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Number 4 Aug., 1883 
 
 Topics of the Time 
 
 Historical Studies 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK 600 YEARS AGO. 
 By the Rev. Dr. Augustus Jessopp. The Nine- 
 teenth Century ........ I 
 
 SIENA. By Samuel James Cappar. The Contem- 
 porary Review ....... 54 
 
 A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTURY. By Frederic Harrison. The 
 Nineteenth Century . * . . . -99 
 
 FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. By Oscar 
 
 Browning. The Fortnightly Review . . .141 
 
 GENERAL CHANZY. Temple Bar . . . .179 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK SIX HUN- 
 DRED YEARS AGO. 
 
 A VILLAGE LECTURE. 
 By the Rev. Dr. JESSOPP. 
 
 [In the autumn of 1878, while on a visit 
 at Rougham Hall, Norfolk, the seat of Mr. 
 Charles North, my host drew my attention to 
 some boxes of manuscripts, which he told me 
 nobody knew any thing about, but which I was 
 at liberty to ransack to my heart's content. I 
 at once dived into one of the boxes, and then 
 spent half the night in examining some of its 
 treasures. The chest is one of many, constitu- 
 ting in their entirety a complete apparatus for 
 the history of the parish of Rougham from the 
 time of Henry the Third to the present day — 
 so complete that it would be difficult to find in 
 England a collection of documents to compare 
 with it. 
 
 The whole parish contains no more than 2,627 
 acres, of which about thirty acres were not 
 included in the estate slowly piled up by the 
 Yelvertons, and purchased by Roger North in 
 1690. Yet the charters and evidences of vari- 
 
2 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 ous kinds, which were handed over with this 
 small property dating before the sixteenth cent- 
 ury, count by thousands. The smaller strips 
 of parchment or vellum — for the most part con- 
 veyances of land, and having seals attached — 
 have been roughly bound together in volumes, 
 each containing about one hundred documents, 
 and arranged with some regard to chronology, 
 the undated ones being collected into a volume 
 by themselves. I think it almost certain that 
 the arranging of the early charters in their rude 
 covers was carried out before 1500 A.D., and I 
 have a suspicion that they were grouped to- 
 gether by Sir William Yelverton, "the cursed 
 Norfolk Justice " of the Paston Letters, who 
 inherited the estate from his mother, in the first 
 half of the fifteenth century. 
 
 When Roger North purchased the property 
 the ancient evidences were handed over to him 
 as a matter of course ; and there are many 
 notes in his handwriting showing that he found 
 the collection in its present condition, and that 
 he had bestowed much attention upon it. 
 Blomefield seems to have been aware of the 
 existence of the Rougham muniments, but I 
 think he never saw them : and for one hun- 
 dred and fifty years, at least, they had lain 
 forgotton, until they came under my notice. 
 Of this large mass of documents I have copied 
 or abstracted scarcely more than five hundred, 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. % 
 
 and I have not yet got beyond the year 1355. 
 The court rolls, the bailiff's accounts, and early 
 leases I have hardly looked at. 
 
 The following lecture — slight as a village 
 lecture must needs be and ought to be — gives 
 some of the results of my examination of the 
 first series of the Rougham charters. The lect- 
 ure was delivered in the Public Reading-room 
 of the village of Tittleshall, a parish adjoining 
 Rougham, and was listened to with apparent 
 interest and great attention by an audience of 
 farmers, village tradesmen, mechanics, and labor- 
 ers. I was careful to avoid naming any place 
 which my audience were not likely to know 
 well ; and there is hardly a parish mentioned 
 which is five miles from the lecture-room. 
 
 When speaking of " six hundred years," I 
 gave myself roughly a limit of thirty years 
 before and after 1280, and I have rarely gone 
 beyond that limit on one side or the other. 
 
 They who are acquainted with Mr. Rogers' 
 " History of Prices " will observe that I have 
 ventured to put forward views on more points 
 than one, very different from those which he 
 advocates. 
 
 Of the value of Mr. Rogers' compilation, and 
 of the statistics which he has tabulated with so 
 much labor, there can be but one opinion. It 
 is when we come to draw our inferences from 
 such returns as these, and bring to bear upon 
 
4 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 them the side-lights which further evidence 
 affords, that differences of opinion arise among 
 inquirers. I really know nothing about the 
 Midlands in the thirteenth century ; I am dis- 
 gracefully ignorant of the social condition of 
 the South and West ; but the early history of 
 East Anglia, and especially of Norfolk, has for 
 long possessed a fascination for me ; and though 
 I am slow to arrive at conclusions, and have a 
 deep distrust of those historians who for every 
 pair of facts construct a trinity of theories, I 
 feel sure of my ground on some matters, 
 because I have done my best to use all such 
 evidence as has come in my way.] 
 
 When I was asked to address you here this 
 evening, I resolved that I would try to give 
 you some notion of the kind of life which your 
 fathers led in this parish a long, long time ago ; 
 but on reflection I found that I could not tell 
 you very much that I was sure of about your 
 parish of Tittleshall, though I could tell you 
 something that is new to you about a parish 
 that joins your own ; and because what was 
 going on among your close neighbors at any 
 one time would be in the main pretty much 
 what would be going on among your fore- 
 fathers, in bringing before you the kind of life 
 which people led in the adjoining parish of 
 Rougham six hundred years ago, I should be 
 describing precisely the life which people were 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 5 
 
 leading here in this parish — people, remember, 
 whose blood is throbbing in the veins of some 
 of you present ; for from that dust that lies in 
 your church-yard yonder I make no doubt that 
 some of you have sprung — you whom I am 
 speaking to now. 
 
 Six hundred years ago ! Yes, it is a long 
 time. Not a man of you can throw his 
 thoughts back to so great a lapse of time. 
 I do not expect it of you ; but nevertheless I am 
 going to try to give you a picture of a Norfolk- 
 village, and that village which you all know 
 better than I do, such as it was six hundred 
 years ago. 
 
 In those days an ancestor of our gracious 
 Queen, who now wears the crown of England, 
 was king ; and the Prince of Wales, whom 
 many of you must have seen in Norfolk, was 
 named Edward, after this same king. In 
 those days there were the churches standing 
 generally where they stand now. In those 
 days, too, the main roads ran pretty much 
 where they now run ; and there was the same 
 sun overhead, and there were clouds, and winds, 
 and floods, and storms, and sunshine ; but if 
 you, any of you, could be taken up, and dropped 
 down in Tittleshall or Rougham such as they 
 were six hundred years ago, you would feel 
 almost as strange as if you had been suddenly 
 transported to the other end of the world. 
 
6 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 The only object that you would at all 
 recognize would be the parish church. That 
 stands where it did, and where it has stood, 
 perhaps, for a thousand years or more ; but, at 
 the time we are now concerned with, it looked 
 somewhat different from what it looks now. 
 It had a tower, but that tower was plainer and 
 lower than the present one. The windows, too, 
 were very different ; they were smaller and 
 narrower ; I think it probable that in some of 
 them there was stained glass ; and it is almost 
 certain that the walls were covered with paint- 
 ings representing scenes from the Bible, and 
 possibly some stories from the lives of the 
 saints, which everybody in those days was 
 familiar with. There was no pulpit and no 
 reading-desk. When the parson preached, he 
 preached from the steps of the altar. The altar 
 itself was much more ornamented than now it 
 is. Upon the altar there were always some 
 large wax tapers which were lit on great occa- 
 sions; and over the altar there hung a small 
 lamp which was kept alight night and day. It 
 was the parson's first duty to look to it in the 
 morning, and his last to trim it at night. 
 
 The parish church was too small for the 
 population of Rougham, and the consequence 
 was that it had been found necessary to erect 
 what we should now call a chapel of ease — 
 served, I suppose, by an assistant priest, who 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 7 
 
 would be called a chaplain. I cannot tell you 
 where this chapel stood, but it had a burial 
 ground of its own. 1 
 
 There was, I think, only one road deserving 
 of the name, which passed through Rougham. 
 It ran almost directly north and south from 
 Coxford Abbey to Castle Acre Priory. The 
 village of Rougham in those days was in its 
 general plan not very unlike the present village 
 — that is to say, the church standing where it 
 does ; next to the church-yard was the parson- 
 age with a croft attached ; and next to that a 
 row of houses inhabited by the principal people 
 of the place, whose names I could give you and 
 the order of their dwellings, if it were worth 
 while. Each of these houses had some out- 
 buildings — cow-sheds, barns, etc., and a small 
 croft fenced round. Opposite these houses was 
 another row facing west, as the others faced 
 east ; but these latter houses were apparently 
 occupied by the poorer inhabitants — the smith, 
 the carpenter, and the general shopkeeper, who 
 called himself, and was called by others, the 
 merchant. There was one house which appears 
 to have stood apart from the rest, and near 
 Wesenham Heath. It probably was encircled 
 
 1 Compare the remarkable regulations of Bishop Woodloke 
 of Winchester (a. D. 1308), illustrative of this. Wilkins' 
 "Cone.," vol. ii., p. 396. By these constitutions every chapel, 
 two miles from the mother church, was bound to have its own 
 burying ground. 
 
8 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 by a moat, and approached by a drawbridge, 
 the bridge being drawn up at sunset. It was 
 called the Lyng House, and had been probably 
 built two or three generations back, and now 
 was occupied by a person of some consideration 
 — viz., Thomas Middleton, Archdeacon of Suf- 
 folk, and brother of William Middleton, then 
 Bishop of Norwich. This house, too, was on 
 the east side of the road, and the road leading 
 up to it had a name, and was called the Hut- 
 gong. In front of the house was something 
 like a small park of five and a half acres enclosed ; 
 and next that again, to the south, four acres of 
 plowed land ; and behind that again — i. e., be- 
 tween it and the village — there was the open 
 heath. Altogether this property consisted of a 
 house and twenty-six acres. Archdeacon Mid- 
 dleton bought it on the 6th of October, 1283, 
 and he bought it in conjunction with his brother 
 Elias, who was soon after made senechal or stew- 
 ard of Lynn for his other brother, the bishop. 
 The two brothers probably used this as their 
 country-house, for both of them had their chief 
 occupation elsewhere ; but when the bishop 
 died, in 1288, and they became not quite the 
 important people they had been before, they 
 sold the Lyng House to another important 
 person, of whom we shall hear more by and by. 
 The Lyng House, however, was not the great 
 house of Rougham. I am inclined to think that 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. g 
 
 stood not far from the spot where Rougham 
 Hall now stands. It was in those days called 
 the Manor House or the Manor. 
 
 A manor six hundred years ago meant some- 
 thing very different from a manor now. The 
 lord was a petty king, having his subjects very 
 much under his thumb, but his subjects differed 
 greatly in rank and status. In the first place, 
 there were those who were called the free 
 tenants. The free tenants were they who lived 
 in houses of their own and cultivated land of 
 their own, and who made only an annual money 
 payment to the lord of the manor as an acknow- 
 ledgment of his lordship. The payment was 
 trifling, amounting to some few pence an acre, 
 at the most, and a shilling or so, as the case 
 might be, for the house. This was called the 
 Rent, but it is a very great mistake indeed to 
 represent this as the same thing which we mean 
 by rent nowadays. It really was almost identi- 
 cal with what we now call, in the case of house 
 property, " ground-rent," and bore no propor- 
 tion to the value of the produce that might be 
 raised from the soil which the tenant held. The 
 free tenant was neither a yearly tenant, nor a 
 leaseholder ; his holding was, to all intents and 
 purposes, his own — subject, of course, to the 
 payment of the ground-rent — but if he wanted 
 
IO HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 to sell out his holding, the lord of the manor 
 enacted a payment for the privilege ; if he died, 
 his heir had to pay for being admitted to his in- 
 heritance, and if he died without heirs, the 
 property went back to the lord of the manor. 
 So much for the free tenants. Besides these 
 were the villeins or villani y or natives, as they 
 were called. The villeins were tillers of the 
 soil, who held land under the lord, and who, 
 besides paying a small money ground-rent, were 
 obliged to perform certain arduous services to 
 the lord, such as to plow the lord's land for so 
 many days in the year, to carry his corn in the 
 harvest, to provide a cart on occasion, etc. Of 
 course these burdens pressed very heavily at 
 times, and the services of the villeins were vexa- 
 tious and irritating under a hard and unscru- 
 pulous lord. But there were other serious in- 
 conveniences about the condition of the villein 
 or native. Qnce a villein, always a villein. A 
 man or woman born in villeinage could never 
 shake it off. Nay, they might not even go 
 away from the manor in which they were born, 
 and they might not marry without the lord's 
 license, and for that license they always had to 
 pay. Let a villein be never so shrewd or enter- 
 prising or thrifty, there was no hope for him to 
 change his state, except by the special grace of 
 the lord of the manor. 1 Yes ! there was one 
 
 1 I do not take account of those who ran away to the cor- 
 porate towns. I suspect that there were many more cases of 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. II 
 
 means whereby he could be set free, and that 
 was if he could get a bishop to ordain him. 
 The fact of a man being ordained at once made 
 him a free man, and a knowledge of this fact 
 must have served as a very strong inducement 
 to young people to avail themselves of all the 
 helps in their power to obtain something like an 
 education, and so to qualify themselves for 
 admission to the clerical order, and to the rank 
 of free men. 
 
 At Rougham there was a certain Ralph Red, 
 who was one of these villeins under the lord of 
 the manor, a certain William le Butler. Ralph 
 Red had a son Ralph, who, I suppose, was an 
 intelligent youth, and made the most of his 
 brains. He managed to get ordained, about 
 six hundred years ago, and he became a chaplain, 
 perhaps to that very chapel of ease I mentioned 
 before. His father, however, was still a villein, 
 liable to all the villein services, and belonging 
 to the manor and the lord, he and all his off- 
 spring. Young Ralph did not like it ; and at 
 last, getting the money together somehow, he 
 bought his father's freedom, and, observe, with 
 
 this than some writers allow. It was sometimes a serious in- 
 convenience to the lords of manors near such towns as Nor- 
 wich or Lynn. A notable example may be found in the 
 " Abbrev. Placit." p. 316(6°. E. ii. Easter term). It seems that 
 no less than eighteen villeins of the Manor of Cossey were 
 named in a mandate to the Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, who 
 were to be taken and reduced to villeinage, and their goods 
 seized. Six of them pleaded they were citizens of Norwich — 
 the city being about four miles from Cossey. 
 
12 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 his freedom the freedom of all his father's 
 children too, and the price he paid was twenty 
 merks. Of the younger Ralph, who bought his 
 father's freedom, I know little more ; but, less 
 than one hundred and fifty years after the elder 
 man received his liberty, a lineal descendant of 
 his became lord of the manor of Rougham ; 
 and, though he had no son to carry on his name, 
 he had a daughter who married a learned judge, 
 Sir William Yelverton, Knight of the Bath, 
 whose monument you may still see at Rougham 
 Church, and from whom were descended the 
 Yelvertons, Earls of Sussex, and the present 
 Lord Avonmore, who is a scion of the same 
 stock. 
 
 When Ralph Red bought his father's freedom 
 of William le Butler, William gave him an 
 acknowledgment for the money, and a written 
 certificate of the transaction, but he did not 
 sign his name. In those days nobody signed 
 his name, not because he could not write 
 (for I suspect that just as large a proportion of 
 people in England could write well six hundred 
 years ago, as could have done so forty years 
 ago), but because it was not the fashion to sign 
 one's name. Instead of doing that, everybody 
 who was a free man, and a man of substance, in 
 executing any legal instrument, affixed his seal, 
 and that stood for his signature. People always 
 carried their seals about with them in a purse or 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 1 3 
 
 small bag, and it was no uncommon thing for a 
 pickpocket to cut off this bag and run away 
 with the seal, and thus put the owner to very 
 serious inconvenience. This was what actually 
 did happen once to William le Butler's father- 
 in-law. He was a certain Sir Richard Bellhouse, 
 and he lived at North Tuddenham, near Dere- 
 ham. Sir Richard was High Sheriff for the 
 counties of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1291, and 
 his duties brought him into court on the 25th 
 of January of that year, before one of the 
 Judges of Westminster. I suppose the court 
 was crowded, and in the crowd some rogue cut 
 off Sir Richard's purse, and made off with his 
 seal. I never heard that he got it back again. 
 
 And now I must return to the point from 
 which I wandered, when I began to speak of the 
 free tenants and the villeins. William le But- 
 ler, who sold old Ralph Red to his own son, the 
 young Ralph, was himself sprung from a family 
 who had held the manor of Rougham for about 
 a century. His father was Sir Richard le But- 
 ler, who died about 1280, leaving behind him one 
 son, our friend William, and three daughters. 
 Unfortunately, William le Butler survived his 
 father only a very short time, and left no child 
 to succeed him. The result was that the in- 
 heritance of the old knight was divided among 
 his daughters, and what had been hitherto a 
 single lordship became three lordships, and 
 
14 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 each of the parceners looking very jealously- 
 after his own interest, and striving to make the 
 most of his powers and rights. Though each 
 of the husbands of Sir Richard le Butler's 
 daughters was a man of substance and influence, 
 yet, when the manor was divided, no one of 
 them was any thing like so great a person as 
 the old Sir Richard. In those days, as in our 
 own, there were much richer men in the country 
 than the country gentlemen, and in Rougham 
 at this time there were two very prosperous 
 men who were competing with one another as 
 to which should buy up most land in the parish, 
 and be the great man of the place. The one of 
 these was a gentleman called Peter the Roman, 
 and the other, Thomas the Lucky. They were 
 both the sons of Rougham people, and it will 
 be necessary to pursue the history of each of 
 them to make you understand how things went 
 in those " good old times." 
 
 First let me deal with Peter the Roman. He 
 was the son of a Rougham lady named Isabella, 
 by an Italian gentleman named Iacomo de 
 Ferentino, or, if you like to translate it into 
 English, James of Ferentinum. 
 
 How James of Ferentinum got to Rougham, 
 and captured one of the Rougham heiresses we 
 shall never know for certain. But we do know 
 that in the days of King Henry, who was the 
 father of King Edward, there was a very large 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 1 5 
 
 incursion of Italian clergy into England, and 
 that the Pope of Rome got preferment of all 
 kinds for them. In fact, in King Henry's days, 
 the Pope had immense power in England, and 
 it looked for awhile as if every valuable piece of 
 preferment in the kingdom would be bestowed 
 upon the Italians who did not know a word of 
 English, and who often never came near their 
 livings at all. One of these Italian gentleman, 
 whose name was John de Ferentino, was very 
 near being made Bishop of Norwich ; he was 
 Archdeacon of Norwich, but though the Pope 
 tried to make him bishop, he happily did not 
 succeed in forcing him into the see at that time, 
 and John of Ferentinum had to content himself 
 with his archdeaconry and one or two other 
 preferments. Our friend at Rougham may have 
 been, and probably was, some kinsman of the 
 Archdeacon, and it is just possible that Arch- 
 deacon Middleton, who, you remember, bought 
 the Lyng House, may have had, as his predeces- 
 sor in it, another Archdeacon, this John de 
 Ferentino, whose nephew or brother, James, 
 married Miss Isabella de Rucham, and settled 
 down among his wife's kindred. Be that as it 
 may, James de Ferentino had two sons, Peter 
 and Richard, and it appears that their father, 
 not content with such education as Oxford or 
 Cambridge could afford — though at this time 
 Oxford was one of the most renowned universi- 
 
1 6 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 ties in Europe — sent his sons to Rome, having 
 an eye to their future advancement ; for, in 
 King Henry's days, a young man that had 
 friends at Rome was much more likely to get 
 on in the world than he who had only friends in 
 the King's Court, and he who wished to push 
 his interests in the Church must look to the 
 Pope, and not to the King of England, as his 
 main support. 
 
 When young Peter came back to Rougham, 
 I dare say he brought back with him some new 
 airs and graces from Italy, and I dare say the 
 new fashions made people open their eyes. And 
 they gave the young fellow the name he is 
 known by in future, and to the day of his death 
 people called him Peter Romayn, or Peter the 
 Roman. But Peter came back a changed man 
 in more ways than one. He came back a cleric. 
 We in England now recognize only three orders 
 of clergy, — bishops, priests, and deacons. But 
 six hundred years ago it was very different. In 
 those days a man might be two or three degrees 
 below a deacon, and yet be counted a cleric and 
 belonging to the clergy ; and, even though Peter 
 Romayn may not have been a priest or a dea- 
 con when he came back to Rougham, he was 
 certainly in holy orders, and as such he was a 
 privileged person in many ways, but a very un- 
 privileged person in one way ; he might never 
 marry. If a young fellow who had once been 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 1 7 
 
 admitted a member of the clerical body took 
 unto himself a wife, he was, to all intents and 
 purposes, a ruined man. 
 
 But when laws are pitted against human nat- 
 ure, they may be forced upon people by the 
 strong hand of power, but they are sure to be 
 evaded, where they are not broken legally ; and 
 this law forbidding clergymen to marry was 
 evaded in many ways. Clergymen took to 
 themselves wives, and had families. Again and 
 again their consciences justified them in their 
 course, whatever the Canon Law might forbid 
 or denounce. They married on the sly, if that 
 may be called marriage which neither the 
 Church nor the State recognized as a binding 
 contract, and which was ratified by no formality 
 or ceremony, civil or religious : but public 
 opinion was lenient ; and where a clergyman 
 was living otherwise a blameless life, his people 
 did not think the worse of him for having a 
 wife and children, however much the Canon Law 
 and certain bigoted people might give the wife 
 a bad name. And so it came to pass that Peter 
 Romayn of Rougham, cleric though he was, 
 lost his heart one fine day to a young lady at 
 Rougham, and marry he would. The young 
 lady's name was Matilda. Her father, though 
 born at Rougham, appears to have gone away 
 from there when very young, and made money 
 somehow at Leicester. He had married a Nor- 
 
1 8 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 folk lady, one Agatha of Cringleford ; and he 
 seems to have died, leaving his widow and 
 daughter fairly provided for ; and they lived in 
 a house at Rougham, which I daresay Richard 
 of Leicester had bought. I have no doubt that 
 young Peter Romayn was a young gentleman of 
 means, and it is clear that Matilda was a very 
 desirable bride. But Peter could lit marry! 
 How was it to be managed ? I think it almost 
 certain that no religious ceremony was per- 
 formed, but I have no doubt that the two 
 plighted their troth either to each, and that 
 somehow they did become man and wife, if not 
 in the eyes of the Canon Law, yet by the sanc- 
 tion of a higher law to which the consciences of 
 honorable men and women appeal, against all the 
 immoral enactments of human legislation. 
 
 Among the charters at Rougham, I find 
 eighteen or twenty which were executed by 
 Peter Romayn and Matilda. In no one of 
 them is she called his wife ; in all of them it is 
 stipulated that the property shall descend to 
 whomsoever they shall leave it, and in only one 
 instance, and there I believe by a mistake of 
 the scribe, is their any mention of their lawful 
 heirs. They buy land and sell it, sometimes 
 separately, more often conjointly, but in all 
 cases, the interests of both are kept in view ; the 
 charters are witnessed by the principal' people 
 in the place, including Sir Richard Butler him- 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 1 9 
 
 self, more than once ; and in one of the latter 
 charters, Peter Romayn, as if to provide against 
 the contingency of his own death, makes over 
 all his property in Rougham, without reserve, 
 to Matilda, and consitutes her the mistress of it 
 all. 1 Some year or two after this, Matilda exe- 
 cutes her last conveyance, and executes it alone. 
 She sells her whole interest in Rougham — the 
 house in which she lives and all that it contains 
 — lands and ground-rents, and every thing else 
 for money down, and we hear of her no more. 
 It is a curious fact that Peter Romayn was not 
 the only clergyman in Rougham whom we 
 know to have been married. 
 
 I said that the two prosperous men in Rough- 
 am, six hundred years ago, were Peter Romayn 
 and Thomas the Lucky, or, as his name appears 
 in the Latin Charters, Thomas Felix. When 
 Archdeacon Middleton gave up living at Rough- 
 am, Thomas Felix bought his estate, called 
 the Lyng House ; and shortly after he bought 
 another estate, which, in fact, \v*as a manor of 
 its own, and comprehended thirteen free tenants 
 and five villeins ; and, as though this were not 
 enough, on the 24th of September, 1292, he 
 took a lease for another manor in Rougham for 
 six years, of one of the daughters of Sir Richard 
 
 1 By the constitutions of Bishop Woodloke, any legacies 
 left by a clergyman to his " concubine " were to be handed 
 over to the bishop's official, and distributed to the poor. — Wil- 
 kins' " Cone." vol. ii, p. 296 b. 
 
20 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 le Butler, whose husband, I suppose, wanted to 
 go elsewhere. Before the lease expired, he 
 died, leaving behind him a widow named Sara 
 and three little daughters, the eldest of whom 
 cannot have been more than eight or nine years 
 old. This was in the year 1294. Sara, the 
 widow, was for the time a rich woman, and she 
 made up her mind never to marry again, and 
 she kept her resolve. When her eldest daugh- 
 ter, Alice, came to the mature age of fifteen or 
 sixteen, a young man named John of Thyrsford 
 wooed and won her. Mistress Alice was by no 
 means a portionless damsel, and Mr. John 
 seems himself to have been a man of substance. 
 How long they were married I know not ; but 
 it could not have been more than a year or two, 
 for less than five years after Mr. Felix's death, 
 a great event happened, which produced very 
 momentous effects upon Rougham and its in- 
 habitants, in more ways than one. Up to this 
 time there had been a rector at Rougham, and 
 apparently a good rectory-house and some acres 
 of glebe land — how many I cannot say. But 
 the canons of Westacre Priory cast their eyes 
 upon the rectory of Rougham, and they made 
 up their minds they would have it. I dare not 
 stop to explain how the job was managed — that 
 would lead me a great deal too far — but it was 
 managed, and accordingly, a year or two after 
 the marriage of little Alice, they got possession 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 21 
 
 of all the tithes and the glebe, and the good 
 rectory-house at Rougham, and they left the 
 parson of the parishwith a smaller house on the 
 other side of the road, and not contiguous to 
 the church, an allowance of two quarters of 
 wheat and two quarters of barley a year, and 
 certain small dues which might suffice to keep 
 body and soul together and little more. And 
 here let me observe, in passing, that there is no 
 greater delusion than that of people who believe 
 that the monks were the friends of the parsons. 
 Whatever else they may have been, at their 
 best, or at their worst, the monks were always 
 the great robbers of the country parsons, and 
 never lost an opportunity of pillaging them. 
 But on the subject of the monasteries and their 
 influence, I dare not speak now ; possibly an- 
 other opportunity may occur for considering 
 that subject. 
 
 John of Thyrsford had not been married 
 more than a year or two when he had enough 
 of it. Whether at the time of his marriage he 
 was already a cleric, I cannot tell, but I know 
 that on the ioth of October, 1301, he was a 
 priest, and that on that day he was instituted to 
 the vicarage of Rougham, having been already 
 divorced from poor little Alice. As for Alice — 
 if I understand the case, she never could marry, 
 however much she may have wished it ; she had 
 no children to comfort her ; she became by and 
 
22 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 by the great lady of Rougham, and there she 
 lived on for nearly fifty years. Her husband, 
 the vicar, lived on too — on what terms of inti- 
 macy I am unable to say. The vicar died some 
 ten years before the lady. When old age was 
 creeping on her she made over all her houses 
 and lands in Rougham to feoffees, and I have a 
 suspicion that she went into a nunnery, and 
 there died. 
 
