very rich. I think it is to the monks that we English owe our strong love of gardening and flowers. And also our love of fishing ; the Church said you were to eat only fish and eggs in the season of Lent and on other ' fast-days', and so every monastery, however far from a river, had to have a fish-pond well stocked with fish, or else live upon salt herrings, which were difficult to get far inland. I always like to think of the dear old monks, in their thick black woollen frocks with their sleeves tucked up, watching their floats in the pond. I hope they Avere always strictly truthful as to the size of the fish which they hooked but did not land. The monks 36 Saxon England Power of the Kings of North- umbria, 630-750. Kings of Mercia, 750-800. Egbert, King of Wessex, 802. also kept alive what remains of learning there were : they brought books from beyond the seas ; they taught schools ; made musical instruments, were builders, painters and craftsmen of all kinds ; and produced famous men of learning like Bede and Wilfred. English missionaries went from English abbeys to preach the Gospel to heathen Germans. So rich and powerful did the Church become, that in the councils of our tenth- century kings the bishops and abbots were even more important than the thegns and earls. The Church then taught men much and tamed them a little. It certainly helped towards uniting the jarring kingdoms ; for Christian Northumbria, in the seventh century, was the first to exercise a real sort of leadership over the other kingdoms ; it was a Northumbrian king, Edwin, who built and gave his name to Edinburgh ; it was in the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow that the good monk Bede wrote the first history of England. You may still see Bede's tomb in Durham Cathedral, with the Latin rhyme on the great stone lid. The last important Northumbrian king fell figl Jng against the Picts beyond the Forth. Mercia had her turn of supremacy in the eighth century, under King Ofta, who drove back the Welsh and took in a lot of their land beyond the Severn. Perhaps it Avas he who built a great rampart there called Offa s Dyke ; beyond it, even to this day, all is 6 Wales Then his family in turn was beaten by Egbert, King of Wessex (802-39). Thenceforth, Wessex was, in name at least, supreme over all England. If ever there was a capital city of England before Norman times it was Winchester, the chief town of Wessex ; though London, one of the few Roman cities that have never been The Danes 37 destroyed or left desolate, must always have been a more important place of trade. From Egbert King George V is directly descended ! Egbert and his son and grandsons had to meet a new New and terrible foe. Down the north-east wind, from P irates , m 7 from Denmark, Norway and the Baltic, all through the ninth, Denmark tenth and eleventh centuries, a continual stream of fierce f Q d nvay and cunning pirates began to pour upon Western Europe. 800-noo. We call them ' the Danes ', or North-men. The British Isles lay right in their path, and at one time or another they harried them from end to end. The churches, in which the principal wealth of the country was stored, were sacked ; the monks were killed, and then the pirates went back to their ships. From Britain they went on to France and even into the Mediterranean : some of them, indeed, crossed the Northern ocean to Iceland, to Greenland, to North America. Their ships, some 80 feet long, and 1G feet broad, with a draft of 4 feet, might carry crews of fifty men apiece, armed to the teeth in shirts of mail, and bearing heavy axes with shafts as long as a man. Often they came under pretence of trading in slaves, and would trade honestly enough if they thought the country too strong to be attacked. About the middle of the ninth century they began to These settle, and make homes in the very lands they had been begii^to plundering. Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, the East gttle in Riding of Yorkshire, were regularly colonized by them, about 860. So were the Orkney and Shetland Isles, the Hebrides, Caithness and Sutherland, as well as the Isle of Man and the eastern coast of Ireland. Their numbers were, however, small, and if Saxon England under weak kings had not enjoyed too much 1 freedom ', they might have been beaten off ; but it 38 Saxon England seemed impossible for the Saxons to collect an army in less than a month, or to keep it in the field when collected. Long before the English 'host' was ready to fight, the pirates had harried the land and dis- Alfredthe appeared. At last Alfred the Great (871-901), grand- savelf son °f Egbert, began to turn the tide against the England 1 ^ nvac ^ ers * ^ e defended Wessex all along the line of the 871-901/ Upper Thames, in battle after desperate battle, and at last beat a big Danish army somewhere in Wiltshire. The pirate king Guthrum agreed to become a Christian, and was allowed to settle with his men in North-Eastern England. Soon after that we find English and 6 settled ' Danes fighting valiantly for their country against fresh bands of Danish pirates. We may call Alfred the first real 6 King of England ' ; he picked up the threads of the national life which the Danes had cut to pieces. He translated good books into the Saxon tongue ; he started the great history of England, called the ' Chronicle ', which was kept year by year, in more than The great one monastery, down to 1154. He and his son, Edward, WeSex of an d his grandsons, Athelstan and Edmund, built fleets the tenth and fortresses, armed their people afresh and compelled them to fight in their own defence. For some years every fresh band of pirates met a warm reception, and every rising of the Danes within the country was beaten down. King Edgar, 959-75, was called £ the peaceful ', and boasted that he had been rowed about on the river Dee by six lesser kings. It was a brief respite, For all about the shadowy kings, Denmark's grim ravens cowered their wings ; and in the reign of Edgar's foolish son, Ethelred the century. Ethelred the Unready 39 Unready, the pirates came back more determined than King before. S weyn, King of Denmark, came in person, and his ^Unt d son Canute ; and this time the Danes intended a thorough ready, and wholesale conquest. This time Wessex fell also ; fresh. 16 ' even Canterbury was sacked, and its archbishop pelted ^*£* sh to death with beef-bones after dinner. The ' wise men ' of unwise Ethelred were as useless as the House of Commons would be to-day if there were a big invasion. They talked, but did nothing. A country in such a plight wants a man to lead it to war ; not thirty ' wise men' or six hundred members of Parliament, with a sprinkling of traitors among them, to discuss how to make peace. Ethelred's ' wise men ' could only recom- mend him to buy oft* the Danes with hard cash called 'Danegold' or 'Danegeld'. The Dunes pocketed the The silver pennies, laughed, and came back for more. When ge ^ e for a moment there arose a hero, Ethelred's son Edmund Ironside, he fought in one year, as Alfred had fought, six pitched battles and almost beat Canute. Then he King agreed to divide the island with Canute, and was ^^"igag, murdered in the next year (1017). Canute ruled Eng- land until his death in 1035. He ruled Denmark and Norway also, and was in fact a sort of Northern Emperor. It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation, what To call upon a neighbour and to say : — ' Dane- 1 We invaded you last night — we are quite prepared to f^ezus fight, Unless you pay us cash to go away.' And that is called asking for Dane-geld, And the people who ask it explain That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld And then you'll get rid of the Dane ! 40 Saxon England It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say : — * Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you, We will therefore pay you cash to go away.' And that is called paying the Dane-geld ; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane. It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray, So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say : — * We never pay any one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost, For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost ! ' And Canute ruled England righteously. He turned Christian, he rebuilt the abbeys and churches w r hich his ancestors had burned, he kept a strong little army of English or Danish soldiers about his person, and he kept order and peace. His sons, however, were good King f° r nothing ; and in 1042 Edward, the younger son of iieCon Ethelred, was recalled from * Normandy', whither he fessor, had been sent to be out of Canute's way, and ruled 1042-1066. England as king till 1066. Dangers Now, as we approach the end of the Saxon period of abroad our h* s ^ 01 T> ^ us * a ^ e a 1°°^ a ^ our foreign neighbours. Those who will be important to us are four in number. 1. Denmark and Norway ; except in the reign of Canute, these were always hostile. Scotland. 2. Scotland, once Pict-land, the district north of the Forth and Clyde. Celtic 1 Scots ' from Ireland had con- Dangers from Abroad 41 quered Celtic Picts from the sixth to the ninth century. They had brought with them the Christian faith, which had been preached in Ireland by St. Patrick in the fifth century. These Scots and Picts continually raided Northumbria just as the Picts had raided Roman Britain ; and Canute had bought off their raids by giving to them all the land as far south as the Tweed, which thus became the 6 border as we have it to-day, between England and Scotland. Cumberland and Lancashire seem to have remained an independent Celtic country till the end of the eleventh century, just as Wales did till the thirteenth. 3. Flanders, that is, roughly speaking, the modern Flanders. Holland and Belgium ; a land already famous both for pirates and traders ; it lies right opposite the mouth of the Thames, and was just the place where the pirates could sell the gold candlesticks which they stole out of English churches. 4. Normandy, the great province on the north coast Nor- of France, of which the river Seine is the centre. This m \ n ?7 5 ( and the land the great Danish pirate, Hollo, had harried early Normans. in the tenth century, until the wearied King of France gave it him to keep, on condition that he would become a Christian. The 'Normans', that is North-men, married French wives, and became the cleverest, the fiercest, and, according to the ideas of the day, the most pious of Frenchmen. They did not cease to be adventurers, and we find their young men seeking their fortunes all over Europe. They thought their Saxon neighbours very slow and stupid fellows, who were somehow in possession of a very desirable island which they managed very badly, and which it was the Normans' duty to take if possible. 42 Saxon England Duke Now King Edward was at heart more a Norman than an Englishman, so pious that he was called ' the Confessor', always weeping over imaginary sins, and forgetting his real sin, which was the neglect of the defence of his island. Like the Normans, he despised his own people. He gave himself away to his young cousin, Duke William of Normandy, and would have liked to give the crown and land of England as well — in fact he made some sort of promise to do so — and he filled his court with Norman favourites and bishops. England had never yet been a united country. Ethelred, and Canute after him, had allowed great i aldermen ' or earls to govern it, one for Northumbria, one for Mercia, one for Wessex ; Edward continued the same plan, and so these great earls were more powerful than the King himself. Northumbria and Mercia were largely Danish at heart and looked more to Denmark than to Wessex for a king. It was on Wessex, then, that the main resistance to Normandy would fall if the Normans attacked England. Earl Edward had no children, and as he drew towards his WesseL°* death, the great Earl Harold of Wessex had to make up his mind whether he would submit to Duke William of Normandy, or call in Danish help, or seize the crown of England for himself. Ambition and patriotism both Becomes said 6 Seize it ' ; and on Edward's death, in January 1066, {g>6? Harold did so. Invasions Danes and Norwegians were on the alert too ; and it fro^for- l°°k e d as if England might be crushed between two sets way and of enemies. For William had long been preparing for a mandy. spring at it : he had won the friendship of Flanders ; and he had the Pope on his side, for the English Church was by no means too obedient to the Pope at this time. Battle of Hastings 43 William now set about collecting a great army of the best fighting men that France, Brittany and Flanders could produce. Our brave Harold, on his side, got the Wessex men under arms, and kept them watching all the summer. Northern England could not help him, for, a month before William landed from France, a mighty Norwegian host appeared in the Humber. Harold, then, had to prepare to meet two invasions ; Battle of and most gallantly he met them. He flew to York, Stamford 0 J 7 Bridge, smashed the Norwegians to pieces at Stamford Bridge, 1066, Sep- and flew south again : but before he reached London teiuber - William had landed in Sussex. There, upon October 14, Battle of on or near the spot where Battle Abbey now stands, ^f ings ' was fought the battle of Hastings, one of the most October, decisive battles in history. It was the fight of French cavalry and archers against the English and Danish foot-soldiers and axe-men, a fight of valour and cunning against valour without cunning. All day they fought, till, in the autumn darkness, the last of Harold's axe- men had fallen beside their dying King, and the few English survivors had fled towards London. One of them left a bag of coins in a ditch at Sedlescombe, which was dug out a few years ago ; the poor little silver pieces are a token of the many foreign countries with which Old England had dealings. The battle of Hastings decided, though not even Results of tHe Nor William knew it, that the great, slow, dogged, English m ® n q^- race, was to be governed and disciplined (and at first quest, severely bullied in the process) by a small number of the cleverest, strongest, most adventurous race then alive. Nothing more was wanted to make our island the greatest country in the world. The Saxons had been sinking down into a sleepy, fat, drunken, unenter- 44 Saxon England prising folk. The Normans were temperate in food and drink, highly educated, as education went in those days, restless, and fiery. They brought England back by the scruff of the neck into the family of European nations, back into close touch with the Roman Church, to which a series of vigorous and clever popes was then giving a new life. Such remains of Roman ideas of govern- ment and order as were left in Europe were saved for us by the Normans. The great Roman empire was like a ship that had been wrecked on a beach ; its cargo was plundered by nation after nation. But if any nation had got the lions snare of its leavings it was the Frenchmen, and through the Frenchmen the Normans, and through the Normans the English. The It cost William about six years of utterly ruthless com? UeSt warfare to become master of all England. England ?06(M(H> res ^ e d him bit by bit ; its leaders had a dozen different " plans ; he had but one plan, and he drove it through. He was going to make an England that would resist the next invader as one people. He had to do terrible things : he had to harry all Yorkshire into a desert ; he had to drive all the bravest English leaders into forest and fen, or over the Scottish border, and to kill them when he caught them. He spared no man who stood in his way, but he spared all who asked his mercy. He could not subdue Scotland ; but once he inarched to the Tay and brought the Scottish king Malcolm to his knees for the time. The great William could not quite give up the plan of governing knd- ian England by great earls ; he was obliged to reward the owners. most powerful of his French followers with huge grants of English land ; and these followers, who had been quite accustomed to rebel against him in Normandy, William the Conqueror 45 often rebelled against him and his descendants in England. But his gifts of land were nearly always scattered in such a way that one great man might have land perhaps in ten different counties, but not too much in any one place. Besides, every landowner, big or little, had to swear a strong oath to be faithful to the King. All gifts of land were to come only from the King, all courts of justice should depend upon the King alone. It remained for William's great-grandson Henry II to put all this down in black and white, in ink, on parchment ; Henry knew, what even William had not learned, that the pen is a much more terrible and lasting recorder than the sword. In a word, William would be king not only of Wessex King but of every rood of English hind and of all men iq^iJ^ dwelling thereon. And so the country began once more to enjoy a peace it had never known since the Roman legions left. The sons of the very men who had fought William at Hastings flew to fight for William against some rebel Norman earl, and earls and other men found that if they wanted to play the game of rebellion they had better go back to France. And the actual number of Normans who remained in England and took root was really very small, though among them we should find nearly all the nobles, bishops, great abbots and other leaders of the people. Very few Norman women came, so these men married English wives, and, within 150 years, all difference between Normans and English- men had vanished. The Norman Conquest of 10G6 was the beginning of the history of the English race as one people and of England as a great power in Europe. You might say, indeed — < Saxon England England's on the anvil — hear the hammers ring — Clanging from the Severn to the Tyne ! Never was a blacksmith like our Norman King- England 's being hammered, hammered, hammered into line ! England 's on the anvil ! Heavy are the blows ! (But the work will be a marvel when it's done) Little bits of Kingdoms cannot stand against their foes. England 's being hammered, hammered, hammered into one ! There shall be one people — it shall serve one Lord — (Neither Priest nor Baron shall escape !) It shall have one speech and law, soul and strength and sword. England 's being hammered, hammered, hammered into shape ! William's work. CHAPTER III THE NORMAN KINGS, 1066-1154 So at last there was going to be a real government in The this country, and it was going to do its duty. Few the^khi^s kings in the Middle Ages had any high idea of their in Noi- fi duty towards their people 9 such as a great Roman England. Emperor had, or such as King George V has. They chiefly thought of their country as a property, or ' estate ', which they were going to cultivate mainly for their own benefit. But the better a king's ' estate ' was cultivated, the better off were the people on it ; and, when I say the 'people ', I mean every one except a few, perhaps a couple of hundred of the 6 barons ' or greatest landowners. A king could only grow very rich and powerful when his country was at peace at home and well armed against foreign foes ; his people could only grow rich under the same conditions. Not so the great barons. Each of them could most Their easily increase his riches at the expense of some other tvitlf the** great baron or of the king ; and the people who lived ^£"^-3 near him would be the first to suffer if he were allowed to do so. William had been obliged to allow his barons and earls to judge and govern their tenants in accor- dance with those ' feudal ' customs which had come to be universal in Western Europe since Roman law had been lost and strong government with it. The great kings who succeeded him slowly, painfully, out of scanty material, had to recreate a strong government, and, so, to give peace and order. William I The people will help the King against the barons. The Sheriffs. Castles. Now of the first four, whom alone we call 6 Norman ' kings, three were w ise and strong, — William I, William II, and Henry I, — and the fourth, Stephen, was foolish and weak. So, while the first sixty-nine years after the con- quest were a time of increasing peace and prosperity, the next nineteen were the most dreadful period in our history. Remember that the Norman barons were only five or six generations removed from the fierce Danish pirates who followed Rollo to France. There, as there were no strong kings to restrain them, they had been accustomed to build castles and to make their tenants fight for them in their private quarrels. When they got to England, and grew richer in lands and tenants than they had been in Normandy, they expected to play their familiar game with even greater success. Their kings, however, from the first, determined they should not do so. William found, in the slow, undisciplined old Saxon life, several things which served him to keep his barons in order. For instance, there was an officer in every county called a sheriff; he collected the King's rents and taxes ; he presided over the rude court of justice which was held in every county ; he was supposed to lead to battle the free landowners of that county. William made his sheriffs much more powerful, and made them responsible for the peace of their counties. In England, too, there had been few castles, and these only stockades of wood on the top of earthen mounds ; whereas in France every baron had a castle. On the Welsh and Scottish borders William was obliged to allow, and even to encourage his followers to build castles, but elsewhere he forbade it. But he built a great many royal castles and filled them with faithful paid Domesday Book 49 soldiers. Again, in Normandy there had been barons as rich in lands and money as the Duke himself ; but William kept enormous tracts of English land in his own hands, and so made the Crown ten times richer than any baron. In Normandy the Duke had no real Taxes, system of taxes ; in England the King could and did levy a regular tax of so many shillings on each estate. Ethelred had begun this in order to get money to bribe the Danes ; the later kings had continued it. Many estates were, however, free from this tax, and Domes- no doubt it was always difficult to collect. So, in 1085, jq^ 00 ^ William sent officers to every village and county in Eng- land to find out who must pay the tax and how much each must pay. These officers called together a sort of 6 Jury 9 of the villagers, who declared the value of the estate. The results were collected and written down in 6 Domesday Book which you may see in the Record Office. An extract from it will run somewhat like this: — ' County of Cambridge: In Blackacre are ten hides [the hide is an old measure of land, say 120 acres]. Thurstan holds it. In King Edward's time Wulfstan held it. It was worth £2 6s. 8d. Xow it is worth £4 13s. 4rfL It never paid tax. There is land for eight ploughs. There are two freeholders and ten serfs. The priest holds half a hide. There is a mill, value 10s. There is wood for 100 pigs, and pasture for 20 cows.' Are you astonished at the small value of land ? You Old must remember that you could then buy with £l what ^"ney 1 might now cost you £40. For there was little silver and less gold in Europe before the discovery of America. Few gold coins were made in England before the reign of Edward III. 1184 D 50 William I The popula- tion of England in 1085. Customs and laws. Free land- owners and un- free tenants. Life in the country. From Domesday Book we can make a rough guess at the population of England in the eleventh century, say about 2,000,000, whereas now it is over 40,000,000. The book does not mention the number of people in the towns, but in many towns it does mention the number of houses. Probably no town, except London, had then as many as ten thousand people. Of many places the book says that they were ' waste that is, had been burned, either by accidental fires (which must constantly have been occurring w hen all buildings were of wood) or by Danes or Normans in the process of conquest. It also tells something of the > customs ' which prevailed in dif- ferent counties and towns. We are getting near an age when we shall be able to call such customs 6 Laws \ The Norman kings tried to use old English customs and to improve them. But theft and murder were still reckoned more as offences against the family of the person wronged than as crimes against the State. You could still atone for such offences by a fine. It was not till late in the twelfth century that you would infallibly be hanged if you were caught ; and the certainty of punishment is what really prevents crime. Now, you can see that the result of an inquiry like Domesday was that the kings knew a great deal about their country and about their people. They would know, for instance, what great baron or earl was really dangerous ; on what part of England what taxes could be levied, and so on. No doubt the new Norman land- owners were often hard to their Saxon tenants. But it would not pay them to be too hard. They wanted rents and labour, and a starving man cannot pay rent or work in the fields. The land was the only source of riches, and therefore every gentleman had to be first and fore- Life in the Country 51 most a farmer, and his tenants under him had to be farmers or farm labourers too. Domesday mentions, under strange names, a great number of different classes of farming tenants ; but, within the next century, we find that all these are melted away into two, the free and the un-free, the freeholders and the * villeins' or ' serfs The former are men whose land averages perhaps forty acres. They pay some small rent in money or in produce to the squire or ' lord of the manor they follow the sheriff to battle when he bids them. The villein perhaps farms nearly as much land as the freeholder. But he is not free ; he is bound to pay a rent in labour, say two or even three days a week on the squire's land, many extra days at harvest time, and perhaps to pay so many eggs or pigs or hens every year ; nor may he sell his land or go away without his squire's leave. In fact he is very much at the mercy of the squire until the latter half of the twelfth century, when the King's Law begins to protect him against the squire, to hang him if he commits crimes, and to enroll him its a soldier. But it will not pay the squire to oppress him too much if he is to get good work out of him. These clever Normans, all but a few of the greatest barons, soon made common cause with their tenants, soon became English at heart. Over them, too, the good land threw its dear familiar spell, and made them love it beyond all things. Norman and Saxon. 1 My son/ said the Norman Baron, ' 1 am dying, and you Jno * ?/» will be heir baron To all the broad acres in England that William crave me about his for my share n 2 52 William I When we conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and a nice little handful it is. But before you go over to rule it I want you to under- stand this : — 6 The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite, But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right ; When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own, And grumbles, " This isn't fair dealing," my son, leave the Saxon alone. 'You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears, But don't try that game on the Saxon ; you'll have the whole brood round your ears. From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the fields, They'll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you will yield ! ' But first you must master their language, their dialect, proverbs and songs, Don't trust any clerk to interpret when they come with the tale of their wrongs. Let them know that you know what they're saying ; let them feel that you know what to say ; Yes, even when you want to go hunting, hear them out if it takes you all day. ' They'll drink every hour of the daylight and poach every hour of the dark, It ? s the sport not the rabbits they're after (we've plenty of game in the park). Don't hang them or cut off their fingers. That 's wasteful as well as unkind, For a hard-bitten, South-country poacher makes the best man-at-arms you can find. Life in the Towns 'Appear with your wife and the children at their weddings and funerals and feasts ; Be polite but not friendly to Bishops ; be good to all poor parish priests ; Say " we", " us " and " ours " when you're talking instead of " you fellows " and " I ". Don't ride over seeds ; keep your temper ; and never you tell 'em a lie ! ' The towns were no doubt horrid places. The fortifi- Life in the cation of one or more ' boroughs ' in each county had towns - been begun by the son and grandsons of King Alfred in their wars against the Danes. Besides a wooden castle on a mound of earth, there would probably be some sort of wooden paling round the towns ; and in the twelfth cen- tury palings would be replaced by stone walls. London, York, Chester probably kept their old Roman walls of stone and occasionally repaired them. As for cleanliness and what we now call c sanitation ', there was none. All refuse was thrown into the streets, which only rain-storms washed, and where pigs, dogs and kites scavenged freely. Each trade or craft had its own street, and a walk down ' Butchers' Row ' would probably be unpleas- ing to modern noses, lint there was strong patriotism in the towns, and great rivalry between them. A towns- man from Abingdon was a suspected ' foreigner ' to the citizens of Oxford. In Sussex to-day the old folk in some villages speak of a hop-picker from another village as a 1 foreigner '. Both in town and country the food, even of the poor- The food est, was fairly plentiful. Salt meat, mainly pork, and in ^ e ^f e Lent salt fish, was the rule, and was washed down by huge floods of strong beer. There were no workhouses and no provision for the poor except charity, but charity 54 William I (called 6 almsgiving ') was universal, and beggars swarmed everywhere. If no one else would feed them, the monks always would, and I fear they made little difference* between those who were really in need and those who preferred begging to working. Washing was almost unknown. Even in the King's household, while there were hundreds of servants in the cooking departments, there were only four persons in the laundry. Horrible diseases like leprosy were common, and occasionally pestilence swept away whole villages and streets of people. Life then was undoubtedly shorter, and its conditions harder, than to-day ; but I think it was often merrier. Holidays were much more frequent ; for the all-powerful Church forbade work on the very numerous saints' days. Religion influenced every act of life from the cradle to the grave. All the village feasts and fairs centred round the village church and were blessed by some saint. The Norman bishops at once woke up the sleepy Saxon priests and abbots, taught them to use better music, more splendid and more frequent services, cleaner ways of life. Stone churches replaced the wooden ones, and those mighty Norman cathedrals, so much of which remains to-day, began to grow up. The zeal for monkery continued right into the thirteenth century, although a pious Norman gentleman seldom went into a monastery himself till his fighting days were over. In the Church a career was open to the poorest village lad who was clever and industrious ; he might rise to be abbot, bishop, councillor of kings, or even Pope. All schools were in the hands of churchmen, and Latin was the universal language of the Church throughout Western Europe. In King Williams ' Great Council ', which took the place The King's Great Council 55 of the Saxon 6 Wise men and which became the direct The father of our House of Lords, there would sit perhaps q^£ 8 150 great lay barons, nineteen bishops, and some thirty Council, abbots ; but the churchmen would be the most learned, the most cunning and the most regular attendants. Though this Great Council met only for a few days in each year, the King would need secretaries and lawyers and officials of one kind or another to be continually about his person ; and most of these would be church- men, whom he would reward with bishoprics and abbeys and livings. So far as there was what we now call a ' Ministry ' or a ' Privy Council it consisted mainly of churchmen. So powerful indeed was the Church that quarrels Quarrels between it and the strong kings were of frequent occur- KiM%ith rence during the next century or two. The churchmen the were too apt to look to the Pope as their real head instead of the King. The popes always tried to keep the Church independent of the King. They wanted the clergy to pay no taxes for their lands, to have separate courts of justice, to be governed by other laws than those of the laymen, and yet to be wholly defended by the kings and laymen. Now no good king approved of these demands, which were indeed monstrous if you consider that the clergy owned between one-quarter and one-third of the land of England, and were getting more and more, from gifts by pious laymen, every day. AVilliam I had to allow the Church to have separate courts of justice, but he had no actual quarrel with the Pope, mainly because his archbishop, Lanfranc, was a very wise man. William II and Henry I each had sharp quarrels with Archbishop Anselm, while as for poor Stephen, he was at the mercy of the great bishops. 56 William I I don't think you want to know at what date this or that baron rebelled against William or Henry, or at what date William or Henry sent an army against the King of France or the Welsh ; I would rather that you would understand how these kings were pursuing, on the whole, two main tasks. First they were trying to make England and Wales one compact kingdom, and secondly they were obliged, because they were Dukes of Normandy, to quarrel with the Kings of France. It was they, then, who founded our 800-year-long hostility to the gallant Frenchmen, which is now, happily, at an end. The first of these tasks was mainly left to the great Norman barons, the Earls of Chester, Shrewsbury and Gloucester, who built castles on the Welsh border and sent continual expeditions far into Wales. William II once marched himself to the foot of Snowdon, and gave the Welsh thieves a very severe lesson against stealing English cattle and murdering English settlers. Henry I started a regular colony of Englishmen in Pembroke- shire. Welsh ' princes ' continued to exist till the end of the thirteenth century, but only once troubled England seriously after Henry Is time. In the north-west, William II completely conquered Westmoreland, Lancashire and Cumberland, made them English ground for ever, and rebuilt the old Roman fortress of Carlisle. On the Scottish border William I built a great fortress at Newcastle-on-Tyne ; but this did not stop King Malcolm's raids, for many Saxons, who had lost their lands in 1066, had fled to Scotland, and helped in these raids. But William II and Henry I managed their Scottish neighbours so cleverly, that from 1095 to 1138 there were no more Scottish raids at Quarrels with the King of France 57 all. During these years of peace many Norman barons got into the south of Scotland, were welcomed and were endowed with lands by King David I. As regards the French business, there was very little Quarrels real peace between the Duke of Normandy and the King of e French King. And as the former was now King of ^ ) 1 ^ nc 1 e 1 v. England also, he generally got the best of it. Until the middle of the twelfth century, the King of France was very poor and could get very few people to fight for him, whereas Henry I once shipped a lot of sturdy English soldiers across the Channel, and won a grea^t victory at Tenchebray, HOG, over Norman rebels who were being encouraged by the French King. As a rule, however, our kings fought their battles in France with foreign soldiers hired in Flanders. The English kings even had some sort of a fleet, for the ' Cinque Ports ' (Dover, Sandwich, Hythe, Romney and Hastings) were obliged to furnish them a certain number of ships every year. The causes of these quarrels with France are not interesting to us. They were usually about some frontier castle which the French King had grabbed or wanted to grab from the Duke, or the Duke from the King. At one of these quarrels William the Conqueror met his death in 1087. A terrible king and a terrible man he had been ; but he had kept peace, and the fiercest baron had trembled before him. His one pleasure was hunting, and he was so greedy of it, that he began to make a series of cruel laws against poachers which later kings kept up till 1217. It was death to kill a stag in the royal forests. His eldest son, Robert, was a weak, good-natured fellow, who had once rebelled against his father, and was the darling of the turbulent barons. So William had 58 William II The sons of William I. William II, called 4 Rufus \ 1087-1100. The first Crusade, 1096. left Normandy to Robert and England to his second son, William, who was called 6 Rufus' from his red hair. Rufus was a violent ruffian, grasping and cruel, and mocked at everything holy ; but he was strong and clever too, a mighty warrior and leader of men. He had at once to meet a fearful rebellion got up by Robert, but the English freeholders turned out in crowds to help him, and he smashed the rebels and battered down their castles as he battered down everything that came in his path. Soon he managed to grab Normandy also from poor Robert, who was always deep in debt and trouble of every sort. In 1096 Robert had gone to the East, and many of the turbulent French and Norman barons with him. They had gone in order to fulfil one of the noblest yet vainest dreams of those times, to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel Saracens or 6 Turks ', who had recently taken Jeru- salem. The Saracens bullied pilgrims who went thither to venerate the places of Christ's earthly ministry and passion. These expeditions from the West were called ' Crusades and pious adventurers went with them from all parts of Europe. A man who died upon a crusade thought that he was fairly sure of going straight to Heaven. This first Crusade was successful, and a Christian kingdom was set up in Jerusalem which lasted there for eighty-eight years, and in some parts of Pales- tine for nearly two hundred years. Europe learned much from the Crusades, and many luxuries, arts and crafts were brought back to it from the East. But the name got much abused, and at last the popes called every private quarrel of their own a crusade, promising their blessing to all who paid money to it, and scolding all who refused. Henry I 59 A prudent yet wicked English king like Rufus stayed at home in spite of the Pope's scoldings, and grabbed as much as he could of the property of his neighbours who went upon the crusade. When Robert came back he found that he had lost Henry I, 1100— 1 1 3 r another chance. Rufus had been shot in the year 1100, while hunting in the Xcw Forest, and his youngest brother Henry had seized the crown of England. Of course Robert rebelled, and the great barons, both of England and Normandy, with him. But, equally of course, Henry and his faithful Englishmen made short work of every rebellion. English chroniclers called Henry I the 'Lion of Justice', and it was not a bad name for him. Though cruel and selfish, he was a much more respectable character than Rufus, and he kept order splendidly. He was a man of learning, which till then had been unusual in royal families. 'An unlearned king,' he used to say, ' is a crowned ass.' Only one of his successors, before the eighteenth century, was wholly unlearned, and that was Edward II, who came to a bad end. Henry endeared himself to his Englishmen by marrying the last princess of the old Saxon race, Edith, daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Ethelred the Unready. Among Henry's courtiers and servants we often find the names of Englishmen as well as Xormans, though all the highest places in the Church were still held by Xormans or by men of mixed race. Well able to fight, and quite ready to do so when it was necessary, Henry, like other clever kings, avoided all unnecessary wars, and got on well with the Scottish and sometimes even with the French kings. But his only son was drowned in the wreck of the 60 Stephen Stephen and Matilda, 1135-54. Civil War, 1138-52. The barons are let loose. 1 White Ship ' in crossing the Channel ; and when Henry died, in 1135, his heir was his only daughter, Matilda, whose second husband was Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou in France. Now no woman had ever reigned in England, and so, when Count Stephen of Blois, son of William Is daughter Adela, appeared in London and claimed the crown, he was welcomed as king, although he and most of the barons had already promised to uphold the claim of Matilda. Stephen was known to be a kind-hearted fellow who would not rule too strictly ; he was, in fact, just like his uncle Robert. Alas for England ! Matilda, naturally enough, claimed her ' rights', and civil war began almost at once. Nothing could have suited the barons better. They changed sides continually, and fought now for Stephen and now for Matilda, as long as there was any one left to fight. 'For nineteen winters/ says the old English chronicler, who was still writing in his monastery at Peterborough, c this went on.' Castles sprang up every- where, ' full of devils/ who tortured men for their riches, made war for sport, burnt towns and corn-crops, coined their own money and compelled the poor to take it in payment. At the end of the reign it was said there were over three hundred unlicensed castles in England. Poor Stephen did his best ; he flew hither and thither besieging these castles, but seldom had patience to take one. He and Matilda (who was just as bad, and a horrid female into the bargain) could only think of bribing the great barons to fight for them by heaping lands, riches and offices on them ; and, between the pair of them, the treasures of the crown of England were soon spent. The King of Scots, David I, who was Matilda's cousin, rushed in at the very beginning with a great army of wild men, ' Battle of the Standard ' 61 and, though the Yorkshiremen gave him a sound thrash- ing at the 6 Battle of the Standard' near Northallerton, 'Battle 1138, he stuck to Cumberland, and Stephen soon tried g t ™f to bribe him by giving him Northumberland also. So, dard.' as the old chronicler says, ' it seemed to Englishmen as if God slept and all His saints.' The Church alone re- mained a refuge for the oppressed, and, naturally enough, the Church came out at the end of it all, not onlv much richer, but with much more power over the hearts of men. At last in 1152 young Henry, the son of Matilda and Peace Geoffrey, made peace at Wallingford with Stephen, who Waifii^. was now an old and worn-out man. Henry was to forcl » govern England as chief minister, while Stephen lived, and then to succeed to the crown. And in two years Stephen died and Henry II became King of England. CHAPTER IV HENRY II TO HENRY III, 1154-1272; THE BEGINNINGS OF PARLIAMENT The task The young man of twenty-one, whom we call Henry II, King G in came *° a country absolutely wasted with civil war. 1154. When he died, thirty-five years later, he left it the richest, the most peaceful, the most intelligent, the most united kingdom in Europe. There is no misery like that of civil war ; there have been two civil wars since that date, one in the fifteenth and one in the seventeenth century ; and of course during these wars the country people suffered. But so firmly did the sense of law and order, which Henry II drove into his people's heads, take root, that there was no complete upset of civil life, even in these later civil wars. We cannot of course attribute all the later good fortune of the country to one man, not even to such a great and wise man as Henry II. His path had been prepared for him long before, and he was extraordinarily fortunate His fa- in his opportunity. A great revival of intelligence had opportu^ already begun all over Europe, and a great revival of nity. trade, no doubt largely owing to the lessons learned in the Crusades. Long-neglected books of Roman Law had been found, and French and Italian lawyers were reading them. Schools were increasing, and even 6 Universities', of which Oxford w as the first in England, were beginning. The towns had been gaining in riches in spite of the civil war ; London, to which Henry I had given a ' Charter allowing it to govern itself and keep its own customs, was even more ahead of the other English towns than Character of Henry II 63 it is to-day. The difference of race between Norman and Englishman was being forgotten. We were growing into one 6 people The worst followers of the worst barons had killed each other off during the war, or gone away to the Crusades. Henry had little difficulty in getting rid of those that remained, and knocking down their ramshackle castles. But great as the opportunity was, it would have been Character of no use if Henry had not been a very great man — one i{ Henry of the greatest kings who ever lived. His power of work, and of making other people work, was amazing ; he seemed to have a hundred pairs of eyes. Laziness was to him the one unpardonable crime. For pomp, even for dignity, he cared nothing. He was cursed, as all kings of his race were, with the most frightful temper ; but he was merciful and forgiving when his rage was over. Norman on the mothers side, English on the grand- mother's, he was the most French of Frenchmen by his father's family, the House of Anjou. He had just married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiress in Europe, who owned all South-Western France, from the River Loire to the Pyrenees. Aquitaine, or i Gascony ', or 1 Guienne', as the southern His part of it is called, was a land of small and very turbu- forel £ n L 7 J posses- lent nobles, who could never get enough fighting. Even sions Henry never succeeded in keeping them in order. But i )urc \en to of course, with all this land, and with the riches of him. England at his back, Henry ought to have been a much more powerful man than his 'overlord', the King of France. Yet the truth is, that all these different French provinces, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Aqui- taine, were rather a trouble than an advantage to him. They cost more to keep in order than they brought in Henry II Hostility of Eng. land and France. Henry II as Law- giver. in rents and taxes, and they led to continual quarrels, mostly about frontier castles, with the French King Louis VII and his successor, Philip II. Henry and his son, Richard I, in fact did well in keeping their huge loosely-knit bundle of provinces together as long as they did. John, who succeeded Richard, lost all the best parts of them at once. For the kings of France were doing just what our kings were doing ; they were trying to make all French- men feel that they were one people. So Henry, Richard and John were really fighting a losing battle in France. For the details of that battle I do not care two straws. Moreover, our sympathies ought to be on the side of the French kings, unless they invaded England. What really matters to us is what Henry was doing in England. You may be sure that he gave no one any rest there, neither his many friends, nor his few foes. The greatest thing England owes to him is the system of Law, which really began in his reign, and has gone on being improved by skilful lawyers ever since. Till his reign, all the Kings servants, sheriffs, officers, bishops and the rest, had acted as judges, rent-collectors, soldiers, taxing-men without distinction ; and the Kings Courts of Justice had been held wherever the King happened to be. But Henry picked out specially trained men for judges, and confined them to the one business of judging. He chose men who knew some Roman Law, and who would be able to improve our stupid old-fashioned customs by its light. He swept away a great many of such customs, among other things the fines for murder, which he treated by hanging ; he built prisons in every county, and kept offenders in them until the judges came round 'on circuit', as, you know, they still do Henry II as Lawgiver four times a year. The judges gave these offenders a fair trial, in which some sort of 'jury' of their neigh- bours had a hand ; and if they were found guilty they were hanged — which surprised them a good deal. The King could not wholly put down the barons' private courts of justice, but he took away every shred of real power from them ; his sheriffs, he said, were to go every- where, no matter what privileges a baron might claim. Another splendid thing which Henry did was to estab- lish one coinage for the whole country, stamped at his royal mint ; and woe it was to the man who ' uttered ' false coins ! As regards his army of freeholders, he compelled He trains , i • ■ • i i ii the nation every man to keep arms m his house to be used when lo war> the sheriff called him to battle. A rich landowner had to be armed in complete chain-mail, to provide his own horses and to serve in the cavalry, and was c alled a ' knight'. But even a man who possessed the small sum of £6 135. 4vill see what a lone road towards union of the . , Great and peace England had travelled since the last barons' charter, rebellion in 1174. In that year the fight had been one of barons against king and people ; now it was one of barons and people against king. All classes of the nation suffered, and had called on the barons to lead them. They could not have done this if the barons had still held their lands in Normandy ; and so it was the loss of those lands that finally made the barons Englishmen. The nation had grown up; it had 'come of age'. What it Avanted was to make its king give security that he would not oppress it in future. So, by the Great Charter, it proposed to ' tie his hands ' in several ways. 74 KING 30HN SIGNS THE qREAT CHARTER. The Great Charter He is not to lew any more land-taxes without calling his Great Council of all the great landowners (barons and others), and asking their consent. He is not to exact higher payments of rent or of other customary dues than earlier kings did. He is to pay his debts to his creditors. His courts of justice shall sit regularly, as those of Henry II and Richard had sat ; and they shall sit in a fixed place instead of rambling over England and France in the train of the King. [This ' fixed place* came to be Westminster.] All free men shall be entitled to a fair trial, and shall not be deprived of their land without a fair trial. The great abuses of the game laws shall be abolished. And so on. No doubt to many of the barons of this year, 1215, it was their own grievances of which they were thinking most — the grinding taxes, the loss of their Norman lands, their cruelly murdered kinsfolk. But in order to get these grievances redressed they were obliged to ask also for the redress of the grievance s from which other classes were suffering ; even ' villeins' are carefully protected by one of the articles of the Charter; even to the hated Scots and Welsh i justice' is to be done. To the Church much more than justice is to be done; it is to be 'made free', which, I fear, means that the kings arc not to appoint its bishops. But later kings always found a way of avoiding this restriction. The Reeds of Runnymede. At Runnymede, at Runnymede, Runny- What say the reeds at Runnymede ? mede. The lissom reeds that give and take, 1215. That bend so far, but never break, They keep the sleepy Thames awake With tales of John at Runnymede. John At Runnymede, at Runnymecle, Oh hear the reeds at Runnymede : — ' You mustn't sell, delay, deny, A freeman's right or liberty, It wakes the stubborn Englishry, We saw 'em roused at Runnymede ! 6 When through our ranks the Barons came, With little thought of praise or blame, But resolute to play the game, They lumbered up to Runnymede ; And there they launched in solid line, The first attack on Right Divine — The curt, uncompromising " Sign ! " That settled John at Runnymede. ' At Runnymede, at Runnymede, Your rights were won at Runnymede ! No freeman shall be fined or bound, Or dispossessed of freehold ground, Except by lawful judgement found And passed upon him by his peers ! — Forget not, after all these years, The charter signed at Runnymede. And still when mob or monarch lays Too rude a hand on English ways, The whisper wakes, the shudder plays, Across the reeds at Runnymede. And Thames, that knows the moods of kings, And crowds and priests and suchlike things, Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings Their warning down from Runnymede ! Henry John's heir w r as a bov of nine years, who was to reign III 1216- . 72.' ~ for fifty-six years as Henry III. A wise Regent was quickly chosen for him, William Marshall, Earl of Pern- Character of Henry III 77 broke ; the French prince was still in the land, but his friends soon deserted him, and he was glad to make a treaty and go away. The Pope supported the new The government, for by John's submission the young King {^Pop- had become his 'vassal'. The Pope expected to make a good thing out of it, and he intended Henry to help him, which Henry, when he grew up, was only too ready to do. For the King, with many good qualities, such as Character piety and mercy, with much learning and good taste for yj- Henry art and building, was quite un-English. He was the first king, since Edward the Confessor, who had leaned wholly upon foreign favourites and despised his own sturdy people. He was frightfully extravagant, and a natural, though not an intentional liar. England was to him only a very rich farm, out of which he could squeeze for himself and our 'Holy Father' the Pope at Rome, cash, more cash, and ever more and more cash. His own share of it he spent on building beautiful churches, such as Westminster Abbey, and in useless wars with his noble overlord, King Louis IX of France, who always beat him, but allowed him to retain Southern Aquitaine, that is, Gascony. Down till about 1232 Henry governed by native English or Norman ministers ; and, so long as Langton lived, the Pope did not interfere much. But soon after that the King's Extrava- extravagance and the Popes increasing demands for fjfenry money began to be felt, and the nation grumbled. The III, barons were now thorough Englishmen, who had no interests outside England at all. They began to wonder whether Magna Charta was a mere bit of waste paper or not ; the King observed few of its provisions, though he constantly sw ore to observe them. In fact, he published it at the beginning of his reign with several important 78 Remon- strance of the barons. National rising, J 257-65. Simon cle Montfort. Prince Edward learns a lesson. articles omitted. Yet it was difficult to catch him out. He was not in the least a 6 gory tyrant \ like his father ; he simply maddened every one by his useless extrava- gance, by never paying his debts, and by never keeping his promises. At last the barons found that lie had promised the Pope an enormous sum of money, in return for which the Pope had promised to one of Henry's sons the crown of Sicily. Sicily, forsooth ! What had England to do with an island in the Mediter- ranean, while French pirates were burning the towns on our south coast without a single King's ship being sent to prevent them ? This was in 1257. The barons met the King in council after council and utterly refused to pay a penny for the Sicilian job. Endless documents were drawn up for the King to sign. He signed them quite readily, promised whatever he was asked, but never kept his word. The chief spokesman of the barons was one Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. The nation and all the best of the churchmen rallied heartily to Simon's side, especially the men of London, and things ended in a kind of war ; wherein, at the battle of Lewes in 1264, the King and his eldest son, Prince Edward, fell into Earl Simon s hands. For a year Simon governed in the King's name ; but he was a hot-headed and rather grasping man, and quarrelled with his own best sup- porters. He even called in the aid of the Welsh. At last Prince Edward escaped from captivity, rallied his father's friends, defeated and slew Simon at Evesham, and put his father back on the throne. Little venge- ance was taken ; and the last seven years of Henry's reign were peaceful, so peaceful indeed, that, though Prince Edward was away in Palestine when Henry died The Friars in England 79 in 1272, no one questioned his right to be crowned king when he returned. Two things rendered Henry's long reign memorable : The the coming of the Friars, and the beginning of Parlia- ^uglMid 1 ineiit. The Friars were the last offshoot of the dying tree of monkery. Wise people began to see that a monk who shut himself up in a monastery might no doubt save his own soul, but could do little for the souls of other people. What Avas wanted was men who could go about in the world preaching and doing good. Two great men, St. Dominic, a Spaniard, and St. Francis, an Italian, founded brotherhoods of 'Friars' (the word means brothers), who were to fulfil this mission. It was a splendid ideal, and St. Francis is one of the most beautiful figures in history. The Friars came and lodged with the very poor in the filthy slums, and did such work as our clergy are doing to-day in all great cities. Others walked all over the land, preaching in the streets and villages. But soon this movement also began to fall ; for pious laymen heaped lands and riches on these brotherhoods, until in little more than a century they had become as rich and as worldly as the monks. Moreover, the ordinary parish and town priests, who suffered even more than the laymen from the greedy demands of the Pope, began to think of monks and friars alike as mere agents of the Pope, as something foreign to the 'national Church Hence, after 1300, there were few gifts of land to monks or friars ; people preferred rather to found schools and Schools colleges. Both at Oxford and Cambridge colleges had ^n egLS been founded before that year. The second thing, the beginning of Parliament, is The Germ even more important. Ever since Magna Charta had of Parh 1 1 ° merit. 80 Henry III been signed the idea that the nation ought in some way to control the King was in the air ; and the question was what shape this control should take. As you know, Parliament to-day consists of two Houses, Lords and The Commons. The House of Lords is a direct descendant House of G f tj ie barons of the thirteenth century. The eldest son J-jorcls of a baron, earl, marquis or duke inherits the right to receive from the King a letter calling him by name to Parliament whenever it meets. The King can 'create' a man a baron, and the creation carries with it this right to receive the letter of summons. Perhaps there were nearly two hundred great barons in Henry Ill's reign ; there are now over six hundred. The bishops always received a similar letter of summons, and, until the Reformation, so did the leading abbots. It was in the reign of Henry III that this Great Council began to take its shape. The King no doubt disliked it, for he disliked all control, and its business certainly was to control him. But he found that he could not do without it. The The origin of the House of Commons is quite different. House ot jf to-day, also has over six hundred members, chosen Com- 7 mons. from different towns and districts of the United Kingdom, by all persons who have the right to vote. Now, before the end of the reign of Henry II, as I told you, the King had been in the habit of sending officials into each county and town to consult with the chief landowners and citizens, and to discover what amount of taxes that county or city could bear. These people met in the old Saxon court of justice, called the ' County Court ', to which all free landowners ought to come ; and they elected i knights ' or gentlemen to speak for them. In Henry Ill's reign the brilliant idea The First Parliaments 81 occurred to somebody, 'Why not send these elected knights or gentlemen to meet the King himself in some general assembly ? Each of them can speak for his own county, and the King will get a fair idea of what amount of money the whole of England is able to give him. 9 Now no general assembly other than that of the Great The first Council of barons existed, so the elected knights from ^nts in the counties and the elected citizens from the towns the reign of H 4 nr used occasionally to be called to the Great Council, and in. tmy there met the barons and the King. Then there would be a great Talking or ' Parliamentum 1 (French parler, to talk). Such knights and citizens would naturally grow bolder when they found themselves met together, and found that the barons were much the same sort of fellows as themselves, and had the same ideas about the Kings extravagance and his ridiculous foreign wars. It was on such occasions that they thoroughly realized that the barons were their natural leaders. Soon, they too would begin to present petitions about the griev- ances of their districts, and to beg the King to make particular laws. Earl Simon has got much fame because, while he was ruling in 12(35, there met, for the first time, in one assembly, barons, bishops, abbots, * knights of the shire' and citizens. You will see in the next chapter how Edward I shaped these assemblies into regular Parliaments, and what powers they won for themselves. My Father's Chair. There are four good legs to my Fathers Chair — Priest and People and Lords and Crown. I sit on all of 'em fair and square, And that is the reason it don't break down. 1134 F 82 r III I won't trust one leg, nor two, nor three, To carry my weight when I sit me down, I want all four of 'em under me — Priest and People and Lords and Crown. I sit on all four and I favour none — Priest, nor People, nor Lords, nor Crown — And I never tilt in my chair, my son, And that is the reason it don't break down ! When your time comes to sit in my Chair, Remember your Father's habits and rules, Sit on all four legs, fair and square, And never be tempted by one-legged stools ! CHAPTER V THE THREE EDWARDS, 1272-1377 Edward I, II and III (notice the grand old Saxon name ; we are all one people now) may be called Edward the Lawgiver, Edward the Poltroon, Edward the Knight. The greatest of these was Edward L He ranks with the half-dozen greatest 6 makers of Edward T, England ', with Alfred, William the Conqueror, Henry II, Henry VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria the Great. I should, indeed, say 6 makers of Britain', for it was Edward who planned, and almost carried out, the union of the whole island under one crown. It was he who gave the abiding shape to our Parliament, who dealt the first suc cessful blow to the pretensions of the Pope, and who first armed his soldiers with the all-conquering long-bow. His care for our coast defences was an example to his descen- dants. His legal reforms were hardly less than those of Henry II, and, at the end of his reign, the law of England and the law courts of England had taken the shape that they bore down to the nineteenth century. Edward I was a brave, truthful, honourable man, of His rather narrow sympathies, and could be very cruel to chaiacter i his foes. He had learned much from his father s muddled reign ; he would engage in no rash foreign adventures to please the Pope or any one else. Of and his course, he must defend his one foreign possession, task * Gascony ; and he fortified it very strongly. Occasion- ally he was obliged to fight King Philip IV of France, but that was because that cunning gentleman was trying to swallow not only Gascony but also little Flanders, which F 2 84 * EDWARD I.