 In dealing with the two cases of Peter Ro- 
 mayn and John of Thyrsford, I have used the 
 term cleric more than once. These two men 
 were, at the end of their career at any rate, 
 what we now understand by clergymen ; but 
 there were hosts of men six hundred years ago 
 in Norfolk who were clerics, and yet who were 
 by no means what we now understand by cler- 
 gymen. The clerics of six hundred years ago 
 comprehended all those whom we now call the 
 professional classes ; all, i. e., who lived by their 
 brains, as distinct from those who lived by trade 
 or the labor of their hands. Six hundred years 
 ago it may be said that there were two kinds of 
 law in England ; the one was the law of the 
 land, the other was the law of the Church. The 
 law of the land was hideously cruel and merci- 
 less, and the gallows and the pillory, never far 
 from any man's door, were seldom allowed to 
 remain long out of use. The ghastly frequency 
 of the punishment by death tended to make 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 2$ 
 
 people savage and bloodthirsty. 1 It tended, 
 too, to make men absolutely reckless of conse- 
 quences when once their passions were roused. 
 "As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb," was 
 a saying that had a grim truth in it. When a 
 violent ruffian knew that if he robbed his host 
 in the night he would be sure to be hung for it, 
 and if he killed him he could be no more than 
 hung, he had nothing to gain by letting him 
 live, and nothing to lose if he cut his throat. 
 Where another knew that, by tampering with 
 the coin of the realm he was sure to go to the 
 gallows for it, he might as well make a good 
 fight before he was taken, and murder any one 
 who stood in the way of his escape. Hanging 
 went on at a paGe which we cannot conceive, 
 for in those days the criminal law of the land 
 was not, as it is now, a strangely devised ma- 
 chinery for protecting the wrong-doer, but it 
 was an awful and tremendous power for slaying 
 all who were dangerous to the persons or the 
 property of the community. The law of the 
 Church, on the other hand, was much more 
 lenient. To hurry a man to death with his sins 
 and crimes fresh upon him, to slaughter men 
 wholesale for acts that could not be regarded as 
 enormously wicked, shocked such as had learned 
 
 1 In 1293 a case is recorded of three men, one of them a 
 goldsmith, who had their right hands chopped off in the middle 
 of the street in London. — " Chron. of Edward I. and Edward 
 IT.," vol. i. p. 102. Ed. Stubbs. Rolls series. 
 
24 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 that the Gospel taught such virtues as mercy 
 and long-suffering, and gave men hopes of for- 
 giveness, on repentance. The Church set itself 
 against the atrocious mangling, and branding, 
 and hanging that was being dealt out blindly, 
 hastily, and indiscriminately, to every kind of 
 transgressor ; and inasmuch as the Church law 
 and the law of the land, six hundred years ago, 
 were often in conflict, the Church law acted to 
 a great extent as a check upon the shocking 
 ferocity of the criminal code. And this is how 
 the check was exercised. A man who was a 
 cleric was only half amenable to the law of the 
 land. He was a citizen of the realm, and a sub- 
 ject of the king, but he was more ; he owed 
 allegiance to the Church, and claimed the 
 Church's protection also. Accordingly, when- 
 ever a cleric got into trouble, and there was only 
 too good cause to believe that if he were brought 
 to his trial he would have a short shrift and no 
 favor, scant justice and the inevitable gallows 
 within twenty-four hours at the longest, he pro- 
 claimed himself a cleric, and demanded the 
 protection of the Church, and was forthwith 
 handed over to the custody of the ordinary, or 
 bishop. The process was a clumsy one, and 
 led, of course, to great abuses, but it had a good 
 side. As a natural and inevitable consequence 
 of such a privilege accorded to a class, there 
 was a very strong inducement to become a mem- 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 2$ 
 
 ber of that class, and as the Church made it 
 easy for any fairly educated man to be admitted, 
 at any rate to the lower orders of the ministry, 
 any one who preferred a professional career, or 
 desired to give himself up to a life of study, en- 
 rolled himself among the clerics, and was hence- 
 forth reckoned as belonging to the clergy. 
 
 The country swarmed with these clerics. Only 
 a small proportion of them ever became minis- 
 ters of religion ; they were lawyers, or even 
 lawyers' clerks ; they were secretaries ; some 
 few were quacks with nostrums ; and these all 
 were just as much clerics as the chaplains, who 
 occupied pretty much the same position as our 
 curates do now — clergymen, strictly so called, 
 who were on the lookout for employment, and 
 who earned a very precarious livelihood — or the 
 rectors and vicars who were the beneficed clergy, 
 and who were the parsons of parishes, occupying 
 almost exactly the same position that they do 
 at this moment, and who were almost exactly 
 in the same social position as they are now. 
 Six hundred years ago there were at least seven 
 of these clerics in Rougham, all living in the 
 place at the same time, besides John of Thyrs- 
 ford, the vicar. If there were seven of these 
 clerical, gentlemen whom I happen to have met 
 with in my examination of the Rougham Char- 
 ters, there must have been others who were not 
 people of sufficient note to witness the execu- 
 
26 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 tion of important legal instruments, nor with 
 the means to buy land or houses in the parish. 
 It can hardly be putting the number too high 
 if we allow that there must have been at least 
 ten or a dozen clerics of one sort or another in 
 Rougham six hundred years ago. How did 
 they all get a livelihood ? is a question not easy 
 to answer ; but there were many ways of pick- 
 ing up a livelihood by these gentlemen. To 
 begin with, they could take an engagement as 
 tutor in a gentleman's family ; or they could 
 keep a small school ; or earn a trifle by drawing 
 up conveyances, or by keeping the accounts of 
 the lord of the manor. In some cases they 
 acted as private chaplains, getting their victuals 
 for their remuneration ; and sometimes they 
 were merely loafing about, and living upon their 
 friends, and taking the place of the country 
 parson, if he were sick or past work. 
 
 But besides the clerics and the chaplains and 
 the rector or vicar, there was another class, the 
 members of which just at this time were play- 
 ing a very important part indeed in the religious 
 life of the people, and not in the religious life 
 alone ; these were the Friars. If the monks 
 looked down upon the parsons, and stole their 
 endowments from them whenever they could, 
 and if in return the parsons hated the monks 
 and regarded them with profound suspicion and 
 jealousy, both parsons and monks were united 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 2J 
 
 in their common dislike of the Friars. Six hun- 
 dred years ago the Friars. had been established 
 in England about sixty years, and they were 
 now by far the most influential Religionists in 
 the country. It will not be far from the truth, 
 and will give you the best notion of the real 
 state of the case that I can offer, if I say that 
 the Friars were the Primitive Methodists of six 
 hundred years ago. The Friars gave out that 
 their mission was to bring back Primitive Chris- 
 tianity, and to reform the Church by Primitive 
 Christian methods ; they were not the first people 
 who have proclaimed themselves the reformers 
 of their age, — not the first nor by any means the 
 last. The Friars, when they began their work 
 in England, were literally beggars ; they went 
 from place to place, preaching Christ, the sinner's 
 Saviour and the poor man's Friend ; but they 
 preached almost exclusively in the large towns 
 — in Yarmouth, in Lynn, in Norwich. In the 
 towns, far more than in the country, the monks 
 had mercilessly fleeced the clergy ; the town 
 clergy, as a rule, were needy, hungry, and dis- 
 pirited ; and because they were so, the poorer 
 inhabitants of the towns were dreadfully neg- 
 lected by the clergy, and were fast slipping 
 back into mere heathenism. The Friars went 
 among the miserable townsmen in their filthy 
 reeking dens and cellars, visited them, minis- 
 tered to them, preached to them, but they 
 
28 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 would take no money from them ; they would 
 not even touch it with the tips of their fingers. 
 As to accepting houses and lands by way of 
 endowment, they lifted up their voices against 
 the whole system of endowments, and declared 
 it to be hateful and antichristian. They tried 
 to carry out to the letter our Lord's directions 
 to His disciples, when He sent them out two 
 and two without silver, or gold, or brass in their 
 purses, without shoes or staves, and with a 
 single garment ; they lived on what people chose 
 to give them, food and shelter from day to day. 
 They were the earnest and enthusiastic apostles 
 of the voluntary system; and, for the three hun- 
 dred years that they were tolerated in England, 
 they were much more true to their great princi- 
 ple than has been generally supposed ; six hun- 
 dred years ago they were by far the most 
 influential and powerful evangelists in England 
 — in fact, they were almost the only evangelists. 
 The Friars, though always stationed in the 
 towns, and by this time occupying large estab- 
 lishments which were built for them in Lynn, 
 Yarmouth, Norwich, and elsewhere, were always 
 acting the part of itinerant preachers, and trav- 
 elled their circuits on foot, supported by alms. 
 Sometimes the parson lent them the church, 
 sometimes they held a camp-meeting in spite of 
 him, and just as often as not they left behind 
 them a feeling of great soreness, irritation, and 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 2g 
 
 discontent ; but six hundred years ago the 
 preaching of the Friars was an immense and in- 
 calculable blessing to the country, and if it had 
 not been for the wonderful reformation wrought 
 by their activity and burning enthusiasm, it is 
 difficult to see what we should have come to, or 
 what corruption might have prevailed in Church 
 and State. 
 
 When the Friars came into a village, and it 
 was known that they were going to preach, you 
 may be sure that the whole population would 
 turn out to listen. Sermons in those days in 
 the country were very rarely delivered. As I 
 have said, there were no pulpits in the churches 
 then. A parson might hold a benefice for fifty 
 years, and never once have written or composed 
 a sermon. A preaching parson, one who regu- 
 larly exhorted his people or expounded to them 
 the Scriptures, would have been a wonder in- 
 deed, and thus the coming of the Friars, and the 
 revival of pulpit oratory, was all the more wel- 
 come, because the people had not become 
 wearied by the too frequent iteration of truths 
 which may be repeated so frequently as to lose 
 their vital force. A sermon was an event in 
 those days, and the preacher with any real gifts 
 of oratory was looked upon as a prophet sent 
 by God. 
 
 * # ■* * * * 
 
 Six hundred years ago no parish in Norfolk 
 
30 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 had more than a part of its land under tillage. 
 As a rule, the town or village, with its houses, 
 great and small, consisted of a long street, the 
 church and parsonage being situated about the 
 middle of the parish. Not far off stood the 
 manor-house, with its hall where the manor 
 courts were held, and its farm-buildings, dove- 
 cote, and usually its mill for grinding the corn 
 of the tenants. No tenant of the manor might 
 take his corn to be ground anywhere except at 
 the lord's mill ; and it is easy to see what a 
 grievance this would be felt to be at times, and 
 how the lord of the manor, if he were needy, 
 unscrupulous, or extortionate, might grind the 
 faces of the poor, while he ground their corn. 
 Behind most of the houses in the village might 
 be seen a croft or paddock, an orchard or a 
 small garden. But the contents of the gardens 
 were very different from the vegetables we see 
 now ; there were, perhaps, a few cabbages, 
 onions, parsnips, or carrots, and apparently 
 some kind of beet or turnip. The potato had 
 never been heard of. As for the houses them- 
 selves, they were squalid enough, for the most 
 part. The manor-house was often built of 
 stone, when stone was to be had, or when, as in 
 Norfolk, no stone was to be had, then of flint, 
 as in so many of our church towers. Some- 
 times, too, the manor-house was built in great 
 part of timber. The poorer houses were dirty 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 3 1 
 
 hovels, run up " anyhow," sometimes covered 
 with turf, sometimes with thatch. None of 
 them had chimneys. Six hundred years ago 
 houses with chimneys were at least as rare as 
 houses heated by hot-water pipes are now. 
 Moreover, there were no brick houses. It is a 
 curious fact that the art of making brick seems 
 to have been lost in England for some hundreds 
 of years. The laborer's dwelling had no win- 
 dows ; the hole in the roof which let out the 
 smoke rendered windows unnecessary, and, even 
 in the houses of the well-to-do, glass windows 
 were rare. In many cases oiled linen cloth 
 served to admit a feeble semblance of light, and 
 to keep out the rain. The laborer's fire was in 
 the middle of his house ; he and his wife and 
 children huddled round it, sometimes grovelling 
 in the ashes ; and going to bed meant flinging 
 themselves down upon the straw, which served 
 them as mattress and feather-bed, exactly as it 
 does to the present day in the gypsy's tent in 
 our by-ways. The laborer's only light by night 
 was the smouldering fire. Why should he burn 
 a rush-light when there was nothing to look at ? 
 And reading was an accomplishment which as 
 few laboring men were masters of as now are 
 masters of the art of painting a picture. As to 
 the food of the majority, it was of the coarsest. 
 The fathers of many a man and woman in every 
 village in Norfolk can remember the time when 
 
32 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 the laborer looked upon wheat-bread as a rare 
 delicacy ; and those legacies which were left by 
 kindly people a century or two ago, providing 
 for the weekly distribution of so many white 
 loaves to the poor, tell us of a time when the 
 poor man's loaf was as dark as mud, and as 
 tough as his shoe-leather. In the winter-time 
 things went very hard indeed with all classes. 
 There was no lack of fuel, for the brakes and 
 waste afforded turf which all might cut, and 
 kindling which all had a right to carry away ; 
 but the poor horses and sheep and cattle were 
 half starved for at least four months in the year, 
 and one and all were much smaller than they 
 are now. I doubt whether people ever fatted 
 their hogs as we do. When the corn was reaped, 
 the swine were turned into the stubble and 
 roamed about the underwood ; and when they 
 had increased their weight by the feast of roots 
 and mast and acorns, they were slaughtered and 
 salted for the winter fare, only so many being 
 kept alive as might not prove burdensome to 
 the scanty resources of the people. 1 Salting 
 down the animal for the winter consumption 
 was a very serious expense. All the salt used 
 was procured by evaporation in pans near the 
 
 1 I take this statement from Mr. Rogers' " History of Prices," 
 but I am not sure that he has taken sufficiently into account 
 the reserve of fodder which the bracken and even the gorse 
 would afford. In some parts of Cornwall and Devon to this 
 day, animals are kept throughout the winter wholly upon this 
 food. 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 33 
 
 sea-side, and a couple of bushels of salt often 
 cost as much as a sheep. This must have com- 
 pelled the people to spare the salt as much as 
 possible, and it must have been only too common 
 to find the bacon more than rancid, and the ham 
 alive again with maggots. If the salt was dear 
 and scarce, sugar was unknown except to the 
 very rich. The poor man had little to sweeten 
 his lot. The bees gave him honey ; and long 
 after the time I am dealing with, people left not 
 only their hives to their children by will, but 
 actually bequeathed a summer flight of bees to 
 their friends ; while the hive was claimed by 
 one, the next swarm would become the prop- 
 erty of another. As for the drink, it was almost 
 exclusively water, beer, and cider. 1 Any one 
 who pleased might brew beer without tax or 
 license, and anybody who was at all before the 
 world did brew his own beer according to his 
 own taste. But in those days the beer was very 
 different stuff from that which you are familiar 
 with. To begin with, people did not use hops. 
 Hops were not put into beer till long after the 
 time we are concerned with. I dare say they 
 flavored their beer with hoarhound and other 
 herbs, but they did not understand those tricks 
 which brewers are said to practise nowadays for 
 making the beer " heady," and sticky, and poi- 
 
 1 On a court roll of the manor of Whissonsete, of the date 
 22d July, 1355, I find William Wate fined " iiij botell cideri 
 quia fecit dampnum in bladis domini." 
 
34 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 sonous. I am not prepared to say the beer was 
 better, or that you would have liked it , but I 
 am pretty sure that in those days it was easier 
 to get pure beer in a country village than it is 
 now, and if a man chose to drink bad beer 
 he had only himself to thank for it. There 
 was no such monopoly as there is now. I 
 am inclined to think that there were a very 
 great many more people who sold beer in 
 the country parishes than sell it now, and I am 
 sorry to say that the beer-sellers in those days 
 had the reputation of being rather a bad lot. 1 
 It is quite certain that they were very often in 
 trouble, and of all the offences punished by fine 
 at the manor courts none is more common than 
 that of selling beer in false measures. Tobacco 
 was quite unknown ; it was first brought into 
 England about three hundred years after the 
 days we are dealing with. When a man once 
 sat himself down with his pot, he had nothing 
 to do but drink. He had no pipe to take off 
 
 1 The presentments of the beer-sellers seem to point to the 
 existence of something like a licensing system among the lords 
 of manors. I know not how otherwise to explain the frequen- 
 cy of the fines laid upon the whole class. Thus in a court leet 
 of the manor of Hockham, held the 20th of October, 1377, no 
 less than fourteen women were fined in the aggregate 30J. 8d., 
 who being brassatores vendidere servisiam (sic) contra assisam, 
 one of these brewsters was fined as much as four shillings. 
 
 The earliest attempt to introduce uniformity in the measures 
 of ale, etc., is the assize of Richard I., bearing date the 20th 
 of November, 1 197. It is to be found in *' Walter of Coventry," 
 vol. ii. p. 114 (Rolls series). On the importance of this docu- 
 ment see StubbV "Const. Hist." vol. i. pp. 509, 573. On the 
 tasters of bread and ale cf. Dep. Keeper's 43d Report, p. 207. 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 35 
 
 his attention from his liquor. If such a porten- 
 tous sight could have been seen in those days 
 as that of a man vomiting forth clouds of smoke 
 from his mouth and nostrils, the beholders 
 would have undoubtedly taken to their heels 
 and run for their lives, protesting that the devil 
 himself had appeared to them, breathing forth 
 fire and flames. Tea and coffee, too, were 
 absolutely unknown, unheard of ; and wine was 
 the rich man's beverage, as it is now. The fire- 
 waters of our own time — the gin and the rum, 
 which have wrought us all such incalculable 
 mischief — were not discovered then. Some lit- 
 tle ardent spirits, known under the name of 
 cordials, were to be found in the better-ap- 
 pointed establishments, and were kept by the 
 lady of the house among her simples, and on 
 special occasions dealt out in thimblefuls ; but 
 the vile grog, that maddens people now, our 
 forefathers of six hundred years ago had never 
 tasted. The absence of vegetable food for the 
 greater part of the year, the personal dirt of the 
 people, the sleeping at night in the clothes 
 worn in the day, and other causes, made skin 
 diseases frightfully common. At the outskirts 
 of every town in England of any size there were 
 crawling about emaciated creatures covered 
 with loathsome sores, living Heaven knows how. 
 They were called by the common name of lep- 
 ers, and probably the leprosy strictly so called 
 was awfully common. But the children must 
 
$6 HISTORICAL STUDIES, 
 
 have swarmed with vermin ; and the itch, and 
 the scurvy, and the ringworm, with other 
 hideous eruptions, must have played fearful 
 havoc with the weak and sickly. As for the 
 dress of the working classes, it was hardly dress 
 at all. I doubt whether the great mass of the 
 laborers in Norfolk had more than a single gar- 
 ment — a kind of tunic leaving the arms and 
 legs bare, with a girdle of rope or leather round 
 the waist, in which a man's knife was stuck, to 
 use sometimes for hacking his bread, sometimes 
 for stabbing an enemy in a quarrel. As for any 
 cotton goods, such as are familiar to you all, 
 they had never been dreamed of, and I suspect 
 that no more people in Norfolk wore linen 
 habitually than now wear silk. Money was 
 almost inconceivably scarce. The laborer's 
 wages were paid partly in rations of food, part- 
 ly in other allowances, and only partly in 
 money ; he had to take what he could get. 
 Even the quit-rent, or what I have called the 
 ground-rent, was frequently compounded for by 
 the tenant being required to find a pair of 
 gloves, or a pound of cummin, or some other 
 acknowledgment in lieu of a money payment ; 
 and one instance occurs among the Rougham 
 charters of a man buying as much as eleven and 
 a half acres, and paying for them partly in 
 money and partly in barley. 1 Nothing shows 
 
 1 In the year 1276 half-pence and farthings were coined for 
 the first time. This must have been a great boon to the poorer 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. Z7 
 
 more plainly the scarcity of money than the 
 enormous interest that was paid for a loan. 
 The only bankers were the Jews 1 ; and when a 
 man was once in their hands he was never likely 
 to get out of their clutches again. But six 
 hundred years ago the Jews had almost come 
 to the end of their tether ; and in the year 1290 
 they were driven out of the country, men, 
 women, and children, with unutterable barbar- 
 ity, only to be replaced by other blood-suckers 
 who were not a whit less mercenary, perhaps, but 
 only less pushing and successful in their usury. 
 It is often said that the monasteries were the 
 great supporters of the poor, and fed them in 
 times of scarcity. It may be so, but I should 
 like to see the evidence for the statement. At 
 present I doubt the fact, at any rate as far as 
 Norfolk goes. 2 On the contrary, I am strongly 
 
 classes, and it evidently was felt to be a matter of great impor- 
 tance, insomuch that it was said to be the fulfillment of an 
 ancient prophecy by the great seer Merlin, who had once fore- 
 told in mysterious language, that " there shall be half of the 
 round." In the next century it appears that the want of small 
 change had again made itself felt : for in the 2d Richard II. 
 we find the Commons setting forth in a petition to the King, 
 that ,f . . . . Ies ditz coes, n mi petit monoye pur paier pur ft 
 les petites mesures a grant damage des dites coes," and they 
 beg '* Qe plese a dit Sr. le Roi et a son sage conseil de faire 
 ordeiner Mayles et farthinges pur paier pur les petites mesures 
 . . . . et en eovre de chatitee. . . ." — Rolls of Pari 
 vol. iii. p. 65. 
 
 1 1 am speaking of Norfolk and Suffolk, where the Jews, as 
 far as I have seen, had it all their own way. 
 
 2 The returns of the number of poor people supported by 
 the monasteries, which are to be found in the " Valor Eccle- 
 siasticus," are somewhat startling. Certainly the monasteries 
 did not return less than they expended in alms. 
 
38 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 Impressed with the belief that six hundred years 
 ago the poor had no friends. The parsons were 
 needy themselves- In too many cases one 
 clergyman held two or three livings, took his 
 tithes and spent them in the town, and left a 
 chaplain with a bare subsistence to fill his place 
 in the country. There was no parson's wife to 
 drop in and speak a kind word — no clergyman's 
 daughter to give a friendly nod, or teach the 
 little ones at Sunday-school — no softening in- 
 fluences, no sympathy, no kindliness. What 
 could you expect of people with such dreary 
 surroundings? — what but that which we know 
 actually was the condition of affairs? The 
 records of crime and outrage in Norfolk six 
 hundred years ago are still preserved, and may 
 be read by any one who knows how to decipher 
 them. I had intended to examine carefully the 
 entries of crime for this neighborhood for the 
 year 1286, and to give you the result this even- 
 ing, but I have not had an opportunity of doing 
 so. The work has been done for the hundred 
 of North Erpingham by my friend Mr. Rye, 
 *and what is true for one part of Norfolk during 
 any single year is not likely to be very different 
 from what was going on in another. 
 
 The picture we get of the utter lawlessness 
 of the whole country, however, at the begin- 
 ning of King Edward's reign is quite dreadful 
 enough. Nobody seems to have resorted to 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 39 
 
 the law to maintain a right or redress a wrong, 
 till every other method had been tried. . . . 
 It really looks as if nothing was more easy than 
 to collect a band of people who could be let 
 loose anywhere to work any mischief. One man 
 had a claim upon another for a debt, or a piece 
 of land, or a right which was denied — had the 
 claim, or fancied he had — and he seems to have 
 had no difficulty in getting together a score or 
 two of roughs to back him in taking the law 
 into his own hands. As when John de la Wade 
 in 1270 persuaded a band of men to help him in 
 invading the manor of Hamon de Cleure, in 
 this very parish of Tittleshall, seizing the corn 
 and threshing it, and, more wonderful still, cut- 
 ting down timber, and carrying it off. But 
 there are actually two other cases of a precisely 
 similar kind recorded this same year — one where 
 a gang of fellows in broad day seems to have 
 looted the manors of Dunton and Mileham ; 
 the other case was where a mob, under the 
 leadership of three men, who are named, entered 
 by force into the manor of Dunham, laid hands 
 on a quantity of timber fit for building pur- 
 poses, and took it away bodily ! A much more 
 serious case, however, occurred some years after 
 this, when two gentlemen of position in Norfolk, 
 with twenty-five followers, who appear to have 
 been their regular retainers, and a great multi- 
 tude on foot and horse, come to Little Barning- 
 
40 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 ham, where in the Hall there lived an old lady, 
 Petronilla de Gros ; they set fire to the house in 
 five places, dragged out the old lady, treated 
 her with the most brutal violence, and so work- 
 ed upon her fears that they compelled her to 
 tell them where her money and jewels were, 
 and, having seized them, I conclude that they 
 left her to warm herself at the smoldering ruins 
 of her mansion. 
 
 On another occasion there was a fierce riot 
 at Rainham. There the manor had become 
 divided into three portions, as we have seen 
 was the case at Rougham. One Thomas de 
 Hanville had one portion, and Thomas de 
 Ingoldesthorp and Robert de Scales held the 
 other two portions. Thomas de Hanville, per- 
 adventure, felt aggrieved because some rogue 
 had not been whipped or tortured cruelly 
 enough to suit his notions of salutary justice, 
 whereupon he went to the expense of erecting 
 a brand-new pillory, and apparently a gallows 
 too, to strike terror into the minds of the dis- 
 orderly. The other parceners of the manor 
 were indignant at the act, and, collecting nearly 
 sixty of the people of Rainham, they pulled 
 down the pillory, and utterly destroyed the 
 same. When the case came before the judges, 
 the defendants pleaded in effect that if Thomas 
 de Hanville had put up his pillory on his own 
 domain they would have had no objection, but 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 4 1 
 
 that he had invaded their rights in setting up 
 his gallows without their permission. 
 
 If the gentry, and they who ought to have 
 known better, set such an example, and gave 
 their sanction to outrage and savagery, it was only 
 natural that the lower orders should be quick to 
 take pattern by their superiors, and should be 
 only too ready to break and defy the law. And 
 so it is clear enough that they were. In a 
 single year, the year 1285, in the hundred 
 of North Erpingham, containing thirty-two 
 parishes, the catalogue of crime is so ghastly 
 as positively to stagger one. Without taking 
 any account of what in those days must have 
 been looked upon as quite minor offences — such 
 as simple theft, sheep-stealing, fraud, extortion, 
 or harboring felons — there were eleven men and 
 five women put upon their trial for burglary; 
 eight men and four women were murdered ; 
 there were five fatal fights, three men and two 
 women being killed in the frays ; and, saddest 
 of all, there were five cases of suicide, among 
 them two women, one of whom hanged herself, 
 the other cut her throat with a razor. We 
 have in the roll recording these horrors very 
 minute particulars of the several cases, and we 
 know too that, not many months before the 
 roll was drawn up, at least eleven desperate 
 wretches had been hanged for various offences, 
 and one had been torn to pieces by horses for 
 
42 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 the crime of defacing the King's coin. It is 
 impossible for us to realize the hideous ferocity 
 of such a state of society as this ; the women 
 were as bad as the men, furious beldames, 
 dangerous as wild beasts, without pity, without 
 shame, without remorse ; and finding life so 
 cheerless, so hopeless, so very, very dark and 
 miserable, that when there was nothing to be 
 gained by killing any one else they killed them- 
 selves. 
 
 ' ' Anywhere, anywhere out of the world ! " 
 
 Sentimental people who plaintively sigh for 
 the good old times will do well to ponder upon 
 these facts. Think, twelve poor creatures 
 butchered in cold blood in a single year within 
 a circuit of ten miles from your own door ! 
 Two of these unhappy victims were a couple 
 of lonely women, apparently living together 
 in their poverty, gashed and battered in the 
 dead of the night, and left in their blood, 
 stripped of their little all. The motive, too, for 
 all this horrible house-breaking and bloodshed, 
 being a lump of cheese or a side of bacon, and 
 the shuddering creatures cowering in the corner 
 of a hovel, being too paralyzed with terror to 
 utter a cry, and never dreaming of making re- 
 sistance to the wild-eyed assassins, who came 
 to slay rather than to steal. 
 
 Let us turn from these scenes, which are too 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 43 
 
 painful to dwell on ; and, before I close, let me 
 try and point to some bright spots in the village 
 life of six hundred years ago. If the hovels of 
 the laborer were squalid, and dirty, and dark, 
 yet there was not — no, there was not — as much 
 difference between them and the dwellings of 
 the farmer class, the employers of labor. Every 
 man who had any house at all had some direct 
 interest in the land ; he always had some rood 
 or two that he could call his own ; his allotment 
 was not large, but then there were no large 
 farmers. I cannot make out that there was any 
 one in Rougham who farmed as much as two 
 hundred acres all told. What we now under- 
 stand by tenant farmers were a class that had 
 not yet come into existence. When a landlord 
 was non-resident he farmed his estate by a bailiff, 
 and if any one wanted to give up an occupation 
 for a time he let it with all that it contained. 
 Thus, when Alice, the divorced, had made up her 
 mind in 1318 to go away from Rougham — per- 
 haps on a pilgrimage — perhaps to Rome — who 
 knows ? — she let her house and land, and all 
 that was upon it, live and dead stock, to her 
 sister Juliana for three years. The inventory 
 included not only the sheep and cattle, but the 
 very hoes, and pitchforks, and sacks ; and every- 
 thing, to the minutest particular, was to be 
 returned without damage at the end of the 
 term, or replaced by an equivalent. But this 
 
44 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 lady, a lady of birth and some position, certainly 
 did not have two hundred acres under her hands, 
 and would have been a very small personage 
 indeed, side by side with a dozen of our West 
 Norfolk farmers to-day. The difference be- 
 tween the laborer and the farmer was, I think, 
 less six hundred years ago than it is now. Men 
 climbed up the ladder by steps that were more 
 gently graduated ; there was no great gulf fixed 
 between the employer and the employed. 
 
 I can tell you very little of the amusements 
 of the people in those days. Looking after the 
 fowls or the geese, hunting for the hen's nest in 
 the furze brake, and digging out a fox or a 
 badger, gave them an hour's excitement or 
 interest now and again. Now and then a wander- 
 ing minstrel came by, playing upon his rude 
 instrument, and now and then somebody would 
 come out from Lynn, or Yarmouth, or Norwich, 
 with some new batch of songs, for the most part 
 scurrilous and coarse, and listened to much less 
 for the sake of the music than for the words. 
 Nor were books so rare as has been asserted. 
 There were even story-books in some houses, as 
 where John Senekworth, bailiff for Merton Col- 
 lege, at Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire, possessed, 
 when he died in 1 3 14, three books of romance ; 
 but then he was a thriving yeoman, with carpets 
 in his house, or hangings for the walls. 1 
 
 1 Rogers' " Hist, of Prices," vol. i. p. 124. 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 45 
 
 There was a great deal more coming and 
 going in the country villages than there is now, 
 a great deal more to talk about, a great deal 
 more doing. The courts of the manor were 
 held three or four times a year, and the free 
 tenants were bound to attend, and carry on a 
 large amount of petty business. Then there 
 were the periodical visitations by the Arch- 
 deacon, and the Rural Dean, and now and then 
 more august personages might be seen with a 
 host of mounted followers riding along the roads. 
 The Bishop of Norwich was always on the move 
 when he was in his diocese ; his most favorite 
 places of residence were North Elmham and 
 Gaywood ; at both of these places he had a 
 palace and a park ; that meant that there were 
 deer there and hunting, and all the good and evil 
 that seems to be inseparable from haunches of 
 venison. Nay, at intervals, even the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury himself, the second man in the 
 kingdom, came down to hold a visitation in 
 Norfolk, and exactly 602 years ago the great 
 Archbishop Peckham spent some time in the 
 country, and between the 10th and 15th of 
 January, 1281, he must have ridden through 
 Rougham, with a huge train of attendants, on 
 his way from Docking to Castle Acre. I have 
 no doubt that his coming had very much to do 
 with the separation of Peter Romayn from 
 Matilda de Cringleford, and the divorce of poor 
 Alice from John of Thyrsford. 
 
46 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 The year, 1280, in which Archbishop Peck- 
 ham began his visit to Norfolk, was a very 
 disastrous year for the farmers. It was the 
 beginning of a succession of bad seasons and 
 floods even worse than any that we have known. 
 The rain set in on the 1st of August, and we 
 are told that it continued to fall for twenty-four 
 hours, and then came a mighty wind such as 
 men had never known the like of ; the waters 
 were out, and there was a great flood, and houses 
 and windmills and bridges were swept away. 
 Nay y we hear of a sad loss of life, and many 
 poor people were drowned, and many lost their 
 all ; flocks and herds, and corn and hay being 
 whelmed in the deluge. In November there 
 was a frightful tempest, the lightning doing ex- 
 tensive damage; and just at Christmas-time the 
 frost set in with such severity as no man had 
 known before. The river Thames was frozen 
 over above London Bridge, so that men crossed 
 it with horses and carts ; and when the frost 
 broke up on the 2d of February there was such 
 an enormous accumulation of ice and snow that 
 five of the arches of London Bridge blew up, 
 and all over the country the same destruction 
 of bridges was heard of. Next year and the year 
 after that, things went very badly with your 
 forefathers, and one of the saddest events that 
 we get from a Norfolk chronicler, who was alive 
 at the time, is one in which he tells us that, 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 47 
 
 owing to the continuous rain during these three 
 years, there was an utter failure in garden prod- 
 uce, as well as of the people's hope of harvest. 
 The bad seasons seem to have gone on for six 
 or seven years ; but by far the worst calamity 
 which Norfolk ever knew was the awful flood of 
 1287, when by an incursion of the sea a large 
 district was laid under water, and hundreds of 
 unfortunate creatures were drowned in the 
 dead of the night, without warning. Here, on 
 the higher level, people were comparatively out 
 of harm's way, but it is impossible to imagine 
 the distress and agony that there must have 
 been in other parts of the county not twenty 
 miles from where we are this evening. After 
 that dreadful year I think there was a change 
 for the better, but it must have been a long 
 time before the county recovered from ^the 
 ''agricultural distress ; " and I strongly suspect 
 that the cruel and wicked persecution of the 
 Jews, and the cancelling of all debts due to them 
 by the landlords and the farmers, was in great 
 measure owing to the general bankruptcy which 
 the succession of bad seasons had brought about. 
 Men found themselves hopelessly insolvent, and 
 there was no other way of cancelling their obli- 
 gations than by getting rid of their creditors. 
 So when the king announced that all the Jews 
 should be transported out of the realm, you 
 may be sure there were very few Christians 
 
48 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 who were sorry for them. There had been a 
 time when the children of Israel had spoiled the 
 Egyptians — was it not fitting that another time 
 should have come when the children of Israel 
 should themselves be spoiled ? 
 
 The year of the great flood was the frequent 
 talk, of course, of all your forefathers who over- 
 lived it, and here in this neighborhood it must 
 have acquired an additional interest from the 
 fact that Bishop Middleton died the year after 
 it, and his brothers then parted with their 
 Rougham property. Nor was this all, for 
 Bishop Middleton's successor in the see of 
 Norwich came from this immediate neighbor- 
 hood also. This was Ralph Walpole, son of 
 the lord of the manor of Houghton, in which 
 parish the bishop himself had inherited a few 
 acres of land. In less than forty years no less 
 than three bishops had been born within five 
 miles of where we are this evening : Roger de 
 Wesenham, 1 who became Bishop of Lichfield in 
 1245; William Middleton, who had just died; 
 and Ralph Walpole, who succeeded him. 
 There must have been much stir in these parts 
 when the news was known. The old people 
 would tell how they had seen " young master 
 Ralph " many a time when he was a boy scam- 
 pering over Massingham Heath, or coming to 
 
 1 The names of several members of the bishop's family occur 
 in the Rougham Charters as attesting witnesses, and a Roger 
 de Wesenham is found among them more than once. 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 49 
 
 pay his respects to the Archdeacon at the Lyng 
 House, or talking of foreign parts with old 
 James de Ferentino or Peter Romayn. Now 
 he had grown to be a very big man indeed, and 
 there were many eyes watching him on both 
 sides of the water. He had a very difficult 
 game to play during the eleven years he was 
 Bishop of Norwich, for the king was dreadfully 
 in need of money, and, being desperate, he 
 resorted to outrageous methods of squeezing it 
 from those whom he could frighten* and force; 
 and the time came at last when the bishops and 
 the clergy had to put a bold face on, and to 
 resist the tyranny and lawless rapacity of the 
 sovereign. 
 
 And this reminds me that though archdea- 
 cons, and bishops, and even an archbishop, in 
 those days might be and were very important 
 and very powerful personages, they were all 
 very small and insignificant in comparison with 
 the great King Edward, the king who at this 
 time was looked upon as one of the most 
 mighty and magnificent kings in all the world. 
 He, too, paid many a visit to Norfolk six hun- 
 dred years ago. He kept his Christmas at 
 Burgh in 1280, and in 1284 he came down with 
 the good Queen Eleanor and spent the whole of 
 Lent in the country ; and next year, again, they 
 were in your immediate neighborhood, mak- 
 ing a pilgrimage to Walsingham. A few years 
 
50 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 after this the king seems to have spent a week 
 or two within five miles of where we are ; he 
 came to Castle Acre, and there he stayed at the 
 great priory whose ruins you all know. There 
 a very stirring interview took place between the 
 king and Bishop Walpole, and a number of 
 other bishops, and great persons who had come 
 as a deputation to expostulate with the king, 
 and respectfully to protest against the way in 
 which he was robbing his subjects, and espe- 
 cially the clergy, whom he had been for years 
 plundering in the most outrageous manner. 
 The king gave the deputation no smooth words 
 to carry away, but he sent them off with threat- 
 ening frowns and insults and in hot anger. 
 Some days after this he was at Massingham, 
 and one of his letters has been preserved, dated 
 from Massingham, 30th of January, 1296, so 
 that it is almost . certain that the great king 
 passed one night there at least. It is a little 
 difficult to understand what the king was doing 
 at Massingham, for there was no great man 
 living there, and no great mansion. Sometimes 
 I have thought that the king rode out from 
 Castle Acre to see what state the Walpoles of 
 those times were keeping up at Houghton. 
 Had not that audacious Bishop Walpole dared 
 to speak plainly to his Grace the week before ? 
 But the more probable explanation is that the 
 king went to Massingham to visit a small 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 5 I 
 
 religious house or monastery which had been 
 recently founded there. I suspect it had al- 
 ready got into debt and was in difficulties, and 
 it is possible that the king's visit was made in 
 the interest of the foundation. At any rate, 
 there the king stayed ; but though he was in 
 Norfolk more than once after this, he never was 
 so near you again, and that visit was one which 
 your forefathers were sure to talk about to the 
 
 end of their lives. 
 
 ****** 
 
 And these were the days of old. But now 
 that we have looked back upon them as they 
 appear through the mists of centuries, the dis- 
 tance distorting some things, obscuring others, 
 but leaving upon us, on the whole, an impres- 
 sion that, after all, these men and women of 
 the past, whose circumstances were so different 
 from our own, were perhaps not so very unlike 
 what we should be if our surroundings were as 
 theirs. Now that we have come to that conclu- 
 sion, if indeed we have come to it, let me ask 
 you all a question or two. Should we like to 
 change with those forefathers of ours, whose 
 lives were passed in this parish, in the way I 
 have attempted to describe, six hundred years 
 ago ? Were the former times better than 
 these ? Has the world grown worse as it has 
 grown older? Has there been no progress, but 
 only decline? 
 
52 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 My friends, the people who lived in this vil- 
 lage six hundred years ago were living a life 
 hugely below the level of yours. They were 
 more wretched in their poverty, they were in- 
 comparably less prosperous in their prosperity, 
 they were worse clad, worse fed, worse housed, 
 worse taught, worse tended, worse governed ; 
 they were sufferers from loathsome diseases 
 which you know nothing of ; the very beasts of 
 the field were dwarfed and stunted in their 
 growth, and I do not believe there were any 
 giants in the earth in those days. The death- 
 rate among the children must have been tre- 
 mendous. The disregard of human life was so 
 callous that we can hardly conceive it. There 
 was every thing to harden, nothing to soften ; 
 everywhere oppression, greed, fierceness. Judged 
 by our modern standards, the people of our 
 county village were beyond all doubt coarser, 
 more brutal, and more wicked, than they are. 
 Progress is slow, but there has been progress. 
 The days that are, are not what they should 
 be ; we still want reforms, we need much re- 
 forming ourselves: but the former days were 
 not better than these, whatever these may be ; 
 and if the next six hundred years exhibit as de- 
 cided an advance as the last six centuries have 
 brought about, and if your children's children 
 of the coming time rise as much above your 
 level in sentiment, material comfort, knowledge, 
 
VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK. 53 
 
 intelligence, and refinement, as you have risen 
 above the level which your ancestors attained 
 to, though even then they will not cease to de- 
 sire better things, they will nevertheless have 
 cause for thankfulness such as you may well 
 feel to-night as you look back upon what you 
 have escaped from, and reflect upon what you 
 are. 
 
SIENA. 
 
 By SAMUEL JAMES CAPPER. 
 
 It has been truly said that every square 
 league of Italian soil deserves our attention and 
 study, and perhaps no part of Italy is more full 
 of rich and varied human interest than the 
 quondam republics of Florence, Pisa, Lucca, and 
 Siena, of the last of which I propose to write in 
 this article. 
 
 Etruscan vases and other remains have at 
 various times been found in and around Siena ; 
 but nothing is known with certainty of its 
 history, until, in the reign of Augustus, we find 
 it spoken of as a Roman military colony. The 
 three hills upon which it stands rise to upward 
 of one thousand feet above the sea level, and 
 the soil of which they are composed is doubt- 
 less the product of volcanic action. Siena has 
 always been subject to earthquakes, which, how- 
 ever, at the worst, never did greater injury than 
 the shaking down of a few chimneys. Formerly 
 they recurred at intervals of forty or fifty years, 
 but latterly they have been much more frequent, 
 ten years rarely passing without their un- 
 welcome advent. During the months of July 
 54 
 
SIENA. 5 5 
 
 and August of last year they occasioned great 
 terror in Siena : in one day no fewer than 
 seventy shocks were observed, and thousands of 
 the inhabitants camped out in the squares and 
 gardens, lest their houses should fall upon them. 
 Scientific men tell us that the tufa upon which 
 the city stands being to a great extent hollowed 
 out, there is very little danger of the earth- 
 quakes doing real injury; but to unscientific 
 residents, the existence of this hollow space 
 underneath makes the fate of Korah, Dathan, 
 and Abiram seem more painfully probable than 
 if solid earth were below. Be this as it may, in 
 spite of the panic, no damage has actually been 
 done ; and the huge masses of the churches and 
 palaces show no rents or cracks, save one or two 
 that are almost as venerable as the buildings 
 themselves. 
 
 Siena used to be a more favorite station for 
 English residents than it now is. Before rail- 
 way days, almost all visitors to Rome from the 
 north passed a day or two in Siena ; now the 
 railway conveys them direct from Florence, and 
 the ancient little city is passed by. Those, how- 
 ever, who follow the older fashion find its interest 
 grow upon them, as the strain and stress of the 
 nineteenth century fade from their mind and 
 they gradually feel more and more at home 
 among the relics of the spirit of the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
56 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 In the short space at my disposal, it would be 
 vain for me to do more than briefly glance at 
 one or two interesting episodes in the history of 
 this little republic, speak of some of the 
 worthies it has produced (a few of whom, by the 
 common consent of Christendom, have been 
 deemed worthy " on fame's eternal roll-call to 
 be filed "), and then describe the " Palio," the 
 August festival of the city. 
 
 In a famous passage Macaulay describes the 
 wide-reaching effects of the ambition of Fred- 
 erick the Great, and how, as its bitter fruit, the 
 natives of Coromandel engaged in internecine 
 slaughter, and red Indians scalped one another 
 on the great lakes of Canada. In like manner, 
 for hundreds of years, there was constant strife 
 among the republics of Italy, and the flower 
 of their citizens perished, either on the battle- 
 field or the scaffold, because of the rivalry of 
 the great factions having their origin in Ger- 
 many, the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Indeed, 
 the history of the Italian republics throughout 
 the Middle Ages is the record of constant war- 
 fare in the interest of the one or the other 
 party. Without, therefore, trying to realize 
 what Siena may have been when the great 
 Etruscan league bore sway throughout Central 
 Italy, or when, having become subject to Rome, 
 the conquering legions tramped through its 
 streets, on their way to Gaul, or Germany, of 
 
SIENA. 57 
 
 Britain, let us come at once to the mediaeval 
 history of the city, from which period the walls, 
 churches, and palaces date. After the Lombard 
 invasion of Italy, Siena was governed by a repre- 
 sentative of the Lombard kings ; but when, in 
 .800, Charlemagne destroyed, or, more properly, 
 absorbed into his empire the kingdom of the 
 iron crown, Siena was declared a free city. The 
 lordships and baronies and rich lands he divided, 
 with no niggard hand, among his warlike follow- 
 ers from beyond the Alps, and some of these 
 became the ancestors of the nobility of Siena. 
 The soil, then, as now, rich beyond all northern 
 ideas, and generous of corn, wine, and oil, soon 
 rendered wealthy its fortunate possessors, who, 
 no longer contented with the feudal castles on 
 their estates, began to build palaces in Siena, 
 and built them so solidly that now, after five or 
 six centuries, they stand firm and strong as 
 when erected, and there seems no reason why 
 they should not bid defiance to time and earth- 
 quakes for five centuries more. The feudal 
 origin of these palaces, and the fact that the 
 possessors derived their revenues from wide 
 lordships and domains outside the city, in some 
 degree account for what for a long time greatly 
 puzzled me. As you walk through the old 
 streets of Siena, every hundred yards, or even 
 much more frequently, you come upon great 
 palazzi, for the most part built of enor- 
 
58 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 mously solid masonry, and often of such vast size 
 that you would think that each one could ac- 
 commodate a whole regiment. How was it 
 possible, I have often thought, for such houses 
 to be erected, and the expenses of such house- 
 holds to be borne in an inland city, shut out 
 from the wealth derived from maritime trade, 
 which made princes of the merchants of Venice, 
 Genoa, and Pisa ? True the wealth of many of 
 these great families is a thing of the past. I 
 recently heard of a whole patrician family living 
 in a portion of their huge palace, all being en- 
 tirely supported out of the dowry of the wife of 
 the eldest son, who was probably the daughter 
 of some wealthy plebeian. Yet not one of this 
 interesting family would do a hand's turn of 
 work to save himself from starvation : they are 
 far too sensible of what is due to themselves 
 and to the honor of the family. 1 Still, it would 
 be a great mistake to suppose that the patrician 
 families of Siena are poor. On the contrary, 
 
 1 With a city full of huge empty palaces, one would naturally 
 suppose that strangers would be embarrassed in their choice of 
 desirable furnished apartments. So I expected, and put what I 
 thought a likely advertisement in a little Sienese journal, the 
 Lupa. Not an answer, however, did I receive, and I am assured 
 that that Sienese patrician must be poor and miserable indeed 
 who would not rather see the palace of his ancestors crumble to 
 ruin than resign a portion of it to the occupation of strangers. 
 I have since secured an apartment in the palazzo of a noble 
 family, whose history has been bound up with that of the re- 
 public for centuries, and at what in England would be regarded 
 as a ridiculously cheap rate, but under such peculiar circum- 
 stances as in no way to militate against the above statement. 
 
SIENA. 59 
 
 the most distinguished of them remain possessed 
 of great estates in the country as well as of their 
 stately old palaces in the city. For instance, 
 the Palazzo Tolomei was built in 1205, It is an 
 imposing square Gothic pile of stone, dark with 
 the grime of nearly seven centuries, during 
 which period the family have been leading patri- 
 cians in Siena, and they still continue to occupy 
 an important position in the city. The Chigis, 
 Piccolominis, Bandinis, and many others, retain 
 their ancient state and greatness. The Picco- 
 lomini family gave two popes to Rome — 
 the celebrated Eneas Sylvius who wore the 
 tiara as Pius II, and his nephew, Pius III. To 
 this family also belonged that Ascanius Picco- 
 lomini, Archbishop of Siena, who, when the 
 prison doors of the Inquisition were opened to 
 Galileo, received the venerable philosopher, and 
 made a home for him within the walls of the 
 Archiepiscopal Palace. The persecuted philoso- 
 pher seems to have been quite overcome with 
 the kindness showered upon him by the arch- 
 bishop, for he speaks of it in his letters as " in- 
 explicable." To this family also belongs that 
 Ottavio Piccolomini, whose defection from 
 Wallenstein forms the subject of Schiller's 
 drama. His portrait may be seen at the Palazzo 
 Pubblico on a charger at full gallop in some- 
 what the same truculent attitude in which 
 Napoleon is popularly represented crossing the 
 
60 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 Alps. The Saracini family, whose massive pal- 
 ace is one of the principal ornaments of the Via 
 della Citta, has, during its long history, given 
 one pope and many cardinals to Rome. It is, 
 however, on the point of dying out, only one 
 aged childless representative remaining. 
 
 I am assured that the families who reckon 
 popes among their predecessors, as for instance 
 the Piccolomini, Chigi, and Saracini, date the 
 greater part of their wealth and greatness from 
 that time. The popes appear, as a matter of 
 course, to have made use of the vast revenues 
 of the Church to aggrandize their families. We 
 are wont to attribute the political maxim, " To 
 the victors the spoils," — which has proved so 
 great a # curse to the great Transatlantic repub- 
 lic, — to old General Andrew Jackson ; but, if 
 the above statement be true, he took no new 
 departure when he laid down the principle, but 
 was following a time-honored, not to say sacred, 
 precedent. An unwritten law, by which only 
 the eldest son of each patrician house has been 
 allowed to marry, has powerfully contributed to 
 prevent the dispersion of their inherited wealth. 
 
 From the time of Barbarossa (i 152) until 
 long after the last of the Imperial House of 
 Suabia, the unfortunate Conradin, had perished 
 on the scaffold at Naples (in 1269), Siena was 
 always intensely Ghibelline and anti-papal, al- 
 though its sturdy independence showed itself, 
 
 * uf,x,*n^ 
 
 Ct* 
 
SIENA. 6 1 
 
 even when Barbarossa was at the height of his 
 power, and came, breathing out vengeance 
 against the Italian free cities, determined to 
 deprive them of their liberty. Siena alone had 
 the courage to shut its gates in the face of the 
 mighty conqueror and to dare him to do his 
 worst. Frederick sent his son Henry with a 
 large army which closely invested the city. 
 The besieged, however, made a simultaneous 
 sortie from the two gates, Fonte Branda and 
 St. Marco, and, attacking the German camp at 
 a place called the Rosaio, routed the Imperial- 
 ists and put them to flight. But if Siena was 
 Ghibelline in its politics, its great rival and 
 sister republic, Florence, held by the Guelphs. 
 
 Under the great Emperor Frederick II, the 
 old quarrel between the Papacy and the Empire 
 broke out with fresh fury, and involved all Italy 
 in strife. Upon his death, Florence first, quick- 
 ly followed by the whole of Tuscany, with the 
 exception of Siena, threw off its allegiance to 
 the Empire. The leaders of the Ghibelline 
 party in Florence took refuge in Siena, which 
 speedily led to hostilities between the two 
 cities. 
 
 To resist the victorious Guelphs, Siena had 
 only the alliance of Pisa ; and the little repub- 
 lic, hardly beset, sent pressing requests for 
 succor to Manfred, son of the Emperor Frede- 
 rick, and King of Naples. On August II, 1259, 
 
62 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 the king sent a reply, still preserved in the 
 archives of Siena, in which he announced the 
 despatch of an army sufficient to place the 
 Ghibelline cause in its old position of suprem- 
 acy ; but, alas ! instead of the promised army, 
 only one hundred German troopers arrived. 
 The mountain had brought forth a mouse, and 
 things looked gloomy indeed for Siena. In this 
 crisis, however, a leading Florentine exile, Fari- 
 nata degli Uberth, whom Dante, a few years 
 later, was to immortalize in the pages of the 
 " Inferno," cheered the drooping spirits of the 
 Sienese. lie said : " We have the banner of the 
 king ; this will suffice to make him send us as 
 many soldiers as we may require, and that with- 
 out asking for them." The city was at the time 
 closely invested by the Florentines. Uberti 
 gave the unhappy Germans as much wine as 
 they could drink, and, promising them double 
 pay, persuaded them to charge the enemy's 
 lines. This they did, and with incredible fury. 
 The Florentines, taken by surprise, and not 
 knowing what might follow this whirlwind of 
 one hundred German devils, were upon the 
 point of raising the siege. When, however, 
 they perceived the insignificant number of their 
 assailants, they summoned heart of grace, slew 
 the hundred troopers to the very last man, and 
 capturing the royal banner subjected it to every 
 conceivable outrage. This was exactly what 
 
SIENA. 63 
 
 the Mephistophelean Uberti desired. Enraged 
 at the dishonor done to his standard, Manfred 
 despatched eight hundred German knights, un- 
 der his cousin Giordano Lancia di Angalono, to 
 the help of Siena, and with the levies from Pisa 
 the whole of the Ghibelline forces amounted to 
 9000 horse and 18,500 foot-soldiers. 
 
 To maintain this host was an enormous tax 
 upon the city of Siena, and in order to employ 
 the army, and if possible to induce the Floren- 
 tines to give battle, the Sienese commanders laid 
 siege to the neighboring city of Montalcino. 
 
 The Florentines, were, however, not at all 
 disposed to make easy the plans of their ene- 
 mies, and obstinately remained within their 
 walls. But the guile of Uberti was more than a 
 match for them. With great secrecy he 
 despatched two monks to the leaders of the 
 people of Florence, to represent that they were 
 the emissaries of the most powerful citizens of 
 Siena, who, finding the tyranny of Provenzano 
 Salvani 1 and Uberti insupportable, were deter- 
 
 1 This is the Provenzano mentioned by Dante in the 
 eleventh canto of the " Purgatorio " : — 
 
 " Colui che del cammin si poco piglia 
 Dinanzi a me, Toscana sono tutta 
 Ed ora a pena in Siena sen pispiglia 
 Ond' era sire, quando fu distrutta 
 La rabbia fiorentina che superba 
 Fu a quel tempo si com' ora e putta. 
 
 Quegli e, ripose Provenzan Salvani 
 Ed e qui, perche fu presuntuoso 
 A recar Siena tutta alle sue mani." 
 