\S V/ARS VlTH TR^ WELSH — Ifoid the King vsHavecl {he Tw 10 J^J!i° y & 7 in 139i. planning schemes of vengeance against them. In 1397, after long waiting, he struck swiftly at the leaders of the barons, killing his uncle Thomas and banishing his cousin Henry of Lancaster (son of John of Gaunt, Edward Ill's third son). Then he got Parliament to pass certain Acts which gave him almost absolute power, and all sober men, who reverenced both the Crown and the ' Constitution ' (which, roughly speaking, means government through Parliament), stood aghast at this. In 1399 Henry of Lancaster returned, accused Richard Henry, of misgovernment, deposed him and perhaps had him Lancaster murdered. He then took the crown, and for fourteen becomes years tried to rule England as King Henry IY, but as Henry without much success. The very barons who had aided j}^ 1399- g 2 100 Henry V him to usurp the throne said he did not reward them enough ; they rose against him, and a sort of civil war began in 1403 and smouldered on for three or four years. Henry was not a bad fellow personally ; he was devoted to the Church, and the Church supported him ; so did the House of Commons, which got much power in his reign. But to keep order, the first task of a king, Henry V, was too hard a task for him. He died in 1413. His 1413-22. gon u enr y y ? equally devoted to the Church, was a much stronger and cleverer man ; there was no civil war in his short reign. But this was mainly because he put all his energies into renewing the war with France. His This really was wicked ; whatever right Edward HI France° n m ^ht have had to the French crown, Henry V could 1415. have none, for he was not the best living heir of Edward III. The Earl of March was the best living- heir of Edward III, for he was descended from Edward's second son, King Henry V only from his third ; but March had been quietly shoved aside when Henry IV seized the English crown. However, France was in a worse condition than England ; her king, Charles VI, was mad, and her great nobles were rearing each other and their beautiful country to pieces. Henry V saw his opportunity and used it without mercy or remorse. He probably thought that such a war would at least draw away all the baronial rowdies and their followers from England, and it did. Henry set about the busi- His fieet ness of making war in the most practical manner. We anc guns. Qwe ^ m Qne g rea ^ blessing ; he was the first king since the Conquest who began to build a Royal fleet, as distinguished from the fleet of the Cinque Ports (which he also kept going) ; he was the first to use guns 101 ENGLISH 7VRCHE.RY WINS AT /AOINCOVRT 102 Henry V on a large scale, both on his ships and with his land army. Guns and gunpowder had been know T n before the middle of the fourteenth century, but so far had been little used. Their use explains Henry's success in his sieges in France, for with big guns you can batter doAvn stone walls pretty quickly, whereas Edward III had spent eight months over the taking of Calais, which he only won by starving it out. The French towns defended themselves gallantly, but, before his death, Henry had managed to conquer all Normandy, and had even reached the River Loire. Battle of But his great feat was the glorious battle of Agincourt, court" won a S a i ns t enormous odds in 1415. Finally in 1420 1415. he got hold of the poor mad Charles VI, entered Paris Treaty of with him and compelled him to conclude the Treaty of K2(f eS ' Troyes, by which he, Henry, should succeed to the French crown and marry the French princess Katharine. Death of Then, in the flower of his age, and leaving to an infant Henry V, 0 f n j ne mon ths old the succession to both crowns, he died in 1422. Henry VI, There was one good c king's uncle', John, Duke of Th? Duke Bedford, who did his best to keep these two crowns on of Bed- his nephew's head ; but there were other uncles and tinues°the cousins who were not so good. Little Henry VI .grew French U p j n ^ 0 a gentle, pious, tender-hearted man, who hated w r ar, hated wicked courtiers, loved only learning and learned men, founded the greatest school in the world (Eton), and shut his eyes to the fact that England was getting utterly out of hand. Bedford just managed to hold down Northern France (which had always hated the Treaty of 1420) until his own death in 1435 ; after that all Frenchmen rallied to their natural king, Charles VII., The noble French c Maid of God', Joan war. Joan of Arc 103 of Arc, came to lead her people and inspired them with Joan of the belief that God would fight for them if they would Arc * fight bravely for their country. She was just a peasant- girl of no education, but of beautiful life and well able to stand hardship ; she believed that the Saints ap- peared to her and urged her to deliver France. The French soldiers came to believe it too, and she led them to battle dressed in full armour and riding astride of a white horse. She allowed no bad language to be used in the army : ' If you must swear, Marshal/ she said to one of the proudest French nobles, ' you may swear by your stick, but by nothing else.' The English caught her and burned her as a witch, but she lives in the hearts of all good Frenchmen (and Englishmen) as a saint and a heroine until this day. Step by step the The •English were driven back till ail Normandy, all Aqui- SsfSfr,,,* w ' m (in veil < >u l tainc were lost, and in 1453 nothing remained to us but of France, ri , . 1430-53. Calais. King Henry VI was not sorry ; by this time he knew Anprerof how wicked his lather s attack upon Prance had been. EngHdi; But the fighting instinct of Englishmen was desperately weakness sore; defeat after such victories seemed unbearable. VTs * Y And, while the barons' quarrels round the King's totter- ^fJ 11 " ing throne became shriller and shriller, there were but too many men in England ready to fight somebody, they did not much care whom so long as there was plunder at the end. Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou, a fiery, cruel woman, ignored her gentle husband and governed in his name. She had already made herself the partisan of one of the two baronial factions, and had struck down the King s uncle the Duke of Gloucester. Her favourite minister, the Duke of Suffolk, was actually caught and beheaded by common sailors on board # 104 YI a King's ship as he was flying to France. What should we say if a lot of British sailors now caught and be- headed Mr. Asquith on board the Dreadnoughts In Insurrec- the same year 1450 there was a fearful insurrection JackCade * n Kent, led by a scamp called Jack Cade, who marched 1450. into London and beheaded several more of the King's ministers. Law and order were utterly at an end. The Duke The Duke of York, who was now the best living heir the House °^ Edward III, at length took up the cudgels against of York the House of Lancaster. There was civil war for some House of s * x years (1455-61), and battle after battle. The horror Lan- G f a n i ia( j driven the good King, on two occasions, out caster. . . T ° °' 7 of his mind. It was called the war of the House of York against the House of Lancaster, of the 'White Rose' against the c Red Rose ' ; really, it was the war of some dozen savage barons on one side against another dozen on the other. Each of them had a little army of archers and spearmen ; each had perhaps the grudges of a century to pay off upon some rival. The war hardly affected the towns at all, and stopped trade very little ; and even the country districts, except in the actual presence of the armies, seem to have suffered little. The growth of wool, at any rate, and with it the increase of riches, went on as fast as ever. 'The King ought to put a sheep instead of a ship on his coins,' was a common saying of the day. Of course the coasts were utterly undefended, and pirates of all sorts had a happy time in the Channel. Wars of If any line of division can be discovered in the country 1455 R 61 eS ' we ma y sa y rou sWy that the North and West were Lan- castrian, the South and East (then the richest counties) Yorkist. At last Henry VI was deposed, Queen Mar- garet took flight, and Edward, Duke of York, became Edward IV 105 King as Edward IV. He was a thoroughly bad man, Edward being cruel, vindictive and, except in warfare, lazy. IV be ~ ° ' ... comes But Margaret had been vindictive too, and, as regards King, cruelty, there was little to choose between the parties ; after every battle the leaders of the vanquished side were put to death almost as a matter of course. But, just as Henry IV had quarrelled with the barons The Earl who had crowned him, so did Edward IV quarrel with ^ ic ^ al " his c Kingmaker' and best friend, the Earl of Warwick, called the Warwick thereupon deposed Edward and took poor m "k|~ r- Henry VI, who had been an ill-used prisoner in the ifestora- Tower of London, and put him back on the throne tV on °^ T . , . Hem v \ 1, again. It was only a six months restoration (14/0-1), ]47<» i. for Edward returned, slew Warwick in battle, slew Edward 1\ a^ain Henry's only son after the battle, slew all the Lan- 1471^3, ' castrian leaders he could catch, and finally had King Henry murdered in the Tower. After this he ' reigned more fiercely than before'; he struck down his own brother George, Duke of Clarence ; he employed spies, tortured his prisoners, and hardly called Parliament at all ; he took what taxes he pleased from the rich, lint he kept order very little better than Henry VI had done. Once he thought he Mould play the part of a 'fine old English king', so he led a great army across to France in 1475, but there allowed himself to be bribed by the cunning Louis XI to go home again with- out firing a shot. At his death in 1483 his brother, the hunchback Richard, seized the crown, and murdered Edward's two sons (Ed ward \ and Richard, Duke ot Edward A' York) in the Tower. Richard III was a fierce, vigorous p^L^a villain, and had, in two years and a half, succeeded in 111, 1483— 5 murdering a good many nobles, both of the Lancastrian and Yorkist parties. 106 rv VII The Earl Finally, all the sober English leaders who still kept momf h their heads began to send secret messages to a famous comes to exiled gentleman, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who England. wag j[ escen d e( i through his mother from the House of Lancaster, begging him to come over from France and upset the tyrant. He was to marry Edward I V's daughter Elizabeth, and thus to unite the Red and White Roses. Henry landed in South Wales with a very small army, which increased as he marched eastwards. Battle of He met King Richard, defeated and slew him at Bos- W85 W ° rth ' WOI> th in Leicestershire, 1485. Then he advanced to London and was received with joy and relief as King Henry VII. The seeds Apart from the politics and wars of this dreary period of the there are one or two things to be noticed of much Kerorma- . ° . tion. greater interest for us. Every age is only preparation for the next, and the seeds of many of the great 'awakenings' of the sixteenth century were sowed in the fifteenth. First, of the religious awakening. We had long been accustomed to growl at the riches of the Church, but, till the end of Edward Ill's reign, no one had questioned its spiritual powers. No one had doubted Hatred of that priests could really pardon sin. Men hated the bllt no one liad y et doubted that he was the ' Head church- 0 f the Church ' any more than they had doubted that men. every priest performed a miracle every time he conse- crated the Holy Sacrament. Few had even questioned that by payment of money to Rome you could buy salvation. But the popes, when they got back to Rome, after the 'Great Schism' was ended in 1415, were little more than Italian bishops, mainly occupied with wars against their neighbours. No doubt their bark was still Seeds of the Reformation 107 terrible, but what about their bite ? Had the}', people wondered, any teeth left to bite with ? At the end of Edward Ill's reign the great English John scholar, John Wyclif, began to ask questions about all y these things, and to argue that the favourite doctrines of the Roman Church were all comparatively new, that they were not part of Christ's teaching, and could not be found in the Bible at all. He published an English translation of the Bible ; hitherto men had only a Latin version of it, and the Church did not encourage laymen to read it. He also founded an order of 6 poor priests', who were to go about preaching simple Christianity. The English bishops were absolutely terrified ; and The the monks, abbots and friars more terrified still. These ]; (,llal1 7 heresy . had long known what greedy eyes laymen cast on their vast wealth. Wyclif, said the great churchmen, was a £ heretic', and ought to be burned alive (lie died in his bed all safe in 1384). In the reigns of Henry IV j£ ere tics and Henry V the clergy persuaded Parliament to make burned, laws saying that heretics should be burned alive, and many of Wyclifs followers, during the next hundred and twenty years, were actually so burned. The Church nicknamed them 1 Lollards', or babblers. The 'State', as represented by the King and Parlia- ment, somewhat unwillingly supported the churchmen in this matter ; yet on the whole the State considered that these Lollards were raising dreadful questions, and it would be better to crush them and not allow them the safetv-valvc of talking. The Church sat on the safety-valve as long as it could ; but the steam of free thought was bubbling underneath, and, once it had gathered head enough, would blow those that sat on the Coming Changes Changes coming all over Europe. Gun- powder. Printing. Dis- covery. Greek learning. safety-valve sky-high into little tiny pieces. When Lol- lardy bursts forth again in the reign of Henry VIII it will be called by the better name of 1 Protestantism \ Other changes, too, were not far away. For nearly a thousand years past the nations of Europe had been considered as one great family, of which the Pope and, since 800, some hazy German king who called himself ' Roman Emperor ' were supposed to be the two heads ; other kings were, or ought to be, vassals of these two. The Kings of England and France had never really ad- mitted these large claims, and that was why England and France were ahead of other nations. But all these ideas were out of date ; the spirit of the Crusades was dead, the commercial rivalry of great nations had begun. Gunpowder was changing the face of war and was making the strongest and heaviest armour quite useless. The printing of books with movable type was discovered about 1459, and, at Westminster, William Caxton was printing English and Latin books in the reign of Edward IV. In the same reign certain Bristol mer- chants were sailing far into the Atlantic, to discover half-mythical islands, of which dim stories, long for- gotten, were now being revived and retold ; they did not find any such islands till the reign of Henry VII had begun. Spaniards led by Columbus were the first to set foot in America in 1492 ; Portuguese were the first to round the Cape of Good Hope five years later. But the idea of new worlds to be discovered was in the air. Finally, the Turks had taken Constantinople in 1453, and its exiles, who still spoke a sort of Greek and possessed many manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophers, came to Italy and began to spread the knowledge of Greek to Western Europe. The Hour before the Dawn 109 Four things, then, were to change the face of the Men world — gunpowder, printing, geographical discovery, and Greek. They would lead men first to wonder, then to reflect, and lastly to question — to question whether all the tales which the Church had been telling the world for a thousand years were true or false. Could Becket's bones really restore a dead man to life ? Could a priest turn bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ ? Was the world really flat, and did the sun and moon go round it, as the Church said they did ? Might there possibly be other worlds ? You can under- stand, then, that the end of the fifteenth century left men rubbing their eyes, half awake and uneasy, but thinking — thinking hard. The Dawn Wind. At two o'clock in the morning, if yon open your window The hour and listen, jjefore the You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to ( ann * call the sun. And the trees in the shadow rustic and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done. So do the cows in the field. They graze for an hour and lie down, Dozing and chewing the cud ; or a bird in the ivy wakes, Chirrups one note and is still, and the restless Wind strays on, Fidgeting far down the road, till, softly, the darkness breaks. 110 The Hour before the Dawn Back comes the Wind full strength with a blow like an angel's wing, Gentle but waking the world, as he shouts : ' The Sun ! The Sun ! ' And the light floods over the fields and the birds begin to sing, And the Wind dies down in the grass. It is Day and his work is done. So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking- Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan, Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking, And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own ! 9 ■i-AN let*?- .The Citie of hundred miles W Or 'J9 c ,EAT itch f C1PAN0U some Here 1 fall of O) •dia^oia'^ ^ g.cp rich. Voices Here ^° & 4% >e herm^dens TERRA /INTARC men This isaMafi of MMERfCM O nd ttoe to GHlls . sbewe H Here men say compass c INLAND a \ mff? C There uashere A ii HlTL BF.RE 1 " ,t es ' J t tants . them 'heretics'. Their main cry was for the Bible as H 2 116 T VIII the ground of all Christian teaching ; * away with every- thing that cannot be found in the Bible/ Henry Until 1527 the Government sternly repressed every divorce, movement against the Pope. Then a purely political 1527. event caused it to turn round. King Henry wanted to divorce his wife Katharine, a Spanish princess, who had been the wife of his brother Arthur. Arthur had died in 1501. The Pope had allowed Henry to marry Katharine, although many people had doubted whether such a marriage could possibly be lawful. Only one child of this marriage, Princess Mary, born 1516, had survived, and Henry thought, or professed to think, that this was a 6 judgement of God' on him. Also he Anne wanted to marry some one else, the Lady Anne Boleyn, Boleyn. one G f Q ueen Katharines court ladies. He applied to the Pope for a divorce. Popes were in the bad habit of doing these little jobs to please kings ; but Pope Clement VII would not do this. King Charles of Spain and Germany, called the ' Emperor was the nephew of Queen Katharine ; he was much the most powerful monarch in Europe, and Clement dared not offend him. Henry So the Pope, and Wolsey for him, shifted and twisted Clen^nt 6 an( ^ turned an d promised, but could not give the King VII, of England his wishes. 15.77-9 Suddenly, to the surprise of all his courtiers, of all England, of all Europe, Henry roared out, ' Pope ! What do I care for the Pope ? Call my Parliament ! ' The Par- It was the year 1529. The King was thirty-eight liamentof u j ■■ m. 1 i • i x r 1529-36. years old, and quite unknown to his people, except trom Union of the rumours of his extravagance. Suddenly he appeared people^ before them as their leader and friend, prepared to do all, and more than all, on which their hearts were set. The Church of England 117 The nation had hardly dared to whisper its desire to curb the Pope and the Church ; here was a king who shouted it aloud ! Do not think that I praise Henry VIII. It was a selfish and wicked motive that started the idea in his mind. What I say is that, once the idea was started, he would have all the kings of Europe against him, and no friend but his own people ; and so King and people now became one as they had never been before. Very few Englishmen were as yet prepared to accept What the any new sort of Church ; most of them hated the idea ? afc ^ of ' heresy \ Henry hated it also, and continued to the end of his life to burn a few extreme heretics. King and people wished no more than to abolish the power of the Pope in England, to strip the Church of its enormous wealth, and yet to remain 'good Catholics'. Was this possible? History was to prove that it was not ; once the Pope was pulled down in England a ' Reformation ' of all the Church in England must follow, in spite of any effort to prevent it. Henry just managed to stave oft* this reformation while he lived. The Parliament of 1529 sat for seven years, and when The laws it rose a new England had begun. How the new laws Jjj^pJ against the Church were forced through the House of 1529-06. Lords no one knows ; one fears it was by terror and threats, for nearly all the bishops and certainly all the abbots would be against them ; and of the forty-five lay peers, a strong minority must have hated serious changes. But the House of Commons, almost to a man, welcomed these changes ; and that House then repre- sented the sober country gentlemen and the sober merchants of England. One by one all the powers of the Pope were shorn 118 rv VIII Arch- bishop Cranmer. Monas- teries dissolved. Thomas Crom- well ; fierce measures against the old Church and the old nobles. Pilgrim- age of Grace, 1536. away, the power of making laws for themselves was taken from the clergy, the Church was declared to be independent of any foreign influence, but w r holly depen- dent on the Crown. Every one was obliged to swear that the King was the i Head of the Church \ The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, pro- nounced the divorce from Katharine, and married his King to Anne Boleyn ; the Princess Mary was set aside, and when Anne's daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, was born, she was declared heir to the throne. All the smaller monasteries were dissolved and their lands handed over to the Crown ; Henry gave most of them to his courtiers and to important country gentlemen, and so a new set of nobles, newly enriched from Church lands and entirely dependent on the King, rapidly came to the front. Many of the best men in England were deeply shocked at these changes, even some who had been prepared to go a long way in reforming the abuses of the Church. But Henry and his savage minister, Thomas Cromwell, struck down every one who stood in their path. The Courtenays and Poles, descended from Edward IV, were imprisoned, or driven into exile, or had their heads cut off. Sir Thomas More, once the King's intimate friend, and Bishop Fisher of Rochester, both men of European fame for their learning and piety, were the most distinguished victims. In the North of England, in 1536, a fierce insurrection broke out called the ' Pilgrimage of Grace 9 ; the rebels cried out for the restoration of the monasteries, for in that wild country the monks had been the only doctors and their houses had been open to all travellers. The rising was put down with great cruelty, for Henry was 120 Henry VIII naturally a cruel man, and he was now drunk with pride and power. He had already beheaded his second wife Anne, and married his third, Jane Seymour ; she bore to him in 1537 a son, afterwards Edward VI, and died a few days afterwards. In the last seven years of his life he married three more wives, one of whom he divorced, another he beheaded, and the third survived him. In 1539 the remaining monasteries, even the greatest, were dissolved and, as a result, the great abbots ceased to attend Parliament. Some of their wealth was used to found schools and professorships at Oxford and Cam- bridge, and to create six new bishoprics ; but most of it went to the nobles and gentlemen. Thus, within three years, nearly a quarter of the land of England had got new owners. All the great offices of state had been wholly taken away from churchmen, and were now in the hands of these new nobles. New ' Confessions of Faith' (declaring what was the true teaching of the Church of England) were published ; first the ' Ten Articles ', then the ' Six Articles ' ; the former w as a step in the direction of the German Protestantism ; the latter was very nearly the old Catholic faith but without the Pope ; and I must repeat that it was this midway position which, as late as Henry's own death, most people in England preferred. But Henry had ordered an English translation of the Bible to be placed in every parish church for every one to read, and in 1544 he allowed the Litany to be said in English ; this was really the beginning of our beloved Prayer Book. And, once lay Englishmen began to read the Bible for themselves, they would not long be con- tent to believe in confession to a priest or in the miracle Danger of Foreign Invasion 121 of the Mass (Jboth of which were taught in the Six Articles). Now all these changes were carried through under Danger of continued danger from abroad, for of course the Pope invasion had declared Henry to be deposed, and called on all on behalf Catholic princes to go and depose him. Much of the p 0 pe. danger was from the old alliance of France and Scot- land, but far more from the power of Spain, Germany and Flanders, now all in the hands of the Emperor, Charles V. Threats of invasion were incessant, but Henry armed his people to the teeth, and, at the end of Henry his reign, had a navy of seventy ships ready for action. ^JSS^ He built castles all round his southern and eastern coasts, and was always making great guns to put in them. He knew that the few remaining descendants of Edward III were plotting to upset his throne, especially the exiled Reginald Pole, a great favourite of the Pope. He had already sliced off the heads of all his royal cousins whom he could catch. With the approval of Who his Parliament, he had settled that the crown should go i 1 ^ o succeed after his death to his son Edward; if Edward had no Henry? children, to Mary ; then, if Mary had no children, to Klizabcth ; lastly, if all three of his children died without direct heirs, it was to go to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, not to those of his elder sister, Margaret, Queen of Scotland. He hated Scot- land as bitterly as Edward I, and continued the Border wars as fiercely until his death in 1547. Thus you will say I have drawn for you the picture of Henry's a monster of cruelty and selfishness? Yes, Henry was character « just that. But he was also something* much more. He was a great patriot, a great Englishman. He taught Englishmen to rely on themselves and their ships ; and 122 Henry VIII he taught future English kings to rely on their people. He shivered in pieces the foreign yoke that had bound the Church of England since Saint Augustine had preached Sufferings in the open air to the early King of Kent. Great of bh poor. suffering accompanied these great changes ; and they were thoroughly bad for the moral character of the Greed of the Kich 123 generation which saw them. The new landowners were men who thought only of riches, and turned out the tenants of the old monks by the score, and by the hundred. A swarm of beggars was let loose over the country, beggars to whom the monks had given daily doles of bread and beer. Savage laws of whipping and forced labour had to be passed to keep these men in order. Moreover, since the discovery by the Spaniards Greed of rich gold and silver mines in America, money had °? J* 16 come into Europe in great floods, and this had sent up the price of all goods at a fearful rate ; all trade seemed uncertain ; great fortunes might be suddenly made, and as suddenly lost. So the strong and the clever (and often the wicked) prospered, and the weak and the old- fashioned people were ruined. The six years' reign of the boy Edward VI (1547- Edward 53) only made all this social misery worse. Every one XJv had been afraid of Henry VI II ; no one was afraid of a Scramble child of ten, though he was a clever and strong-willed of tlie 7 ° ° new child. The result was that the government became a nobles for scramble for wealth and power among the new nobles, j^J| r- the Seymours, Dudleys, Russells, Herberts, Greys and many more who had been enriched with abbey lands. It was the fear of losing these lands and the desire of confiscating for themselves what remained of Church property that drove these men, quite against the wishes of sober people, to force on a reformation of the teaching of the Church. The result in the long run was good, They dc- because the Protestant faith did then first get a lawful fSfJjL^ footing in England ; but the result for the moment was tion, bad, because moderate men began to mistrust a Reformation which seemed to be bound up with greed for spoil and with contempt for all the past traditions of 124 Edward YI The two Prayer Books of Edward VI, 1549 and 1552. The Duke of Somer- set, Pro- tector. His quarrel with Scot- land, 1548. The Duke of Northum- berland, 1550-3. Violence of the Re- formers. England. At the same time the leaders of the new Protestant Church were all men of high character ; Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper, all Bishops of King Edward, all died for their faith in the next reign. However much we may rightly abuse the greedy nobles, we can never wholly regret a reign which first gave us the Prayer Book in English and substituted the Communion for the Mass. Cranmer prepared two suc- cessive Prayer Books ; the second (1552) somewhat more Protestant than the first of 1549, and it was the second which, with very slight alterations, became our present Prayer Book in the reign of Elizabeth. In Edward's reign also the marriage of priests was allowed, and the Statutes for burning heretics were abolished. In his reign too, alas, the beautiful stained-glass windows, statues and pictures were removed from most of our churches, whose walls were now covered with whitewash. Edwards first Regent or ' Protector ' was his mother's brother, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset ; a man of much higher character than most of the nobles, but rash and hot-headed, and quite unfit to lead the nation. He continued Henry's vindictive quarrel with Scotland, Avon a great victory at Pinkie, and drove the Scots once more into the arms of France. Their girl-queen, Mary Stuart, who might have been a bride for our boy-king, was sent for safety to France and married to the French King's son. Somerset was soon upset by a much more violent person, the ruffian John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who pushed on the Reformation at greater speed for purely selfish ends, and disgusted all sober men with it. He brought in a lot of foreign Protestants and gave them places in the English Church ; he brought in foreign troops to be his body- Lady Jane Grey 125 guard, bullied the Princess Mary (who was the natural head of the Catholic party), thrust all the leading Catholics into prison, and tossed the remaining Church lands to his fellow nobles. But Edward, who had always been very delicate, began Edward early in 1553 to draw near his end. Mary's succession ^ ver y was sure, and, though no one knew exactly what line she would take in religious matters, it was certain that she would stop the violent progress of the Reformation, and quite certain that she would kill Northumberland. So the Duke persuaded the dying boy-king, now Hisdeath, sixteen, to make a will, passing over both his sisters, J,))3 ' and leaving the crown to his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, Jane heiress of the Suffolk line and recently married to one of Cjrcy - Northumberland's sons. When Edward died in July, *> 9 Jane was actually proclaimed Queen in London. But not a cheer was raised bv the crowd, and the whole %l 9 nation rose as one man for the injured Princess Mary. Within nine days Jane was a prisoner in the Tower, where a few months afterwards she was executed, and Mary rode into London with her sister Elizabeth at her side. Mary's reign of five years and four months is the Mary T, greatest tragedy in our history. She was a good woman, ^ " p passionately attached to the Catholic faith and to the character memory of her mother. She was learned, clever and of iofty courage. But she w T as a Spaniard at heart and never an Englishwoman. Like a Spaniard she was vindictive, and, unfortunately, she had deep wrongs to avenge. Yet, if Protestantism were to triumph in the long The Re- run, something of the fearful cruelty she was going to inflict upon it was necessary ; for moderate men had hitherto mainly seen it as the religion of a gang of selfish nobles seeking to divide all the riches of England among 126 Mary I themselves. Nine-tenths of England preferred anything — almost the Pope — to Northumberland and his land- grabbing crew. At the least, they wanted a return to the state of things at the end of Henry's reign. 