64 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 mined to deliver themselves from it at any cost. 
 The messengers added that when the Floren- 
 tines, under pretext of succoring Montalcino, 
 should reach Siena, one of the gates of the city 
 would be opened to them. Unhappily for 
 Florence, her leaders believed the messengers 
 and acted upon their insidious advice. The 
 people of Florence rose in mass, and aid was 
 demanded from the allied Guelphic cities. Bo- 
 logna, Perugia, and Orvieto sent their contin- 
 gents. A host of 33,000 warriors gathered 
 around the Carroccio, or sacred car of Florence. 
 The army marched to Monte Aperto, a few 
 miles from Siena, in the full hope and expecta- 
 tion that the city would soon be theirs. Tow- 
 ard sunset on the 3d September (1260) the 
 Sienese, after publicly invoking the aid of the 
 Virgin, and dedicating their city to her, 
 marched out to meet their enemies, and upon 
 the following day the struggle took place. It 
 was a hard-fought and long-doubtful battle, and 
 it was by treachery that it was at length 
 decided. Bocca degli Abati, a Ghibelline, who 
 fought in the ranks of the Florentines, struck 
 off, with one blow of his sword, the hand of 
 Jacopo di Pazzi, who bore the standard of the 
 cavalry. Fell panic seized the Florentine riders 
 when they saw their banner fallen, and that 
 there was treachery within their ranks, the 
 extent of which they could not gauge. Each 
 
SIENA. 65 
 
 man spurred his horse away from the fatal 
 field, and soon the foot-soldiers were involved 
 in one common rout. Then began a butchery 
 which made the Arbia stream run blood. 
 
 ". . . . lo strazio e il grande scempio 
 Che fece 1' Arbia colorata in rosso." 
 
 Meanwhile, in the city of Siena, the old men, 
 women, and children, together with the bishop, 
 priests, and monks of all orders were assembled 
 in the cathedral asking mercy of God. The 
 twenty-four Signori, who then ruled Siena, 
 posted a watchman on the tower of the Palazzo 
 Marescotti, now the palace of the Saracini, 
 whence the field of battle was distinctly visible. 
 The winding road over hill and dale would make 
 the distance five or six miles ; but, as a bird 
 would fly, in a direct line, Monte Aperto is 
 little more than three miles away. Thus, the 
 watchman, a certain Cerreto Ceccolino, could 
 distinctly perceive the movements of the con- 
 tending armies. Terrible was the anxiety of 
 the crowd of old men, women, and children at 
 the base of the tower as they waited for the 
 report of the combat. At length the watch- 
 man strikes his drum, and, in the breathless 
 pause that follows, he cries with a loud voice so 
 that all may hear : " They have reached Monte 
 Selvoli, and are pushing up the hill to secure it 
 as a coign of vantage, and now the Florentines 
 
66 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 are in motion and they also are trying to gain 
 the hill." 
 
 Again the drum sounds : " The armies are 
 engaged ; pray God for victory." Next the 
 watchman cries : " Pray God for ours ; they 
 seem to me to be getting the worst of it." 
 But soon the pain and suspense of the anxious 
 crowd were relieved by the watchman crying : 
 " Now I see that it is the enemy who fall back." 
 And now in all the joy of victory the watch- 
 man beats a triumphant march, and informs 
 the anxious ones below that the standards of 
 Florence have all gone down, and that her 
 soldiers are broken and routed, and how cruel 
 a slaughter there is among them. Cruel 
 slaughter, indeed ! The Carroccio, or sacred 
 car of Florence, drawn by white oxen, and 
 with the great standard of the city displayed 
 from its lofty flag-staffs, was taken at a place 
 called " Fonte al pino," close to the Arbia. 
 Among its gallant defenders was a Florentine 
 named Tornaquinci, with his seven sons, all of 
 whom were slain. 
 
 Consternation now fell upon the army of 
 Florence. Many threw down their arms and 
 cried " We surrender " ; but the chronicler adds, 
 grimly, " they were not understood." A few 
 of the bravest from Florence, from Lucca, and 
 from Orvieto flung themselves into the castle 
 of Monte Aperto, and there held out until the 
 
SIENA. 6y 
 
 leaders of the army of Siena, sated with 
 slaughter, admitted them to quarter. l The 
 chroniclers estimate that ten thousand of the 
 Guelphic host fell on this fatal field, and that 
 almost all the remainder were made prisoners. 
 The misery caused in Florence by the battle is 
 indescribable, and in a very few years a like 
 misery was to fall upon Siena. Monte Aperto 
 was the last decisive victory gained by the 
 Ghibelline cause. Nine years afterward, in 
 1269, the Sienese army was routed at Colle, 
 and exactly twenty years after that at Camp- 
 aldino. 2 Nothing can be more melancholy than 
 the story of the internecine fratricidal struggles 
 between the cities of Italy, with their constant 
 episodes of treachery and cold-blooded cruelty. 
 The history of the Republic of Siena during 
 the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth cent- 
 uries is a long tale of anarchy and revolution, 
 and of incessant struggles between the different 
 
 1 January 10, 1883.— Yesterday I had the advantage of 
 driving, with a friend, over the battle-field for a second time. 
 We called at the modern villa of Monte Aperto, where resides 
 Signor Canale, who most courteously pointed out to us the 
 site of the ancient castle of the same name, and showed us 
 exactly where the Florentine host camped on the night before 
 the battle, and where the Carroccio was taken at <s Fonte al 
 pino," around which stone pines still raise their lordly heads. 
 
 2 Dante himself fought at this battle, and in the fifth canto 
 of the ' ' Purgatorio " he addresses Buonconte di Montefeltro, 
 mortally wounded on that field : — 
 
 " . . . . Qual forza o qual ventura 
 Ti travio si fuor di Campaldino 
 Che non si seppe mai tua sepoltura? " 
 
68 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 parties in the State. In 1277 a law excluded 
 from the supreme magistracy not only the 
 patricians but the people, and decreed that for 
 the future the government shoulpl rest alone in 
 the hands of good " merchants loyally affected 
 to the Guelph cause." This government by 
 the middle classes was called the " Administra- 
 tion of the Nine," and lasted for no less than 
 seventy years. Though hated alike by the 
 aristocracy and the people, this regime proved 
 advantageous to the State. Under it the 
 Palazzo Pubblico was built, and the graceful 
 Mangia Tower rose, while the cathedral was 
 enlarged and beautified and the city grew 
 wealthy with trade. When the " Nine " fell 
 before a combined assault of the aristocracy 
 and the people, the republic seemed to be 
 given over to anarchy. (In four months and a 
 half there were no less than five revolutions.) 
 Yet, strange to say, it was at this very time 
 that architecture and sculpture and painting 
 advanced with wondrous strides. The great 
 Florentine poet told of his awful visions in the 
 exquisitely beautiful language then spoken in 
 Northern Italy, and crystallized into literary 
 form the lovely Tuscan tongue; and against 
 the black background of remorseless feuds, 
 treacherous intrigues, and cruel wars, there 
 stand out, white and spotless, some of the most 
 perfect exemplars of sainthood into which 
 
SIENA. 69 
 
 humanity has ever flowered. The Republic of 
 Siena made amends for the turbulence and 
 violence and bitter party spirit it had shown 
 throughout its history, by the united and gal- 
 lant resistance it offered to Cosimo dei Medici, 
 when he determined to add the lordship of 
 Siena to that of Florence, in the middle of the 
 sixteenth century. Florence was in 1530 be- 
 sieged and conquered by the combined arms of 
 the Emperor Charles V, and Pope Clement 
 VII. Siena, yielding to the traditional hatred 
 of many centuries, sent some pieces of artillery 
 into the imperial camp, and rejoiced greatly at 
 the downfall of her ancient foe. That joy did 
 not last long. Hardly was Florence his, when 
 Charles determined to become possessor of 
 Siena, and this, by fraud and force, he suc- 
 ceeded in a few years in accomplishing. 
 
 The better to dominate the unruly city, the 
 Spaniards built a powerful fortress. Proud of 
 their long self-government and jealous of their 
 independence, the Sienese felt this to be intol- 
 erable. They sent ambassadors to the emperor 
 to implore him not to affix upon their free city 
 this badge of servitude. The imperial reply 
 was: "Sic volo, sic jubeo." They sent to 
 Pope Julius III ; they had hope in him, for was 
 not his mother, Christofana Saracini, a daughter 
 of Siena ? But Julius cared more for the shame- 
 ful pleasures to which he was addicted than for 
 
JO HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 the liberty of the country of his forefathers, and 
 replied : " If one castle does not suffice his Im- 
 perial Majesty to keep within bounds these hare- 
 brained Sienese, why, let him build two." Re- 
 jected on all hands, the Sienese took courage 
 from despair. They secretly conspired, deter- 
 mined to dare every thing, and on July 27, 1552, 
 they rose in insurrection against their Spanish 
 masters. For three days a fierce struggle raged 
 throughout the city : every street, every square, 
 every palace, almost every house was a battle- 
 field. The struggle ended in the triumph of 
 the citizens ; the Spaniards were beaten, and the 
 flag of the Republic again waved from the Pa- 
 lazzo Pubblico. 
 
 The Spaniards, who had retired to the newly 
 erected fortress, saw themselves compelled to 
 capitulate, and no sooner did the citizens be- 
 come possessed of it than they proceeded to 
 raze it to the ground. Where this ill-omened 
 castle stood, there is now the garden of the 
 Lizza, a charming little public park, which com- 
 mands very extensive views of the surrounding 
 country. Thither every evening almost all Siena 
 resorts to breathe fresh air and to see and be 
 seen. To go back three hundred years : when 
 Charles V heard of the surrender of the Spanish 
 garrison he was furious, and the year 1553 saw 
 a Spanish army of vengeance carrying fire and 
 sword into the Sienese territory. This army 
 
SIENA. 71 
 
 was checked by the unexpected and heroic re- 
 sistance of the little town of Montalcino, which 
 was closely invested for eighty days. But in 
 the following year came another army, under 
 the ferocious Marignano, and this time the 
 Spaniards penetrated to the very walls of the 
 city, and 25,000 Spaniards and soldiers of 
 Cosimo bivouacked before the gates. All the 
 citizens were called to arms, and the priests and 
 monks were compelled to work on the fortifica- 
 tions. 
 
 Three ladies, named Forteguerri, Piccolomini, 
 and Fausti, organized three battalions of women. 
 Three thousand maidens worked on the ram- 
 parts and in the trenches. The general-in-chief 
 was Pietro Strozzi, a Florentine exile, and a 
 bitter personal enemy of Cosimo. He deter- 
 mined to relieve Siena by a coup-de-main 
 against Florence. Marignano marched to pre- 
 vent him. The two armies met at Marciano, 
 where the Sienese suffered the crushing defeat 
 of Scannagallo, caused by the treachery of the 
 commander of the French cavalry in the service 
 of Siena, who had been bought by Marignano 
 with the price of twelve tin flasks filled with 
 pieces of gold. The Sienese lost all their artil- 
 lery and fifty-five banners, while 12,000 men fell, 
 either killed or wounded. 
 
 The siege now became more strict and more 
 dreadful — little or no quarter was given. Fif- 
 
7 2 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 teen hundred peasants, caught by Marignano 
 while endeavoring to take supplies into the city, 
 were hanged within sight of the despairing 
 citizens, so that a Spanish historian, an eye-wit- 
 ness, adds : " The trees seemed to produce 
 more dead bodies of men than leaves." Still 
 the citizens would not yield, and they even car- 
 ried their patriotism to the height of inhumanity 
 to their own flesh and blood, several times turn- 
 ing out of the gates hundreds of " useless 
 mouths," consisting of the old, the sick, the in- 
 firm, and of women and children, who either 
 perished by the Spanish sword, or became the 
 prey of wild beasts, or died from cold and 
 hunger. Within the city, to the ravages of the 
 sword and of famine were added those of 
 pestilence, and at length, on the 17th of April, 
 1555, Siena surrendered. Before the siege it 
 numbered forty thousand inhabitants, at its 
 close there remained but six thousand ; but the 
 thirty-four thousand then left to be accounted 
 for did not all perish in the siege, for seven 
 hundred families, preferring exile to slavery, 
 wandered forth into voluntary banishment. 
 
 It is impossible not to sympathize with one's 
 whole heart with a gallant little people thus pro- 
 tracting a struggle for liberty and their ancient 
 independence, almost to the point of extermina- 
 tion, against such a ruler as Charles V, and 
 such a general as Marignano ; but it is just to 
 
SIENA. 73 
 
 remember that the Republic of Siena, during 
 the whole of its existence, had displayed more 
 and worse vices than did even the little repub- 
 lics and states of ancient Greece. There was 
 never an end to the cruel feuds and bitter party 
 hatreds which rent asunder the city state ; 
 and he who had rendered the greatest service 
 to the republic was most likely to become the 
 object of the envy and hatred of his fellow- 
 citizens, who would often even clamor for his 
 blood. Aonio Paleario, of whom I shall have 
 occasion shortly to speak, thus writes of the re- 
 public in 1530: "The city rises on delightful 
 hills, its territory is fertile and produces every 
 thing in abundance, but discord arms the 
 citizens against one another, and all their 
 energy is consumed in factions " ; and it is 
 worthy of notice that it was unsafe for him to 
 settle in Siena until the Spanish domination was, 
 for the first time, firmly established after 1530. 
 
 Upon the surrender of the republic in 1555, 
 Charles V handed it over in fief to his son, 
 Philip II of Spain, and he, in turn, at the 
 treaty of the Chateau de Cambray (1559), made 
 it over to Cosimo dei Medici, whom Italian 
 historians are wont to call the Tiberius of Tus- 
 cany. From that time Siena remained an in- 
 tegral part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, 
 until after exactly three hundred years, in 1859, 
 it decided by a plebiscite, first among its sister 
 
74 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 cities, to place itself under the tricolor flag of 
 United Italy. 
 
 From the earliest times, and during the most 
 stormy periods of its independent existence, the 
 Republic of Siena was a liberal patron of the 
 art of painting, and the deep religious feeling 
 and tender devotional beauty of the works of 
 its great masters, from the thirteenth century 
 downward, still appeal to the traveller as well 
 from the altars and walls of its many churches 
 as in the " Instituto delle belle arti," where the 
 treasures of many of the suppressed convents 
 have been collected. That the love of painting 
 is not dead in this one of its old haunts is 
 shown by the splendid mosaics executed on the 
 facade of the cathedral by Signor Luigi Mussini, 
 the distinguished painter, director of the insti- 
 tution just named, and by Signor Franchi, who 
 is also attached to the institution. The excel- 
 lence of the school of wood-carving in Siena is 
 shown by the yearly increasing amount of deli- 
 cate and costly work entrusted to Siena houses 
 by connoisseurs of this branch of art in Eng- 
 land ; and it is interesting that the whole of the 
 internal woodwork on, I believe, the last Cunard 
 liner was executed here. 
 
 Few buildings in Italy, or indeed in the 
 world, present a more imposing appearance 
 than does the cathedral, built on the very sum- 
 mit of one of the hills on which Siena stands ; 
 
SIENA. 75 
 
 though it takes time to accustom the eye to the 
 alternate courses of white and black marble of 
 which it is built, and architectural critics find 
 fault with its style. None, however, can deny 
 the extraordinary richness and imposing effect 
 of the interior. More even than the cathedral, 
 the numerous and massive palaces, seemingly 
 capable of defying all enemies, including time, 
 attest the development to which architecture 
 had attained in Siena in the Middle Ages. 
 . In all, Siena gave nine popes to Rome, a gift 
 possibly of doubtful advantage ; but of the 
 benefit to Christendom of the Saints that were 
 born in Siena there can be no doubt. Of these 
 the greatest was Catherine, the daughter of a 
 dyer, who, in her short life of thirty-three years, 
 by her greatness of soul and absolute saintliness 
 of character, became a power in Christendom, 
 and by effecting the return of the papacy from 
 Avignon to Rome, influenced, to an extent 
 difficult now to estimate, the history of the 
 whole world. The purity of the style of her 
 letters is as remarkable as the force of her 
 character and the saintliness of her life, and she 
 is justly regarded, with Dante, Petrarch, and 
 Boccaccio, as one of the founders of that lingua 
 Toscana which has become modern Italian. 
 Her life and life's work have been treated with 
 such fulness and with so deep a sympathy by 
 Mrs. Josephine Butler in her recent touching 
 
7^ HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 biography of the saint that I will say no more 
 of her here. 1 
 
 It is interesting, too, as one comes under the 
 shadow of the enormous mass of the huge 
 church of St. Dominic, and passes into the 
 cloisters, now occupied as a studio by the 
 distinguished sculptor Sarrocchi, to remember 
 that this was long the abode of the " angelical 
 doctor," St. Thomas of Aquinas. 
 
 The saints of the Middle Ages gave place in 
 the sixteenth century to thinkers and reformers. 
 Foremost among them must be mentioned 
 Lelius and Faustus Socinus, uncle and nephew. 
 Born of an old and famous Sienese family, and 
 descended from a series of eminent juriscon- 
 sults, equally distinguished by great erudition 
 and extreme conservatism, Lelius Socinus 
 threw himself with such ardor into the ranks 
 of the reformers as soon to distance and shock 
 them. He visited, in succession, France, Eng- 
 land, the Low Countries, Germany, and Poland, 
 and in the end settled at Zurich, where he died, 
 at the age of thirty-seven, in 1 562. His nephew, 
 
 1 Within the last few months Monsignor Capel has been 
 holding services in English in a church attached to what was 
 once the house of the father of St. Catherine, for the especial 
 benefit of the English in fc'iena. Far be it from any one to 
 attempt to rob the Roman Catholic Church of the halo shed 
 upon it by the holy life of such a saint, but it would be at least 
 open to argument whether, had Catherine lived one hundred 
 and fifty years later, she would not have taken her stand by the 
 side of Vittoria Colonna and rejoiced in the dawn of the 
 Reformation. 
 
SIENA. J? 
 
 Faustus, after passing twelve years at the court 
 of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, with whom he 
 was a great favorite, suddenly went into volun- 
 tary exile in Germany, and for the remainder of 
 his life devoted himself with ardor and enthu- 
 siasm to the dissemination of the views that 
 had become associated with the name of his 
 uncle. Maltreated and persecuted, he at length 
 found a refuge near Cracow, where he died in 
 1604, at the age of seventy-five. Uncle and 
 nephew left behind them an enormous body of 
 heterodox divinity, now never opened but by 
 professed students ; but the ideas and influence 
 of these two great men, received and handed 
 on by later thinkers, were probably never more 
 rife and potential than now, after nearly three 
 centuries. 
 
 First among the great reformers to whom 
 Siena gave birth stands the majestic figure of 
 Bernardino Ochino. He was born in 1487, just 
 four years after Luther. He was a born saint, 
 and endeavored by a life of privation and 
 austerity to carry heaven by assault. He first 
 joined the Franciscans, their rule of life appear- 
 ing to him the most austere of any of the 
 monastic orders, and when that of the Capu- 
 cines seemed to him still more rigorous, he left 
 the former and joined the latter. As in the 
 case of Luther, then in his German monastery, 
 the severest discipline and most wearing au- 
 
78 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 sterities could not give peace to bis soul, a 
 peace which he found only in simple trust in 
 the Divine mercy. 
 
 Ochino was possessed of a wonderful elo- 
 quence, which stirred men's hearts as with the 
 voice of a trumpet. Since Savonarola's death 
 no such potent preacher had appeared in Italy. 
 Under his preaching for a charitable object at 
 Naples, five thousand scudi were raised. After 
 listening to him the men of Perugia promised 
 to be reconciled to one another, and to forego 
 the bitter hatred of centuries. Charles V, 
 after hearing one of his sermons, exclaimed : 
 " This man would make the very stones weep." 
 A singularly noble presence, a face wasted by 
 vigils and labors, with hair prematurely gray, 
 and above all the knowledge of the purity and 
 unaffected piety of his life, heightened the 
 effect of his eloquence. He passed from city 
 to city of Italy preaching, and was everywhere 
 received with almost princely honors. His 
 head-quarters was often in the Capucine con- 
 vent, close to his native city, and the archives 
 of Siena contain many letters which passed 
 between him and its rulers, which show the 
 strong love he always bore to his birthplace. 
 He was elected General-superior of his order, 
 and in 1542 he was invited to preach the Lent 
 sermons in Venice. All Venice flocked to hear 
 him, and the enthusiasm evoked by his elo- 
 
SIENA. 79 
 
 quence knew no bounds. But the Papal Legate 
 was listening to his words, and on one occasion 
 rose, interrupted him, and commanded him to 
 be silent in the name of the Holy Father. So 
 great, however, was the popularity of Ochino, 
 that three days later he was again allowed to 
 enter the pulpit, and this time before even a 
 larger audience. Upon reaching Verona, after 
 leaving Venice, he received a summons to 
 appear before the Holy Office at Rome. What 
 that summons implied he well knew, and he 
 determined to disobey it. There is among the 
 manuscripts belonging to the library of Siena a 
 letter from Ochino to Vittoria Colonna, dated 
 August 22, 1542, in which he tells her that, 
 having learned from his friends how pretended 
 heretics are dealt with at Rome, he has resolved 
 not to appear there, because he would there 
 have only one of two alternatives, either to 
 deny Christ, or to die in torments : " Deny 
 Christ I never can," he writes ; " to die, by the 
 grace of God, I am ready, as He Himself may 
 dispose of me, but not to give myself volun- 
 tarily into the hands of the executioners. The 
 Lord will know well how to find me whereso- 
 ever I may be, when He wills that my blood 
 shall be shed." He decided upon leaving Italy 
 forever, and a few days later, taking the road 
 of Milan and Aosta, he crossed the great St. 
 Bernard, and descended to Geneva, where he 
 
80 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 was received with open arms, and nominated 
 pastor to the Italian refugees, who were begin- 
 ning to flock to the city of refuge as the only 
 means of escape from the clutches of the 
 Inquisition. From his secure asylum upon the 
 shores of Lake Leman, Ochino continued to 
 hold close and affectionate correspondence with 
 those like minded with himself in Italy, and 
 especially in Siena, and his sermons and works, 
 though prohibited and cursed by the pope, 
 were widely disseminated and read throughout 
 the peninsula. 
 
 And now I must bring to a close these remi- 
 niscences of illustrious Sienese, by a notice of one 
 who, though not born in Siena, was for many 
 years professor in its university, on which he 
 conferred great honor by the lustre of his genius 
 and the brilliancy of his eloquence — Aonio 
 Paleario. Born at Veroli, in Southern Italy, in 
 1503, he from his earliest years threw himself, 
 heart and soul, into the revival of learning and 
 letters, in that new birth of the intellect to 
 which Europe, and Italy especially, were just 
 awakening. When twenty-seven years old he 
 visited Tuscany, and spent a year among like- 
 minded friends of learning at Siena. Thence he 
 proceeded to the University of Padua, princi- 
 pally in order to attend the lectures of Lampre- 
 dius on Demosthenes. Within less than a year 
 he was recalled to Siena by the danger of one of 
 his friends in that city, Antonio Bellanri, 
 
SIENA. 8 1 
 
 The family of Bellanti had rendered the most 
 signal and distinguished service to the republic, 
 only, however, to be repaid by base ingratitude. 
 Their palace had been pillaged by the mob, and 
 Antonio himself thrown into prison on a capital 
 charge based upon an obsolete law of the re- 
 public which punished with death any one who 
 introduced salt into the city to the detriment of 
 the revenue. It is a sad illustration of the viru- 
 lence of party hatred during the last years of 
 the existence of the republic, that no one dared 
 to undertake the defence of the accused. Pa- 
 leario did not hesitate a moment, but hurried 
 back to Siena, and before the Tribunal of the 
 Republic, in one of the halls of the Palazzo 
 Pubblico, delivered a magnificent oration in de- 
 fence of his friend, — a discourse which, read 
 now, after three centuries, would not seem un- 
 worthy of Cicero himself. His efforts were 
 crowned with success, and his friend was ac- 
 quitted ; but so great was the danger that the 
 successful advocate ran of assassination, that his 
 friends persuaded him to leave Siena speedily 
 and return to Padua. Nor did he return until 
 after 1535, when the Spaniards had established 
 their authority in the republic. Paleario could 
 now live safely in Siena, and he gave lectures 
 on philosophy and poetry, and completed his 
 great poem on the Immortality of the Soul, in- 
 tended to be a reply to Lucretius. He pur- 
 
82 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 chased the villa of Cecignano, an estate near to 
 Colle which had once been the property of that 
 Aulus Cecina who was defended by Cicero, and 
 married. 
 
 But Paleario was not only a poet, an orator, 
 and an enthusiast for classical learning : he 
 came of pious parents, among his intimate 
 friends were some of the most eminent and 
 pious churchmen of the day, and he longed for 
 a thorough reformation of the Church without 
 a schism. By degrees he awoke to the convic- 
 tion that this was an impossibility ; and when 
 once he clearly perceived this, his position was 
 decided. Henceforth his life was a constant 
 struggle against the persecution of the Friars. 
 They succeeded in driving him from the Uni- 
 versity of Siena, and he took refuge at Lucca, 
 where he was appointed Professor of Eloquence. 
 Here he remained from 1546 until 1555, in 
 which year his implacable enemies compelled 
 him to leave, and he repaired to Milan. He 
 was constantly warned by his friends, of the 
 danger of the boldness of his utterances as to 
 the necessity of a reform of the Church, and that 
 his only chance of safety was flight beyond the 
 Alps ; but he would not heed them, and indeed 
 seemed to think that his mission in the world 
 was to be a confessor. At the age of sixty-six 
 he was arrested in Milan by the agents of the 
 Inquisition, and taken as a prisoner to Rome. 
 
SIENA. 83 
 
 There he was sentenced to death on the 15th 
 of October, 1569, and the sentence was carried 
 into execution on the 3d of July, 1570. And 
 now let us turn to a letter preserved among the 
 manuscripts in the Public Library of Siena. It 
 is the farewell of Paleario to his wife and chil- 
 dren, and is as follows : — 
 
 " To Marietta Paleario. 
 
 " My Dearest Consort : — I desire that thou shouldst not 
 find displeasure in my pleasure, nor evil in my good. The 
 hour has come when I must pass from this life to my Lord and 
 Master and God. Very joyfully do I go to the marriage 
 supper of the Son of the great King, as I have ever prayed my 
 Lord that of His infinite goodness and bounty He would grant 
 me admittance. 
 
 "Therefore, my beloved consort, comfort thyself in the 
 will of God and in my contentment, and look well to the little 
 family left in deep dismay, and bring them up and guard them 
 in the fear of God, and be thou to them both father and 
 mother. I am already seventy years old and useless. Our 
 sons must labor with virtue and with sweat of the brow to pro- 
 vide what is necessary to live honorably. May God the 
 Father and our Lord Jesus Christ and the Communion of the 
 Holy Spirit be with your spirits. Aonio Paleario. 
 
 " Rome, July 3, 1570." 
 
 With this are a few lines to his sons, Lam- 
 pridio and Fedro, in which he gives some direc- 
 tions about his small property. This letter thus 
 begins : — 
 
 " My most courteous lords (the Inquisitors) are not wanting 
 in politeness to me to the very last, and allow me to write to 
 you. It pleases God to call me to Himself by means that you 
 
84 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 will understand, though they will appear bitter and sharp to 
 you. If, however, you consider that it is with my entire con- 
 tentment and satisfaction, in order to conform myself to the 
 will of God, so it ought to content you." 
 
 It was on the evening of the 2d of July that 
 eight members of the Confraternity of " San 
 Giovanni decollato," a philanthropic society 
 which devoted itself to rendering services to the 
 condemned in the hour of death, presented 
 themselves at the prison of Tordinona, and in- 
 formed Paleario that he had only a few hours to 
 live. They obtained permission for him to 
 write the letters above quoted, and faithfully 
 transmitted them to his wife at Colle. Just as 
 day was breaking over the eternal city, he was 
 led out to die. The scaffold was erected on the 
 bridge of St. Angelo. He was strangled, and 
 his body was then thrown into the flames. 
 Truly, never did Christian philosopher and con- 
 fessor go forth to meet his death with more 
 sublime serenity. 
 