6 No foreigners/ was the cry, 6 England and English Church for the English/ But Mary cared little for her countrymen, cared only for her Church ; she was determined to restore the state of things which had existed at the beginning, not at the end, of her fathers reign ; to restore the Pope and all his works, and to do this by making the closest alliance with the Emperor Charles and his son Philip, whom she determined, against all good advice, to marry. In six months she had terrified her people ; in two years she had completely lost their hearts ; in six years she had wrecked for ever the Catholic faith in the minds of intelligent Englishmen. She hurled all the leaders of the Reformed Church into prison at once, and set about re-establishing the Catholic services everywhere. The greedy nobles, one and all, now professed themselves to be good Catholics, and them she dared not touch. The one thing they feared was to lose their new grants of the abbey lands. They knew the Queen was bent upon restoring the monasteries, and the laws for burning heretics, which had been abolished in the reign of Edward VI ; but she was not able to persuade her Parliaments to do the latter until the end of 1554, and the lands she was never able to touch at all. But Reginald Pole, long an exile and now a Cardinal, came over as c Legate ' of the Pope, and in the Popes name absolved England from the guilt of heresy. Mary had already been married to Prince Philip of Spain. The Protestant Martyrs 127 The burnings of the Protestant martyrs began early in The Pro- 1555, and, in less than three years, nearly three hundred ^ st ^ nt y 9 J 7 J martyrs, persons were burned at the stake. The burnings were 1555-s. nearly all in the south-eastern counties, which shows us that Protestantism had got the strongest hold on what were then the richest and most intelligent parts of England ; the north and west long remained Catholic. The four great Protestant Bishops, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper, were among the victims ; but three-fourths of these victims were persons in quite humble life. The people of those days were well used to look on at all sorts of cruel tortures at executions, and were quite unfeeling on the subject ; but the high courage with which these martyrs met their terrible deaths made an impression that has never been for- gotten. So it wjis the reign of ' Bloody Mary ', not that of Edward VI, that was the true birthday of Protes- tantism in England. And no great Englishman approved of the burnings ; a * Span- it was only the Spanish councillors and the Queen JfatrSd ol herself who urged them on. It was felt to be 'a English- TTK3I1 for foreigners job', and the hatred for Spain and all its ^Sn. works soon came to outweigh the old hatred for France. This hatred became much more fierce when Philip Loss of dragged England into one of his frequent wars with JjSj?^ France, and when the cunning Frenchmen seized the opportunity to make a spring upon Calais (which we had held since Edward III), and captured it. The loss of Calais seemed an indelible shame. All the last two years of Mary's reign, revolts were on the point of breaking out. French ships full of English Protestant exiles prowled in the Channel and harried Spanish and English trade. No heir was born to the throne, though Mary, who was 128 Elizabeth Death of Mary, 1558. Elizabeth, 1558-1603. Her character. ' Glori- ana.' Her dan- ger and that of England. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. slowly dying of dropsy, kept hoping for a baby. Philip showed her no love and little civility. Her reign had been a nightmare of terror, and it closed amid loss, ruin, pestilence and famine. The Princess Elizabeth, who then came to the throne in November 1558, was a very different person to her sister. Her life had been several times in great danger during Mary's reign, and the Spanish councillors had often urged Mary to put her to death. She was a woman of the most strangely varied character ; extraordinarily stingy and mean, extraordinarily brave and fierce (not cruel) ; passionately fond of her country, and English to the backbone ; so jealous that she could not bear her courtiers to look at another woman ; so vain of her beauty that even in old age she covered herself with gorgeous dresses and ridiculous jewels ; by turns a scold, a flirt, a cheat and a heroine. But, somehow or other, she made her. people follow, obey and worship her, till at last she became a sort of crowned spirit and guardian angel of the whole nation, which felt that it had grown to full manhood and power under her protecting care. Men called her 1 Gloriana \ Her position and that of her people was, at her accession, one of great danger. England was entirely without allies, and, owing to the bad management of the two last reigns, almost bankrupt. Catholic Europe and many Catholics in England considered that the Queen had no right to the throne, for they had never approved of her father's marriage to Anne Boleyn. The true Queen of England, they thought, was Mary Queen of Scots. So thought that young and beautiful lady herself, and, in Elizabeth's first year, Mary became Queen of France as well. Indeed, the prospect of the The Religious Settlement 129 union of France, Scotland and England in one hand thoroughly frightened King Philip of Spain, and made him for many years more friend than foe to Elizabeth. He therefore in 1558 implored Elizabeth to keep The England Catholic and to marry some decent Catholic settfe- US Prince. But her sisters reign had killed Catholicism in l l } en } °^ „ Jiinglana. the hearts of all the best and most vigorous of the younger men in England ; she knew this, and so, though she dreaded the extreme Protestants and loved the gorgeous services of the old Church, she rightly decided that she must reign as a Protestant Queen. Yet the A Protes- difficulties of settling the new Church were enormous *, Q ueelu she had to make bishops of men who had fled abroad to escape death ; and many of the most eager Protestants now objected to bishops altogether, while many more disliked even the very moderate services of the Prayer Book of 1552. Such men were the germ of the party soon to be called ' Puritans and, in later days, 1 Dis- senters ' or ' Nonconformists '. Moderation,) then, was the Queens watchword ; to build up a Church which should offend as few, and please as many as possible. Her great adviser for forty years was the wise William William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, the most far-seeing and moderate of men. And the Queen and Cecil and Burghley. their Parliament had, in five years — say by 1563 — built the Church upon such broad foundations that it has remained, with few changes, our own 1 Church of England 9 until this day. Laws were passed in Parlia- ment making Elizabeth 6 Supreme Governor' of this The Church, making the Prayer Book (very slightly altered Prayer from the edition of 1552) the only lawful service book, Tho k " and publishing the present i Thirty-nine Articles 9 as the Thirty- Confession of Faith. Year by year more and more Articles. 1134 I Elizabeth people rallied to this Church, and Parliament was able to pass stronger and stronger laws against those who refused to conform to it, whether Catholics or Puritans. Plots All her reign, but especially for the first twenty-eight against years of it, the Queen was in constant danger of being Queen's murdered by some extreme Catholic agent of the Pope. Such men called her heretic', ' bastard', 4 usurper' and other ugly names. There was plot after plot, and the Catholics, perhaps not unnaturally, considered the traitors who were executed for these plots to be martyrs, not murderers. But, as each plot failed, the main result was to drive all moderate Catholics into the English Church ; for most of them, much as they had de- plored the ' heresy ' of their Queen, were patriots at heart. Stingi- Elizabeth hated war, partly because she had a shrewd ofthe *^ ea ^" ia ^ England was hardly strong or rich enough to Queen. engage in a great foreign war, but still more because she simply couldn't bear to pay her soldiers and sailors. In fact, she expected her subjects to fight her battles for her by taking service with rebellious Scottish, French or Spanish subjects, while she pretended to be at peace She helps with the sovereigns of those countries. But she was to r rebel °^ en °bliged to send small, and almost secret expedi- but tions to help these rebels. Philip of Spain, for instance, secretly. en g a g e( j j n a ] on g an( j desperate attempt to suppress Protestantism in the 6 Low Countries' (the modern Belgium and Holland), and our Queen was constantly sending aid to the Protestants there, though never The openly till 1585, by which time the 4 Dutch Republic' Dutch. j ia( j )3 een b orn there, and had become the most valuable ally of England. It was the same story in France, where a strong Protestant party, continually fed by Rivalry with Mary Stuart 131 underhand help from England, kept up a civil war for thirty years. All this weakened the two great Catholic powers, and made Elizabeth stand out more and more as the champion of European Protestantism. On the whole, however, her reign is mainly occupied with two long duels, that with Mary, Queen of Scots, 1560—87, and that with the King of Spain, which began to be severe about 1570 and lasted till her death. The beautiful Mary Stuart returned, a widowed The long Queen, to Scotland in 1561 to find that Elizabeth had SthSLn already helped the Scottish nobles to overthrow the Stuart. French power and the Catholic Church at one blow. The new Church that was then set up in Scotland was The Re- called the i Presbyterian \ from its government by 'pres- fc 1 ^^. 011 byters' or elders instead of bishops, and was far more land, violently Protestant than ours. This is important to The remember because, to those English Puritans who English ' , Puritans. wanted to abolish bishops and the Prayer Book in our own Church, the example of Scotland was always present. Mary was a clever woman, but quite without principles, and far more reckless than her English rival. She honestly believed herself to be rightful Queen of England, but she found it hard work to keep her own crown, and in six years she had lost it. For she was always an object of suspicion to the Scottish nobles, both as a Catholic and as a Frenchwoman at heart. She married her cousin, Lord Darnlcy, in 1505, and bore him a son, who afterwards, as James I, united the two crowns of Britain. Then, in 1567, Mary allowed her husband to be murdered and married his murderer, the Earl of Bothwell. Scotland rose in wrath, deposed and -plight of imprisoned her, crowned her baby son, and had him M^ry to brought up as a Protestant king. A year later Mary i 2 132 Elizabeth Mary in custody in England ; her plots. Her trial and death, 1587. Spain will avenge her. The English Navy, and Eng- lish mer- chant- ships. escaped from prison and fled to England, demanding aid from her rival Elizabeth. That clever lady pretended to pity Mary, but kept her safe, at first as a sort of guest, soon as a prisoner for nineteen dreary years. No wonder that Mary soon began to plot against Elizabeth's life, and to implore the aid of every Catholic power in Europe. The one insurrection of Elizabeth's reign, that of the North of England in 1569, was got up in order to put Mary on the throne. At last, in despair, Elizabeths wisest coun- cillors implored her to bring Mary to trial ; and in 1587, the Scottish Queen was tried, condemned and beheaded in Fotheringay Castle. This was an open challenge on the part of England to Catholic Europe. Mary had made a will in which she passed over her son, left Philip of Spain heir to both her crowns and implored him to avenge her. He was ready to do so, for he had long been tired of Eliza- beth's secret aid to his rebels, and exasperated at the failure of the plotters to kill the English Queen. So he prepared to send against us a great fleet, known to history as the ' Spanish Armada '. Now Henry VII and Henry VIII had been the real makers of the English navy, for they had been the first kings to build big ships which could sail anywhere and fight anybody. And Henry VIII had paid very special attention to guns and gunnery. He had also been the true father of English merchant shipping, and had en- couraged his subjects to trade to distant parts of the world. All merchant-ships in those days carried guns, for they always had to be ready for a tussle with pirates. So, though the Spanish fleet was perhaps twice as numerous as the English Royal navy, the number of English Sailors 1&3 fighting ships that England could put to sea far out- numbered those that Spain could send into the Channel. And our men were going to fight, not only for Queen and faith, but for home and wives and children ; to fight too on their own shores, every tide and shoal of which was well known to them. When Spain had discovered America and the Portu- Spanish guese had found the way round the Cape of Good Hope p 0 ™tu- C 1 ' to India, each tried to exclude all other nations from the seas they had explored, from the lands they had discovered, and from the trades they had opened up. And a Pope had had the astounding insolence to divide these seas, countries, and trades between the Spaniards and Portuguese, giving the Western World to Spain, the Eastern to Portugal. Englishmen, when they abo- English lished the Pope, naturally laughed at this exclusion ; i^^ica! they meant to take, and did take English goods to all countries where they could find a market for them, and this rough deep-sea game went on all through the reigns of Edward and Mary. In the reign of Elizabeth it became the game of Englishmen. You can imagine some simple English sailor lad, who had perhaps never done more than a few coasting voyages from one little port of Devon to another, opening his eyes to the wonders of the Tropics as he sails in Francis Drake's Drake's great voyage in the Golden Hind, across the Atlantic, round°the across the Equator, south and ever south till the Strait world, of Magellan opens the door into the Pacific ; then north again, picking up here and there some rich Spanish merchant-ship as a prize ; then across through in- numerable spice islands to the Indian Ocean, and so round the Cape of Good Hope and home ; home to his own wind-swept Channel and the dear cliffs by Ply- 134 Elizabeth mouth. This was in 1580 — the first English Voyage round the World, the third only of such voyages in recorded history ; honour to Sir Francis Drake ! With Drake in the Tropics. South and far south below the Line, Our Admiral leads us on, Above, undreamed-of planets shine — The stars we knew are gone. Around, our clustered seamen mark The silent deep ablaze With fires, through which the far-down shark Shoots glimmering on his ways. The sultry tropic breezes fail That plagued us all day through ; Like molten silver hangs our sail, Our decks are dark with dew. Now the rank moon commands the sky, Ho ! Bid the watch beware And rouse all sleeping men that lie Unsheltered in her glare. How long the time 'twixt bell and bell ! How still our lanthorns burn ! How strange our whispered words that tell Of England and return ! Old towns, old streets, old friends, old loves, We name them each to each, While the lit face of Heaven removes Them farther from our reach. Now is the utmost ebb of night When mind and body sink, And loneliness and gathering fright O'erwhelm us, if we think — Yet, look, where in his room apart, All windows opened wide, Our Admiral thrusts away the chart And comes to walk outside. With Drake in the Tropics 135 Kindly, from man to man he goes, With comfort, praise, or jest, Quick to suspect our childish woes, Our terror and unrest. It is as though the sun should shine — Our midnight fears are gone ! South and far south below the Line, Our Admiral leads us on ! /flTTHE. TIME OFTHC rtKHADA ' ELIZABETH REVIEWS THE TROOPS AT TU-BVIC* Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, Grenville, Cavendish and a hundred more of gallant English merchants and sailors pushed their ships and their trade into every corner of Spanish America ; and of course the Spaniards 136 Elizabeth hanged many of them as pirates and burned others as heretics. Remonstrances to the English Queen were of little use, for she was often able to reply to Philip, 'Then why is your Majesty encouraging plots against my life and helping my rebels in Ireland ? ' The Philip had, in fact, delayed his attack too long ; he Armada, had no idea how strong England had grown in the thirty 1588. years of Elizabeths reign. And though he was now King of Portugal as well as Spain, and master of all the gold mines of America, he was as stingy as Elizabeth. Even in this critical year 1588, his 6 Armada' was not nearly big enough to win, and it was very badly equipped as a fighting force ; his ships did not carry enough gunpowder, and most of their provisions were rotten. Still, the terror was great in many English hearts as the Spaniards swept up Channel in the last half of July. For one long hot week our light and swift sailing ships hung round their flanks, knocking their spars to pieces at long range, almost w ithout the loss of a single English life or gun. The object of the Spaniards was to avoid fighting until they came off the Dutch coast, for there was a large Spanish army collected in the River Scheldt, under the great General Parma, ready to be ferried across to the mouth of the Thames. But before the Spaniards reached the Straits of Dover their fleet had been half crippled by the English guns ; and, when they were off Calais, a lot of boats smeared with pitch and full of gunpowder were set on fire and set adrift among them. This so terrified the Spanish Admiral that he put his whole fleet about and fled into the North Sea. Then great gales arose and drove them northward and ever northward. Many were wrecked, the remainder lumbered round Scotland and southward again round The Spanish Armada 137 Ireland ; perhaps half or one-third, and these mostly mere hulks, arrived at length in the harbours of Spain ; the winds and waves and rocks had finished what the English guns had begun : — Long, long in vain the waiting mothers kneel In the white palaces of far Castile, Weep, wide brown eyes that watch along the shore, Your dark-haired lovers shall return no more ; Only it may be, on the rising tide, The shattered hull of one proud bark may glide, To moor at even on a smooth bays breast, Where the South mountains lean toward the West, A wraith of battle with her broken spars, Between the water's shimmer and the stars. 1 Our country, and, with her, the great cause of free- England dom and Protestantism, were saved. Spain was now f^T^f^ known to be mainly a bugbear to frighten children, and saved. England and Elizabeth ruled the waves. The great Queen lived for fifteen years after her The last victory, and her enemy, Philip, lived for ten. She never Ki^abeth realized how complete that victory had been ; when her L589-1W3. best councillors and her bravest sailors urged her to follow it up and blow the Spanish once and for all out of the seas, she utterly refused. She allowed occasional raids on the Spanish coasts and colonies, and one of these took the city and burned the great dockyard of Cadiz ; but pay for a big war she would not ; though, in a big war, swift victory was all but certain, and would have produced a lasting peace. Her last years were very lonely ; she had never married ; the great men who had helped her to make England a first-rate power, Burghley, Walsingham, Drake, Grenville, had 1 Sir James Rennell Rodd : Oxford Prize Poem, 1SS0, * Raleigh \ 138 Elizabeth died before her. The rising generation was all looking towards her successor, and that could only be King James of Scotland, whom she cordially hated, and whom she knew to be incapable of continuing her work. The Church of England, which she had nursed, was indeed safe ; but the Puritan party within it was growing, and was strong even in Parliament. All this foretold that seventeenth-century England would have plenty of troubles to face, though no such dangers from foreign foes and religious strife as had threatened it during the seventy years of Elizabeths life and the forty-five of her reign. She died at Richmond in the seventieth year of her age in 1603. Greater, perhaps, than all the other glories of the reign of Elizabeth is the glory that, in her early years, was born at a little town ' in the heart of a sleepy Midland shire ' (Warwickshire) the greatest poet of all time, William Shakespeare. Elizabeth used to boast that she was ' mere English ' ; Shakespeare, whose genius sought the subjects of his plays in all countries and in all periods of history, was at heart, and in his art, as mere English as his Queen. His characters may wear the dresses, and bear the names of ancient Romans, of Bohemians, Danes or Moors, but their language and their thoughts are those of the Englishmen of Shakespeare's own day. ' Together.' When Horse and Rider each can trust the other every- where, It takes a fence and more than a fence to pound that happy pair ; For the one will do what the other demands, although he is beaten and blown, And when it is done, they can live through a run that neither could face alone. 4 Together ' 139 When Crew and Captain understand each other to the core, It takes a gale and more than a gale to put their ship ashore ; For the one will do what the other commands, although they are chilled to the bone, And both together can live through weather that neither could face alone. When King and People understand each other past a doubt, . It takes a foe and more than a foe to knock that country out ; For the one will do what the other one asks as soon as the need is known, And hand in hand they can make a stand which neither could make alone ! This wisdom had Elizabeth and all her subjects too, For she was theirs and they were hers, as well the Spaniard knew ; For when his grim Armada came to conquer the Nation and Throne, Why, back to back they met an attack that neither could face alone ! It is not wealth nor talk nor trade nor schools nor even the Vote, Will save your land when the enemy's hand is tightening round your throat. But a King and a People who thoroughly trust each other in all that is done Can sleep on their bed without any dread — for the world will leave 'em alone ! CHAPTER VIII THE EARLY STUARTS AND THE GREAT CIVIL WAR, 1603-1660 James I, Henry VIII and Elizabeth had given England unity hisclfa ' an ^ patriotism. Would the next race of kings, the racter. Stuarts, be able to maintain unity? That was the question which every one was asking while King James I was slowly riding from Scotland to London in 1603. James, of whom you may read the character in Sir Walter Scott's beautiful story, The Fortunes of Nigel, Avas already thirty-five, ' an old king he said ; and he had had a miserable time in Scotland between the tur- bulent nobles and the Presbyterian ministers who were always preaching at him. And he had been very poor. He knew England to be rich, and thought he was going to be a rich and great king. He was a firm and very learned Protestant, a kindly man, though irritable and conceited. He saw a great deal farther than most of his subjects saw, but he never understood the temper of the English people ; and above all he did not know r , as the Tudors had known, when he had ' come to the place called Stop \ You might describe him as The child of Mary Queen of Scots, A shifty mother's shiftless son, Bred up among intrigues and plots, Learned in all things, wise in none ! Ungainly, babbling, wasteful, weak, Shrewd, clever, cowardly, pedantic, The sight of steel would blanch his cheek, The smell of baccy drive him frantic. Temper of England 141 He was the author of his line — He wrote that witches should be burnt ; He wrote that monarchs were divine, And left a son who proved they weren't ! Now the temper of the English people was going to Temper of be a very serious matter. They were fully ' grown up En £ land - and fully aware that they were grown up ; and they did not want to be i in leading-strings ' any longer. Even the great Elizabeth, in her last years, had galled this proud temper a good deal She had scolded her Parlia- ments and done high-handed things against the law. But she had served and guided her people faithfully, and they knew it and made allowances accordingly. James I and his son Charles I never thought of Mistakes themselves as ' servants ' of their people. They wanted S?^® to rule as the Tudors had ruled, though the need for the kmgb. guidance and the leading-strings had passed away. They were not 'tyrants ' or cruel men or extortioners, but they irritated the nation until they provoked rebellion and civil war. And so they broke the unity of King and People, which was hardly restored again before the reign of Victoria the Great. The main thing to remember about them is that they Their quarrelled continually with their Parliaments, with the 2?^p!fL House of Lords almost as much as with the House of liamente. Commons ; and nearly all their quarrels were over religion or money. The House of Commons took the lead in the quarrels, because it was the most powerful body of gentlemen in the country. The Tudors had flattered and strengthened it enormously, and added very largely to its numbers ; for they had been rather afraid of the House of Lords. The Stuarts added more than a hundred members to the House of Lords in the NORTHERN Shetland SCOTLAND islands^. Half scale of main map Orkney pgjt* /stands M> CAITHNESS l Falmouth T The Lizard Longitude West 2° of Greenwich Meridian o° of Greenwich . tmcry Walker &c GREAT BRITAIN, TO ILLUSTRATE HISTORY FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO THE PRESENT DAY Religious Quarrels 143 hope of getting its support against the Commons, but without much success. First then, for the quarrels about religion. England Religious was growing more Puritan every day. Men saw that the Angers : Church of Rome had 'set its house in order' since the from Reformation, and so was regaining its ground every- again! where. It was catching hold of kings and courtiers, even in lands that had been soundly Protestant fifty years before. Spain backed it up with sword and gun ; and Spain, though the old men who had beaten the Armada might laugh at her, still seemed to be a gigantic power. James I was bent on keeping peace with Spain James's and wished his son to marry a Spanish princess. This, [^gpam said the Puritans, would simply bring back the Pope and Popery to England. Once some wicked and hot- The 'Gun- headed Catholics made a plot to blow up the King and pj^ er both Houses of Parliament with gunpowder (1605). I 1605. think you have all heard of Guy Fawkes and the 'Fifth of November', but perhaps, when we see his absurd figure carried about in the streets, Ave are apt to forget that, on that day in the year 1605, he was actually found in a cellar under the Houses of Parliament, watching a lot of barrels of gunpowder to which he was going to set light the next morning when Parliament should have met. The King and the Prince of Wales, and all the Bishops, Lords and Commons would have met a horrible death, and the friends of Fawkes would then have seized the government on behalf of the Catholics. No wonder Protestants hated and feared a religion in whose name such things could be planned. The Puri- 1 tans also said that the English Church was getting too Puritans ; much like the Catholic Church ; or becoming, as we Church ' should say now, too 1 High Church \ The bishops were church™ 144 James I too powerful, the services too splendid, even the teaching was growing Catholic again. So these Puritans began to cry out, first for a limit to the power of the bishops, then for their abolition, and finally for the abolition of the Prayer Book. But, when it came to that cry, England was by no means united, and at last was divided on the religious question, into two camps of nearly equal strength, who were obliged to fight it out in a bloody civil war. On the second question, the quarrels about money, w r hich we can call the ' civil ' as opposed to the religious causes of quarrel, there was no real division of opinions. No one of any importance in England wanted the King to be able to take taxes at his pleasure, nor to keep people in prison without bringing them to trial, nor to make war or peace without consulting his Parliament. The Tudors had done many of these things, but, on the whole, with the approval of the whole nation and for its good. The people they kept in prison without trial were usually foreign spies or traitors, who were threatening the very existence of England as a nation. James and Charles, however, sent members of Parlia- ment to prison for speeches made in Parliament against the 6 tyranny' of the bishops, against taxes, against un- patriotic alliances with Spain. They took, at the English ports, Customs' duties on goods without consent of Parliament. They did indeed maintain a fine navy, and they certainly built splendid ships, but they did nothing with them. Their sailors were itching to cut Spanish and Popish throats far away in America, and Portuguese throats far away in India ; but the fleet was kept hanging about in the Channel, while the flag was insulted by Frenchmen, by Spaniards, and even by our Civil Quarrels 145 old friends, the Protestant Dutch. So at last men were unwilling to serve in such a navy ; and had to be 'impressed', that is, compelled to serve. And when King Charles, in 1635-6-7, asked for a tax called 1 Ship- 1 Ship- money ', to maintain the Navy, men began to say 1 No ', $63? e5 1 6 not without consent of Parliament', and so on. It was the same story with the Army, or rather with The the old 'militia' of 6 every man armed in his county', 4 Militia*, which did duty for an army. The Tudors had not been very successful in their efforts to make this force a real one. Men hated the service and shirked it when they could; they talked nonsense about 'England not wanting an army when she had got such a fine navy '. You will often hear the same sort of nonsense talked nowadays ; don't believe it ! King James, towards the end of his reign, had a fine opportunity of showing that England could bite by land as well as bv sea ; for The a frightful war broke out in Germany between Catholics fears' and Protestants, which was to last for thirty years ; and }} * T in ii ii* t-» i i i ~x i i Germany, all good Protestants in England and Scotland were ieis-48. eager to go and help their brothers in Germany. But James couldn't make his mind up : he talked big and sent messengers flying about to the kings of Europe, but act he would not ; and so nothing was done except that a great many volunteers went, both from England and Scotland, and learned soldiering to some purpose, as James's son, King Charles I, was to find out one day. Till that day there was no real army in England, although Charles, when he came to the throne, tried to establish a general right of 6 impressing ' soldiers, and quarrelled with his Parliaments at once about it. Lastly, James dismissed all his Parliaments in anger, and used rude language in doing so. When he died in 1625, nearly Death ojE all the seeds of the future civil war had been sowed. 1625. 1194 k 146 Charles I Charles I, Charles I, the ' Martyr King', was a very different his cha-' man f rom his father ; he was shy, proud, cold, ignorant racter. G f the world, obstinate and mistrustful. He did not mean to lie, but he hardly ever told the whole truth ; and so neither his enemies nor his friends could trust him. James would have liked to be good friends with his people, and was at bottom what we call 'a good fellow', with a strong sense of fun. Charles never made a joke in his life, and did not care twopence for public opinion, or for being friends with any one except his bishops. His wife, moreover, was a Catholic and a Frenchwoman and cared nothing for England. Though a firm Protestant, Charles was much more ' High Church 9 than James, and wanted to give the bishops more power. He did once interfere (1627) on behalf of the French Protestants, who were (rather mildly) ill- treated at that time by their kings, but he made a His quar- complete mess of the task. That was at the beginning three V Par- °f re ig n > an d> as in his first four years he quar- ^^nts, relied openly with his first three Parliaments, he could hardly get money enough to help him to live and govern England, and none to defend the honour of Eleven England abroad. Then for eleven years, 1629-40, he without called no Parliament at all. This was the longest interval Parlia- without a Parliament since the reign of Henry III, and jxiexifc 1629-40. to all Englishmen, whose tempers were now boiling over, it seemed intolerable. Pros- During this period Charles took the Customs' duties English f a ^ P or ^ s ? though Parliament had never granted them trade. to him, and they proved to be his main source of income, for, of course, the long peace since 1605 had greatly increased English trade, not only with all European countries (especially Turkey, Russia, Portugal and Quarrel with Scotland 147 Spain), but also, in spite of Spanish jealousy, with Spanish America, the West and East Indies, and the Colonies which were now beginning to be founded in North America (as I will tell you later on at p. 166). Our 'East India Company', which began to build for us our Indian Empire of to-day, had been founded at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Besides the ' Customs ', there were lots of other little Charles's sources of income, many of them quite against the law, and altogether Charles had a revenue of about a million Scotland, 1(337 pounds a year, which certainly enabled him to live as long as he could keep the peace. Perhaps he might never have called a Parliament again if he had not quarrelled about religion with his subjects in Scotland. His Archbishop of Canterbury was William Laud, an honourable but narrow-minded man, who set himself to weed out the Puritan party in the Church of England, and to make every one conform to the services of the Prayer Book. All Puritan England was already growling deeply at this, when it occurred to Laud to try to enforce the same services and ceremonies on Presbyterian Scotland. Some steps in this direction had been begun by King James, but had met with very little success ; there were, however, already some sort of restored bishops in Scotland, though they had no power. Suddenly, in 1637, Charles resolved to force upon Scotland a Prayer Book like the English one, as a first step towards making the Church quite uniform in the two kingdoms. Scotland, poor, proud, and intensely patriotic, had Resis- for long felt sore and neglected since its native kings ^ n ^ e had gone from Edinburgh to London. At this ' English ' Scots, insult it simply rose and slammed the door in the faces of the King and his Archbishop. A 6 Covenant ' was 148 Charles I The signed in Edinburgh and almost all over Scotland, which ant ^1638. bound all men by the most solemn oath to maintain the Presbyterian Church and to root out bishops and all their works ; the Covenanters flatly refused all com- promise, and Charles, if he were to remain a king at all in Scotland, would have to fight. It would be no easy task ; for neither Edward I nor Henry VIII at the head of a united England had been successful against the Scots. And Charles and Laud were almost the only people in England who did not think the Scots were right to resist ! The Scots got together a much better army than Charles could get, and faced him sturdily ; The first the first ■ Bishops' War as the Puritans called it, was War l opS a dead failure. ' Call your Parliament, Sir/ was the 1639. ' only advice his councillors could give the King. The Short Charles gave way, and, in April, 1640, called a Parlia- ment 1 merit which, as he dismissed it in a few days, had the April- nickname of 'The Short Parliament \ For, instead of May, 1640. gj v j n g Ylixr cash to crush Scotland with, it began to pour out a torrent of the grievances of the past eleven years, nay, of the past thirty-seven years; grievances about taxes, customs, ship-money ; about bishops, popery in high places, judges who twisted the law to please the The King;, and so forth. After one more effort at war with 'Bishops' Scotland in the summer, during which the Scots simply War', walked into England as far as Durham and sat down there, the King had to own himself beaten, and to call, Meeting on November 3, 1640, a Parliament that was to be of the LongVar- anything but short. History knows it as 'The Long NoT if' Parliament 1640. ' The leaders of this body were no revolutionists or 'radicals'. Nearly all were great lawyers or country gentlemen of old families and rich estates ; Hampden, The Long Parliament 149 Pym, Holies, Vane, Cromwell, Hyde, Falkland, were the leaders in the Commons ; Essex, Warwick, Bedford, Broke, and Saye in the Lords. The great merchants of the City of London, which was already perhaps the greatest place of trade in the world, were on the same side. No one had the least intention of upsetting the throne Inten- of King Charles. But in civil matters all were agreed f^[|„ # lta in wishing to purify the Law Courts and to restore the 6 ancient constitution by which they meant the control of Parliament over the Crown, as it had existed before the Wars of the Roses. The ' strong government ' of the Tudors, they said, had been necessary at the time ; it was no longer necessary. The King of England ought to be a 1 limited monarch ', not an ' absolute monarch and Charles must be made to realize the fact. So, in about nine months, the whole fabric of the Work of civil government was thoroughly overhauled. The Jj? ;** rst ~ ~ J nine King s one honourable and clever minister, the Earl of months. Strafford, was sent to the Tower and at length beheaded. Archbishop Laud was sent to the Tower. The judges who had twisted the law to please the King were removed, and provision was made against their twisting it in the future. Several new law courts, which had grown up in Tudor times, were taken away ; the power of levying any taxes without full consent of Parliament was taken away ; and it was decided that henceforward Parliament should meet at least every three years. All this was done with the most thundering applause A rift ot the nation, from Tweed to Tamar, from Kent to nation Cumberland ; for, as I have said, all men were agreed as to the i civil ' causes of complaint against their King. But it was another story when questions relating to religion 150 Charles I The were touched. Only one half of England was Puritan religious or wished to abolish bishops or Prayer Book. Three- question. L J fourths of the House of Lords and nearly half the House of Commons were against making any such change ; and this at once began to give the King c a party' in the State. He meant to use that party not only to save the Church, but also, if possible, to restore his own ' strong government ' in civil matters. So things stood in the autumn of 1641 ; and two events then hurried on the civil war, the King's visit to Scotland, and a rebellion in Ireland. The O ur Parliament-men easily guessed that the King's King's yj s i£ i 0 Scotland was made in order to see whether, if visit to 7 Scotland, he had to fight his Parliament, the Scots would help August, i|] m- Yor he gave the Scots everything that they asked, and showered honours on their leaders ; in fact, he appealed to their old jealousy of England. Still he got little or no promise of help there. The To understand the other thing, the Irish Rebellion, we R^bVon mus * £° back a l° n S wa y* N° English sovereign before October, ' the Tudors had seriously tried to govern Ireland. The State of kings had often made grants of Irish land to English- Ireland, men, who had then gone over there and had, in a few years, become wilder than the Irish themselves. There was some shadow of English government in Leinster, with a ' Lord Deputy ' as Governor, and a sort of Irish Parliament ; but, in the fifteenth century, the English territory had shrunk to a very narrow district round Dublin called 1 the Pale Outside the Pale, it was all broken heads and stolen cows, as it had been for a Ireland thousand years. But Henry VIII had taken the task Tudors the of g° vernment in hand, and had tried to turn the wild Irish chiefs into decent English landowners, who should State of Ireland 151 really come to Parliament, help the judges in keeping order, and cultivate their lands properly. He had dis- solved the Irish monasteries as he had dissolved the English, and had given their lands to these chiefs. He put down rebellious earls with a very strong hand, and quite successfully. He had taken the title of ' King ' of Ireland. The ' Reformation ' had been started in Ireland under Edward VI, but there had been little Reformation for Mary to suppress, and no 'heretics' were burned there. Certainly, until the middle of the sixteenth century, Ireland had shown little affection for Pope or Catholic faith. But rebellion in some shape Catholic remained the one thing that Irish chiefs loved, and it E!~" occurred to some of them, especially to one Shan O'Xeill, early in the reign of Elizabeth, that a rebellion in the name of religion would be a much more successful affair than without that name : ' England is now Protestant ; therefore let Ireland rise for the Pope,' was Shan's idea. Philip of Spain saw a splendid chance (for the Pope and himself) of injuring Elizabeth by sending aid to Irish-Catholic rebellions ; and, from with 1570 at least, he continued to do so either secretly or !fS am openly until his death. The idea 1 caught on ', as we should say, with the whole Irish nation and every one went about shouting 6 Pope aboo \ ' Spain aboo ', and ' O'Neill (or Desmond, or some other wild earl) aboo \ Thus England, when she tried to keep order, always appeared to be ' persecuting ' Catholics in Ireland. But Elizabeth could not face the frightful cost of Colonies keeping order there until the last two years of her reign, ^tions ' when she went to work in earnest and with some success, p Ireland in six- Usually she had preferred to plant 'colonies' of English- teenth men upon some Irish districts which had been confiscated centul *y- 152 Charles I after a rebellion. So Minister was 'planted', 1583 ; so Colony of Ulster was planted with Scottish landowners, trades- men and artisans by James I. These last were mostly Presbyterians, and made vigorous and successful colonists. But, of course, the Irish landowners, who had rebelled and been turned out, always hoped to Ulster, 1607. IRELAND English Miles o ip 20 40 6o i — I — i i— J id ft. Boyne PALE 15th. Century ublin aterford fernery Walker so recover their land. And the rebellion of 1641 was prompted either by this hope, or by the fear of fresh confiscation. ^Catho 11 But to the Puritans in the English Parliament it lies, 1641. seemed to be simply a rebellion of the ' wicked Papists', ' probably got up by the King,' they said, ' certainly by the Queen, in order to give excuse for raising an army Cavaliers and Roundheads 153 to use against the English Parliament.' And, with this English fear in their heads, the leaders of Parliament were now men t driven to take steps far beyond any they had intended fri ght- a year before. First they brought forward laws for the utter abolition of bishops and all their works ; and then ^n- t - laws to transfer the command of the army or militia Bill', from the Crown to Parliament. berTi64i. This last was revolution pure and simple. No king civil war could agree to this, and so Charles began to set about 111 si s nt - preparations for war. Large numbers of Members of Parliament came to join him from both Houses ; but those that remained at Westminster were of course all the more determined to fight. The words 'rebellion', ■ treason', 1 traitor' are very Cavaliers ugly words ; and traitors in those days were put to a 5?^ ^ very ugly death. So, many moderate men, who had heads, hated Charles's unlawful government, and applauded all the work of this Parliament during its first nine months, now threw in their lot with the Crown. So did many men who cared nothing for bishops ; Charles was their King, and his flag was flying in the field. There were many men, too, who hated the long sermons and the gloomy nature of the Puritans ; for the Puritans ob- jected to country sports, maypoles, dancing, and to lots of innocent amusements. These ' Cavaliers ' called the Parliament men ' Roundheads ', ' crop-eared rogues ', and so on ; they gave the King an excellent force of cavalry, in which arm the Parliament was at first weak. The Kings best foot-soldiers were mostly Cornishmen or Welshmen, good fellows to fight, too. But the Parliament had the richer districts of the kingdom, the South and East ; London was in its grip ; it had most of the fleet ; and much the fuller purse. 154 Charles I It is a great mistake to imagine that the war was one of gentlemen against merchants and traders. Nearly half the country gentlemen of England were Puritans, and at first all the leaders on both sides were drawn from the upper classes ; later on there were one or two instances, on each side, where men of lesser birth rose to high commands in the armies. The equipment of each force was much the same ; the infantry carried either long clumsy muskets which could shoot about 300 yards at extreme range, or 6 pikes ', which were straight two-edged knives fastened on to long poles. Each side cast a few light field-guns, which did little damage ; but later on the Parliament cast some heavy siege-guns which really finished the war. Each side had soldiers who had fought in the German wars : Prince Rupert, Sir Jacob Astley, Sir Ralph Hopton, for the King ; Lord Essex, Lord Man- chester, Sir William Waller, Sir Thomas Fairfax, for the Parliament. The King had perhaps this advantage : when the war began no one had yet dreamed of deposing him, much less of killing him. * Whatever we do, he will still be the King and his sons after him/ was the idea in the minds even of the stanchest of his enemies. So at first Parliament was ' afraid of beating the King too much But Charles had no need to be afraid of beating his rebels too much. Once battle was joined each side displayed the greatest gallantry, chivalry and mercy. No war was ever fought with so much bloodshed in battle and so little cruelty after battle. Except where actual fighting or a siege was going on, civil life was not inter- rupted. Down to the end of 1643 the advantage was on the whole with the King. Then both men and Battle of Edgehill money began to fail him, and an incomparable leader came to the front for the Parliament in the person of Oliver Cromwell, who was to finish the war and die, ten years later, something very like King of Great Britain. With what feelings the men in either army must have looked upon each other before the first great battle ! Naked and grey the Cotswolds stand Before Beneath the autumn sun, Edgehill And the stubble fields on either hand October Where Stour and Avon run, 1642. There is no change in the patient land That has bred us every one. She should have passed in cloud and fire And saved us from this sin Of war — red Avar — 'twixt child and sire, Household and kith and kin, In the heart of a sleepy Midland shire, With the harvest scarcely in. But there is no change as we meet at last On the brow-head or the plain, And the raw astonished ranks stand fast To slay or to be slain By the men they knew in the kindly past That shall never come again — By the men they met at dance or chase, In the tavern or the hall. At the justice-bench and the market-place, At the cudgel-play or brawl, Of their own blood and speech and race, Comrades or neighbours all ! More bitter than death this day must prove Whichever way it go, 156 Charles I For the brothers of the maids we love Make ready to lay low Their sisters' sweethearts, as we move Against our dearest foe. Thank Heaven ! At last the trumpets peal Before our strength gives way. For King or for the Commonweal No matter which they say, The first dry rattle of new-drawn steel Changes the world to-day ! Progress The King very nearly got into London, after a fierce war, 6 drawn battle at Edgehill in Warwickshire, in the autumn 1642- 3. G f jg42 ; but the Londoners turned out in such force for the defence of the city, and looked so grim, that The King Charles dared not fight his way in. He fell back on 1643- 6° rd ' Oxford, and fixed his head-quarters there ; it was an excellent centre ; he meant to move one army up from Yorkshire, another from Cornwall, and a third from Oxford, and so to crush Parliament between three fires. All 1643 he strove for this, and his generals w r on vic- JohnPym tories both in the north and west. But then John Pym, Scots^ 6 ^e statesman who took the lead in Parliament, help Par- called in the aid of the Scots. The Scots agreed to hament. come, but demanded that their ' Covenant ', to enforce the Presbyterian Church on all three kingdoms, should Battle of be the price of their coming. In 1644 they came and Moor^° n helped to rout the King's best army at Marston Moor, 1644. n ear York. Oliver The real victor in that battle was, however, Oliver ro we . QpQjj^yg]^ a Huntingdonshire squire, forty-three years of age, who had never seen a shot fired until he began to raise the sturdv Puritan farmers of the Eastern Counties for the Parliament. He trained them and led r The Parliamentary Army 157 them till they became the ' Ironsides the finest cavalry The in the world. Look well at them, and think of them ; Ironsides - for they are the direct forerunners of the cavalry regi- ments of our present gallant little army. Cromwell was no narrow-minded Puritan, and for forms of Church government he cared not a straw. But he held that God spoke to each individual mans soul and pointed out his path for him. He thought that all forms were just so many fetters on men's souls, and that all churches, especially the Roman and English, had laid on such fetters. And he had been a strong opponent of the King in civil matters also. Moreover, he saw, as no one else saw, that ' half-measures ' would never finish the war. ' If I met the King in the field, I would pistol him/ he said. In 1645 a new Parliamentary army, better paid and The 'New better armed and more in earnest, was raised under M° tlel . . Army, Fairfax and Cromwell, and it won, within three months, I64r>. the great victory of Xaseby, which practically brought Battle of the Royalist cause to an end. A few gallant High- y?fj? by ' landers under Montrose made a diversion for the King in Scotland, but Montrose too was beaten before the year was over. Charles had already called into England all the soldiers whom he had sent to put down the Irish rebels, and he tried to get the help of these same rebels themselves. This, as you can imagine, did not make his cause more popular with his English Protestant subjects. He was in fact a very bad leader of a very good cause. Early in 1646 the King fled to the Scottish The King army and Oxford surrendered. The Scots, after trying *\ ies J° l lit' Oft M to induce him to take the oath to the Covenant, sold 1646, and him for £400,000 to the English Parliament as a prisoner and went back home. The Parliament spent the years luonent. 158 Charles I Parlia- ment per- plexed, 1646-7-8. Crom- well's army quarrels with Par liament, 1647-8. Battle of Preston, 1648. Trial and death of Charles I, J anuary 30, 1649. 1647 and 1648 in trying to make some sort of treaty with Charles so that the government of the country might continue under a king; Charles argued each point, and was ready to promise, now this, now that, but never anything sincerely. All the time he was trying to get help from France, or from Scotland or from Ireland. Meanwhile the Parliamentary leaders had to try to fulfil their treaty with the Scots. They could abolish bishops, sell all the lands of the Church of England, turn out all the Royalist parsons, and forbid the use of the Prayer Book ; but they found it almost impossible to estab- lish a Presbyterian Church in England. In reality few Englishmen wanted this. Even those who had most wanted to pull down bishops began to see that 'ministers and elders' might try to force men's con- sciences quite as much as bishops had done. No one felt this more than Cromwell ; and what Cromwell thought, his army, which had finished the war, thought also. This army began to growl against its masters the Parliament. It also began to growl for the punishment of 6 Charles Stuart, that man of blood '. When Charles did at last persuade the Scots, who were by this time very cross with the Parliament, to come in again on his behalf, this growl became an open cry ; the Army duly went and smashed the Scots at Preston, and then came back to London resolved on the King's death. Cromwell hesitated long ; he was a merciful man, and he saw what a terrible thing he had to do — to kill a king ! But he believed that the Lord guided his mind, and that there could be no peace while Charles lived. Parliament was utterly horrified at this sugges- tion, but it Mas at the mercy of the Army which it had Death of Charles I 159 created. Cromwell turned out over a hundred of its most moderate members and terrified the remainder. A sham court of justice was established to try and to condemn the King. Charles, of course, refused to acknowledge that any court had any power to try him ; and he met his death on January 30, 1649, with perfect serenity and courage. The very men who did the deed were terrified at what they were doing. Charles was a martyr, a martyr for the English Was Church and its government by bishops, a martyr for j^artyi^* our beautiful and dear Prayer Book. But the fact that he was a martyr did not make him a good king or a good man. Yet, though Charles had often overridden the law, What is and, if he had got back to power, would have done so jjj ^ put again, what had the Army and the dregs of the Long place 1 Parliament to put in his place ? They confiscated and sold to new owners much of the land of those who had fought for the King. They set up a sort of Republic The which they called ' The Commonwealth with a Council J™?^? 11 " of State, and a single House of Parliament, in fact the <>r Re- 6 Rump ' of the Long Parliament, as witty cavaliers pu lc ' called it. They abolished the House of Lords the day after they had murdered the King. In reality they had abolished Law, Order, and the old natural Constitution ; and all their efforts for the next eleven years to put anything artificial in its place were hopeless failures. The one real fact left in England was the Army ; this The Rule meant the Rule of the Sword, the worst of all conceivable g w ^.d. tyrannies, however good the men may be who wield that Sword. They were good men who wielded it. Cromwell was a man of the most lofty character, and so were many of 160 The Commonwealth Charles II in exile and in Scotland. Cromwell in Ire- land, 1649. Battles of Dunbar, 1650, and Worces- ter, 1651. Cromwell 4 Lord Protec- tor' of England, Scotland, and Ire- land, 1653-8. his associates. They were also great patriots and great Englishmen. But nineteen-twentieths of Englishmen hated the whole thing heart and soul, looked upon Charles I's death as an abominable murder, and only prayed for Charles II to come and avenge it. That young man, now nineteen years old, had fled to the Continent. The Scots invited him to Scotland, made him take the Covenant (which he hated) and prepared to fight for him. But Cromwell and his Iron- sides, after going across and stamping out the Irish rebellion with a great deal of cruelty, made short work of one Scottish army at Dunbar in 1650, and of another, which had invaded England, at Worcester in 1651. The young King fought most gallantly at the latter battle, and had a series of hair-breadth escapes before he regained the Continent ; you have often heard, perhaps, of how he spent a day in hiding in the upper branches of a great oak-tree in Shropshire — - While far below the Roundhead rode And hummed a surly hymn. That is why people wear oak leaves on May 29, and why so many public-houses still bear the sign of the 4 Royal Oak '. Yet, if civil war was over, there was no civil peace in Britain ; and in 1653 Cromwell was obliged to turn out the 'Rump' of the Long Parliament and to take on himself the government of England, Scotland, and Ireland as 1 Protector', a title which pleased his old friends little more than it pleased his old enemies. He made experiment after experiment in forms of govern- ment ; tried sometimes with, and sometimes without, some sort of sham Parliament ; once he even tried to create a sort of sham House of Lords. But all these Cromwell as Ruler 161 things were only thin disguises for the rule of the Sword and the Army. He was much pressed to take the title His rale of King and to restore the old Constitution, but from hated!™* 1 this he shrank. Except to Papists and to the beaten Church of England he was not intolerant ; he believed in letting men's consciences be free, and he strove to make people righteous and God-fearing. All that, how- ever, was a dismal failure ; it only disgusted all moderate people with the whole Puritan creed. Yet, in Oliver's five years of rule, he accomplished His Par- what the Stuarts had not done in forty-five. Not only |Jf Jj** 1 * had he subdued Scotland and Ireland, but he even three made them send thirty members apiece to a sort of mgdoms# united Parliament in England. And far more than this ; he made the name of England once more dreaded and honoured abroad as it had not been since the death of Elizabeth. He wrung from the Dutch a heavy payment His care for some wrongs they had done our traders in the Far Navy! East ; he won for us a share in that Far-Eastern trade. He fell upon the Spaniards in the true style of Drake and Raleigh ; he took their great plate fleet ; he tore Jamaica from them ; he sent his ' Ironsides ' to France His vie- to aid France against Spain ; they were the first great English army seen abroad since the fifteenth century, Spain, and where they fought they swept all before them. He took up the great cause of Protestantism all over Europe. When he died in 1658 England was again the Hisdeath, first naval power and almost the first military power in 16oS * the world. But when his son Richard (' Lazv Dick ' or ' Tumble- Richard Croni down Dick ', as people called him) succeeded him as we n p ro . Protector, the whole unnatural arrangement crumbled . . 