 It may be asked, how stands it now with 
 Protestantism in the city of Ochino and Paleario ? 
 As in the greater part of Italy, in Spain, and 
 elsewhere, the Holy Office did its work thor- 
 oughly, and crushed and burned out the Refor- 
 mation. So far as I know, beyond one or two 
 Swiss and English, there are no Protestants in 
 Siena. A very handsome Waldensian temple 
 was erected in a leading boulevard near to the 
 
SIENA. 85 
 
 Church of St. Dominic more than a year ago, 
 and though no service has yet been held there, 
 yet as a large building is now in process of con- 
 struction beside it to serve as a presbytery, it 
 may be hoped that the church will soon be 
 opened. Occasional Waldensian services are 
 now held in the house of a Swiss resident. 
 
 But I have dwelt, I fear, too long upon the 
 memory of some of those who shed lustre upon 
 Siena by their genius and virtue in the past. 
 
 The old city sits a queen upon three hills, and 
 from every point in the surrounding country its 
 cathedral, its towers, and walls form a picture of 
 singular beauty. In its mediaeval walls, still in- 
 tact and perfect, were once no fewer than thirty- 
 eight gates ; of these, thirty have been closed, 
 so that eight remain open. The circuit of the 
 walls is seven kilometres, and they enclose an 
 irregular star-shaped space, a good deal of which 
 is laid out in olive-yards and gardens. Once 
 Siena numbered 100,000 inhabitants ; now there 
 are but 24,000. After the ravages of the plague, 
 in 1348, and the last struggle for the freedom of 
 the republic in 1554-5, many houses were 
 razed, and the ground occupied by them was 
 turned into gardens as we now see them. The 
 surrounding country, as seen from the walls of 
 the fortress, appears one great olive-yard and 
 vineyard. The vines are either trained upon mul- 
 berries or upon other trees, rarely upon olives. In 
 
86 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 the winter the gray, silvery sheen of the olives 
 stands out against the bright red earth, which 
 has given its name to " burnt Siena " ; but with 
 the spring the young corn planted everywhere 
 between the olives and the mulberries covers 
 the ground with exquisite verdure ; and when 
 the vines and other trees put out their leaves 
 toward the middle of May, it is difficult to con- 
 ceive of a fairer green than the country ex- 
 hibits. 
 
 In a month or six weeks all is changed ; hill 
 and valley alike are golden with ripe grain, and 
 as soon as the grain is harvested the land re- 
 verts to its native redness, though late in the 
 autumn this is relieved by some green crops, as 
 welcome to the eye as they doubtless are to the 
 cattle for whose sustenance they are intended. 
 Last year the yield of grapes was exceptionally 
 abundant, and it was curious, as one drove along 
 distant country lanes, to see great purple clus- 
 ters hanging by the roadside from the topmost 
 branches of oaks and other trees upon which 
 the vines had been trained. At this season, too, 
 women and boys are to be seen up among the 
 branches gathering the grapes, and the great 
 white, large-horned, meek-eyed oxen draw 
 primitive vans through the fields on which are the 
 tubs or baskets in which the grapes are collected. 
 The landscape, as seen from the walls, is occa- 
 sionally relieved by groves of the stone pine and 
 
SIENA. Sy 
 
 copses of oak and other trees. These latter are, 
 I fear, becoming scarcer year by year, for the 
 Sienese seem to have less respect for trees than 
 even the Italians generally, and to have no 
 compunction in cutting them down. There 
 is but one exception to this sad rule, and that is 
 the cypress, a grove or avenue of which every 
 Italian gentleman strives to have around his 
 villa. Very beautiful is its flame-like form, but 
 after all not so beautiful as the oak, which no- 
 where flourishes better than here in Tuscany, if 
 only allowed to do so. It is painful to look at 
 the denuded condition of Italy as regards wood, 1 
 and then think of the magnificent forests of 
 oak that have been felled within the last thirty 
 years to provide sleepers for its railway system. 
 To return to the view from the walls of Siena. 
 
 1 Since this article has been in type I have heard of an 
 English family who, thirty years ago, found the neighborhood 
 of Siena beautifully wooded with oaks. Twenty years later 
 they returned to find the greater part felled, and two years 
 since nearly all were gone. Men of good position and in 
 other respects sane seem afflicted with a mischievous madness, 
 which shows itself in an utter hatred of trees. A few years 
 back, between the outer and inner gate at Camollia, was a 
 superb avenue of ilex. Every tree was felled in one year by a 
 tree-hating "Sindaco," and now in this most exposed place 
 there is not a particle of shade against the blazing Italian sun. 
 A mile outside the city are some 6ne villas, and there used to 
 be some lovely shady lanes, with fine old oaks on either side, 
 through whose umbrageous foliage the hot sun could not 
 penetrate. These oaks have nearly all been slaughtered, the 
 proprietor having no other idea but to make what he calls a 
 " campo pulito" — a clean field ; and even where along a little 
 hollow flows a rivulet, erst shaded by willows, the fiat has 
 gone forth, and all the trees are at this moment being felled. 
 They make a desolation, and call it a " campo pulito." 
 
88 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 The distant hill-sides are covered with ilex and 
 oak, but for the most part only scrub, as the 
 charcoal-burner is always at work, and long 
 before the trees have reached maturity they 
 fall before the inexorable axe. These hills 
 stretch away, range beyond range, into the 
 distance, and in the soft waning light present 
 the most exquisite shades of purple. To the 
 south the wooded Monte Amiata rises to a 
 height of 5,600 feet, about half way distant 
 between Siena and Rome, while to the north 
 the main chain of the Apennines, on the con- 
 fines of Modena, rises high above the other 
 hills by which the city is surrounded, and in 
 winter, deep in snow, and gleaming white in the 
 sunshine, presents a truly Alpine appearance. 
 When you enter one of the gates of Siena, you 
 pass along narrow streets, many of which are so 
 steep as to be impassable to vehicles. Along 
 the more level streets come lumbering country 
 wains, each drawn by two milk-white oxen, 
 with great branching horns, and large, soft eyes. 
 The Qontadine from the surrounding district, 
 with bright, handsome, wholesome faces and 
 immense waving Tuscan hats, give much pict- 
 uresqueness to the streets, as do the numerous 
 ecclesiastics in their shovel hats and knee- 
 breeches. 
 
 In August comes the great festival of the 
 city, the Palio. Its origin is lost in hoar an- 
 
SIENA. 89 
 
 tiquity. In fact, there is reason to believe that 
 when only the summits of the three hills upon 
 which Siena sits were built upon, the inhab- 
 itants used to come down to meet one an- 
 other into what is now the Piazza del Campo, 
 the great market-place. It is a true amphi- 
 theatre, having exactly the form of an immense 
 upturned cockle-shell, and probably it was once 
 the crater of a volcano. Its size may be esti- 
 mated by the fact that it is said to hold, and 
 indeed on at least one occasion has held, as 
 many as 35,000 people, though half that num- 
 ber is sufficient to give it a crowded appearance. 
 The principal building in the Piazza is the 
 magnificent Palace of the Republic, standing 
 now as strong and intact and perfect as if it had 
 not witnessed the daily life, the games, and the 
 life and death struggles of Siena in countless 
 revolutions throughout nearly six centuries — 
 for it was commenced in 1284 and finished 
 about 1330. Rising gracefully by the side of 
 the Palace of the Republic is the so-called 
 Mangia Tower, which from every part of the 
 city and for many miles around is visible, a 
 miracle of lightness and strength. The Palazzo 
 Pubblico, with the Mangia Tower, forms the 
 diameter or base of the semicircle, and stands 
 at the lowest part of the Piazza, while the 
 semicircle of palaces faces it from higher 
 ground in a regular amphitheatre. In remote 
 
90 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 times the citizens used here to celebrate a game 
 called " Elmora," which was in truth more than 
 a game ; it was a regular battle with sticks and 
 stones and other weapons, and always caused 
 the death of at least one citizen. For this, in 
 1 29 1, was substituted boxing, which continued 
 to be practised down to the beginning of the 
 present century. But the public games of the 
 " Contrade " began in 1482, in which year, for 
 the first time, jousts and tourneys were held by 
 them in the Piazza. From 1500 to 1599 the 
 Contrade had annual bull-fights, to which each 
 Contrada brought its own bull. A little fort- 
 ress, too, was constructed and adorned with 
 banners by each Contrada, in which the bull- 
 fighters sought refuge when too closely pressed 
 by the tormented animals. This cruel sport 
 gave place, from 1600 to 1650, to races between 
 buffaloes, each ridden by a jockey ; but as this 
 also was almost always accompanied by death 
 or severe wounds to some of the competitors, 
 in 1650 horses were substituted for buffaloes, 
 and the races have thus been run down to the 
 present day. The word " Contrada " simply 
 means a street or district of the city, but the 
 Contrade are more than lay corporations ; each 
 has a church, a distinctive banner, and special 
 regulations of its own. They are probably as 
 old as the republic itself. In 1328 there were 
 fifty-nine of these Contrade. Thirteen ceased 
 
SIENA. 91 
 
 to exist at the time of the plague, and twenty- 
 three more after the siege. Six were sup- 
 pressed in 1675 for having insulted the judges 
 at the tourney of that year, thus leaving the 
 seventeen which still remain. The Contrade 
 mostly take their name from some animal, a 
 picture of which is emblazoned upon their 
 respective banners. These emblems are as 
 follows: the tortoise (the most ancient), the 
 goose, the tower, the giraffe, the conch-shell, 
 the wood, the caterpillar, the wolf, the eagle, 
 the owl, the wave, the dragon, the snail, the 
 panther, the sheep, the unicorn, and the porcu- 
 pine. Of these only ten are allowed to ruii 
 horses at the Palio, the course being too narrow 
 to admit of more with safety. For weeks 
 before the event actually comes off the greatest 
 excitement prevails throughout the city, every 
 one being anxious for the success of the horse 
 belonging to his or her Contrada. At length 
 the great day arrives. The ten horses that are 
 to run are led into the churches of their re- 
 spective Contrade, and are there blessed by 
 the priests. The banners of all the seventeen 
 Contrade wave everywhere throughout the city. 
 The people are crowded into the immense shell- 
 like space of the Piazza del Campo, the centre 
 of which is occupied by the spectators, as are 
 tier upon tier of seats arranged against the 
 ground-floor of the palaces, and also balconies 
 at a higher level. 
 
92 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 The course is a stone pavement, about thirty 
 feet wide, on the outside circumference of the 
 Piazza, and exactly below the tiers of seats at 
 the base of the palaces. It is now covered 
 three or four inches deep with sand and earth, 
 and even with this concession it seems a des- 
 perate course for mortal horses to run. Not 
 only are the turns short and sharp, but there 
 are constant steep ascents and descents. Where 
 the descending slope is steepest, near the beauti- 
 ful little chapel erected hard by the Palazzo 
 Pubblico, not only have boardings been freely 
 erected, but they have been well padded with 
 ' beds and mattresses, to give if possible a soft 
 reception to any unfortunate rider who may be 
 spilt here. A troop of Carbineers, who, through- 
 out Italy, are employed on police duty, and who 
 are particularly fine men, well horsed, and with 
 superb uniforms, canter round the course two 
 or three times to clear it of people. 
 
 The appearance of the Piazza during last 
 year's Palio was at this moment very striking. 
 An old gentleman, in one of the balconies, who 
 said he was seventy-four years old, and that he 
 had witnessed more than fifty Palios, estimated 
 the number of people present at nearly 30,000. 
 He was, of course, a laudator temporis acti, and 
 thought the present show very inferior to those 
 of his youth. Probably, however, the change 
 was more in the spectator than in the scene. 
 
SIENA. 93 
 
 The tiers of seats crowded with gayly dressed 
 spectators, the bright-colored clothing of the 
 crowd, the characteristic immense broad-waving 
 Tuscan hats of the countrywomen, the waving 
 of fans, the hum of many voices, like the roar 
 of the sea when the wind drives shoreward its 
 thundering breakers ; the grand old palaces 
 decked out for the occasion, on whose topmost 
 balconies up to the towers and roofs were 
 grouped spectators ; the music of the bands, 
 the roll of the drums, the waving of banners, 
 the signal shots from mortars, the capering of 
 the horses, and the wild joy of an entire people, 
 together formed a strange and intoxicating tout 
 ensemble of movement, color, and sound. The 
 clusters of many-colored elastic balloons, inflated 
 by the venders and floated up almost to the 
 level of the roofs of the palace, were a distinct 
 addition to the brightness of the scene. 
 
 But now, in a moment, every voice is hushed 
 and every neck is craned. From the street 
 Casato, preceded by a band of music, appear 
 the representatives of the seventeen Contrade, 
 greeted by the applause of their respective 
 partisans. Each Contrada is represented by 
 a captain, clothed in splendid armor; two 
 ensigns, who act as wavers of banners ; a first 
 page, who walks by himself, carrying a banner 
 on his shoulder ; a drummer and four other 
 pages, all attired in the brilliant and picturesque 
 
94 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 fashion of the Middle Ages. Then follows the 
 horse of parade, a show horse, richly capari- 
 soned, bearing a rider armed cap-a-pie as a 
 knight ; and, lastly, the horse that is to do the 
 running, without even a saddle, and quite with- 
 out ornament. Where these horses are pro- 
 cured, or how selected, I do not know ; they 
 must be chosen for qualities of speed or 
 endurance, but they are said to be horses that, 
 except on this festal day, are busy all the year 
 round drawing carts and performing other hum- 
 ble duties. They are little creatures and have 
 a weedy appearance. The bright colors of the 
 costumes of the Middle Ages, the plumes on 
 the helmets, the burnished cuirasses, the rich 
 caparisons of the horses, the flashing swords, 
 the gracefully attired pages, the bold knights, 
 the dexterous ensigns, — who, proud of their 
 office, wave their banners in a thousand capri- 
 cious curves, yet so that they always remain 
 unfurled, and every now and again, hurl them 
 into the air, catching them with wonderful 
 agility, — and the captains with a grave and 
 solemn air, befitting the dignity of their posi- 
 tion — in short, all this wealth of costume, all 
 this varied luxury of dress and of arms, carries 
 even the most matter-of-fact beholder many 
 centuries backward on the stream of time, to 
 the days of embattled castles with moats and 
 drawbridges, and of jousts and tourneys. Cer- 
 
SIENA. 95 
 
 tainly our modern dress, when placed side by 
 side withthat of the Middle Ages, looks mean 
 and common indeed. 
 
 As the Contrade defile past the balcony, 
 where sit the judges of the course, they stop to 
 salute them, to wave their banners, and to 
 throw them into the air. Last comes the 
 " Caroccio," or sacred war-car of the republic, 
 the pride of the ancestors of those who now 
 surround it, in defence of which the flower of 
 the youth of Siena bled and died on many 
 a hard-fought field. It is adorned with the 
 standard which waved at the famous battle of 
 Monte Aperto, and with the banners of all the 
 Contrade of Siena. The representatives of the 
 Contrade, nearly 200 in all, now range them- 
 selves on tiers of seats, appropriately raised at 
 the foot of the Palazza Pubblico ; and a won- 
 derful picture the old palace makes, with the 
 graceful Mangia Tower rising beside it, — its 
 windows alive with gay and happy faces, and 
 at its base a perfect parterre of bright colors, 
 formed by the representatives of the Contrade. 
 The roll of drums ceases, the many-colored 
 banners are no longer waved, the music is 
 hushed, and there only remains the murmur of 
 the agitated and expectant crowd. The show 
 having finished, the business of the day now 
 begins. The horses that are to compete are 
 ridden bare-backed. However humble their 
 
96 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 ordinary employment, they seem now affected 
 by the general enthusiasm around them, and 
 are eager for the start. Hark ! the roll of the 
 drum, the report of a gun, the rope falls, and 
 the ten horses are off m a wild gallop. The 
 partisans of the respective Contrade are in a 
 state of great excitement, and cheer their 
 champions on with frantic cries. The horse 
 of the " Lupo " (wolf) is a little ahead of any 
 of the others ; but that of the " Torre " (tower) 
 presses him hard, although the rider of the 
 latter had been thrown and slightly hurt at the 
 trial race in the morning. There is a sharp 
 struggle between the two riders with their 
 leather thongs, the horses all the time at full 
 gallop, and then the horse of the " Torre " 
 shoots ahead, passes the starting-point for the 
 third time, and wins. The Contrada of the 
 Torre is that which surrounds the Mangia 
 Tower and the Palazza Pubblico, and great is 
 the delight of its inhabitants. A woman begins 
 to ring the bell of the chapel of the Piazza. 
 The victorious rider receives the prize from the 
 hands of the judges, and the flag with the date, 
 glorious for him and for his Contrada, worked 
 upon it. It is difficult to say whether man or 
 horse is the hero of the hour ; both are greeted 
 with transports of joy, and are even fondly 
 embraced by both men and women. They are 
 then led in triumph into a church, where a 
 
SIENA. 97 
 
 priest intones the " Te Deum," amid the 
 " Evvivas " of the people, for the Italians see 
 nothing irreverent in this strange proceeding. 
 
 About a fortnight after the Palio, the con- 
 quering Contrada gives a dinner to the repre- 
 sentatives of all the other Contrade. This year 
 it took place in a narrow street at one side of 
 the Palazzo Pubblico, right down the middle of 
 which tables were placed. On either side the 
 houses were brilliantly illuminated with tapers 
 and Chinese lanterns of many colors, and of its 
 kind, nothing could be more picturesque. This 
 dinner takes place at 9 P. M., and lasts far into 
 the night. The narrow old street, with its lofty 
 houses lighted from basement to garret, with 
 here a triumphal arch of evergreens, and there 
 a transparency of the arms of the Contrada ; 
 the interested, but most orderly citizens of 
 Siena, with their wives and children, assisting 
 at the banquet by walking down one side of 
 the tables and up the other ; the narrow streak 
 of soft blue Italian sky between the house-tops 
 on either side, illuminated by a full clear moon 
 which, being in the zenith, looked down upon 
 the festivity ; — altogether formed a really charm- 
 ing tableau. 
 
 I am assured that there is little drunkenness, 
 and not much betting on these occasions. 
 Certainly I, personally, saw no drunkenness, 
 nor did I hear any bets made. This is, how- 
 
98 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 ever, strictly negative evidence, and one would 
 expect a great deal of betting in a country, 
 where in every town, little and great, there is 
 an office for the sale of tickets in the Govern- 
 ment and Municipal Lotteries, institutions for 
 national demoralization worthy only of the 
 darkest of dark ages. Be this as it may, I 
 never beheld a gentler or more well-behaved 
 crowd, and the great Piazza was quickly 
 emptied by means of the eleven streets or 
 passages which open into it. 
 
 St. Catherine speaks of the sangae dolce of 
 her beloved Sienese ; and there is a feeling in 
 the city that it is not consistent with this trait 
 of their character that the riders at the Palio 
 should be allowed to strike one another with 
 their whips, a clear survival from the old days 
 when the " Elmora " always counted its victims 
 slain, and boxing and bull-fighting were the 
 order of the day. 
 
A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE EIGH- 
 TEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 By FREDERIC HARRISON. 
 
 The stormy antipathies of Thomas Carlyle 
 have to answer for many a miscarriage of his- 
 torical justice ; but for none more unfounded 
 than that superior air with which he teaches 
 the nineteenth century to sit in judgment on 
 the eighteenth. " The age of prose, of lying 
 of sham," said he, " the fraudulent-bankrupt 
 century, the reign of Beelzebub, the peculiar era 
 of Cant." And so growls on our Teufelsdrockh 
 through thirty octavo volumes, from the first 
 philosophy of clothes to the last hour of Fried- 
 rich. 
 
 Invectives against a century are even more 
 unprofitable than indictments against a nation. 
 We are prepared for them in theology, but 
 they have quite gone out of serious history. 
 Whatever else it may be, we may take it that 
 the nineteenth century is the product of the 
 eighteenth, as that was in turn the product of 
 the seventeenth ; and if the Prince of Dark- 
 ness had so lately a hundred years of rule in 
 Europe, to what fortunate event do we owe 
 
 99 
 A-OFC. 
 
IOO HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 our own deliverance, and indeed the nativity of 
 Thomas Carlyle ? But surely invectives were 
 never more out of place, than when hurled at a 
 century which was simply the turning epoch 
 of the modern world, the age which gave birth 
 to the movements wherein we live, and to all 
 the tasks that we yet labor to solve. Look 
 at the eighteenth century on all sides of its 
 manifold life, free the mind from that lofty pity 
 with which prosperous folks are apt to remem- 
 ber their grandfathers, and we shall find it in 
 achievement the equal of any century since the 
 Middle Ages in promise and suggestion and 
 preparation, the century which most deeply 
 concerns ourselves. 
 
 Though Mr. Carlyle seems to count it the 
 sole merit of the eighteenth century to have 
 provided us the French Revolution (the most 
 glorious bonfire recorded in profane history), it 
 is not a little curious that almost all his heroes 
 in modern times, apart from Oliver Cromwell, 
 are children and representatives of that unspeak- 
 able epoch. Such were Friedrich, Mirabeau and 
 Danton, George Washington, Samuel Johnson 
 and Robert Burns, Watt and Arkwright ; and, 
 for more than half of the century, and for more 
 than half his work, so was Goethe himself. It 
 sounds strange to accuse of unmitigated gross- 
 ness and quackery the age which gave us these 
 men ; and which produced, besides, " Robinson 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. IOI 
 
 Crusoe," and the " Vicar of Wakefield," the 
 " Elegy in a Church-yard," and the lines " To 
 Mary," and " To my Mother's Picture," Berke- 
 ley's dialogues and Burke's addresses, Reynold 
 and Gainsborough, Flaxman and Stothard, Han- 
 del and Mozart. But one remembers that accord- 
 ing to the Teufelsdrockhian cosmogony, great 
 men are dropped ab extra into their age, much 
 as some philosophers assure us that protoplasm, 
 or the primitive germ of life, was casually 
 dropped upon our planet by a truant aerolite. 
 
 A century which opens with the " Rape of the 
 Lock," and closes with the first part of " Faust," 
 is hardly a century of mere prose, especially if we 
 throw in Gray, Cowper, and Burns, the " Ancient 
 Mariner " and the " Lyrical Ballads." A century 
 which includes twenty years of the life of 
 Newton, twenty-three of Wren, and sixteen 
 of Leibnitz, and the whole lives of Hume, 
 Kant, Adam Smith, Gibbon, and Priestley, is 
 not the age of mere shallowness ; nor is the 
 century which founded the monarchy of Prus- 
 sia and the empire of Britain, which gave birth 
 to the republic in America and then in France, 
 and which finally recast modern society and 
 formed our actual habits, the peculiar era of 
 quackeries, bonfires, and suicides. Measure it 
 justly by the light of scientific history, and not 
 by the tropes of some Biblical Saga, and it 
 holds its own beside the greatest epochs in the 
 
102 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 modern world ; of all modern eras perhaps the 
 richest, most various, most creative. It raised 
 to the rank of sciences, chemistry, botany, and 
 zoology ; it created the conception of social 
 science and laid its foundations ; it produced 
 the historical schools and the economic school 
 of England and of France, the new Meta- 
 physic of Germany, the new Music of Ger- 
 many; it gave birth to the new poetic 
 movement in England, to the new romance 
 literature of England and of France, to the 
 true prose literature of Europe ; it transformed 
 material life by manifold inventions and arts ; 
 it transformed social life no less than political 
 life ; it found modern civilization in a military 
 phase, it left it in an industrial phase : it found 
 modern Europe fatigued, oppressed with worn- 
 out forms, uneasy with the old life, uncertain 
 and hopeless about the new ; it left modern 
 Europe recast without and animated with a 
 new soul within, burning with life, hope, and 
 energy. 
 
 The habit of treating a century as an organic 
 whole, with a character of its own, is the beaten 
 pathway to superficial comparison. History, 
 after all, is not grouped into natural periods of 
 one hundred years, as different from each other 
 as the life of the son from that of his father. 
 Nor, whatever, the makers of chronologies may 
 say, does mankind really turn over a new page 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 103 
 
 in the great Record, so soon as the period of 
 one hundred years is complete. The genius of 
 any time, even though it be in a single country, 
 even in one city, is a thing too marvellously 
 complex to be hit off by epithets from the Minor 
 Prophets or Gargantuan anathemas and nick- 
 names. And as men are not born at the begin- 
 ning of a century, and do not die at the end of 
 it, but grow, flourish, and decay year by year 
 and hour by hour, we are ever entering on a 
 new epoch and completing an old one, did we 
 but know it, on the first day of every year we 
 live, nay at the rising and setting of every sun. 
 But, though a century be an arbitrary period, 
 as purely conventional as a yard or a mile, and 
 though every century has a hundred characters 
 of its own, and as many lives and as many re- 
 sults, we must for convenience take note of 
 conventional limits, and fix our attention on 
 special features as the true physiognomy of an 
 epoch. History altogether is a wilderness, till 
 we parcel it out into sections more or less arbi- 
 trary, choosing some class of facts out of the 
 myriads that stand recorded, steadily turning 
 our eyes from those which do not concern our 
 immediate purpose. And so, we can think of a 
 century as in some sort a definite whole, in 
 some sense inspired with a definite spirit, and 
 leading to a set of definite results. And we are 
 quite right in so doing, provided we keep a 
 
104 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 watchful and balanced mind, in no mechanical 
 way, and in no rhetorical or moralizing mood, 
 but in order to find what is general, dominant, 
 and central. 
 
 If we seek for some note to mark off the 
 eighteenth from all other centuries we shall find 
 it in this : it was the time of final maturing to 
 the great Revolution in Europe, the mightiest 
 change in all human history. By revolution we 
 mean, not the blood-stained explosion and 
 struggle in France which was little but one of 
 its symptoms and incidents, but that resettle- 
 ment of modern life common to all parts of the 
 civilized world ; which was at once religious, 
 intellectual, scientific, social, moral, political, 
 and industrial ; a resettlement whereon the 
 whole fabric of human society in the future is 
 destined to rest. The era as a whole (so far 
 from being trivial, sceptical, fraudulent, or sui- 
 cidal) was, in all its central and highest moments, 
 an era of hope, enterprise, industry, and human- 
 ity ; full of humane eagerness for improvement, 
 trusting human nature, and earnestly bent on 
 human good. It sadly miscalculated the diffi- 
 culties and risks, and it strangely undervalued 
 the problems it attempted to solve with so light 
 a heart. Instead of being really the decrepit 
 imposture amongst the ages, it was rather the 
 naif and confident youngster. The work of 
 political reformation on which it engaged in a 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 105 
 
 spirit of artful benevolence brought down on its 
 head a terrible rebuff ; and it left us thereby a 
 heritage of confusion and strife. But the hurly- 
 burly at Versailles and the Reign of Terror are 
 no more the essence of the eighteenth century, 
 than the Irish atrocities and the Commune of 
 Paris are the essence of the nineteenth. Polit- 
 ical chaos, rebellions, and wars are at most but 
 a part of a century's activity, and sometimes 
 indeed but a small part. 
 