1608-9. away at once because it did not suit the spirit of the 1134 L 162 The Restoration English people. There were eighteen months of anarchy ; now some soldier, now the restored £ Rump ' held power. At last, in January, 1660, General Monck, an old soldier of Cromwell's, who had the command in Scotland, made up his mind to restore the exiled King, Charles II. And on his thirtieth birthday, the 29th of May, 1660, that clever and unprincipled young gentleman rode into London amid the t£ars and shouts of a people gone mad with joy. The reign of the Sword was over, the reign of the Law had begun. Unfortunately this reign of the Sword left on men's minds an unreasonable hatred and fear, not only of this Puritan army, but of all armies ; and that hatred and fear has too often paralysed the arm of England, and is not wholly dead to-day. It has prevented men from seeing that to serve King and country in the Army is the second best profession for Englishmen of all classes ; to serve in the Navy, I sup- pose we all admit, is the best. Charles II prudently kept up a few of the regiments of Cromwell's old army, and even increased it a little during his reign. But he had often hard work to pay it, for his Parliaments were always jealous of a power that they knew had been their master once and might be so again. CHAPTER IX THE FALL OF THE STUARTS AND THE REVOLUTION, 1660-1688 The lessons of the 6 Great Rebellion 9 were by no Charles means thrown away upon Charles IL No king after gl; 1660 " 1660 ever attempted to raise a penny without con- Again a sent of Parliament. Once, but only once, at the end of England, his reign, Charles let four years go by without calling a Parliament. Once, but only for a moment, an unlaw- ful court of justice was created by James II ; and there were hardly any other attempts at 'strong government' of the Tudor type. There were plenty of quarrels to come between Kings and Parliaments, but these were nearly always about religion or foreign wars. As far as possible everything was restored, in Great The Britain and Ireland, as it had existed just before the stored. Civil War. The two Houses of Parliament, with all their old power, were restored. The Church of England, with Prayer Book and bishops, was restored as in 1640. It had suffered quite as much as the Crown, or the Cavaliers who had fought for the Crown. A certain amount but by no means all of the land was restored to its rightful owners. Almost all the Church livings The Dis- had been given away to Presbyterians and other Dis- senters - senters. During the Rebellion a whole crop of ' sects 9 had arisen, some of which, like the Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers, are still with us. In 1660 all wished for nothing better than a peaceful life, and to conduct their worship in their own way. No one could L 2 Charles II Parlia- ment passes laws against Dissen- ters, 1661-5. The Re- storation in Scot- land. complain when the church livings were given back to the Church of England ; but it was a great mistake of Parliament and Church to prevent the Dissenters from holding their public worship as they pleased. It was a lasting misfortune for England that a series of laws was passed in the reign of Charles II to shut out both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters from all offices in the State, and even from offices in town councils. Catholics were excluded from Parliament, for the Great Rebellion had left a hatred of Popery greater than that which had existed before it. These intolerant laws, though partly softened for Protestant Dissenters in 1690, and for Catholics also in the reign of George III, were not abolished till 1828 and 1829. Of course, no persons now suffered death for their religion (and it was in Charles IFs reign that Queen Mary's laws for burning heretics were finally wiped out), but many Dissenters w ere imprisoned, among them John Bunyan, author of the Pilgrim's Progress. In Scotland a similar restoration took place of the old Scottish Parliament, in which Lords and Commons had always sat in one house ; of Church government by bishops ; of lands which had been confiscated. The extreme Covenanters refused to recognize these changes, and before long broke out into open rebellion in the south-west. Rebellion went on smouldering a good deal until 1688 ; much cruelty was exercised, and much more was wrongly believed to have been exercised, in putting it down. Charles's English ministers would have liked to govern Scotland from London and to unite the two Parliaments, but the patriotic spirit of the smaller country was as yet entirely against this. King Charles II came back to find a new kind of Eng- Character of Charles II 165 land, an England less high-minded, less romantic, more Character 6 modern and more commonplace than before the war. Jj Cnarle « The country was again set upon peace, order and money- getting. The King set a bad example in his private life, but in his public life he was not by any means a bad king. He was very clever, and had a keen eye for the interests of trade, of the colonies and of the Navy. The Cromwellians had bequeathed to him a very fine Navy ; but too often he let it rot for want of spending money on it. His sailors were badly paid and badly cared for ; he let his contractors swindle him, and he was too idle to look into small but important matters himself. Also he was always shockingly in want of money to spend upon pleasure, and, if Parlia- ment would not give him enough, he was apt to ask the King of France to pay him large sums, in return for which he would promise to do something which that king wanted — not always to the honour of England. But, when he had got the money, Charles very seldom kept his promises to King Louis. France was now taking the place in the eves of English- Englishmen which Spain had held in the period 15(50- cEroLlof 1640, the place, that is, of the national bugbear and France, terror, whose vast army and vast wealth were to be used to help the Pope and to spread the Catholic faith. Englishmen wanted to fight King Louis, just as they had wanted to fight King Philip in James Is days. Charles II, however, saw that our real rivals were the and Protestant Dutch, whose merchant-ships covered all ^iVi/the seas, whose trading stations were all over the world. Dutch. And, if you are to understand this, it is time that I told you something about the grow th of our own Colonial Empire. 166 Charles II The idea The first idea of all voyages to distant countries had x 1 been to get either gold and silver, or precious goods like nies beyond silk and spices, which could not be grown in Europe. the seas • Spain, Portugal, Holland and France had all been ahead of us in the race of discovery ; but we were going Sir Walter to beat them all in the long run. It was Sir Walter Raleigh, in Elizabeth's reign, who first imagined a true ' colony'. He did not mean, as the Spaniards meant, a sort of shop, in which Englishmen were to buy gold or silk or spices ; but rather a 6 plantation ' of English- men in some distant land who were to buy all their goods, their iron tools, their woollen clothes, their linen and their boots from England. This would, in the first place, give an enormous lift to English manufactures, and, in the second place, would create a piece of ' England-bey ond-the-sea ', a piece, in fact, of an English Empire. Raleigh planned to plant such a colony in Virginia, on the shore of North America ; it collapsed for want of funds. But the idea lived on, and in 1606 it was taken up again by a group of London merchants, who subscribed money and sent out colo- nists. By the year 1620, Virginia was a flourishing little state. The In that year some sturdy Puritans, since called the Facers in ' P^S r ^ m Fathers', got leave to emigrate to North America, America. They objected to being compelled to use the Prayer Book service in England, and wanted to worship God in their own fashion ; and they founded a little state called ' Plymouth ' on the American coast. Other colonies, some religious, some commercial in their British origin, soon followed, and, by 1660, the whole eastern America coas t G f North America was dotted with little English in seven- § # ° teenth states ; but, between Virginia and the more sternly century. British America 16T Puritan ' New England lay a little wedge, on the valley of the River Hudson, which had been settled by the Dutch. There was no gold in North America, and, except tobacco, no rich natural crop ; but there was a virgin soil of great fertility, vast forests full of valuable timber, swarms of fur-bearing animals like beavers, and splendid fisheries on the coasts. So these peoples rapidly grew into rich and prosperous little states, working, in a climate not unlike that of Europe, at the same sort of work that their fathers had known across the ocean. But many of the colonics were full of Puritans and Temper Protestant Dissenters, the very men who, in King Colonists. Charles I's reign, had fought against the Crown. So there was born, in all our colonists, a spirit of resistance to government in general, and the quite foolish notion that all government is oppressive. Such a spirit might easily lead to rebellion. The colonists, however, knew well that all round them were Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Spaniards, casting greedy eyes on their riches, and that against these foes only the English fleet could protect them. So some sort of pretence of loyalty to their Mother Country was for many years almost a necessity to them. The Mother Country usually left them to themselves ; it never taxed them ; it sent them Governors, who hoisted a British flag outside their Govern- houses, and Hook the lead in Society ', but did little other {J^ ot governing. Each colony set up a miniature House of Colonies. Commons, or something like it, of its own, and made its own laws on the English model. On one thing only England insisted, that the colonists were to buy their goods wholly from English merchants ; and if they produced any goods which England wanted and could 168 Charles II not grow herself (e.g. tobacco, rice, beaver-skins) they were to send all such goods to England. The two Charles II fought two great wars with the Dutch Wars^ during his reign ; and great sailors came to the front, 1664 and though none as great as Robert Blake, who had been Cromwell's admiral. The sailors and the Navy covered themselves with glory, but, as I said above, the manage- ment of the Service was shockingly bad, and it was no thanks to King Charles that the Dutch did not win. The Dutch in the Medway. If war were won by feasting, Or victory by song, Or safety found in sleeping sound, How England would be strong ! But honour and dominion Are not maintained so, They're only got by sword and shot, And this the Dutchmen know ! The moneys that should feed us, You spend on your delight, How can you then have sailor-men To aid you in your fight ? Our fish and cheese are rotten, Which makes the scurvy grow — We cannot serve you if we starve, And this the Dutchmen know ! Our ships in every harbour Be neither whole nor sound, And, when we seek to mend a leak, No oakum can be found, Or, if it is, the caulkers, And carpenters also, For lack of pay have gone away, And this the Dutchmen knoiv I War with the Dutch 169 Mere powder, guns, and bullets, We scarce can get at all, Their price was spent in merriment And revel at Whitehall, While we in tattered doublets From ship to ship must row, Beseeching friends for odds and ends — And this the Dutchmen know/ No King will heed our warnings, No Court will pay our claims — Our King and Court for their disport Do sell the very Thames ! For, now De Ruyter's topsails, Off naked Chatham show, We dare not meet him with our fleet — And this the Dutchmen know ! There were some fearful drawn battles, both in the North Sea and the Channel. Once the Dutch sailed into the Thames and the Medway and burned a lot of our ships at Chatham. But the main result of these wars was that the Dutch gave up to us their colony in North America, which was henceforth to be called New ^ ew York. In the same reign ' North and South Carolina 9 York - were added to our American list of states ; they lie south of Virginia, are hot and swampy, and produce mainly rice and tobacco. Besides these colonies we possessed several valuable Other West Indian islands, notably Jamaica, which grew colomes - sugar ; Ave had a whale-fishing and fur-trading station in Hudson Bay, northwards from the French settle- ments in Canada ; we had several little dots of land protected by forts on the west coast of Africa, whence we exported black slaves to our own and the Spanish colonies ; and, in India, we had Bombay and Madras. 170 Charles II The c East India Company ' had been founded to trade with the far East (from which the Dutch had steadily driven out the first European traders, the Portuguese), as far back as the end of Elizabeths reign. Dutch, Frenchmen and Englishmen scrambled against each other to get permission, from the ' Great Moguls' and other Eastern kings with magnificent names, to sell and buy in those countries ; and, on the whole, during the seventeenth century the English Company got the best of the trade with Hindostan into its hands. So you see the seeds of a great empire were already sown, and the colonial trade made English merchants both rich and very adventurous. Parties in I wish I could say as much good for Charles IX's ment? reign at home as abroad, but I cannot. And this is mainly because in his reign we feel that England had ceased to be united, and seemed to have little chance of recovering its unity. The notion that 'all kings are trying to oppress all peoples ' seems to have grown up ; it was the outcome of the Civil War. So there are now two 'parties' in Parliament and even in the nation. There are the party of the King and his ministers, and the party of those who are not his ministers, but would like to be. These parties were 'Whig' then called 'Tories' and 'Whigs'; in our days they 'Tory \ call themselves ' Conservatives ' and ' Liberals ' (or 'Radicals'). Each was supposed to represent certain principles of government ; the Tories were for Church and Crown and gentlemen ; the Whigs for Dissenters, for trade, and for all who would bully the King. Their Tories were supposed to be against all changes in pre- tended l&ws or institutions ; the Whigs were supposed to p . ri ?" favour moderate and slow changes of law. Both pro- ciples. ° 1 Government by Party 171 fessed to be utterly loyal to the Constitution, i. e. to government by King, Lords, and Commons. But neither was really true to its original principles. The Whigs originally favoured a vast empire, and the careful protection of British trade, by war if necessary, especially by war with Catholic France ; whereas the Tories were all for a French alliance and despised trade and colonies. Nowadays things have reversed them- selves ; and it is the Conservatives (or Tories) who want to protect British trade, to keep a large army and navy always ready for war, and to win the love of our brothers in the Colonies. Each party has constantly taken a different view of what the exact needs of Britain are, and each has exaggerated its own view, out of rivalry with the other party. And this has been unfortunate ; for it has too often Govem- made the leaders of each party tell lies to the people "party \ of Great Britain, in order to get their friends elected to Parliament, and themselves to office as the King's ministers. For you will see, if you reflect, that, when every law and every grant of money has to be passed by both Houses of Parliament, it would be of no use to a king to have Whig ministers if there was a Tory majority in the House of Commons ; a king who wanted to govern well and without quarrels must take ministers from the party which, for the time, has the upper hand in the House of Commons. In those days the House of Commons was chosen by a very small body of electors ; now it is chosen by almost all the grown-up men in Great Britain. But the principle was the same then as now ; a king who, perhaps, wanted to make a ' Whig ' war or carry a 6 Whig ' law might sud- denly find himself, after the election of a new Parlia- 172 Charles II ment, face to face with a c Tory ' House of Commons, and so he would have to dismiss his Whig ministers, take Tory ministers, and drop his 'Whig' war or his 4 Whig ' law. No doubt it has made kings govern according to what was supposed to be the wish of their people for the time being ; but, in the first place, a people as a whole seldom wishes the same thing for many years on end, and does not by any means always wish what is best for the country ; in the second place, the system leads to friction and quarrel between parties, and so to waste of power and lack of union in the nation. All this was only beginning in Charles IFs reign, but it was beginning, and it was going to go on and get worse. It has gone on and got worse every day until now. In Charles IFs time Parliament was constantly the scene of fierce party disputes, mainly upon religion. Charles had no lawful sons, and his heir was his brother James, who after the death of his first wife had become a Catholic and married an Italian Catholic lady ; Charles himself was accused of favouring Catho- lics, even of being secretly a Catholic. Wild stories were started and believed of 'Popish plots' to kill Charles and set up James. (Charles, who was perhaps the most genuinely humorous of all our kings, said to his brother, 6 Dear James, no one would be such a fool as to kill me in order to make you king '.) The Whigs got up a plan to shut out James from the succession and to set up a bastard son of Charles in his place ; in 1680, 1681, it looked almost like a civil war between Tories and Whigs. But all moderate men dreaded this, and the King played his game so cleverly that, when he died in 1685, his brother James succeeded him without trouble. Charles had taken sharp vengeance on some Character of James II 173 of the Whig plotters, and their families did not forget the fact. James II, however, was not merely the Catholic king James II, of a strongly Protestant people ; he was also the most c yJ m obstinate man in England. If not, like Edward II, racter. a crowned ass, he was at least a crowned mule. In three years he had wrecked his own throne, and very nearly pulled down the ancient monarchy of England on the top of himself. His Parliament was quite loyal and quite prepared to shut its eyes to his Catholic faith, His if he would not flaunt it in every one's face. But, from f^h° llc the very first, he set himself not only to do this, but to make the Catholics supreme in the State. He wished to give them all posts in Army, Navy and Civil Service, and even in the Church of England. He thought that He tries by promising to abolish all laws against the Protestant ^ e i§)jr e Dissenters he might get them to help him to abolish senters, . 1687 the laws against the Catholics also. But the Dissenters, who certainly had never loved the Church of England, feared a Catholic king much more, and altogether refused to listen to James ; they threw in their lot with those very churchmen and bishops who had bullied them. In Ireland, James appealed to the wildest pas- sions of the Irish against the Protestant colonies of Englishmen which had been planted thereby Elizabeth, by James I and by Cromwell, and confirmed in their lands by Charles II. To the one person who could perhaps have helped him to put down England by the sword, namely King Louis of France, this crowned mule turned a deaf ear, and professed that he wanted no such help. In short he listened to nobody but a few Catholic priests in his own household. 174 William III Question, of the succes- sion. Birth of Prince James Edward, 1688. The in- vitation to the Dutch Prince of Orange, 1688. Character of Wil- liam of Orange. Until 1688 his heir had been his eldest daughter, the good and beloved Princess Mary, who had been married in 1677 to her Dutch cousin, Prince William of Orange, who was now the leader of Protestant (and much of Catholic) Europe against the King of France. Most Englishmen were content to wait till James should die ; then this darling Protestant girl would be their queen. But in June, 1688, James had a son born to him, who would, of course, be brought up as a Papist. The whole nation shivered at the prospect ; its leaders, Whig and moderate Tory alike, would wait no longer, and a secret message was at once dispatched to Prince William, begging him to come over to England, either to turn out King James or to teach him by force (for nothing but force would ever convince such a character) to govern better. Prince William of Orange was the son of Charles Fs daughter Mary. He was a frail little creature, nearly always ill, with an enormous hook-nose and cold grey eyes, which only lighted up in battle. His manners were also cold and unkind ; but underneath all he had a soul of fire. He cared for but one thing on earth, to smash King Louis of France. He saw that rich England had been, since Cromwell's time, too much the ally of France, too much the enemy of Holland. He thought she had played false to Protestantism. If he came to England to deliver it from King James, he meant afterwards to throw the whole weight and wealth of Eng- land into the alliances which he was for ever knitting together against his hated enemy, France. For English 'politics' and the English Constitution, for the squabble of Whigs and Tories in the English Parliament, he cared nothing at all. But he was the husband of the heiress of England, and here was his chance of power. The Revolution of 1688 175 Men went about saying that the child just born to Landing King James was not his son at all, was no true Prince nameless, of Wales, 'he had been smuggled into the Palace in a warming-pan ' — and much other nonsense of that sort. It suited William to believe this, or to pretend to believe it. James was well warned of what was coming, but he shut his ears, and so was quite unready to meet William and his Dutch fleet, which had a lot of English and Scottish soldiers and exiles on board it. William landed in Devonshire and moved slowly towards London. James had an army, many of whose regiments would have fought faithfully for him, if he would only have led them ; but he turned tail and fled to France ; and Flight of just before Christmas, 1688, William entered London. f(te 8 ies> What was to be done? Was James still king? Had who is to Mary become queen ? Who was to call a Parliament ? be kmg • (only a king can do this, and it seemed as if there was no king). William, however, called a ' Convention ' (which was a Parliament in all but name), and, after some debate, this body decided that James was no longer king, but that William and Mary were joint William King and Queen of England and Ireland. A Scottish §aryJI Convention declared the same thing for Scotland. A 1689. document was drawn up called the 1 Bill of Rights The Bill which is a sort of second edition of Magna Charta. It 1689.* ^ fully expresses the idea that the Sovereign of England is a 6 limited monarch' and that there are a great many things he may not do. This 6 Revolution of 1688' was mainly the work of the The Re- Whigs, and William has often been called the ' Whig of loss-l). Deliverer \ Revolutions are bad things, but it is diffi- cult to see how this one could have been avoided. James was a real tyrant, almost as impossible a ruler 176 William III for Englishmen as John or 6 Bloody ' Mary I had been ; and, since Mary II refused to reign without her hus- band, and the baby Prince of Wales had fled with his father, the question was perhaps settled in the only satisfactory manner. But England was by no means united by the settlement ; William was a foreigner and a foreigner he remained till his death. CHAPTER X WILLIAM III TO GEORGE II, 1688-1760 ; THE GROWTH OF EMPIRE 'Broavn Bess/ Id the days of lace-ruffles, perukes and brocade Brown Bess was a partner whom none could despise — An out-spoken, flinty-lipped, brazen-faced jade, With a habit of looking men straight in the eyes — At Blenheim and Ramillies fops would confess They were pierced to the heart by the charms of Brown Bess. Though her sight was not long and her weight was not small, Yet her actions were winning, her language was clear ; And everyone bowed as she opened the ball On the arm of some high-gaitered, grim grenadier. Half Europe admitted the striking success Of the dances and routs that were given by Brown Bess. When ruffles were turned into stiff leather stocks And people wore pigtails instead of perukes Brown Bess never altered her iron-grey locks, She knew she was valued for more than her looks. 6 Oh, powder and patches was always my dress, And I think I am killing enough/ said Brown Bess. So she followed her red-coats, whatever they did, From the heights of Quebec to the plains of Assaye, From Gibraltar to Acre, Cape Town and Madrid, And nothing about her was changed on the way ; (But most of the Empire which now we possess Was won through those years by old-fashioned Brown Bess.) 1134 M 178 William III Iii stubborn retreat or in stately advance, From the Portugal coast to the cork-woods of Spain She had puzzled some excellent Marshals of France Till none of them wanted to meet her again : But later, near Brussels, Napoleon, no less, Arranged for a Waterloo ball with Brown Bess. She had danced till the dawn of that terrible day — She danced on till dusk of more terrible night, And before her linked squares his battalions gave way And her long fierce quadrilles put his lancers to flight. And when his gilt carriage drove off in the press, ' I have danced my last dance for the world ! ' said Brown Bess. James II defeated in Ireland 179 If you go to Museums — there 's one in Whitehall — Where old weapons are shown with their names writ beneath, You will find her, upstanding, her back to the wall, As stiff as a ramrod, the flint in her teeth. And if ever we English have reason to bless Any arm save our mothers', that arm is Brown Bess ! The Bill of Rights had said that 6 to keep an Army in Reign of time of peace was against Law '. Only the fact that ni^Sd England was at war for very long periods during the Mary ir, next hundred years saved the Army from being abolished ; 0 f Wil-' and at every interval of peace it was reduced far too H am 111 t« i n alone, much tor the safety of the country. In 1689 war with 1694-17 02. France was certain, for, as I told you, William had come to England mainly to induce England to help Holland and other countries whom France was threaten- ing. Also the French King at once took up the cause of James. James went to Ireland and called on the Catholic James Irish to help him ; French troops and money were sent Catholic after him. Ireland had now some real wrongs to jj^P J» avenge, for Cromwell's conquest had been cruel, and 1LlUK ' many old Irish families had lost their lands, to make room for English settlers ; these Catholics, therefore, gave James a good army, with which, early in 1G89, he advanced to try and subdue the most Protestant of the Irish Provinces, Ulster. But he failed to take the city Siege of of Londonderry, which held out against a most awful kondou- n * derry, siege for three months and more. It was not till a year 1689. after this that William was able to muster enough English and Dutch troops to begin the reconquest of Battle of Ireland. He smashed James to pieces at the battle of the the Boyne, and drove him once more into exile in 1690 ; ?690 Ue ' m 2 180 William III Cruel laws against Irish Catholics, 1692-1710. The laws never enforced. Laws against Irish trade. Laws against Scottish trade. a year later the war ended with the surrender of Limerick, which the Catholics had defended as bravely as the Protestants had defended Londonderry. Ireland was at last completely conquered. William wanted to give, and promised to give, the defeated Irish Catholics peace and protection ; but the English Parliament intended that those who provoked the war should pay the expenses of the war. A vast number of estates were therefore again taken from the Catholics and given to the Protestants, and a fresh set of grievances began for Ireland. Harsh laws were also passed in this and the next reign, both in the English and Irish Parliaments, with the intention of stamping out the Catholic religion altogether. They were hardly ever put in force, for the whole Irish people, Catholic and Protestant alike, hated them ; and men, after what they had gone through, only wished to live at peace with their neighbours. Harsh laws were also passed and had been passed since 1660 in the English Parliament against Irish trade ; for the jealous English merchants feared that Irishmen would make woollen goods, or grow fat bacon, beef or butter cheaper than England could do. These laws were put in force ; and their result in the long run was to make Ireland ripe for rebellion. The same jealousy was displayed towards Scotland, which was just beginning to have a few small manufac- tures of its own, and which certainly grew excellent and cheap beef and mutton. Then, too, there was a large party which had clung to King James or was ready to rise for him, especially in the wild Highlands, north of the Forth and Clyde. The South and East of Scotland had accepted the Revolution of 1688, and the Presbyterian Church had again been established. The Union with Scotland 181 risings for King James were put down, though not without tough fighting. But, when Scotland asked to be allowed a share in the trade with our colonies, the English Parliament answered with a contemptuous i no ' ; and the result was that Scotland growled and growled more and more throughout the reign of William. But in the next reign, after long and fierce debates, the The old Scottish Parliament was induced to vote for a with** union with the English (1707) ; and henceforward there Scotland, was one united Parliament of Great Britain, and trade was perfectly free between the two nations. Then began the great commercial prosperity of Modern Scotland. Within fifty years Glasgow had got an enor- mous share of the trade with the British colonies and India, and one of the most interesting tales of town history is the story how the grave merchants of Glasgow got together and set to work to deepen the river Clyde so as to make it carry the trade which they knew would come. The first Glasgow ship for tobacco sailed to America ten years after the union, and began what is still one of Glasgow 's greatest industries. William III paid far too little attention to these questions of Ireland and Scotland, but his excuse was that he and his Dutch and German allies were engaged The war in a desperate struggle to save Flanders and the line of iV th . , . France, the river Rhine from King Louis of France. With great 1689-97. difficulty could he squeeze out of the English Parliament men and money for these wars. None of the English statesmen, Whigs or Tories, really liked the war, and the Tories in particular began to dislike the Revolution which they had helped to make. But wherever the English regiments fought they covered themselves with glory, especially at Steinkirk, 109:2, and Landen, 169:5, 182 William III Jealousy against the army in Eng- land. Death of J ames II in exile ; a new war with France, 1702-13. Question of the suc- cession again. though they were defeated in both battles. William was a fierce and dogged fighter, but he was not a first- rate general, and France