 In the core, the epoch was hearty, manly, 
 humane ; second to none in energy, mental, 
 practical, and social ; full of sense, work, and 
 good-fellowship. Its manliness often fattened 
 into grossness ; soon to show new touches of 
 exquisite tenderness. Its genius for enterprise 
 plunged it into changes, and prepared for us 
 evils which it little foresaw. But the work was 
 all undertaken in genuine zeal for the improve- 
 ment of human life. If its poetry was not of the 
 highest of all orders, the century created a new 
 order of poetry. If its art was on the whole 
 below the average, in the noble art of music it 
 was certainly supreme. In philosophy, science, 
 moral and religious truth, it was second to none 
 that went before. In politics it ended in a 
 most portentous catastrophe. But the very 
 catastrophe resulted from its passion for truth 
 and reform. Nor is it easy for us now to see 
 how the catastrophe could have been avoided, 
 
106 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 even if we see our way to avoid such catas- 
 trophes again . And in such a cause it was better 
 to fail in striving after the good than to perish 
 by acquiescing in the evil. If one had to give 
 it a name, I would rather call it the humane age 
 (in spite of revolutions, wars, and fashionable 
 corruption) ; for it was the era when humanity 
 first distinctly perceived the possibilities and 
 conditions of mature human existence. 
 
 It would be easy enough to find scores of 
 names, facts, and events to the contrary of all 
 this ; but it would be quite as easy to find scores 
 to the contrary of any opinion about any epoch. 
 A century is a mass of contradictions by the 
 necessity of the case ; for it is made up of every 
 element to be found in human nature. The 
 various incidents are in no way to be overlooked ; 
 neither are they to be exaggerated. To balance 
 the qualities of an epoch, we must analyze them 
 all separately, compare them one by one, and 
 then find the centre of gravity of the mass. 
 England will concern us in the main ; but the 
 spirit of the age can never be strictly confined 
 to its action in any one country. Such move- 
 ments as the Renascence in the sixteenth, or 
 the Revolution in the eighteenth century, are 
 especially common to Europe. It would be im- 
 possible to understand the eighteenth century 
 in England, if we wholly shut our eyes to the 
 movements abroad of which the English phase 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 107 
 
 was the reflex and organ. Nor must we forget 
 how much our judgment of the eighteenth cent- 
 ury is warped (it is obvious that Mr. Carlyle's 
 was entirely formed) by literary standards and 
 impressions. Literature has been deluged with 
 the affectations, intrigues, savagery, and unclean- 
 ness of the eighteenth century. Other centuries 
 had all this in at least equal degree ; but the 
 eighteenth was the first to display it in pungent 
 literary form. Industry, science, invention, and 
 benevolence were less tempting fields for these 
 brilliant penmen. And thus an inordinate share 
 of attention is given to the quarrels of poets, 
 the vices of courts, and the grimacing of fops. 
 It is the business of serious history to correct 
 the impression which torrents of smart writing 
 have "left on the popular mind. 
 
 We are all rather prone to dwell on the follies 
 and vices of that era, with which we are more 
 familiar than we are with any other, almost 
 more than we are with our own. It is the first 
 age, since that of Augustus, which ever left 
 inimitable pictures of its own daily home exis- 
 tence. We recall to mind so easily the ladies of 
 quality at the Spectator's routs, the rioters and 
 intriguers of Hervey's memoirs, and of Wal- 
 pole's, and of "the little Burney's" ; the Squire 
 Westerns, the Wilkeses and the Queensberry's ; 
 the Hell-fire clubs and the Rake's Progresses ; 
 the political invectives of Junius and Burke; 
 
108 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 the Courts of St. James' and Versailles ; the 
 prisons, the assizes, the parties of pleasure to 
 Bedlam and to Bridewell ; the Wells at Tun- 
 bridge, Bath, and Epsom ; the masquerades 
 at Vauxhall and Ranelagh ; the taverns, the 
 streets, the Mohawks, and the Duellists; the 
 gin-drinking and the bull-baiting, the gambling 
 and the swindling ; and a thousand pictures of 
 social life by a crowd of consummate artists. 
 Perhaps we study these piquant miniatures with 
 too lively a gust. The question is not whether 
 such things were, but what else there was also. 
 The pure, the tender, the just, the merciful, is 
 there as well, patiently toiling in the even tenor 
 of its way ; and if we look for it honestly, we 
 shall find it a deeper, wider, more effective force 
 in the main, shaping the issue in the end for 
 good. 
 
 Addison and Steele were not the greatest of 
 teachers, but they have mingled with banter 
 about fans and monsters something deeper and 
 finer, such as none had touched before ; some- 
 thing of which six generations of moralists have 
 never given us the like. " To love her was a 
 liberal education." Is there a nobler or pro- 
 founder sentence in our language? It is a phrase 
 to dignify a nation, and to purify an age ; yet it 
 was flung off by " poor Dick," one of the gayest 
 wits, for one of the lightest hours of a most 
 artificial society. Western, be it not forgotten, 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. IO9 
 
 was the name not only of a boisterous fox- 
 hunter, but of the most lovable woman in Eng- 
 lish fiction. What a mass of manly stuff does 
 our English soil seem to breed as we call up the 
 creations of Fielding ! What homes of sturdy 
 vigor do we enter as we turn over the pages of 
 Defoe, and Swift, and Smollett, and Goldsmith, 
 and Johnson ; or again in the songs of Burns, 
 or the monotonous lines of Crabbe ; or in such 
 glimpses of English firesides as we catch in the 
 young life of Miss Edgeworth, or in our old 
 friend "Sandford and Merton," or the record of 
 Scott's early years, or the life of Adam Smith, 
 or Bishop Berkeley ! What a world of hardi- 
 hood and patience is there, in the lives of Cap- 
 tain Cook, and Watt, Brindley, and Arkwright, 
 Metcalfe, and Wedgwood ! What spiritual 
 tenderness in the letters of Cowper, and the 
 memoirs of Wesley, Howard, Wilberforce, and 
 scores of hard workers, just spirits, and faithful 
 hearts who were the very breath and pulse of 
 the eighteenth century ! What a breeze from 
 the uplands plays round those rustic images in 
 all forms of art ; the art often thin and tame 
 itself, but the spirit like the fragrance of new 
 hay ; in such paintings as Morland's, or such 
 poems as Thomson's, Beattie's, and Somer- 
 ville's, or such prose as Fielding's, Goldsmith's, 
 and Smollett's ! 
 
 " How jocund did they drive their team afield ! 
 
 How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke ! " 
 
IIO HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 If in that mass of toiling, daring, hearty, 
 simple life, we think overmuch of the riot of 
 Fashion and the gossip of Courts, the fault is 
 perhaps with those who look to Fashion for the 
 key-note, and care more for crowds than they 
 care for homes. 
 
 A century is never, we have said, a really 
 organic whole, but a group of various move- 
 ments taken up and broken off at two arbitrary 
 points. The eighteenth is as little a whole as 
 any other ; but we may group it into parts in 
 some degree thus. The first ten or fifteen years 
 are clearly more akin to the seventeenth century 
 than the eighteenth. Locke, Newton, and 
 Leibnitz ; Wallis and Wren ; Burnet and Somers ; 
 James II, Louis XIV, and William III; 
 Bossuet and Fenelon lived into the century, 
 and Dryden lived up to it — but none of these 
 belong to it. As in French history it is best to 
 take the age of Louis by itself, so in English 
 history it is best to take the Whig Revolution 
 by itself; for Anne is not easily parted from 
 her sister, nor is Marlborough to be severed 
 from William and Portland. In every sense the 
 reign of Anne was the issue and crown of the 
 movement of 1688, and not the forerunner of 
 that of 1789. For all practical purposes, the 
 eighteenth century in England means the reigns 
 of the first three Georges. This space we must 
 group into three periods of unequal length : — - 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUR Y. Ill 
 
 1. From the accession of the House of Han- 
 over (17 14), down to the fall of Walpole (1742). 
 This is the age of Bolingbroke and Walpole ; 
 Swift, Defoe, Pope, Addison, Steele, Bishop 
 Berkeley, and Bishop Butler, Halley, Stephen 
 Gray, and Bradley. 
 
 2. From the fall of Walpole (1742) to the 
 opening of the French Revolution (1789). It is 
 the age of Chatham, of Frederick, Washington, 
 and Turgot ; of Wolfe, Clive, and Hastings, 
 Rodney and Anson ; of Gibbon and Robert- 
 son ; of Hume and Adam Smith ; of Kant, 
 Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau ; of Richard- 
 son and Fielding, Sterne and Smollett, John- 
 son and Goldsmith ; of Cowper and Gray, 
 Thomson and Beattie ; of Reynolds and Gains- 
 borough, Hogarth and Garrick ; of Cook, W T att, 
 Arkwright, Brindley, Herschel, Black, Priestley, 
 Hunter, Franklin, and Cavendish ; of Handel, 
 Bach, Haydn, and Mozart ; of Wesley, White- 
 field, Howard, and Raikes. 
 
 This is the central typical period of the 
 eighteenth century, with a note of its own ; 
 some fifty years of energy, thought, research, 
 adventure, invention, industry ; of good fellow- 
 ship, a zest for life, and a sense of humanity. 
 
 3. Lastly, come some twelve years of the 
 Revolution (1 789-1 801) : a mere fragment of a 
 larger movement that cannot be limited to any 
 country or any century ; the passion and the 
 
112 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 strife, the hope and the foreshadowing of things 
 that were to come and things that are not come. 
 It is the age of Pitt, Fox, Burke, and Grattan ; 
 of Cornwallis and Nelson ; of Bentham and 
 Romilly, Wilberforce and Clarkson ; of Goethe 
 and. Burns, Coleridge and Wordsworth; of Tel- 
 ford and Stevenson ; of Flaxman, Bewick, Rom- 
 ney, and Stothard ; the youth of Sir H. Davy, 
 Scott, Beethoven, and Turner ; the boyhood of 
 Byron and Shelley. 
 
 It is impossible to omit this critical period 
 of the century, though we too often forget that 
 it forms an integral part of it, quite as truly as 
 the age of Pope or the age of Johnson. The 
 century is not intelligible if we cast out of it the 
 mighty crisis in which it ended, to which it was 
 leading all along ; or if we talk of that New 
 Birth as a bonfire or a suicide. Even in art we 
 are apt to forget that the century of Pope 
 and Johnson it was that gave us "Faust," the 
 " Ancient Mariner," " The Task," the " Lyri- 
 cal Ballads," Flaxman, Stothard's, and Blake's 
 delicate and weird fancies, Turner's first marine, 
 Beethoven's early sonatas, and Scott's transla- 
 tions from the German. All that we value as 
 specially distinctive of our age lay in embryo in 
 many a quiet home, whilst the struggle raged 
 at its hottest on the banks of the Seine, or on 
 the Rhine, the Po, and the Nile. 
 
 When the eighteenth century opened, the 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 113 
 
 supremacy in Europe belonged to England, as 
 it has hardly ever belonged before or since. In 
 William III she had one of the greatest and 
 most successful of all modern statesmen, the 
 one great ruler she ever had since Cromwell. 
 The Revolution of 1688 had placed her in the 
 van of freedom, industry, and thought. Her 
 armies were led by one of the most consummate 
 soldiers in modern history. Her greatest genius 
 in science, her greatest genius in architecture, 
 and one of her wisest spirits in philosophy, were 
 in full possession of their powers ; " glorious 
 John," the recognized chief of the Restoration 
 poets, was but just dead, and his young rival 
 was beginning to unfold his yet more consum- 
 mate mastery of rhyme. The founders of Eng- 
 lish prose were equipping our literature with a 
 new arm, the easy and flexible style of modern 
 prose ; Swift, Addison, and Defoe were the first 
 to show its boundless resources, nor has any im- 
 provement being added to their art. The 
 nation was full of energy, wealth, and ambition ; 
 and it still glowed with the sense of freedom, 
 with all that it shook off in the train of the 
 Stuarts. 
 
 We should count the last days of William and 
 the whole reign of Anne rather with the Revo- 
 lution of 1688, of which they were the fruit, 
 than with the Hanoverian period, for which they 
 paved the way. And thus we may pass the 
 
1 .14 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 campaigns of Churchill, and the overthrow of 
 Louis, and all else that was the sequel and 
 corollary of the struggle with the Stuarts. On 
 the other hand, when we reach the close of the 
 century, England is struggling with a move- 
 ment which she had only indirectly created, but 
 which she was equally unable to develop or to 
 guide. The characteristic period of the eigh- 
 teenth century for England is that between the 
 death of Anne and the great war with the Re- 
 public (17 14-1793). The first fourteen years of 
 the century belong to the history of the English 
 Revolution : the last years to the history of the 
 French Revolution. The eighty years of com- 
 parative non-intervention and rest are for Eng- 
 lishmen, at least, the typical years of the eigh- 
 teenth century. 
 
 It was an era of peace. Indeed it was the 
 first era of systematic peace. In spite of Fon- 
 tenoy and Minden, Belleisle and Quiberon Bay, 
 it was the first period in our history where the 
 internal welfare of the nation took recognized 
 place before the interests of the dynasty, and 
 its prestige in Europe. The industrial pros- 
 perity of the nation, and the supreme authority 
 of Parliament, were made, for the first time in 
 our history, the guiding canons of the states- 
 man. Walpole is the statesman of the eigh- 
 teenth century ; a statesman of a solid, albeit 
 a somewhat vulgar type. If history was the 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 115 
 
 digest of pungent anecdote, it would be easy 
 to multiply epigrams about the corruption of 
 Walpole. Yet, however unworthy his method, 
 or gross his nature, Robert Walpole created 
 the modern statesmanship of England. The 
 imperial Chatham in one sense developed, in 
 another sense distorted, the policy of Walpole, 
 much as the First Consul developed and dis- 
 torted the revolutionary defence of France. 
 And so the early career of William Pitt was 
 a mere prolongation of the system of Walpole : 
 purer in method, and more scientific in aim, 
 but less efficient in result. Alas ! after ten 
 glorious years as the minister of peace and of 
 reform, Pitt's career and his very nature were 
 transformed by that aristocratic panic which 
 made him the unwilling instrument of reaction. 
 But Walpole has left a name that is a symbol 
 of peace, as that of Chatham and of Pitt is a 
 symbol of war. And thus Walpole remains, 
 with all his imperfections on his head, the 
 veritable founder of our industrial statesman- 
 ship, the parliamentary father of Fox, of Peel, 
 of Cobden, of Gladstone. 
 
 That industrial organization of peace by 
 means of a parliamentary government was the 
 true work of our eighteenth century ; for the 
 European triumphs of Anne should be counted 
 among the fruits of the heroic genius of William, 
 and the crusade of Pitt against the Republic 
 
Il6 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 should be counted as a backward step of re- 
 actionary panic. It was not well done by the 
 statesmen of peace, that industrial organiza- 
 tion of England ; it was most corruptly and 
 ignobly done — but it was done. And it ended 
 (we must admit) in a monstrous perversion. 
 The expansion of wealth and industry which 
 the peace-policy of Walpole begot, stimulated 
 the nation to seek new outlets abroad, and 
 led to the conquest of a vast empire. When 
 the eighteenth century opened, the King of 
 England ruled, outside of these islands, over 
 some two or three millions at the most. 
 When the nineteenth century opened, these 
 two or three had become at least a hundred 
 millions. The colonies and settlements in 
 America and in Australia, the maritime depen- 
 dencies, the Indies East and West, were mainly 
 added to the Crown during the eighteenth 
 century, and chiefly by the imperial policy of 
 Chatham. So far as they were a genuine 
 expansion of our industrial life, they are a per- 
 manent honor of the age ; so far as they are 
 the prizes of ambitious adventure, they were 
 the reversal of the system of Walpole. It was 
 Chatham, says his bombastic monument in 
 Guildhall, who made commerce to flourish by 
 war. It is an ignoble epitaph, though Burke 
 himself composed it. But for good or for evil, 
 it was the policy and the age of the two Pitts 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. WJ 
 
 which gave England her gigantic colonial and 
 maritime empire. And whether it be her 
 strength and glory as many think it, or her 
 weakness and burden as I hold it, it was 
 assuredly one of the most momentous crises in 
 the whole of our history. 
 
 A change, at least as momentous, was ef- 
 fected at home from within. The latter half 
 of the eighteenth century converted our people 
 from a rural to a town population, made this 
 essentially a manufacturing, not an agricultural 
 country, and established the factory system. 
 No industrial revolution so sudden and so 
 thorough can be found in the history of our 
 island. If we put this transformation of active 
 life beside the formation of the empire be- 
 yond the seas, we shall find England swung 
 round into a new world, as, in so short a time, 
 has hardly ever befallen a nation. The change 
 which in three generations has trebled our 
 population, and made the old kingdom the mere 
 heart of a huge Empire, led to portentous con- 
 sequences both moral and material which were 
 hardly understood till our own day. It is the 
 singular boast of the nineteenth century to have 
 covered this island with vast tracks of continuous 
 cities and works, factories and pits ; but it was 
 the eighteenth century which made this possible. 
 Appalling as are many of the forms which the 
 fabulous expansion of industry has taken to-day, 
 
Il8 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 it is too late now to deplore or resist it. The 
 best hours of the twentieth century, we all trust, 
 will be given to reform the industrial extrava- 
 gances of the nineteenth century ; but it will be 
 possible only on condition of accepting the in- 
 dustrial revolution which the eighteenth century 
 brought about. 
 
 Whatever be the issue of this great change 
 in English life, there can be no question about 
 the sterling qualities of the men to whose genius 
 and energy it was due. The whole history of 
 the English race has no richer page than that 
 which records those hardy mariners who with 
 Cook and Anson girdled the globe ; the in- 
 ventors and workers who made the roads and 
 the canals, the docks and the light-houses, the 
 furnaces and the mines, the machines and the 
 engines ; the art-potters like Wedgwood, in- 
 spired spinners like Crompton, road-makers like 
 the blind Metcalfe, engineers like Smeaton, 
 discoverers like Watt, canal-makers like Bridge- 
 water and Brindley, engravers like Bewick, 
 opticians like Dollond, inventors like Ark- 
 wright. Let us follow these men into their 
 homes and their workshops, watch their lives 
 of indefatigable toil, of quenchless vision into 
 things beyond ; let us consider their patience, 
 self-denial, and faith before we call their age of 
 all others that of quackery, bankruptcy, and 
 fraud. We may believe it rather the age of 
 science, industry and invention. 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 119 
 
 A striking feature of those times was the 
 dispersion of intellectual activity in many local 
 centres, though the entire population of the 
 island was hardly twice that of London to-day. 
 Birmingham, Manchester, Derby, Bristol, Nor- 
 wich, Leeds, Newcastle, and other towns were 
 potent sources of science, art, and culture, and 
 all the more vigorous that they depended little 
 on the capital. A hundred years ago the popu- 
 lation and extent of Birmingham were hardly 
 one hundredth part of what they are now. But 
 what a wealth of industry, courage, science, 
 and genius in that quiet Midland village lay 
 grouped round Dr. Darwin and his Lunar 
 Society ; with James Watt and Matthew Boul- 
 ton, then at work on their steam-engine ; and 
 Murdoch, the inventor of gas-lighting ; and 
 Wedgwood, the father of the Potteries ; and 
 Hutton the bookseller, and Baskerville the 
 printer, and Thomas Day, and Lovell Edge- 
 worth : a group to whom often came Franklin, 
 and Smeaton, and Black, and, in their centre 
 their great philosopher and guide and moving 
 spirit, the noble Joseph Priestley. Little as 
 we think of it now, that group, where the in- 
 domitable Boulton kept open house, was a 
 place of pilgrimage to the ardent minds of 
 Europe ; it was one of the intellectual cradles 
 of modern civilization. And it is interesting to 
 remember that our great Charles Darwin is on 
 
120 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 both sides the grandson of men who were lead- 
 ing members of that Lunar Society, itself a 
 provincial Royal Society. What forces lay 
 within it ! What a giant was Watt, fit to 
 stand beside Gutenberg and Columbus, as one 
 of the few whose single discoveries have 
 changed the course of human civilization ! 
 And, if we chose one man as a type of the 
 intellectual energy of the century, we could 
 hardly find a better than Joseph Priestley, 
 though his was not the greatest mind of the 
 century. His versatility, eagerness, activity, 
 and humanity ; the immense range of his 
 curiosity, in all things physical, moral, or 
 social ; his place in science, in theology, in 
 philosophy, and in politics ; his peculiar rela- 
 tion to the Revolution, and the pathetic story 
 of his unmerited sufferings, may make him the 
 hero of the eighteenth century. 
 
 The strength of the century lay neither in 
 politics nor in art ; it lay in the breadth of 
 understanding. In political genius, in poetry, 
 in art, the eighteenth was inferior to the seven- 
 teenth century, and even to the sixteenth ; in 
 moral, in social, and in material development 
 it was far inferior to the nineteenth. But in 
 philosophy, in science, in mental versatility, it 
 has hardly any equal in the ages. Here, espe- 
 cially, it is impossible to limit the view to one 
 country. Politics, industry, and art are local. 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 121 
 
 Science and research know nothing of country, 
 have no limitations of tongue, race, or govern- 
 ment. In philosophy, then, the century num- 
 bers : — Leibnitz, Vico, Berkeley, Montesquieu, 
 Diderot, D' Alembert, Condorcet, Kant, Turgot, 
 Hume, Adam Smith. In science, it counts 
 Buffon, Linnaeus, Lavoisier, Laplace, Lamarck, 
 Lagrange, Halley, Herschel, Franklin, Priest- 
 ley, Black, Cavendish, Volta, Galvani, Bichat, 
 and Hunter. To interpret its ideas, it had 
 such masters of speech as Voltaire, Rousseau, 
 Swift, Johnson, Gibbon, Lessing, Goethe, and 
 Burke. It organized into sciences (crystallizing 
 the data till then held in solution) physics, 
 chemistry, botany, zoology, comparative ana- 
 tomy, electricity, psychology, and the elements 
 of social science, both in history and in statics. 
 It threw up these three dominant movements : 
 (i) the idea of law in mind and in society, that 
 is, the first postulate of mental and social sci- 
 ence ; (2) that genius for synthesis of which the 
 work of Buffon, of Linnaeus, and the Ency- 
 clopaedia itself, were all phases ; (3) that idea 
 of social reconstruction, of which the New 
 Regime of '89, the American Republic, and our 
 reformed Parliament are all products. The 
 seventeenth century can show perhaps a list of 
 greater separate names, if we add those in 
 poetry, politics, and art. But for mass, result, 
 multiplicity, and organic power, it may be 
 
122 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 doubted if any century in modern history has 
 more to show than the eighteenth. 
 
 There is this stamp upon every stroke of 
 eighteenth-century work : the habit of regard- 
 ing things as wholes, bearing on life as a whole. 
 Their thirst for knowledge is a practical, organ- 
 ic, working thing ; their minds grasp a subject 
 all round, to turn it to a useful end. The ency- 
 clopedic spirit animates all : with a genius for 
 clearness, comprehension, and arrangement. It 
 was for the most part somewhat premature, 
 often impatient, at times shallow, as was much 
 of the work of Voltaire, Diderot, Johnson, and 
 Goldsmith. But the slightest word of such 
 men has to my ear a human ring, a living voice 
 that I recognize as familiar. It awakens me, 
 and I am conscious of being face to face with 
 an interpreter of humanity to men. When they 
 write histories whole centuries glow with life ; 
 we see and we hear the mighty tramp of ages. 
 In twelve moderate octavos, through all which 
 not a sentence could belong to any other book, 
 Gibbon has compressed the history of the world 
 during more than a thousand years. Is there 
 in all prose literature so perfect a book as this ? 
 In these days we write histories on far pro- 
 founder methods ; but for the story of ten 
 ordinary years Mr. Freeman and Mr. Froude 
 will require a thousand pages ; and Macaulay's 
 brilliant annals, we are told, needed more time 
 to write than the events needed to happen. 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1 23 
 
 I often take up my Buffon. They tell us now 
 that Buffon hardly knew the elements of his 
 subject, and lived in the paleozoic era of science. 
 It may be, but I find in Buffon a commanding 
 thought, the Earth and its living races in order- 
 ly relation, and in the centre Man with his 
 touch of them and his contrast to them. What 
 organic thought glows in every line of his ma- 
 jestic scheme ! What suggestions in it, what 
 an education it is in itself ! And if Buffon is 
 not a man of science, assuredly he is a philoso- 
 pher. No doubt, his ideas of fibres and cells 
 were rudimentary, his embryology weak, and 
 his histology rude ; but he had the root of the 
 matter when he treated of animals as living 
 organisms, and not simply as accumulations of 
 microscopic particles. Now, Buffon is a typical 
 worker of the eighteenth century, at its high- 
 water mark of industry, variety of range, human 
 interest, and organizing life. 
 
 We may take Adam Smith, Hume, Priestley, 
 Franklin ; they are four of the best types of the 
 century ; with its keen hold on moral, social, 
 and physical truth at once ; its genius for scien- 
 tific and for social observation ; its inexhaustible 
 curiosity ; and its continual sense that Man 
 stands face to face with Nature. They felt the 
 grand dualism of all knowledge in a way that 
 perhaps we fail to grasp it with our infinity of 
 special information, and a certain hankering 
 
124 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 after spiritualities that we doubt, and infinitesi- 
 mal analyses which cease to fructify. Adam 
 Smith, the first (alas ! perhaps the last) real 
 economist, did not devote his life to polishing 
 up a theory of rent. Astronomy, society, edu- 
 cation, government, morals, psychology, lan- 
 guage, art, were in turns the subject of his 
 study, and in all he was master ; they all moved 
 him alike, as part of man's work on earth. He 
 never would have founded Political Economy 
 if he had merely been an economist. And all 
 this is more true of Hume, with a range even 
 wider, an insight keener, a judgment riper, a 
 creative method even more original. And so, 
 Priestley and Franklin : as keen about gases 
 and electric flashes as about the good of the 
 commonwealth and the foundations of human 
 belief. And when Turgot, himself one of the 
 best of this band of social reformers, said of 
 Franklin — 
 
 Eripuit caelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis, 
 
 it is true, in a wide sense, of them all, and 
 especially of Turgot himself. They all sought 
 to conquer the earth, as the dwelling-place of a 
 reformed society of men. 
 
 This encyclopedic, social spirit belongs to 
 all alike. We recognize in all the zeal to make 
 their knowledge fruitful, systematic, common to 
 all, useful to man. Out of fashion as such a 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 125 
 
 thing is to us, every sentence they utter bears 
 its meaning on its face ; every book, every voy- 
 age, every discovery, is hailed with eureka 
 through Europe ; the voyages of travellers, or the 
 surgical operation for cataract, instantly affect 
 history, morals, logic, and philosophy. They can- 
 not rest till every corner of the planet is explored, 
 till the races of man are compared, and the 
 products of the earth are stored in museums, 
 classified in orders, grouped into kingdoms. 
 Science and social life, nay, philosophy and 
 morals were strangely transformed when the 
 limits and the form of Man's Earth were first 
 exactly realized. Cook and Banks, Anson and 
 Bougainville, reveal to Europe the antipodes, 
 and their human, brute, and vegetable worlds ; 
 and every science and every art is alive with 
 new ideas ; history, philosophy, morals, and 
 social economy, are lit up with new laws. We 
 see the same thing to-day ; but the sacred fire 
 perhaps burns with a soberer flame ; the wonder 
 and the sympathy are a little dulled by use ; 
 and through the mountains of our materials the 
 volcanic shock of a new truth is less distinctly 
 felt. 
 
 The universal human interest of these men 
 throbs in every page they write. Defoe is 
 politician, romancer, theologian, economist, 
 pamphleteer, and philosopher. Swift is all this, 
 verse-maker, and many things besides. Voltaire 
 
126 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 is poet, historian, critic, moralist, letter-writer, 
 polemist, arbiter in science, philosophy, and art 
 in general ; like Virgil's monster, with a hun- 
 dred tongues and a hundred throats of brass. 
 Diderot was a very encyclopedic Briareus. But 
 the intense social aim comes out in all alike, 
 however different in nature and taste. Cowper 
 himself has it, as he sits beside his tea-urn, 
 watches his hare and his spaniel, or apostro- 
 phizes his sofa. Fielding clothes it with flesh 
 and blood, hot blood and solid flesh ; it lights 
 up the hackwork of Goldsmith, and sheds a 
 fragrance forever through his lovely idyl of the 
 Vicar's home ; Johnson in his arm-chair thun- 
 ders it out as law to the club ; Bentham tears 
 up the old Statute-book by passionate appeals 
 to the greatest happiness of the greatest num- 
 ber ; Burns sang for it the songs which will live 
 forever in English homes ; Hogarth, the Field- 
 ing of the brush, paints it ; Garrick, the most 
 versatile of actors, played it ; Mozart, the most 
 sympathetic of all musicians, found its melody; 
 Reynolds caught every smile on its cheek, and 
 the light upon its eye ; and Hume, Adam 
 Smith, Priestley, and Burke sounded some of 
 its deepest notes. 
 
 Of all in this century, three men stand out, in 
 three countries, as types of its vast range, of 
 its organizing genius, of its hold on the reality 
 behind the veil that we see: — Kant in Ger- 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 12/ 
 
 many, Diderot in France, Hume in England. 
 For us here, Hume is the dominant mind of the 
 age ; with his consummate grasp of human life 
 in all its moral, social, and physical conditions ; 
 by his sense, good-fellowship, urbanity, and 
 manliness. This was not the age of the lonely 
 thinkers in their studies, as Kepler, Galileo, 
 Descartes, had been. Nor was it the age of 
 Bacon, Pascal, Hobbes, and Locke ; when 
 philosophy was shaken by political and religious 
 fanaticism. It was not the age of the wonder- 
 ful specialists of our own day, when mountains 
 of observation defy all attempts at system. It 
 was an age more like the Revival of thought 
 and learning — but with a notable difference. 
 Its curiosity is as keen, its industry even great- 
 er, its mental force as abundant. But it is far 
 less wild ; its resources are under command, its 
 genius is constructive ; and its ruling spirit is 
 social. It was the second and far greater Revi- 
 val — that New Birth of time whereof the first 
 line was led by Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, and 
 Bacon ; whereof the second line was led by 
 Newton, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, Hume, and 
 Kant ; whereof the third line will be led by 
 those who are to come. 
 
 In the progress of Europe,, especially in its 
 mental progress, there is an incessant ebb and 
 flow, a continual give and take. The intellec- 
 tual lead passes from one to the other, qualified 
 
128 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 and modified by each great individual genius. 
 In the sixteenth century it was Spain and 
 Italy, in the seventeenth it was Holland and 
 England, in the eighteenth it was France, and 
 now perhaps it is Germany, which sets the tone, 
 or fashion, in thought. For the first genera- 
 tion perhaps of the eighteenth century, England 
 had the lead which Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, 
 Hobbes, Locke, Harvey, Cromwell, and Will- 
 iam, had given her in the century preceding. 
 The contemporaries of Newton, Locke, Dryden, 
 Pope, Swift, Defoe, and Addison, were a force 
 in combination which the worshippers of Louis 
 the Fourteenth did not immediately perceive, 
 but which was above any thing then extant in 
 Europe. The revelation of this great intellect- 
 ual strength in England was made by Montes- 
 quieu and Voltaire. Voltaire, if not exactly a 
 thinker, was the greatest interpreter of ideas 
 whom the world has ever seen ; and became the 
 greatest literary power in the whole history of 
 letters. When in 1728 he took back to France 
 his English experience and studies, he carried 
 with him the sacred fire of freedom whereby 
 the supremacy of thought began to pass to 
 France. Within ten years that fire lit up some 
 of the greatest beacons of the modern world. 
 Voltaire wrote his " Essay on Manners " in 
 1740; Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws" 
 appeared in 1748, and its influence was greater 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1 29 
 
 than that of any single work of Voltaire. The 
 forty years, 1740- 1780, were perhaps the most 
 pregnant epoch in the history of human thought. 
 It contained the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, 
 Diderot, D'Alembert, Vauvenargues, Buffon, 
 Lavoisier, Rousseau, the encyclopedists, Con- 
 dorcet, and Turgot in France ; and, in England, 
 those of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Gibbon, 
 Robertson, Hume, Adam Smith, Priestley, 
 Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gray. During the 
 last twenty years of the century France was 
 absorbed in her tremendous Revolution, and 
 again the supremacy in literature passed away 
 from her to give to Germany Kant, Hegel, 
 Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven ; to give to Eng- 
 land Burke, Bentham, Cowper, Burns, Byron, 
 Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Scott. So 
 sways the battle of ideas from age to age and 
 from shore to shore. 
 
 This is not the place to discuss the vast move- 
 ment of the human mind which is loosely called 
 the Revolution. As an Oxford wit used to say : 
 " To sit in judgment on the Revolution is like 
 asking if the Fall of Man were a justifiable pro- 
 ceeding." Our judgment on all this depends 
 on the bent of our minds in theology, philos- 
 ophy, and politics. One who holds on to his 
 Bible chiefly for its damnatory resources has 
 assured us that this was the Satanic Age. If 
 we look at its achievements, one is tempted to 
 
130 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 wish that our own age were more often visited 
 by that accomplished gentleman. The century 
 completely transformed all that had previously 
 been known as to heat, gases, metals, electricity, 
 plants, animals, tissues, diseases, geography, 
 geology, the races, products and form of the 
 earth, psychology, chronology, history, political 
 and social and economic science. It would take 
 a volume to enlarge on these. One can but 
 give the names of those departments of knowl- 
 edge. Compare the anatomical resources of Dr. 
 Radcliffe with those of Hunter, Bichat, and Du- 
 puytren ; the chemical and physical notions of 
 Boyle with those of Davy, Volta, and Galvani ; 
 the physiology of Boerhaave with that of La- 
 marck ; compare the classifkatory notions of 
 Ray with those of Buffon, Linnaeus, and Cuvier ; 
 take the ideas on society of Hobbes or Harring- 
 ton, and compare them with those of Hume, A. 
 Smith, Burke, and Bentham ; compare Gibbon's 
 idea of history with that of Raleigh, Bacon, 
 Milton. Compare the psychology of Kant with 
 that of Descartes or Locke ; — and we see that 
 the century made a stride, not as we have done 
 by enlarging the sciences, but in creating them 
 or turning their rudiments into mature or- 
 ganisms. 
 
 The weak side of the century was certainly in 
 beauty ; in poetry, and the arts of form. It 
 was essentially the age of prose ; but still it was 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 131 
 
 not prosaic. Its imaginative genius spoke in 
 prose and not in verse. There is more poetry 
 in the " Vicar of Wakefield " than in the " De- 
 serted Village," in " Tom Jones " than in Pope's 
 " Iliad," and the death of Clarissa Harlowe is 
 more like Sophocles than the death of Addison's 
 Cato. The age did not do well in verse ; but if 
 its verse tended to prose, its prose ever tended 
 to rise into poetry. We want some word (Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold will not let us use the word 
 poetry) to express the imaginative power at 
 work in prose, saturating it with the fragrance 
 of proportion and form, shedding over the whole 
 that indefinable charm of subtle suggestion, 
 which belongs to rare thoughts clothed in per- 
 fect words. For my part, I find " the vision and 
 the faculty divine " in the inexhaustible vivacity 
 of " Tom Jones," in the mysterious realism of 
 " Robinson Crusoe," in the terrible tension of 
 Clarissa's tragedy, in the idyllic grace of the 
 Vicar's home. This imaginative force has never 
 since been reached in prose save by Walter 
 Scott himself, and not even by him in such in- 
 imitable witchery of words. If it be not poetry, 
 it is quite unlike the prose that we read or write 
 to-day. 
 
 Besides, one cannot allow that there is no 
 poetry in the century. Let us give a liberal 
 meaning to poetry ; and where we find creative 
 fancy, charm of phrase, the vivid tone of a dis- 
 
132 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 tinct voice that we could recognize in a thou- 
 sand — there, we are sure, is the poet. For my 
 part, I go so far as to admit that to be poetry 
 which is quite intelligible, even if it have no 
 subtlety, mystery, or inner meaning at all. 
 Much as I prefer Shelley, I will not deny that 
 Pope is a poet. Tennyson perhaps would never 
 have run so near commonplace as do stanzas 
 here and there in the famous " Elegy," but does 
 any one doubt that Gray's Elegy is poetry ? 
 And though Wordsworth is a greater man than 
 Cowper, it is possible, had there never been a 
 " Task," that there might never have been an 
 " Excursion." The poetry of the century is 
 below our lofty English average, but it is not 
 contemptible ; and when it is good it has some 
 rare qualities indeed. 
 
 In the poetry of the century are three distinct 
 types : first, that of Pope ; next, that of which 
 the " Elegy " is the masterpiece ; lastly, the songs 
 of Burns. Now, the first belongs to the age of 
 Louis XIV. The second is the typical poetry 
 of the century. The third is but the clarion 
 that heralds the revolutionary outburst which 
 gave us Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Words- 
 worth, Goethe, and Schiller. Cowper in part 
 belongs to the three types ; he is the connecting 
 link between them all: touching Pope by his 
 easy mastery of rhyme, akin to Gray by his ex- 
 quisite culture and grace, foretelling Words- 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1 33 
 
 worth and Shelley by his moral and social ear- 
 nestness. If the century produced little true 
 poetry, it produced some little that is very good, 
 and a good deal which has some very fine qual- 
 ities. The " Rape of the Lock " is a poem in a 
 class by itself, and Pope wrote other pieces of 
 magical skill and verve. Goldsmith's poems 
 would please us more if he had not bettered 
 them himself in his own prose. Burns wrote 
 the most ringing songs in our literature. Cow- 
 per is a true poet of a very rare type, one of the 
 most important in the development of English 
 poetry. And Gray's Elegy is better known and 
 more widely loved than any single poem in our 
 language. All this should be enough to save 
 the age of prose from the charge of being 
 prosaic. 
 
 In the best poetry of the century (at least 
 after Pope's death) there is a new power, a new 
 poetic field, a new source of poetry. The 
 new source of poetry is the People ; its new 
 field is the home ; the new power within 
 it is to serve the cause of humanity. It 
 told the short and simple annals of the poor. 
 It is a field unknown to Chaucer, Spen- 
 ser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, or Pope. 
 But Goldsmith has it in his heart of hearts ; 
 such men as Thomson and Collins and Beattie 
 and Crabbe have it, though they remain on the 
 lower ranges at their best ; Burns is the very 
 
134 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 prophet of it ; and it glows in a gentle hermit- 
 like way in every murmur of Cowper's tender 
 soul. " The Task " is by reason of this one of 
 the landmarks of our literature, though its own 
 nobler progeny may have lessened its charm to 
 us. It is because the original charm is still as 
 fresh as ever, that we may call the " Elegy in a 
 Country Churchyard " the central poem of the 
 age. Our young word-mongers and unuttera- 
 bles will tell us to-day that its moralizing is as 
 obvious as a tombstone, that its melody is rudi- 
 mentary, and its epithets almost trivial. Yes ! 
 and for that reason it has sunk into the soul of 
 all who speak the English tongue ; it has cre- 
 ated the new poetry of the cottage ; its very 
 surrender of brilliancy, subtlety, or novelty is 
 its strength. The sustained undertone of pathos, 
 the magical unity of its thought and its color- 
 ing, the simple humanity of it, — all these make 
 the " Elegy " the poem of the eighteenth cent- 
 ury, the voice of the humane age at its best. 
 
 Poetry is the central art ; but it is not all art ; 
 and the art of the century deserves a word. 
 We may give up architecture at once. People 
 were so much absorbed in making their homes 
 comfortable within, that they seemed blind to 
 ugliness elsewhere ; and if Mr. Ruskin is certain 
 that Satan had to do with the Churches of the 
 Georgian era, there is no means of disproving 
 it. But Reynolds remains the greatest English 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1 35 
 
 painter ; Gainsborough and Romney have not 
 been surpassed in their own line ; Hogarth re- 
 mains still our greatest humorist with the pencil ; 
 Garrick is still our greatest actor ; Flaxman is 
 still our greatest sculptor; and it is well to re- 
 member that Turner was of the Royal Academy 
 before the century was out. But besides all 
 these, Crome, Stothard, Blake, Bewick, Chip- 
 pendale, Wedgwood, and Bartolozzi worked in 
 the century — and in their given lines these men 
 have never been surpassed. 
 
 There is another art which lies closer to civi- 
 lization than any art but poetry. Music is a 
 better test of the moral culture of an age than 
 its painting, or its sculpture, or even its archi- 
 tecture. Music, by its nature, is ubiquitous, as 
 much almost as poetry itself ; in one sense more 
 so, for its vernacular tongue is common to man- 
 kind. Music in its nature is social, it can enter 
 every home, it is not the privilege of the rich ; 
 and thus it belongs to the social and domestic 
 life of a people, as painting and sculpture, the 
 arts of the few, never have done or can do. It 
 touches the heart and the character as the arts 
 of form have never sought to do, at least in the 
 modern world. When we test the civilization 
 of an age by its art, we should look to its music 
 next to its poetry, and sometimes even more 
 than to its poetry. Critics who talk about the 
 debasement of the age when church-wardens 
 
I36 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 built those mongrel temples must assuredly be 
 deaf. Those church-wardens and the rest of the 
 congregation wept as they listened to Handel 
 and Mozart. One wearies of hearing how grand 
 and precious a time is ours, now that we can 
 draw a cornflower right. 
 
 Music is the art of the eighteenth century, 
 the art wherein it stands supreme in the ages ; 
 perfect, complete, and self-created. The whole 
 gamut of music (except the plain song, part 
 song, dance, and mass) is the creation of the 
 eighteenth century: opera, sonata, concerto, 
 symphony, oratorio ; and the full use of instru- 
 mentation, harmony, air, chorus, march, and 
 fugue, all belong to that age. If one thinks of 
 the pathos of those great songs, of the majesty 
 of those full choirs, of the inexhaustible melody 
 of their operas, and all that Bach, Handel, 
 Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, and the early years of 
 Beethoven gave us, it is strange to hear that 
 that age was dead to art. Neither the age 
 which gave us the Madonnas and the Sistine, 
 nor the age which gave us Reims and West- 
 minster Abbey, nor even the age which gave us 
 the Parthenon, did more for humanity than the 
 age to which we owe the oratorios, and the 
 operas, the sonatas, symphonies, and masses of 
 the great age of music. 
 
 Not merely was music of the highest order 
 produced, not merely did that age create almost 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1 37 
 
 all the great orders of music, but the generation 
 gave itself to music with a passion such as 
 marks all ages wherein art reaches its zenith. 
 When Handel and Buononcini, Gluck and 
 Piccini, Farinelli and Caffarelli, divided the 
 town, it was not with the languid partisanship 
 which amuses our leisure, but with the passions 
 of the red and green factions in the Circus of 
 Byzantium. England, it is true, had few musi- 
 cians of its own ; but Handel is for practical 
 purposes an English musician, and the great 
 Italian singers and the great German masters 
 were never more truly at home than when sur- 
 rounded by English admirers. Our people bore 
 their fair share of this new birth of art, especially 
 if our national anthem was really the product of 
 this age. And not our people only, but the 
 men of culture, of rank, of power, and the court 
 itself. And the story that the king caused the 
 whole house to rise when the Hallelujah 
 Chorus was heard is a happy symbol of the en- 
 thusiasm of the time. 
 
 Their music showed that their hearts were in 
 the right place, but they showed it in more 
 practical ways. The age, with all its grossness, 
 laid the seeds of those social reforms, which it 
 is the boast of our own time to have matured. 
 It was then that the greatest part of the hospi- 
 tals as we know them were founded ; the asy- 
 lums, reformatories, infirmaries, benefit societies 
 
133 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 Sunday-schools, and the like. It was then, 
 amidst a sea of misery and cruelty, that How- 
 ard began what Burke called " his circumnavi- 
 gation of charity." Then, too, began that holy 
 war against slavery and the slave-trade, against 
 barbarous punishments, foul prisons, against 
 the abuses of justice, the war with ignorance, 
 drunkenness, and vice. Captain Coram, and 
 Jonas Hanway, and John Howard, and Thomas 
 Raikes, led the way for those social efforts 
 which have taken such proportions. Jeremy 
 Bentham and Samuel Romilly struck at the 
 abuses of law ; Clarkson and Wilberforce and 
 the anti-slavery reformers at slavery and the 
 trade in men. Methodism, or rather religious 
 earnestness, lies at the heart of the eighteenth 
 century ; and the work of Wesley and Whitefield 
 is as much a part of its life, as the work of 
 Johnson, Hume, or Watt. That great revival 
 of spiritual energy in the midst of a sceptical 
 and jovial society was no accident, nor was it 
 merely the impulse of two great souls. It is the 
 same humanity which breathes through the 
 scepticism of Hume, and the humor of Field- 
 ing ; and it runs like a silver thread through 
 the whole fabric of that epoch. Cowper is its 
 poet, Wilberforce was its orator, Whitefield was 
 its preacher, Wesley was its legislator, and 
 Priestley himself the philosopher whom it cast 
 forth. The abolition of slavery, a religious re- 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1 39 
 
 spect for the most miserable of human beings, 
 as a human soul, is its great work in the world. 
 This was the central result of the eighteenth 
 century ; nor can any century in history show a 
 nobler. The new gospel of duty to our neigh- 
 bor, was of the very essence of that age. The 
 French Revolution itself is but the social form 
 of the same spirit. He who misses this will 
 never understand the eighteenth century. It 
 means Howard and Clarkson just as much as it 
 means Fielding and Gibbon ; it means Wesley 
 and Whitefield quite as much as it means Hume 
 or Watt. And they who shall see how to recon- 
 cile Berkeley with Fielding, Wesley with Hume, 
 and Watt with Cowper, so that all may be 
 brought home to the fold of humanity at last, 
 will not only interpret aright the eighteenth 
 century, but they will anticipate the task of the 
 twentieth. 
 
 A few words about the eighteenth century 
 afford no space to touch on the greatest event of 
 it — the Revolutionary crisis itself. The intel- 
 lectual preparation for it is all that we can here 
 note ; and we may hear the rumblings of the 
 great earthquake in every page of Hume, Adam 
 Smith, Priestley, and Bentham ; nay, in Cow- 
 per and Burns, and Wordsworth and Coleridge. 
 The " Rights of Man," the " Declaration of 
 Independence," the " Negro's Complaint," " the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number," 
 
140 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 " A man 's a man for a' that," the " new birth " 
 of the Methodists, were all phases of one move- 
 ment to attain the full conditions of humanity. 
 The Revolution did not happen in 1789 nor in 
 1793. The Terror was in '93 ; the old system 
 collapsed in '89. But the Revolution is con- 
 tinuing still, violent in France, deep and quiet 
 in England. No one of its problems is com- 
 pletely solved ; no one of them is removed from 
 solution ; no one of its creations has complete 
 possession of the field. The reconstruction, 
 begun more than a hundred years ago, is doing 
 still. For they see history upside down who 
 look at the Revolution as a conflagration instead 
 of a reconstruction ; or who find in the 
 eighteenth century a suicide, instead of finding 
 a birth. 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 
 
 By OSCAR BROWNING. 
 
 PROBABLY no event in the history of England 
 during the last hundred years is so important 
 as the outbreak of war with France in 1793. 
 It led, by a chain of almost necessary conse- 
 quence, to our long struggle against Napoleon 
 I. It added millions to our debt, it caused the 
 distress and discontent which paved the way 
 for the Reform Bill of 1832, its results placed 
 England at the head of the European system. 
 From a narrower point of view it formed a 
 turning-point in the career of Pitt. Up to that 
 time he had pursued a policy of peace, re- 
 trenchment, and reform. The most enlight- 
 ened minister of his age, he promised fair to 
 anticipate by fifty years some of the most 
 important changes which our own age has 
 witnessed. From that period he was the 
 minister of war, extravagance, and coercion. 
 His name was a synonyme for blood, violence, 
 and treachery, not only upon the Continent 
 but among English Liberals. The war then 
 kindled was not extinguished until it had 
 killed him in its course. His friends saw the 
 141 
 
142 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 " Austcrlitz look " on the blanched counte- 
 nance of their dying chief. Passing a map of 
 Europe in his last days, he said : " Roll up that 
 map, we shall not want it any more." 
 
 The character of our conduct in that crisis 
 has long been disputed amongst politicians. 
 War was opposed in 1793 by Fox and the 
 Liberal party who followed him, and he lost no 
 opportunity of urging the desirability of peace. 
 However, when be became Foreign Minister 
 after the death of Pitt, he did not make peace. 
 In 1853, after the death of the Duke of Wel- 
 lington, the question was argued by Richard 
 Cobden. In his pamphlet, " 1793 and 1853," 
 he tries to show that our war with France was 
 neither necessary nor just. His arguments are 
 those of a partisan, and the authorities which 
 he recommends to his reverend correspondent, 
 and on which he probably relied himself, are 
 such ordinary books as the " Annual Register," 
 the " Pictorial History of England," Alison's 
 " History of Europe," and the " Parliamentary 
 Debates." The present writer has had the 
 opportunity of reading nearly all the despatches 
 in the English Record Office and the French 
 Foreign Office which bear upon the subject ; 
 and his aim is to present as clear and impartial 
 an account of the origin of the war as can be 
 done in the limited space at his disposal. 
 
 It is now admitted on all hands that the war 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 143 
 
 was none of our seeking. It was declared by 
 the French Government, and would, perhaps, 
 not have been declared by us. It may be 
 urged that there was such a fundamental 
 antagonism between the principles of the 
 French Revolution and those of the English 
 Government that the outbreak of war was 
 merely a question of time. But we were a 
 grave and serious nation, dealing with a crowd 
 of heated anarchists, unused to govern, intem- 
 perate of language. Neither their words nor 
 their actions could be interpreted by ordinary 
 rules. Had we exhausted every precaution ; 
 were we guilty of no false step which we might 
 have foreseen would lead us into the path 
 along which we had no desire to move ? 
 
 From the first outbreak of the Revolution 
 the policy of the English Ministry had been to 
 preserve a strict neutrality. Although the con- 
 trary has often been maintained, there should 
 be no doubt of it since the publication of the 
 " History of the Politics of Great Britain arid 
 France in 1800." This work, written by Herbert 
 Marsh, the celebrated Professor of Divinity and 
 the translator of Mosheim, is an exhaustive ex- 
 amination of the conduct of the English Gov- 
 ernment in its relations with France at this 
 period. He proves, as far as could be proved 
 from the materials within his reach : (1) that 
 the British Government knew nothing of the 
 
144 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 Conference of Pilnitz, and that when requested 
 in 1 79 1 to join a coalition against France it ab- 
 solutely refused to do so ; (2) that we behaved 
 with extreme friendliness to France in the affairs 
 of San Domingo ; (3) that we were one of the 
 first to recognize the new French Constitution 
 of 1 79 1 ; (4) that in January, 1792, we took 
 measures for reducing our armaments by sea 
 and land ; (5) that when France had declared 
 war against Austria on April 20, 1792, the Brit- 
 ish Government took every pains to assert . its 
 neutrality ; (6) that the proclamation of May 21st 
 against seditious writings was a mere act of in- 
 ternal policy, and was not directed against the 
 French. 
 
 Evidences of this position might be easily 
 multiplied to any extent. On September 20, 
 1 79 1, Lord Grenville writes from Weymouth 
 that M. de Bintinaye, an emissary of the French 
 emigres princes, is to be told " that his Majesty's 
 resolution extends not only to the taking no 
 part either in supporting or opposing the meas- 
 ures which other powers may adopt, but also to 
 the not influencing in any manner their deter- 
 mination in that respect." " Sir R. Keith has 
 been authorized to explain to the Emperor [of 
 Germany] his Majesty's determination to take 
 no part in the business of France unless any 
 new circumstances should arise which might 
 have an influence on the interests of his own 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 145 
 
 subjects. This is all that has passed, and the 
 princes ought to know it." Nor was the dispo- 
 sition of the French Government to us of a less 
 friendly character. Chauvelin's instructions as 
 Minister to England are dated April 19, 1792. 
 He was the ostensible head of the French 
 mission, but the moving spirit of it was Tal- 
 leyrand, the famous Bishop of Autun, who 
 could not be formally commissioned to the 
 English court because no member of the 
 Assemblee Nationale of 1789 was allowed to 
 hold public office. He is charged to use every 
 argument to keep England out of the new 
 coalition, and to persuade her to enter into 
 a defensive alliance with France for the mu- 
 tual guarantee of each other's possessions. 
 England might persuade Austria and Prussia to 
 withdraw from the league. If Spain took part 
 against France, France and England with South 
 America might join against her. A defensive 
 alliance might include a ratification of the Treaty 
 of Commerce of 1787. But above all he was to 
 try to obtain a loan of three or four millions in 
 England, if possible, with the guarantee of the 
 English Government. In return for the guar- 
 antee he was to offer the cession of the isle of 
 Tobago, almost entirely inhabited by English, 
 of course with the consent of the inhabitants. 
 The English Government were 'to be told that 
 for their object there was no time like the 
 present. 
 
I46 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 On August 4, 1792, Lord Gower writes to 
 Lord Grenville that the royal family, especially 
 the Queen, are in great danger, and he demands 
 instructions for his conduct. Lord Grenville 
 replies on August 9th, the very eve of the at- 
 tack on the Tuileries and the last day of liberty 
 for the monarchy of France, that no instructions 
 could be of any service to their Majesties in the 
 present crisis, that we have been strictly neutral 
 during the last five years, that if we could do 
 any good matters might be different. " The 
 King's feelings might lead him to depart from 
 the line he has chosen. But any measure of 
 this kind could only commit the King s name 
 in a business in which he has hitherto kept him- 
 self unengaged without any reasonable hope of 
 its producing a good effect ; on the contrary, 
 interference might do harm. We are not indif- 
 ferent to the fate of their most Christian Maj- 
 esties. Express our sentiments of regard, 
 friendship, and good-will, but make no declara- 
 tion." 
 
 We see that up to the 10th of August the 
 British Government preserved an attitude of 
 scrupulous neutrality. From that day the face 
 of affairs was changed. The King was a pris- 
 oner in the Temple ; the royal authority was in 
 abeyance. The Government were compelled 
 either to recall their ambassador or to recognize 
 the validity of the Provisional Committee. In 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 47 
 
 recalling Lord Gower they followed the exam- 
 ple of other European nations. Indeed, the 
 massacre of September followed closely upon 
 August 10th, and the life of an intimate friend 
 of the royal family would scarcely have been 
 secure. The Duke of Dorset, Lord Gower's 
 predecessor, had been forced to leave Paris, be- 
 cause a letter written to the Comte d'Artois, 
 congratulating the Count on his safe escape 
 from Paris, had been found upon one of the 
 Duke's servants. Mr. Cobden makes a great 
 matter of this recall of Lord Gower, and says 
 that after the deposition of Louis Philippe in 
 1848 our Minister continued to be accredited 
 to the French Republic. Such, however, were 
 not the views held either in France or England 
 at the time. On August 28th Chauvelin wrote 
 to Lebrun that the recall of Lord Gower need 
 not affect the neutrality of England : " Ce rappel 
 tient uniquement a ces raisons d' Etiquette et de 
 bienseance." Lebrun, on August 29th, in his 
 instructions to M. Noel, whom he was sending 
 to England, says that notwithstanding the views 
 of George III, who was rightly believed to be 
 anxious for war, the Cabinet is composed of en- 
 lightened men, and that Dundas' note recalling 
 Lord Gower was very moderate. 
 