still had the best of it when a sort of truce was concluded in 1697. Parliament, in which the Tories then had the upper hand, at once reduced the army to 7,000 men. This was most foolish, as every one knew that old King Louis XIV was only preparing for a fresh war in order to put his own grandson on the throne of Spain, which fell vacant in 1700. The Austrians also claimed the Spanish crown, and it was the plain duty of England to help them. Many Englishmen, however, said, 'No, let them fight it out. What does it matter to England ? ' 'This is what comes of your foreign king,' and so on. William, foreigner as he was, knew better. The growing power of France threatened every nation in Europe. The time had gone by when England could afford to stand aside from the quarrels of her neighbours. William might, however, have failed altogether to convince Englishmen of this if Louis had not made one great mistake. Old King James II died in 1701, and Louis at once recognized his son (the same Prince of Wales who was born in 1688) as 'James III'. This was the same as dictating to Englishmen who should be their King ; and the whole nation voted for war at once. William would have led it to battle as bravely as ever but for his death in 1702. His good wife, Mary, had died childless seven years before, and her sister Anne now became Queen. But Anne, too, was now childless, and so, to find an heir of the old royal blood who was also a Protestant, England would have to go back a long way, in fact to the descendants of James I. James I's daughter, Elizabeth, had married a German Question of the Succession 183 prince, and that Elizabeth's youngest child, Sophia of Hanover, a very old lady, was the best Protestant heir. She had already a son and a grandson, who were one day to be King George I and King George II. No one liked the prospect of a petty German prince as our King ; but most people thought anything was better than a Papist, and unfortunately our lawful King, James III, remained a Papist all his days. He could have bought his throne at any moment by turning Protestant, but he was far too honourable to do that. Before we leave King William we must notice an Parlia- important change which took place during his reign, j^esali- a change which really transferred the sovereignty of powerful, the country from King to Parliament. To previous Taxes, kings Parliament had usually voted, at the beginning of the reign, a certain sum of money to be paid eacli year out of taxes, which sum, they thought, should be enough to pay all the expenses of governing and defending the country. It never was enough, and extra money had always to be voted for wars. Now, however, William's Parliament voted him only a small sum for his life — enough for himself and his Court ' to live on ' ; but the expenses of governing and defending the country, paying the Army and Xavy and Civil Service, they only voted from year to year. So since his time the kings have always been obliged to call a Parliament every year whether they wanted to or not— or else to leave army and navy without pay. Further, as William's wars cost a great deal of money, Loans and and as Parliament shrank from laying on the heavy J^e 4/0 J tional taxes which were necessary to pay for them, it allowed Debt, the Crown to borrow money from any one who would lend it at interest. The interest had to be paid yearly 184 Anne till the loan was repaid. Few such loans ever w r ere repaid, and so a perpetual debt was created called the 1 National Debt ', which has now increased to an enor- mous amount. But people are always glad to lend money to the Crown, because they know they will get the interest on it paid quite punctually. As long as we pay the interest on this National Debt we are still paying for some of King William's wars and for those of all later sovereigns ; but we need not grumble, be- cause, if these great wars had not been fought, there would have been no British Colonies or Empire, and probably no independent Great Britain ; our country would have been a province of France. So let King William sleep in peace. Anne, Queen Anne's wars were going to be very successful her"" 14 ' indeed, though they continued till the last year of her character. ie ign. She herself was almost the stupidest woman in her dominions ; but she was a good and kindly soul, devoted to the Church of England, and had generally the sense to leave affairs of State to her ministers. She called herself a Tory, and her ministers called themselves Tories ; but they were going to fight a i Whig war \ By this I mean a war to maintain the Protestant kings in England, and to increase the trade and Empire of The Duke England. And so they really had to act as Whigs, borough. The hero of that war was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the greatest soldier England ever pro- duced. He was not only great in planning a campaign and in fighting a battle, but also in his care for his soldiers, their food, their clothing, their comfort and their pay. Also he was very clever at keeping the allies of Great Britain united. These allies — Dutch, Austrians and Germans, were very difficult to manage ; War of the Spanish Succession 185 for each thought mainly of their own interests, and quarrelled with the others continually. But Marl- The War borough thought of only one thing — how to beat the gpanish French, and very handsomely did he beat them. At Succes- Blenheim, 1704, Ramillies, 1706, Oudenarde, 1708, Mai- 1702-13. plaquet, 1709, he won victories as complete as those of Battles of Edward III and Henry V. And our redcoats were heim, &c. foremost in all these battles and won immortal glory. By 1710 we had swept the French out of Germany and Flanders, and were well on the road to Paris. Our navy had been equally successful ; we had beaten a The war great French fleet off Malaga in Spain, and had taken 1? J Gibraltar and the Isle of Minorca. In America our colonists, with little aid from home, had begun to bite away the frontier of the French colony of Canada. All looked like ending in a Treaty of Peace of great glory for Great Britain. But in Great Britain itself things were not going so Parties in well. i Politics ' had now become a sort of unpleasant 1>;ll ll7-oi. The w r ar had just begun again, and the late ministers Bad state had so obstinately refused to strengthen the army or JJ^tiy navy, that the King was forced to hire six thousand Germans to defend the coast of Kent against an expected invasion ! France had taken Minorca from us, and a very badly fitted out British fleet, under Admiral Byng, had failed to rescue it. The fault was the Ministers' who had neglected the Navy, but the nation was angry Avith the Admiral, and, to save trouble to the Ministry, Byng was tried and shot on his own ship. 1134 N 194 George II Pitt saves Great Britain. Our ally, Frederick of Prussia, 1756-62. The 4 Seven Years' War \ 1756-63. In America. Pitt changed all this very quickly. He called upon the nation outside Parliament, upon Tory and Whig alike ; and while he was War Minister, these evil party names seemed to have lost their meaning. The spirit of the nation, now united as it had never been since the days of Elizabeth, rose to his call. He terrified the quarrelsome House of Commons, until it voted him whatever he asked for in the way of men, money and ships ; he put the militia for home defence on a new footing ; he doubled the regular army, and enrolled whole regiments of those very Highlanders who, eleven or twelve years before, had been fighting against King George at home. He doubled the number of our ships of war. As our old ally, Austria, had gone over to the French, Pitt made a warm friend of the new German power, the King of Prussia ; and, instead of borrowing from Germany troops to defend Britain, he sent regiment after regiment of British troops to help Prussia in Germany against France and Austria. The war that began in 1756 was called the 6 Seven Years' War '. It was far more clearly a war for empire than any earlier one. * I will win America for us in Germany,' was what Pitt said ; and what he meant was that France, if thoroughly beaten in Germany, would be unable to spare troops to defend far-away Canada. But, being a thorough man, he also set about winning America in America itself. He even persuaded the disloyal colonists to help us to fight their battles for them, and he paid them to do so. His huge and victorious fleet prevented the French from sending any help to Canada. That colony did, indeed, defend itself down to 1760 with true French gallantry. But when, by an amazing piece of daring, our General Wolfe took French driven from India 195 Quebec, the end was not far off. Three British armies, Winning coming by different roads, gradually closed round the j^. 1 ^ a ' Canadian capital of Montreal, and in 1760 all was over, and North America was British from the Polar ice to Cape Florida ; the one little French settlement on the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, had lost all importance. In India there is a similar story of conquest to be The told. There, the native princes had, on the whole, driven 1 inclined to the French side. One of them — Surajah frojn Dowlah — took Calcutta in 1756, and allowed a number 1757-00. of English prisoners to be suffocated in a horrible dungeon called the 'Black Hole'. Clive, with about two thousand Sepoys and Englishmen, came up from Madras to avenge this. lie retook Calcutta, and won a victory, against odds of twenty-five to one, at Plassev in 1757. That victory extended the power of the East India Company far into Bengal. In the region of Madras our success Mas equally great ; and in 1761 we took Pondicherry, and swept the French out of all India. All the native princes at once went over to our side. What was it that gave us, a nation of less than eight The millions of men, these amazing successes over a nation j^£ refc 0 of at least twenty millions, more naturally warlike, power, quite as brave, and much cleverer than ourselves i It was mainly one thing, sea power. The nation that commands the sea by having the greatest number of ships and the best-trained sailors, will always beat its rivals in distant lands, simply because it commands the roads leading to those lands. If you look back to the beginnings of things you will see that it was Crom- well, it was Elizabeth, nay, it was Henry VIII and Henry VII, who, by their early and wise care for our N 2 196 George III Navy, won for us America and India. We might, and we usually did, neglect our Navy in time of peace ; but in time of war, it had got a mysterious habit of doubling itself, and of discovering great fighting sailors. In this war it had discovered three, Admiral Boscawen, who Battles of beat one great French fleet at Lagos, and Admiral and er ° n Rodney, avIio played the same game in the West Indies. Lagos, Perhaps the most daring of all was Sir Edward Hawke, who, as Mr. Newbolt sings, 6 came swooping from the West ' one wild November afternoon on to the French fleet off the rocky coast of Quiberon, and fought a night battle on a lee shore : — Down upon the quicksands, roaring out of sight, Fiercely beat the storm wind, darkly fell the night, But they took the foe for pilot and the cannon's glare for light, When Hawke came swooping from the West ! Death of Meanwhile old King George II had died in 1760; n6o rgeI1, an d grandson, George III, aged twenty-two, had George become king. And now, almost too late, the Spaniards 1820. came to the help of their French cousins. Pitt wanted to fly at them and smash them before they had time to declare war on us ; but neither the new King nor the Resigna- other ministers would agree to this ; and Pitt, in a fit Pitt °1761. °f an g er ? resigned his office. Yet even when Spain did War with declare war, at the opening of 1762, the spirit which 1762. ' Pitt had given to the fighting services carried all before it. We mopped up the remaining French West Indian Islands, and we took from the Spaniards their two richest colonies, Havana in the Isle of Cuba, and Manila in the far Eastern seas. But when Pitt retired, the union of King, Ministers, Accession of George III 197 Parliament and People, which had lasted for five out of the seven years of war, was at an end. George III George had his very valiant but obstinate mind set on only golvedto one thing, to raise the power of the Crown, and to get put down • • Wliicrs free from the government of the great Whig families. He meant to take as ministers whom he pleased. He knew that he could not keep such ministers in office if the House of Commons was always against them ; and so he set himself to bribe the members of that House. He would distribute offices, pensions and favours to its members, until he had made a 6 Royal ' party, which should oppose the 'Whig' party. This Royal party would then vote with the ministers whom the King would choose. It took George nearly ten years to do this ; but he had a good deal of success in the end. And the nation outside Parliament felt some sympathy Popu- for him ; for every one knew how these great Whig °* families had kept all the richest jobs of the kingdom in III ; his their own hands. George was also very popular with c racfcer ' the middle classes and the country gentlemen. In fact, he was a sort of Tory ; and this new Royal party became a sort of new Tory party. George was at least a thorough Briton, brave, homely, dogged, and virtuous in his private life ; but he was in such a hurry to carry out this political job, that he was quite ready to scuttle out of his glorious war, and desert his allies just as Anne's ministers had done in 1713. Yet, like the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, the Treaty Peace of of Paris of 1763 could not fail to bring solid advantages HS 81 to Great Britain. Though we gave back to Spain her rich colonies of Havana and Manila, and took from her only the useless American swamp, called Florida, we recovered Minorca. Though we gave back to France 198 George III all her great and rich West Indian Islands, we retained several of the smaller ones ; though we gave back to her her trading-stations in India, she had to promise never to fortify them again. And, finally, we kept our greatest conquest of all, Canada. CHAPTER XI THE AMERICAN REBELLION AND THE GREAT FRENCH WAR, 1760-1815 ; REIGN OF GEORGE III 'Twas not while England's sword unsheathed Put half a world to flight, Nor while their new-built cities breathed Secure behind her might ; Not while she poured from Pole to Line Treasure and ships and men — These worshippers at Freedom's shrine They did not quit her then ! Not till their foes were driven forth By England o'er the main — Not till the Frenchman from the North Had gone, with shattered Spain ; Not till the clean-swept ocean showed No hostile flag unrolled, Did they remember what they owed To Freedom — and were bold ! Soon after the peace of 1763, we began to perceive The one result of the conquest of Canada which few people had expected. Our American colonies, having no American French to fear any longer, wanted to be free from our 1775. control altogether. They utterly refused to pay a penny of the two hundred million pounds that the war had cost us ; and they equally refused to maintain a garrison of British soldiers. They intended to shake off all our restrictions on their trade, and to buy and sell in whatever market they could find. When our 200 George III What the English Whigs thought of it. War with America, 1775-82. The 1 United States of America 1776. Parliament proposed in 1764 to make them pay a small fraction of the cost of the late war, they called it ' oppression ', and prepared to rebel. 6 We are Whigs/ they said ; c Whigs always resist oppression. You English Whigs did so in 1688.' There were two results from this. In the first place the great Whig families were already sore at King George's attempts to take his ministers without consult- ing them. And, when they saw the King and his ministers set upon compelling the Americans to pay the tax, they began to denounce the very things of which they had formerly been the champions, namely, the Empire, the Army and the Navy. America was right, they said, to resist such ' oppression Even the great William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, said this. And so the whole meanings of the words i Whig ' and 1 Tory ' were completely changed. The Whig became a person who cared little for the Empire, and, occasionally, even supported the enemies of his country, just as the Tory of Anne's reign had done. And the Tories became, for a season, the true patriots, as the Whigs of Anne's reign had been. The second result was that we had to fight our Colonies, and that we failed to beat them. It was a hopeless business from the first. The distance was too great, the spaces of America were too vast for us to hold by force, even if we had won in battle. The quarrels in our Parliament were too fierce to allow of success. We had no great minister at home, and no great general in America. The colonists called a Congress at Philadelphia ; declared themselves to be independent ; and in 1776 took the name of the * United States of America '. Blood had already been shed War with America 201 when this happened. A real hero, patient, resourceful and brave, called George Washington, commanded the American army. We never sent enough troops ; we had not, in fact, enough troops to send. Though we often won battles, we suffered some very severe disasters. The Americans very soon sought French help, and They France was delighted at such a chance of avenging her . losses in the former war. The French fleet, though help, 177S. small, had been much improved since that war, and was able to draw away our ships from the coast of America to all quarters of the world. We were just Naval able to defend the rest of our Empire (except Minorca, p^JIL which we now lost again) ; but not to beat our colonists 1778-83. at the same time. Spain, and even our ally Holland, soon joined France ; and for a few months, we had the navies of all the world against us. So, when Lord Cornwallis, with seven thousand men, was obliged to surrender to a French and American force at Yorktown in 1781, Ave determined to withdraw from America ; after which, having our hands free, Ave finished the naval Avar victoriously in other quarters of the world. Rodney smashed a great French fleet in the West Indies ; and Lord Heathfield, at Gibraltar, beat off the siege of that rock, which had lasted for three years. By Peace of a Treaty signed in 1783 Ave acknowledged the In- ^ a -^" es dependence of America, gave back Florida and Minorca 1783. to Spain, and some small West Indian islands, as well as Senegal in West Africa, to France. These were serious losses ; yet France had been even harder hit by the Avar than Ave had been. She had hoped, in return for her help, to receive perpetual trading privileges Avith America ; but the Americans showed no more gratitude 202 George III to her than they had previously shown to us, and she received none. The snow lies thick on Valley Forge, The ice on the Delaware, But the poor dead soldiers of King George They neither know nor care — Not though the earliest primrose break On the sunny side of the lane, And scuffling rookeries awake Their England's spring again. They will not stir when the drifts are gone Or the ice melts out of the bay, And the men that served with Washington Lie all as still as they. They will not stir though the mayflower blows In the moist dark woods of pine, And every rock-strewn pasture shows Mullein and columbine. Each for his land, in a fair fight, Encountered, strove, and died, And the kindly earth that knows no spite Covers them side by side. She is too busy to think of war ; She has all the world to make gay, And, behold, the yearly flowers are Where they were in our fathers day ! Golden-rod by the pasture wall When the columbine is dead, And sumach leaves that turn, in fall, Red as the blood they shed. All this time there were fierce quarrels in Parliament, between Whigs and Tories, on many questions besides Parliamentary Reform 203 the war. Every act of Government, good or bad, was ment, torn to pieces and called 'infamous' by the Whigs, ' D some of whom sought for popularity by writing in the newspapers, and even by appealing to the passions of the London mob. That mob more than once broke loose and enjoyed some highly exciting riots, in suppress- ing which King George showed great personal courage. One of the cries raised at this time, both in and outside Cry for Parliament, was for a better representation of the of House people of Britain in the House of Commons. It was of Com- really a very reasonable cry, for the existing system mons * was absurd. By that system each county sent two members to The Parliament whatever its population. And in the j^roighs' counties only actual oximers of land could vote at elections. You might be enormously rich and have a long lease of an enormous estate ; but unless you owned land you had no vote. Then the boroughs, which also sent two members each, were still the same towns which had sent members to the Tudor Parliaments. From many of these towns all trade, riches and impor- tance had long departed, and some boroughs had hardly any inhabitants at all ! Side by side with these were great cities grown and growing up, which sent no members to Parliament. Xow, if the Tories had been wise, they would have taken up this question, and made a proper and moderate ' reform ' of the House of Commons. The Whigs, who called themselves ' champions of the people ', could hardly with decency have opposed it. But when William Pitt the younger, William son of the great Minister of the Seven Years' War, Pltt the . younger. took up the question in 1785, he could get very little support from his own party. So this question fell into 204 George III the hands of noisy agitators outside Parliament, who cried out for a 6 Radical Reform and got the name of i Radicals \ His first The ten years that followed the peace of 1783 were r"83-i80i y ears °f S rea ^ prosperity in Britain. The Americans continued to trade with us as before, though, of course, O ur we could no longer compel them to do so. Our Indian Indian Empire had been enormously increased since 1761 by iiimpire. 1 . J Clive and Warren Hastings, and by a long line of heroic soldiers and statesmen. The East India Company was now a sovereign power, and the greatest military power in India. Parliament had begun to take notice of it, not always favourable or wise notice, and passed laws to help it to govern its territories. The Crown now appointed a Governor-General, a council and judges for British India. One of the favourite tricks of the Whigs was to accuse the Company and its agents of cruelty, extortion and so on. The first Governor- General Warren Hastings was so accused, and though he was acquitted, his trial dragged on for many years. Discovery Still farther away the voyages of Captain Cook had Ha^774-egan in this way. The tion, 1789. French people had a series of real grievances against their clumsy, stupid, old-fashioned system of govern- ment by an 6 absolute 9 king ; and they demanded a parliamentary system and a ' limited ' monarchy like 208 George III our own. But at the first touch the whole fabric of old France fell to pieces. Kings, nobles, society itself were hurled down ; all in the name of some imaginary 4 natural rights ' of everybody to have an equal share in government. A Republic was set up ; King Louis XVI was put to death. A new kind of ' Gospel' was preached ; ' all men are equal ', ' all government is tyranny, all religion is a sham ', 6 down with everything and up with ourselves' ('ourselves' being the bloodthirsty mobs of Paris and other great cities). This precious Republic proceeded to offer its alliance to all the peoples of Europe who wished to abolish their kings and 6 recover their liberty '. It declared war on Austria and Prussia, and began by invading Belgium and threatening Holland, which had been our ally since 1688. Then, at the opening of 1793, Pitt felt bound to inter- fere. The nation was heartily at his back. Scenes of the utmost horror and cruelty had taken place in France, and the French people, once the most civilized in Europe, seemed to have gone mad. There were a few noisy politicians in Britain, both in and outside Parliament, who sympathized with the French, and cried out for 'Radical Reform' and a 'National Con- vention' of the whole British people ; but they were very few. The worst of them was the Whig orator, Charles Fox, who had rejoiced over every disaster of his country during the war against America. A good deal of wild nonsense was also written in some of the Whig newspapers. Daily newspapers began early in the eighteenth century ; but they were still expensive, and, as yet, few of the poorer classes could read, so the newspapers used to be passed from hand to hand, or read aloud in the public-house. On the State of Ireland 209 whole, the voice of the newspapers was thoroughly patriotic. But if there were few sympathizers with France in Ireland, • 1""8'^— 18(X) Britain, there were many in Ireland. Ireland still had real grievances, though during the last thirty years they had steadily been removed. She had shown little grati- tude for their removal, and many Irishmen had openly sympathized with the American rebellion. In 1782 her Parliament had been declared to be absolutely free from the control of the British Parliament, and there was therefore a real danger that Ireland might refuse to go to war to help Great Britain. The Catholics were still Catholics shut out from this Parliament ; but, excepting in Ulster, ST^fanST nearly all the poorer Irishmen were Catholics. Pitt, as inlreland. I told you, wanted to admit Catholics to both Parlia- ments ; but it was not the time to make such a great change, when Britain was in the middle of a dangerous war, and when the mass of the Irish peasants, poor, disloyal and ignorant, were quite ready to welcome a French invasion of Ireland. From 1795 there was Civil war almost a state of civil Avar between Irish Protestants ;ll \ d „. rebellion and Catholics ; and, in 1798, the latter openly rebelled, in Ire- England had very few troops to spare, and the rebellion j"^' took nearly a year to put down. French invasion was hourly expected, though only once a very few French troops were able to land. When the rebellion was over, The Pitt rightly decided that the best thing for both conn- ^ePwuL tries was to abolish the Irish Parliament, and to make ments, 1 soo one united Parliament for the two islands (1800). In this united Parliament Pitt intended to allow the Catho- lics to sit ; but King George foolishly and obstinately refused to agree, and so Pitt had to resign the office of Resigna- Prime Minister, which he had held for eighteen years. p?tt°i80i. 1134 o George III The war abroad. France intends to conquer Europe. English com- merce, 1793-1815. The Naval War 1793-7. And now for the ' great war For Britain it would necessarily be a sea war, and therefore a war for empire, trade and colonies. For France, as far as she could make it so, it would be a land war, since it was Europe that France wanted to conquer, not sea or colonies. At first, as I told you, she professed to be conquering other states for their own good, ' to liberate them from their tyrants/ and all that sort of nonsense. But most nations, even those that really were badly governed, soon found out that a French invasion was much worse than any amount of bad government by their own 6 tyrants'. So nation after nation rose and fought against France, either one by one or in great alliances of nations. All were beaten ; France was the greatest land power in the w r orld, and her soldiers the bravest, cleverest and fiercest fighters. All the nations in the world appealed to England to help them with the one thing which all knew she had got in heaps, money. We actually paid Dutchmen, Prussians, Austrians, Spaniards, Russians and even Turks to fight for their own interests against France. How could we afford to do this ? Simply because of the power of our navy, which in a few years became so great, that it was able to crush the commerce and to take the colonies of any nation that would not fight against France. Soon it was only in Britain that people could buy the goods of the far East and the far West, silk, coffee, tobacco, sugar, tea, spice. And at last only in Britain could they buy manufactured articles at all. Even the very Frenchmen who fought us had to buy the clothes and shoes they wore from English merchants ! This control of the world's trade did not come to us at once, and not without hard fighting. Pitt, as I told The Naval War 211 you, had neglected the army and navy. Our admirals were old, our generals were at first very stupid. We sent some troops to help the Dutch, and they were very badly beaten. Holland became a daughter-republic of France, and Belgium became a French province. The poor Dutch did not gain much by the exchange, for the British Navy simply took away all their colonies, notably Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, just as it was taking the French West Indian Islands. Nearer home our fleet did not do so well. The French Republic did not have so good a navy as the old French Monarchy had had ; but its sailors made up in gallantry what they lacked in skill and efficiency, and it was not until 1797 that we Avon a great naval battle in European waters. The Spaniards had been forced into the French alliance, Battle of and in that year Sir John Jervis and Captain Nelson ( ' a i )e Sl - J 1 Vincent, (soon to be Lord Nelson) utterly defeated a big French 17 ( J7. and Spanish fleet at Cape St. Vincent on the Spanish coast. It was just at this time that the greatest soldier that Napoleon ever lived came to lead the French — Napoleon Bona- v ^"£ parte. He appeared first as a victorious general in 1796 ; then as ' First Consul' (that is, President) of the French Republic, 1799; then in 1804 as 'Emperor of Becomes the French'. By this time France had given up all !';^ or idea of delivering peoples from 1 tyrants ', and simply French, meant to conquer all the world for her own benefit. Napoleon at once saw that this was impossible as long as Britain remained free and victorious at sea. To He means invade Britain, or to destroy in some other way the EnSSid? wealth and commerce of Britain, became his one desire. But to invade Britain while our fleet watched outside all French harbours, while it prevented French ships o 2 George III The Volun- teers, 1803-5. Battles of the Nile, 1798, and Copen- hagen, 1800. Peace of Amiens, 1802- 3. War again, 1803- 15. The critical year, 1805. from sailing out, and smashed them if they did, was not so easy. The mere fear of invasion was enough to set the hearts of all Britons beating. Volunteers flocked to arms from every parish in our island ; and by 1804 we had nearly half a million men in fighting trim in a popu- lation of little over eleven millions. If we were to keep the same proportion to-day, we ought to have nearly three millions of men under arms. How many have we got? But in truth Napoleons chances of invading us were not great. Nelson had broken his Mediterranean fleet to splinters at the battle of the Nile, 1798, and had also finished a Danish fleet (which had been got ready to help France) at the battle of Copenhagen in 1800. A few months of peace, 1802-3, followed the retire- ment of Pitt from the Government. But the war began again in 1803 ; Pitt came back in the next year, and governed Britain until his death at the beginning of 1806. The years 1803-4-5 were the most dangerous. Napoleon had got a great army at Boulogne (which is almost within sight of the shore of Kent, not three hours' sail, with a fair wind, from Folkestone), ready to be rowed across the Channel in large, flat-bottomed boats. But what was the use of that without a French fleet to protect the flat-bottoms ? If they had tried to get across unprotected, a single British warship could have pounded them into a red rice-pudding in a few minutes ; and so our real task was to watch the French harbours and prevent their ships of war getting out. The final struggle came in 1805. The French admiral, Villeneuve, managed to get out from Toulon ; drove off* the British force which was watching the Spanish ports, and so Battle of Trafalgar 213 freed the Spanish fleet. He then sailed across the Battle of Atlantic and back again, in the hope of drawing all q™^^ British ships away from the Channel. After a long 1805. chase Lord Nelson met him off the Spanish coast, and won the battle of Trafalgar in October, 1805. It was almost a dead calm all the morning as the English ships 214 George III French victories on the Con- tinent, 1805-9. Napoleon attacks Spain, 1808. crept slowly towards the enemy — they must have looked like moving thunder-clouds. Lord Nelson's famous signal, 'England expects that every man will do his duty / was spelled out in little flags from the mast of his great ship the Victory. And every man did. Almosfrthe whole French and Spanish fleets were there destroyed or taken prisoners. No such victory had been w r on at sea since the Greeks beat the Persians at Salamis nearly five hundred years before Christ. Nelson was killed in the battle ; but the plan of invasion was over and Napoleon never resumed it. The French Navy hardly recovered from this defeat before our own days. You can see the Victory still moored in Portsmouth harbour, and can go into the little dark cabin in which Nelson died, happy in spite of mortal pain, because he just lived long enough to hear of England's triumph. The remaining colonies of France and her allies were gradually conquered during the next ten years. But at first this seemed to help little towards freeing the conti- nent of Europe, which, by 1807, France had subdued right up to the Russian frontier. Prussia had been beaten to pieces in 1806 ; Austria, which, on the whole, had been the most steady of Napoleon's enemies, was beaten for the third time in 1809, and was half inclined to make an alliance with him ; but by that time Napo- leon had run his head against something which w r as going to destroy him. Much the worst governed, most ignorant, most back- ward nation in Europe, was Spain. Napoleon thought it would be easy to put one of his brothers on the throne of Spain, and one of his generals on the throne of Portugal. Spain was, besides, the oldest ally of France ; but when Napoleon tried this plan in 1808, she became The Peninsular War 215 at once his fiercest enemy. She did not want to be ' reformed ' or better governed ; she wanted to keep her stupid, cruel Catholic kings and priests. Both Spain British and Portugal at once cried out for British help ; and, as *e°t P to the road by sea was in our hands, we began at once to Portugal, 1808 send help in money, and very soon in men. With the men we sent a man. 1 In war ', said Napoleon himself, ' it is not so much men as a man that counts/ Sir Sir Arthur Wellesley, one day to be known as the Duke of fveJies- Wellington, was perhaps not so great a soldier as Marl- ley- borough or as Napoleon. His previous experience of war had been mostly in India, where, under his brother, the Marquis Wellesley, who was Governor-General of India, he had won, in 1803 and 1804, great victories over enormous swarms of native cavalry called Mahrat- tas. But he was the most patient and skilful leader we had had since Marlborough, and he had complete confi- dence in himself and in his power to beat the French. He landed in Portugal in 1808, won a great battle at The Vimeiro, and early in the next year had driven the ^JrWar' French back into Spain. He then made Lisbon (the battle of capital city of Portugal) his ' base of operations \ The igog^ British fleet was able continually to bring supplies, money, food and men to Lisbon. Wellington fortified the approach to the city very strongly, and was able to repel an enormous French army, which came to attack him there in 1810. He followed it up into Spain as it Welling- retreated ; and year by year advanced farther into a^ronae Spain, winning battle after battle. But each winter he M10-11- fell back upon his base. The fierce patriotism of the Spanish peasants, who killed every Frenchman they met, helped us enormously, though in the battles their armies were of little use to us, and their generals worse than 216 George III Battle of Vittoria, 1813. Napoleon attacks Russia, 1812; his defeat. Europe awake to resist France, 1813-14. Lord Castle- reagh, 1812-15. Napoleon abdicates, \814. useless. At last in 1813 came a year in which Welling- ton did not need to retreat into Portugal. He won the great battle of Vittoria in June, and then drove the French back in headlong flight over the Pyrenees. Early in 1814 our men were fighting their way into that French province which, five hundred years before, we used to call 6 English Aquitaine And meanwhile in 1812, at the other end of Europe, Napoleon himself had suffered an even worse disaster. He had invaded Russia, a country whose people were as ignorant, as backward and as patriotic as the Spaniards. The greatest French army that was ever put on foot had starved and been frozen among the snows of Russia. As its broken remnants retreated through Germany, the Prussians, whom the French had cruelly ill-treated since 1806, jumped upon them, and called on all other Germans to do the same. The Austrians joined in. England poured money into the hands of all who would fight the French. Since Pitts death until 1812 there had only been one great British minister, George Canning ; but he had resigned his office in 1809. Now in 1812 Lord Castlereagh, a minister almost as great as Pitt, came to the front, and it was his Government that really finished the war. Napoleon could, indeed, collect a new army in 1813, but it was never so good as the one he had lost in Russia ; and it suffered a fearful defeat at Leipzig. After a most gallant defence of the French roads which lead to Paris, Napoleon was compelled by his own generals to resign the throne, and Louis XVIII, the heir of the old French monarchy, was recalled to France as king in 1814. Napoleon was allowed to retire to the little Italian island of Elba, but he did not stay there long. In order to arrange a general peace, the great Battle of Waterloo 217 powers of Europe sent ambassadors to Vienna. But Congress while they were doing this, in March, 1815, Napoleon isis 1 ^ 11 ^ escaped from Elba, landed in France, and called on the ™ tur ? of x 7 . Napoleon, rrench people to follow him once more. Is early all March, Frenchmen were tired of war ; but, like other brave 18I °* • War of fellows, they loved glory, and Napoleon's name spelt 1815. glory for them. They forgot his tyranny and his folly, and they proclaimed him Emperor yet again. Europe was utterly taken by surprise, and nearly all its armies had been dismissed. But the Prussians and English were more ready for fighting than the Russians and Austrians, and so within three months they were able to collect over two hundred thousand men for the defence of Belgium. Napoleon's new army was nearly three hundred thousand strong ; but he only took about half of it to attack Belgium early in the summer of 1815. The Duke of Wellington and the Prussian general, Battles of Marshal Blucher, were waiting for him in a long line to Bras and the south of Brussels. On June 16th, Napoleon's left ^" y j G wing fought a fearful drawn battle with Wellington isi5. at Quatre Bras, and his right wing just managed to beat Blucher at Ligny. On the 17th there was no fighting ; but the Prussians had fallen back northwards, and had lost their close touch with the English. So, Battle of on the 18th, Wellington with 69,000 British, Hanoverians J^ T }™' and Brunswickers had to bear, for seven hours, the 1^15. attacks of 75,000 Frenchmen at Waterloo. Wellington knew that Blucher would come and help him as fast as he could ; but the roads were heavy from rain, and Blucher had been fearfully hard hit two days before. But at last he came, though his men did not get into action till about 4.30 p.m., and did not produce much effect on the French for two hours more. We had then 218 George III been defending our position since 11 a.m. But soon after seven we began to advance, and the night closed with a headlong flight of the French Emperor and his army on the road to Paris. Peace at This battle of Waterloo ended the Great War ; the last, 1815. | ag £ war ^ ^ ug j 10 p 0 ^ we shall ever have to fight against the French, who are now our best friends. Long ago Pitt had said, £ England has saved herself by her exertions, she will save Europe by her example.' In 1815 she had indeed done both. The gains When the final treaty was made in that year, our Britafn^t S a ^ ns * n actual territory were small. We gave back the the Peace, greater part of the colonies we had taken from France and her allies, keeping only the West Indian island of Tobago, the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch colonies of Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and the little Dutch province of Guiana in South America. In the Mediterranean, we kept the island of Malta, but gave back Minorca to Spain. Our real reward, then, came in the commerce of the world, which during the war had passed wholly into our hands. The French Wars. The boats of Newhaven and Folkestone and Dover To Dieppe and Boulogne and to Calais cross over ; And in each of those runs there is not a square yard Where the English and French haven't fought and fought hard ! If the ships that were sunk could be floated once more, They'd stretch like a raft from the shore to the shore, And we'd see, as we crossed, every pattern and plan Of ship that was built since sea-fighting began. The French Wars 219 There'd be biremes and brigantines, cutters and sloops, Cogs, carracks and galleons with gay gilded poops — Hoys, caravels, ketches, corvettes and the rest, As thick as regattas, from Ramsgate to Brest. But the galleys of Caesar, the squadrons of Sluys, And Nelson's crack frigates are hid from our eyes, Where the high Seventy-fours of Napoleons days Lie down with Deal luggers and French chasse-marees. They'll answer no signal — they rest on the ooze With their honey-combed guns and their skeleton crews — And racing above them, through sunshine or irale, The Cross-Channel packets come in with the Mail Then the poor sea-sick passengers, English and French, Must open their trunks on the Custom-house bench, While the officers rummage for smuggled cigars And nobody thinks of our blood-thirsty wars ! CHAPTER XII GEORGE III TO GEORGE V, 1815-1911 The last ninety- six years. Progress towards Demo- cracy. Five sovereigns in these The period of English History which remains for me to tell you about will bring us down to our own days. It is a much more difficult story to understand than any that I have already told you. It is also much more difficult to write about. For people hold such diverse opinions about the events of the present day and of the last hundred years. These opinions are very often the result of their up- bringing ; ' we have heard with our ears and our fathers have told us.' Men are still alive who were born before Waterloo was fought. As you get older you will form opinions about these events for yourselves ; and so it is desirable for me, in this last chapter, rather to state what did take place than to try to guide your opinions. And it will be easier to do this if you, my readers, will allow me to treat the period as all one, rather than narrate the events year by year. On the whole, the progress of Great Britain during the past ninety-six years has been towards what is called 6 Democracy a long word meaning 6 Government by the people \ This form of government may be said to be still ' on its trial Let us hope that it will prove a great success. It will only do so if all classes of the people realize that they have duties as well as rights, and if each class realizes that every other class has rights as well as itself. Five sovereigns have reigned and died during these ninety-six years, and the sixth is now upon the throne. George IV, William IV, Victoria 221 George III had long been blind and insane when he ninety- died in 1820, and it was the eldest of his seven sons George^' who became King in that year as George IV. This ^ 1820 ~ man had been acting as Prince Regent for his insane father since 1810. He was naturally clever and had some kind of selfish good nature, but he was mean, cowardly, and an incredible liar. Some famous lies he told so often that at last he got to believe them him- self ; for instance, he was fond of saying that he had been present at the battle of Waterloo, whereas he had never seen a shot fired in his life. He was succeeded in 1830 by a stupid honest old William gentleman, his brother, William IV, who, as a young i830-7. man, had been nicknamed ' Silly Billy *. There was no harm in King William, but there was little active good, and so the influence of the Crown, both upon private and public life, was very slight when he died in 1837. His heir was his niece Victoria, a girl of eighteen of whom little was then known, but of whose goodness and high spirit stories were already being told. 6 Who will be king, Mamma/ she said, when she was Victoria twelve years old, 'when Uncle William dies?' 'You is37— ioji"; will be queen, my dear.' 1 Then I must be a very good little girl now/ she replied. In this wonderful lady the her char- spirit of all her greatest ancestors seemed to have tlcter * revived, the burning English patriotism of the Tudors, the Scottish heart of the Stuarts, the courage of Edward III, the wisdom of Edward I, Henry II and Alfred. And all were softened and beautified by womanly love and tenderness. No sovereign ever so unweariedly set herself to win the love of her people, to be the servant of her people. And her people re- warded her with a love that she had more than deserved. 222 Edward VII, George V Her reign of sixty-three years will always be remem- bered in history by her name ; it was the 1 Victorian Age '. Her husband was her own cousin, the wise and good Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a small Edward State in central Germany. She was succeeded by her VII 1901— io. ' eldest son, Edward VII, whose too short reign closed only after this book was begun. All the Empire is still in mourning for him, the wise and prudent statesman, the peace-lover, the peacemaker of Europe, the noble English gentleman. George V, The result of the reigns of Victoria and Edward VII 1910 has been to lift the Crown again to a position which it had not occupied in men's minds since the death of Elizabeth. It is not with our lips only that we are loyal to King George V, it is with our hearts also. The crown is not only the 'golden circle' that binds the Empire together ; it is the greatest thing in that Empire. The Bells and the Queen, 1911. i Gay go up and gay go down To ring the Bells of London Town.' When London Town 's asleep in bed You'll hear the Bells ring overhead, In excelsis gloria / Ringing for Victoria, Ringing for their mighty mistress — ten years dead ! Here is more gain than Gloriana guessed, Than Gloriana guessed or Indies bring — Than golden Indies bring. A Queen confessed, A Queen confessed that crowned her people King. Her people King, and crowned all Kings above, Above all Kings have crowned their Queen their love — Have crowned their love their Queen, their Queen their love ! The Bells and the Queen 223 Denying her, we do ourselves deny, Disowning her are we ourselves disowned. Mirror was she of our fidelity, And handmaid of our destiny enthroned ; The very marrow of Youth's dream, and still Yoke-mate of wisest Age that worked her will ! Our fathers had declared to us her praise. Her praise the years had proven past all speech, And past all speech our loyal hearts always, Always our hearts lay open, each to each ; Therefore men gave their treasure and their blood To this one woman — for she understood ! Four o' the clod ! Now all the world is still. Oh, London Bells, to all the world declare The Secret of the Empire — read who will ! The Glory of the People — touch who dan ! The Bells : Power that has reached itself all kingly powers, St. Margarets : By love overpowered — St. Martin's : By love o'erpowered — St. Clement Danes : By love o'erpowered, The greater power confers ! The Bells : For we were hers, as she, as she was ours, Bow Bells : And she was ours — St Patd's : And she was ours — Westminster : And she was ours, As we, even we, were hers ! The Bells : As we were hers ! 224 The British Parliament The British Parlia- ment, 1815-1911. The House of Lords. The House of Commons. Mistakes of the Tories, 1815-32. The next greatest thing, probably every one will admit, is the Parliament of the United Kingdom, During these ninety-six years that Parliament has undergone considerable changes. The House of Lords has been very much increased in numbers, but has not been altogether strengthened by this increase. It still represents, as it has always represented, the wealthy people of the kingdom. When the only wealth was in land, the House of Lords consisted almost wholly of great landowners. Now that the traders have more wealth than the landowners, rich manufacturers and other great employers of labour have been made peers, though they also have nearly always bought land to support their dignity. The House of Commons has undergone a still greater change. I told you in the last chapter what serious need there was in the eighteenth century for a i Reform ' of that House, and how, during the twenty-two years of the Great War, that and all other reforms had to be put off. A very small knot of Whigs had never ceased to urge that reform even during the war. The foremost of these was Charles, Earl Grey. I have had to scold the Whigs a good deal during the reign of George III, and I am afraid I shall now have to scold the Tories for their attitude during the first fifteen of these ninety-six years. They held power right up to 1830, and it was obviously their duty to take up this and many other questions in a serious and ' modern' spirit. They consisted of two sections, the enlightened Tories, like Mr. Canning and Sir Robert Peel, who had sat at the feet of William Pitt ; and the stick-in-the-mud Tories, like Lord Sidmouth and Lord Eldon, who were opposed to any change in any depart- The Reform Bill, 1832 225 ment of life. I think it was strange that the former as well as the latter section of Tories were opposed to reform of the House of Commons. The result was that The it fell wholly to the Whigs to force it on ; and the ^ Whigs, being weak in Parliament, did not scruple to the^House appeal to the passions of uneducated people outside m ons, Parliament. They encouraged 'monster meetings', 181 °- 32 - * monster petitions ' and such like. There were riots in favour of Reform. At one riot at Manchester in 1819 the soldiers had to be called in, and several people were shot. Very likely these were only innocent specta- tors and not rioters at all ; those who get up riots are usually careful to keep out of the way when their sup- pression begins. Stiff laws were passed in Parliament to prevent such riotous meetings for the future. From 1820 to 1830 the question of Reform was never The IX, 'form for a moment allowed to slumber, and at last in 1832 Bin i83& the Duke of Wellington, who, though opposed to Reform himself, was always moderate and sensible, advised the Tories to give way, and a ' Reform Bill p was at last got through both Houses, an eminently sensible and moderate Bill. The number of members in the House was not increased, but the absurd old boroughs with few or no inhabitants lost their right of sending members, and the great growing towns got that right. All persons in the counties with a moderate amount of property, and all persons in the towns who had a house worth £10 a year, got votes for the election of members. The educated people of Great Britain and Ireland were very fairly represented in the House of Commons be- tween 1832 and 1867. But this did not stop agitation outside. A group of Fresh men called ' Chartists ' began to cry out for something a 6 ltatl0n i 1134 p 226 The British Parliament the Chartists 1832-48. Later Reform Bills, 1867 and 1885. The Irish members. more, for the representation of the uneducated as well. They demanded that every grown-up man should have a vote, that members of Parliament should be paid, that a new Parliament should be elected every year, and so on. These men tried to get up riots in favour of their demands ; in 1848 it looked as if these riots were going to be serious. But the thing fizzled out somehow. Twice since that time new 6 Reform Bills' have been passed, one by each party in the State, by the Tories in 1867 (now called c Conservatives') and by the Whigs in 1885 (now called 6 Liberals' or Radicals'). On each occasion the vote was given to poorer and less educated classes of the people, and on the latter occa- sion the distinction between counties and boroughs was practically abolished ; every district in Britain, whether of town or country, is now represented in the House of Commons pretty nearly according to the number of people living in it. Unfortunately one exception to this principle has been allowed. With the exception of those from Ulster, the Irish members of the House of Commons since the Union of 1800 have never been loyal to our system of government, but have continually cried out for a separate Parliament in Dublin. The first great agitator for this purpose was the orator Daniel O'Connell, in the reigns of George IV and William IV and at the beginning of Victoria's reign. He has been followed by many others, notably by Mr. Parnell, and the agitation is still continu- ing. In order to hush this cry, British statesmen have allowed Ireland to have many more members of the House of Commons than the population of that island warrants. More than one statesman, especially the famous Mr. Gladstone in 1885 and 1892, has thought of con- Ministers of the Crown 227 ciliating the Irish, by granting them, under the name of ' Home Rule the separate Parliament which they demand. But most people fear that a separate Irish Parliament would be followed by a complete separa- tion between Ireland and Great Britain, bv the estab- lishment of an Irish Republic, and by the oppression of the w r ell-to-do and intelligent classes of Irishmen, who are certainly loyal to the British Crown. All British politicians, on both sides, have, during the last seventy years, made haste to remove every real, and, indeed, every imaginary grievance of the Irish people, though they have earned no gratitude by doing so. As regards the Ministers of the Crown, whom we The may consider next after Parliament as an 'institution' ^f 1 "} 1 ^^ 3 of the country, it has been well understood, ever since down. George Ills death, that the King ' reigns Hut does not govern \ He takes as his ministers men who are agreeable to the majority in the existing House of Commons. In quiet times there is a new House of Commons about every five or six years and there must be one every seven years. There is, therefore, very likely to be a change of ministry every time there is a new House. Before the first Reform Bill there were only about 300,000 electors ; there are now over 7,000,000. But, oddly enough, the larger the number of electors, the more frequent are the changes of public opinion. In former days Whigs or Tories might well hold office through three or four successive Parliaments ; now it is very rare that either party holds it through two. The opinion of the electors has a curious habit of swinging right round in a very short space of time ; and, so, great changes in our rulers are of frequent occurrence. 228 The British Parliament The Cabinet. The King's advice. Depart- ments of the Govern- ment. These rulers or ministers we call the ' Cabinet ' ; and in the Cabinet you will always find a 6 Prime Minister ', generally called the 6 First Lord of the Treasury', at the head of the whole thing ; it is with him that the real responsibility lies. He explains to the King what he and his friends think ought to be done ; and, when he is a wise man, he generally finds that the King's advice on the matter is very well worth listening to. If the King does not approve of what his Prime Minis- ter suggests he can always dismiss him ; but it is of no use his doing this unless he can appoint some one else whom the existing House of Commons will follow, or unless he is prepared to dismiss the existing House of Commons and call a new Parliament. The King will do this last if he feels sure that the minister and the existing House are leading the nation astray or are leading it where it doesn't want to go. Any very ' revolutionary ' proposal, such as the abolition of either House of Parliament, the surrender of India or the Colonies, the reduction of the Navy very far below the strength necessary to defend the Empire, might quite conceivably obtain for a moment a majority in the House of Commons, and, though it is unlikely, it is just possible that the House of Lords might be terrified into accepting it. But then it would be the duty of the King to interfere, and to dismiss, at all costs, the ministry which was rash enough to make such a pro- posal. Besides the Prime Minister, the most important mem- bers of the Cabinet are the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who manages money matters, the Secretaries of State for War, for Foreign Affairs, for the Colonies, for Home Affairs, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, who Distinguished Prime Ministers 229 manages the Navy. Each is responsible for some par- ticular part of the task of government ; but all must agree upon all important questions, and the minister who doesn't a#ree with the rest of the Cabinet must resign. I shall not trouble you with a list of the ministries The most distill that have held office since 1815 ; two things only you guished should remember : first, that ministries are more short- F T r . imt i JVlinisters lived now than they used to be ; and secondly, that they since 1815 are more dominated by the Prime Minister for the time being than they used to be. The most distinguished Prime Ministers have been Mr. Canning (died 1827), Lord Grey (died 1845), Sir Robert Peel (died 1850), Lord Palmerston (died 1865), Lord Beaconsfield, better known as Mr. Disraeli (died 1881), Mr. Gladstone (died 1898), and Lord Salisbury (died 1903). Each in his own way has contributed something to the greatness of England ; but each, with the exception of Sir Robert Peel, has had a weak side. Speaking generally, those ministers avIio have paid most attention to finances and to internal reform have been less successful in upholding the honour of England abroad and in strengthening the army and navy. With regard to the law and the law courts, it is not The Law such a very different England in which we live from Courte « what it was in the days of our great-grandfathers. The House of Lords is still the highest 6 Court of Appeal * in Great Britain and Ireland ; but to hear appeals, only those peers sit who are specially appointed to be judges for that purpose. There is a Court of Appeal below it and a High Court of Justice below that. The judges are still appointed by the King, and still 1 go on circuit ' four times a year to the several districts of England to 230 Reform of the Criminal Law try criminal Cases, as they have done since the fourteenth century. There are also small courts called ' county courts', for small lawsuits, in some sixty different dis- tricts in England. Scotland has kept, since the Union of 1707, her own system of law and law courts entirely different from ours, but from them also you can appeal to the House of Lords. Ireland has the same system of law as ours, but has her own law courts with appeal to the House of Lords. Each colony in the Empire has its own law courts and judges, and appeals from them and from the Indian law courts come not to the House of Lords, but to a few great judges in the Privy Council. The one really great law reform has been that of the criminal law. In 1815 over one hundred and sixty crimes were still supposed to be punished with death. There are now only two, high treason and wilful murder, and, unfortunately, people who commit high treason are now too often let off. In 1815 a thief might be hanged if he stole five shillings' worth of goods from a shop! He hardly ever was hanged, because he was tried by a jury and a judge, and juries preferred to declare him ' not guilty ' rather than allow him to be hanged ; so, as a rule, he got off altogether. Even of those who were convicted and condemned to be hanged, not one-tenth were hanged. And this was because public opinion was more merciful than the law. From 1788 onwards criminals who had just escaped hanging used to be 6 transported ' to Australia, and this went on till 1840. The other settlers in that continent naturally objected very much to this ; and we now send our criminals to penal servitude ' in large prisons at Dart- moor and Portland instead. No words can be too hard to use against the Tory ministers like Lord Eldon, Removal of Disabilities 231 who, year after year, from 1815 to 1S30 obstructed the reform of the criminal laws as much as they could ; most of the reforms in them were due to the Whigs or to the more enlightened Tory Sir Robert Peel. To Tory Governments belongs the credit of beginning Admis- to remove the laws which made a man's admission to |)^ of Parliament depend upon his religious opinions. Both ^f.^j^^g Lord Castlereagh, who died in 1822, and Mr. Canning, andJews who died in 1827, had always been anxious to admit J? e ?Jf Catholics to Parliament ; but it was just after Canning's 1828-53. death that, first the Protestant Dissenters in l s2s, and then the Catholics in 1829, were admitted. Jews had to wait till 1853, and those who openly declared their disbelief in any religion at all till 1884. The support of the State to the Protestant Church in Ireland, which dated from the time of Elizabeth, was taken away in 18G8. The zeal of the Church of England was, from Church 1829 onwards, quickened by men like Newman and i^o