 The events of August 10th might well im- 
 press the English Government, when we con- 
 sider the effect they produced upon Chauvelin 
 
143 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 himself. No sooner had he heard of what had 
 occurred than he writes to Lord Grenville, that 
 criminal and disastrous events have taken place 
 in Paris, that the security of the National As- 
 sembly has been violated, that men of violent 
 passions have led the multitude astray. He 
 begs the King of England to use all his influence 
 to prevent the armies of the enemy from inva- 
 ding French territory, giving occasion for new 
 excesses, and compromising still further the 
 liberty, the safety, and even the existence of 
 the King and of his family. No sooner has 
 Chauvelin sent this despatch than he discovers 
 his mistake. A Cabinet Council is called to de- 
 liberate upon his letter. Chauvelin receives new 
 intelligence from Paris. He calls Mr. Secretary 
 Dundas and begs that the despatch may be 
 returned to him and may be considered as non 
 avenue. Dundas writes to one of the clerks of 
 the Foreign Office : " Mr. Aust will not allow 
 any copies of the paper delivered this day by 
 M. Chauvelin to get out of the office, and will 
 inform (by circulating this note) H. M.'s confi- 
 dential servants who attended the Cabinet this 
 day, that M. Chauvelin having in the most 
 earnest manner requested the paper to be re- 
 turned to him, Mr. Dundas, after consulting 
 with Mr. Pitt, thought the reasons stated impos- 
 sible to be resisted." The paper was therefore 
 returned to Chauvelin, but a copy had been 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1763. 149 
 
 taken of it which is now in the Record Office. 
 Although Lord Gower was recalled from Paris, 
 Chauvelin still remained in London, and it has 
 often been asked why he did so. It has been 
 said that although he was disowned by Ministers 
 he knew himself to be on very good terms with 
 the Opposition, and that he stayed in England 
 that he might be a centre of intrigue. His 
 despatches give little countenance to this idea, 
 while they supply a natural reason for delay in 
 presenting his letters of recall. When war 
 between France and England became imminent, 
 Chauvelin held some communication with the 
 Opposition by means of Sheridan, who visited 
 him secretly. But whilst there was a hope of 
 peace or even of alliance between the two coun- 
 tries, his great object was to avoid all suspicion 
 of the kind. 
 
 There is in the. French Foreign Office a 
 despatch dated May 23, 1792, signed by Chau- 
 velin, but evidently composed by Talleyrand, 
 which, if read and pondered by Lebrun, should 
 have deterred him forever from such intrigues. 
 Talleyrand writes complaining of the indiscre- 
 tion of French journalists, that the terms Minis- 
 try and Opposition have a very different sense in 
 England to that which is attributed to them 
 abroad. " In reading French papers one would 
 believe that the King and the partisans of 
 privilege and of royal prerogative were on one 
 
ISO HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 side, and the friends of the people on the 
 other, working incessantly, the one for author- 
 ity, the other for liberty. If this were the case 
 a revolution might be probable enough. But 
 in fact the mass of the nation is generally in- 
 different to all these political discussions which 
 make such a noise amongst ourselves. Agricult- 
 ure, art, manufacture, and commerce, the rise 
 and fall of the funds, these are the main objects 
 of attention; the debates of Parliament only 
 interest the people in a secondary degree. The 
 Opposition is generally regarded as an ingredient 
 as necessary to the constitution as the Ministry 
 itself, but that is all, and whenever they are 
 seen at war with each other, whatever may be 
 the opinion which is formed of their measures, 
 the nation feels sure of liberty. Nor is the 
 Ministry itself as instinctively attached to the 
 King or as zealous for the royal prerogative as 
 as is generally believed in France. Composed 
 of different elements, it contains germs of dis- 
 agreement which incline it at one time to the 
 side of the monarchy, at another to that of the 
 people." He concludes a long despatch by say- 
 ing that they must treat with the Ministry 
 alone, and must try to gain their confidence, 
 and that is only to be done by showing the 
 most firm determination to do nothing which 
 may encourage dissension. 
 
 These weighty words ought to dispose of the 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 5 I 
 
 opinion that Chauvelin's object in remaining in 
 England was to intrigue with the Opposition. 
 His real fear was lest his letters of recall should 
 be refused by the court, and so the- rupture be 
 brought about which he and his employers were 
 most anxious to prevent. He writes to Lebrun 
 on August 31st : " It would be natural to recall 
 me as the English have recalled Lord Gower, 
 and I should be glad to go ; but let me make 
 the following observation. Lord Gower's recall 
 is due only to the motive of de Heat esse tnonar- 
 chique. We have no such reason ; we wish to 
 preserve the best intelligence with England. 
 Besides, Mr. Lindsay \the Secretary of Legation) 
 remains. It might be difficult for you to draw 
 up my letters of recall, or for me to present 
 them. How very bad it would be if I were 
 refused an audience ! what a triumph for our 
 enemies ! All the friends we have in England 
 are agreed upon this point." Indeed, the Pro- 
 visional Government sent a new emissary to 
 England in the person of M. Noel, who has 
 made a greater reputation as a writer of school- 
 books than as a diplomatist. They at first 
 intended to supersede Chauvelin, and as a ci- 
 devant marquis they always regarded him with 
 suspicion. On September 6th, however, they 
 definitely tell him that he may stay, yet warn 
 him that he must be prepared to act cordially 
 with the different persons charged' with special 
 
152 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 missions whom the Government are likely to 
 send to London. Some of them were undoubt- 
 edly intended as spies, others were got out of 
 the way that they might escape the fate of their 
 brother aristocrats in the prisons. 
 
 During the autumn things remained tolerably 
 quiet. The King was at Weymouth from Au- 
 gust 17th to the end of September. The centre 
 of disturbance was in the Ministry itself. The 
 King had not given the Ministers his entire con- 
 fidence. The French Revolution offended 
 every principle and prejudice of his nature. 
 Although we have no positive proof, we have 
 many indications that the King was eager 
 either to join the coalition or to take decisive 
 steps for repressing the disorder in France, and 
 seating his royal cousin firmly on the throne. 
 The King was supported in the Ministry by 
 Lord Thurlow, the Chancellor, whom Pitt was 
 obliged to get rid of, and Lord Hawkesbury, 
 the father of a hopeful son who had just entered 
 Parliament, and who afterward became Lord 
 Liverpool. Pitt depended upon his brother, 
 Lord Chatham, First Lord of the Admiralty, a 
 person of gentlemanly bearing, small abilities, 
 and sententious wisdom, and the two Secreta- 
 ries of State, Lord Grenville and Mr. Dundas. 
 Lord Camden, the Duke of Richmond, and 
 Lord Stafford formed a middle party, who oscil- 
 lated between the two extremes. We shall 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 53 
 
 see that Pitt was ready all along to make any 
 sacrifice for the preservation of peace with 
 France. Grenville seems to have gradually 
 drifted to the side of the King, who, as events 
 progressed, became still more eager for war. 
 
 The French Embassy had some hope that a 
 Coalition Ministry would be formed which would 
 be more favorable to their cause. The summer 
 of 1792 was occupied by correspondence, inter- 
 views, and conversations, all bearing on the 
 possibility of including Pitt and Fox in the 
 same Cabinet, and providing the country with a 
 Ministry resting on a broad foundation. The 
 true history of these intrigues has yet to be 
 written. The account generally given of them 
 is that Pitt was not unwilling to receive some 
 of the Whig party, but that the scheme shat- 
 tered upon the obstinacy and impracticability of 
 Fox. There is in the British Museum (Add. 
 MSS. 27,918) a secret political diary of the 
 Duke of Leeds, which gives a minute account 
 of these transactions, and one of different com- 
 plexion to that which is derived from Lord 
 Malmesbury's diary. According to Lord Mal- 
 mesbury, Pitt was eager for the coalition. There 
 was a certain difficulty about Fox, "perhaps it 
 would not be quite easy to give Fox the Foreign 
 Department immediately, but that in a few 
 months he might certainly have it." " Pitt did 
 not come with the King's command to propose 
 
154 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 a coalition, but that he would be responsible 
 that it would please the King and the Queen, 
 and that the only difficulty at all likely to arise 
 was about Fox, and that difficulty entirely ow- 
 ing to Fox's conduct in Parliament during the 
 last four months." The only authority for 
 these opinions of Pitt is Lord Loughborough, 
 the very man whose restless desire for office and 
 unscrupulous ambition was urging the Duke of 
 Portland to sacrifice Fox. It is certain that the 
 idea of a coalition was mentioned to Pitt and 
 the King in June, but the Duke of Leeds' diary 
 shows that neither of them seriously enter- 
 tained the idea, and that Fox was perfectly 
 justified in believing it to be impossible. On 
 Tuesday, August 14th, the Duke of Leeds, who 
 had been Foreign Minister in Pitt's Cabinet, and 
 who expected to be made Prime Minister, with 
 Pitt and Fox serving under him as secretaries, 
 had an interview with the King at Windsor. 
 The Duke expounded his plans, advocating as 
 well as he could the cause of Mr. Fox. 
 " Whether it had any effect I am ignorant, for 
 his Majesty did not, I believe, mention Mr. 
 Fox's name more than once, if even that, dur- 
 ing the whole conversation. I mention the 
 several interviews which had passed between 
 Lord Loughborough and Mr. Dundas, at one 
 at least of which Mr. Pitt had been present, and 
 which had been mentioned in the newspapers 
 
FRA NCE A ND ENGLA ND IN 1 793. I 5 5 
 
 as affording sufficient reason to suppose his 
 Majesty's servants not indisposed to our ar- 
 rangement, and I took for granted his Majesty 
 was informed of every thing that had passed 
 down to the present time. To my great sur- 
 prise the King answered that he had not heard 
 any thing upon the subject for a long time ; 
 that Mr. Pitt had, indeed, some months ago 
 mentioned something like an opening on the 
 part of the Duke of Portland and his friends, to 
 which his Majesty had answered, 'Anything 
 complimentary to them, but no pozver.' " The 
 Duke of Leeds pertinently remarks upon this : 
 " The first part of this brief but curious answer 
 explains the circumstance of the offer of the 
 Garter to the Duke or Portland, and of the 
 Marquisate of Rockingham to Lord Fitzwill- 
 iam ; and the latter proves but too clearly the 
 great difficulty, if not impossibility, of succeed- 
 ing in the proposed arrangement. " The Duke 
 of Leeds, unabashed by this repulse, went on to 
 suggest that, although Pitt could not remain at 
 the head of the Treasury, he could still be Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer as well as Secretary of 
 State. " The King asked me who was pro- 
 posed to be First Lord of the Treasury ? I 
 answered that I could not tell, but that it was 
 meant that some one should be in that situation 
 who was on terms of friendship and confidence 
 with both parties. His Majesty replied it 
 
156 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 would be very awkward for Mr. Pitt after hav- 
 ing been head of that board to descend to an 
 inferior situation at it, and that whoever was 
 First Lord must either be a cipher or Mr. Pitt 
 appear as a commis" 
 
 On Wednesday, August 22d, the Duke of 
 Leeds had an interview with Pitt. Pitt re- 
 ceived him very civilly, but did not appear 
 quite at his ease. The Duke told the same 
 story that he'had told to the King. " Mr. Pitt 
 listened attentively to all I said, and answered, 
 there had been no thought of any alteration in 
 the Government, that circumstances did not call 
 for it, nor did the people wish it, and that no 
 new arrangement, either by a change or coali- 
 tion, had ever been in contemplation." On the 
 Duke reminding him of the reported interviews 
 between Lord Loughborough and Dundas, at 
 which Pitt had been present, he said that it was 
 true, but that such meetings had not in view 
 any change of administration. The language 
 both of Pitt and of the King admits of no 
 doubt, and we must conclude that the negotia- 
 tions for a coalition which have been repeated 
 in all histories of the time have, as far as Pitt is 
 concerned, no basis but the interested imagina- 
 tion and creative memory of Lord Lough- 
 borough. 
 
 The King remained at Weymouth from the 
 middle of August to the end of September, and 
 
PRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 57 
 
 during this time home politics were in abeyance, 
 but events were moving rapidly in France. On 
 September 20th, the cannonade of Valmy an- 
 nounced, as Goethe said to those who heard it, 
 the birth of a new era ; on October 23d, a salvo 
 of artillery all along the French frontier an- 
 nounced that the soil of France was free from 
 the enemy. Before the end of September the 
 French armies marched across the frontier, Nice 
 was taken on September 28th, Spires on Sep- 
 tember 30th ; the attacked became the aggres- 
 sors, and the French Government imagined a 
 victorious course of mingled conquest and propa- 
 ganda. These events did not appear to com- 
 promise English interests until Dumouriez 
 began to overrun the Netherlands. The battle 
 of Jemappes was fought on November 6th, and 
 on November 14th the capture of Brussels laid 
 the whole of Belgium at his feet. These vic- 
 tories encouraged the French to take a higher 
 tone. Chauvelin, who did not like to go to 
 Court for fear he should be badly received, now 
 asked his Government for credentials as Min- 
 ister of the Republic. He writes to Lebrun on 
 November 3d, that the time has come to treat 
 openly with England, and that he wishes for 
 positive instructions. 
 
 Lebrun was clear-sighted enough to see the 
 effect which the conquest of Belgium was likely 
 to have in England. He writes to Chauvelin 
 
158 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 on October 30th : " The army of the Republic 
 commanded by Dumouriez is on the point of 
 entering, if it had not already entered, the ter- 
 ritory of the Low Countries. It is possible that 
 Dumouriez may conquer them, and in this case 
 it is quite possible that the inhabitants will rise 
 in a general insurrection against the House of 
 Austria. What would England do in this case ? 
 Would she feel bound by the convention of 
 November 10, 1790? The Republic solemnly 
 renounces every conquest." The next day, 
 October 30th, Lebrun orders Chauvelin to an- 
 nounce distinctly that " the nation will never 
 suffer Belgium to be under foreign influence, 
 and that it will never annex the smallest part of 
 the French Empire." He adds: " Now we of 
 course desire for our protection a democratic 
 power on our frontier." On November 6th he 
 shows a still greater desire to know what public 
 opinion in England thinks about the conquest 
 of the Netherlands, and he expresses the same 
 view as before. On November 10th he writes in 
 a similar strain to Noel : " Our policy is very 
 simple on this point as on all others. We do 
 not wish for conquest ; we have no desire to 
 give any nation this or that form of government. 
 The inhabitants of Belgium will choose that 
 which suits them best ; we shall not interfere." 
 Interested as the English might be in the fate 
 of Belgium, they were far more interested in 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 59 
 
 that of Holland. Holland was united to us by 
 the closest ties ; its friendship was the triumph 
 of our diplomacy ; the power of the Stadtholder 
 depended upon our support ; to desert it would 
 have been an act of ingratitude as well as of 
 weakness. At Pitt's accession to office in 1783, 
 he found England, after her struggle with 
 America, isolated in Europe. The main jealousy 
 of this country was directed toward France. 
 But France was really weak and anxious to re- 
 cover something of the maritime power of which 
 England had robbed her. With this object she 
 turned to the strong fleet of Holland ; in close 
 alliance with the Dutch she might regain her 
 trade, and even establish a footing in India. 
 The mission of Lord Malmesbury was designed 
 to counteract these plans. Arriving in Holland 
 when the power of the Stadtholder was at its 
 lowest ebb, he reconstructed it, discomfited the 
 patriot party which was devoted to France, and 
 laid the foundations of the triple alliance between 
 England, Holland, and Prussia, which for three 
 years gave the law to Europe. Therefore, 
 although we might overlook the conquest of 
 Belgium, we could not but regard the least 
 attempt upon Holland as a cause of war. Yet 
 such was the levity of the French in this serious 
 crisis, that Maret, afterward Duke of Bassano, 
 who arrived in England about November 8th, 
 having just left the victorious Dumouriez, told 
 
l6o HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 Chauvelin that Dumouriez had the intention of 
 " throwing a few shells into Maestricht." Chau- 
 velin had sense enough to see that this would 
 make a breach inevitable. 
 
 On November 21st, Maret, who was on the 
 point of leaving England to return to France by 
 way of Brussels, wrote a letter to Lebrun which 
 exactly explains the situation. He proposes to 
 tell Dumouriez that if he attacks Holland, which 
 he certainly had in contemplation, it will inevi- 
 tably mean war with England. War is certainly 
 dreaded by the city, even if the Government 
 desire to distract people's attention from home 
 affairs. The philosopher-general will not be in- 
 sensible to these arguments. He will prefer the 
 hope of a general peace to an additional triumph. 
 He then adds with cynical acuteness : " Whether 
 the state of our finances make it impossible for 
 us to go to war, or the fear of letting loose upon 
 society a mob of unoccupied persons by dis- 
 banding our armies make peace impossible, in 
 either case the feeling of England toward us 
 is of the first importance. If we wish for peace 
 let us make an alliance with England ; if we 
 desire war let us attempt to form a junction 
 which will diminish the number of our enemies, 
 and which may embroil England with Spain. 
 Chauvelin, good-fellow as he is, is impossible 
 here. Men are prejudiced against him. Send 
 Barthelemi " (the best diplomatist the French 
 
FRA NCE A ND ENGL A ND IN 1 793 . 1 6 1 
 
 possessed, who, in 1790, made the treaties of 
 Bale with Prussia and Spain) " as ambassador 
 extraordinary, and some one else as subordinate 
 agent. I should be very happy to take this 
 place. Nominate Chauvelin to some first-rate 
 post. Noel could replace Barthelemi in Switzer- 
 land." If this advice had been adopted, and as 
 we shall see this was very nearly being the case, 
 peace between the two countries would most 
 probably have been preserved. 
 
 We now come to the two acts of the French 
 Government which formed the strongest case 
 for grievance on the English side, and which 
 are generally considered as the true causes of 
 the war ; the decree of November 19th, and the 
 opening of the navigation of the Scheldt. 
 Each of these will require attention. The 
 decree of November 19th was passed by the 
 Convention in great haste and under the fol- 
 lowing circumstances. In the middle of the 
 sitting Rhul rose and stated that the district of 
 Darmstadt, which properly belonged to France 
 by the Treaty of Ryswick, had assumed the 
 national cockade and asked to become French. 
 The Duke of Deux Ponts had marched an 
 army to stop the movement. " The citizens of 
 the Duchy of Limburg, in the district of 
 Darmstadt, ask our protection against the 
 despots ; also the club of the Friends of Lib- 
 erty and Equality established at Mayence have 
 
1 62 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 written to ask if you will grant protection to 
 the people of Mayence, or abandon them to 
 the mercy of the despots who threaten them." 
 He concludes thus : " I ask that the nations who 
 wish to fraternize with us shall be protected by 
 the French nation." It will be seen that this 
 proposition goes merely to the extent of defen- 
 sive measures. It is then moved that Rhul's 
 proposition be referred to the diplomatic com- 
 mittee, which should determine how the French 
 should not only protect but guarantee the lib- 
 erty of surrounding nations. Legendre sup- 
 ports the proposition. Brissot says that the 
 diplomatic committee is about to speak on the 
 subject on the following Friday (Nov. 19th is 
 Monday). On Rhul urging the cause of the 
 people of Mayence, Brissot asks that the 
 principle of the decree shall be voted immedi- 
 ately. At last Larevelliere-Lepeaux, that dis- 
 tinguished member of the Directory, who 
 afterward complained that it was so hard to 
 found a new religion to take the place of 
 Christianity, and to whom Talleyrand recom- 
 mended the experiment of being crucified and 
 rising again on the third day, proposed the 
 decree in the following words : " The National 
 Convention declares, in the name of the French 
 nation, that it will give fraternity and assist- 
 ance to all peoples who shall wish to recover 
 their liberty, and charges the executive power 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. l6 3 
 
 to give the necessary orders to the generals to 
 carry assistance to these peoples, and to defend 
 citizens who have been harassed, or who may 
 be harassed in the cause of liberty." Sergent 
 then proposed that the decree should be trans- 
 lated into all languages and printed. The 
 convention then proceeded to other business, 
 and broke up at five o'clock. 
 
 Such is the history of this famous decree. 
 In the French manner of those days a few 
 isolated facts repeated by a member were made 
 the occasion for asserting a number of sweeping 
 generalities, and the terms of the hastily passed 
 decree went even beyond the intention and 
 meaning of those who passed it. Was it 
 worthy of a powerful nation like the English 
 to treat every word of this hasty declaration, 
 " translated into all languages," as if it were 
 the solemn and authoritative voice of a grave 
 and powerful legislature representing a united 
 people ? 
 
 The opening of the navigation of the Scheldt 
 was much more serious. This is announced to 
 Chauvelin in a letter from Lebrun, dated Nov. 
 27th. " The executive council has just freed the 
 navigation of the Scheldt. No injury is done 
 to the rights of the Dutch. Our reasons are 
 that the river takes its rise in France, and that 
 a nation which has obtained its liberty cannot 
 recognize a system of feudalism, and still less 
 
164 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 submit to it. This need not affect the good 
 harmony which exists between ourselves and 
 England. Engagements which the Belgians 
 entered into before the epoch of their present 
 liberty naturally fall to the ground." He urges 
 Chauvelin to counteract any bad impressions 
 which this may produce, and say that it was 
 done in the interest of the prosperity of Bel- 
 gium. It was natural that these two measures, 
 following so quickly upon each other, should 
 excite strong feeling in England. The views 
 of the English Government are given in a 
 despatch addressed to Chauvelin on December 
 31st, signed, indeed, by Grenville, but bearing 
 throughout the stamp of the stern and haughty 
 style of William Pitt. His sentences,, when 
 once known, are unmistakable. It states that 
 in the decree of November 19th all England saw 
 the formal declaration of a design to extend 
 universally the new principles of government 
 adopted in France, and to encourage disorder 
 and revolt in all countries, even in those which 
 are neutral. " The application of these princi- 
 ples to the King's dominions has been shown 
 unequivocally by the public reception given by 
 the promoters of sedition in this country, and 
 by the speeches made to them precisely at the 
 time of this decree, and since on several differ- 
 ent occasions. England cannot consider such 
 an explanation [as has been given] satisfactory, 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 65 
 
 but she must look upon it as a frank avowal of 
 those dispositions which she sees with so just 
 an uneasiness and jealousy." 
 
 With regard to the Scheldt the trumpet- 
 voice of the statesman sounds with no uncer- 
 tain note. " France can have no right to annul 
 the stipulations relative to the Scheldt, unless she 
 have also the right to set aside equally the other 
 treaties between all the Powers of Europe, and 
 all the other rights of England or her allies. 
 She can even have no pretence to interfere in 
 the question of opening the Scheldt, unless she 
 were the sovereign of the Low Countries, or 
 had the right to dictate laws to all Europe. 
 England never will consent that France shall 
 arrogate the power of annulling at her pleasure, 
 and under the pretence of a pretended natural 
 right of which she makes herself the only judge, 
 the political system of Europe established by 
 solemn treaties and guaranteed by the consent 
 of all the Powers. This Government, adhering 
 to the maxims which it has followed for more 
 than a century, will also never see with indiffer- 
 ence that France shall make herself either 
 directly or indirectly the sovereign of the Low 
 Countries, or general arbiter of the rights and 
 liberties of Europe. If France is really desirous 
 of maintaining peace and friendship with Eng- 
 land, she must show herself disposed to re- 
 nounce her views of aggression and aggrandize- 
 
1 66 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 ment, and to confine herself within her own 
 territory, without insulting other Governments, 
 without disturbing their tranquillity, without 
 violating their rights." Chatham could not 
 have spoken more plainly or more worthily. 
 In these sentences is contained the whole 
 opposition of England to the encroachments of 
 the Revolution, to the spoliation of Napoleon. 
 At the same time it may be argued whether 
 the opening of the Scheldt was a question on 
 which the English was bound to go to war. 
 We appealed on our side to the law of nations, 
 the French on theirs to the law of nature. 
 Both these appeals may be disregarded in the 
 inquiry. Our treaty with Holland of 1788 
 bound us to guarantee the Dutch possessions 
 from attack or from the threat of attack. But 
 in this instance the Dutch did not protest 
 against the action of the French, nor did they 
 call upon us for our assistance. Therefore it 
 was a matter with which we had no immediate 
 concern. That we should not have considered 
 it as a casus belli in the last resort is shown by 
 the fact that negotiations were impending be- 
 tween the Dutch and Dumouriez under the 
 sanction of Lord Auckland at the time when 
 the war eventually broke out. The idea of 
 opening the Scheldt to commerce was not a 
 new one. It had been threatened by Joseph II, 
 and only laid aside upon French persuasion. 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 67 
 
 At this time we had instructed our ambassador 
 at Vienna to inform the Emperor personally 
 that there was no object of his ambition which 
 we should not be ready to further, provided he 
 would break his alliance with France. This 
 had been written by Lord Carmarthen, while 
 Pitt was still Prime Minister. It was scarcely 
 reasonable to regard as an inexpiable insult to 
 England the carrying out by one power of a 
 measure which we had ourselves suggested to 
 another. Other proofs are not wanting that 
 neither the decree of November 19th nor the 
 opening of the Scheldt would have been re- 
 garded as sufficient reasons for going to war on 
 the part of England. Chauvelin had a long 
 interview with Grenville on November 29th, 
 which left this impression upon his mind. 
 Still more explicit is a letter of Maret, dated 
 December 2d, in which he gives an account of 
 two interviews, one with William Smith, Pitt's 
 private secretary, and the other with Pitt him- 
 self. From the first interview Maret derived 
 the impression that England had negotiated 
 with Spain, that Pitt was extremely reluctant 
 to go to war, and the recognition of the French 
 Republic was not at all unlikely. 
 
 The interview with Pitt was more momen- 
 tous. Pitt began by speaking of his fears about 
 Holland, of his determination to support the 
 allies of England, and to enforce the rigorous 
 
l68 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 execution of the treaties which unite her with 
 other powers. He expressed a sincere desire to 
 avoid a war which would be fatal to the repose 
 and to the prosperity of the two nations, and 
 asked if the same desire was shared by the 
 French Government. On Maret giving satis- 
 factory assurances of this, Pitt said : " If the 
 French Government would authorize some one 
 to confer with us we should be disposed to 
 listen to him, and to treat him with cordiality 
 and confidence." Maret. "You speak of a 
 secret agent ; there is not such a one here. If 
 there had been one in London I would rather 
 that he had come here than myself." Pitt. " I 
 mean a person with whom we could communi- 
 cate cordially and frankly, and who would not 
 repel our confidence." Maret said, that in that 
 case England would have to recognize the 
 Republic. Pitt replied that that course must 
 be avoided, probably to spare the susceptibilities 
 of the King. " Do not reject this offer and we 
 will examine every thing carefully." Maret said 
 that he would urge Lebrun to send some one. 
 Pitt replied : " Why not yourself ? Write at 
 once to Paris, moments are precious." Maret 
 promised to do so. Pitt spoke again of Hol- 
 land, and as Maret was going away Pitt called 
 him back and alluded to the question of the 
 Scheldt. Maret avoided discussion on this 
 point, and Pitt mentioned the decree of No- 
 
FRA NCE A ND ENGLA ND IN 1 793 . 1 69 
 
 vember 19th. Maret gave the same answer that 
 he had given to Smith, namely, that it only 
 applied to powers at war with France ; then 
 Pitt cried : " If an interpretation of this kind 
 were possible the effect would be excellent." 
 Maret assured Pitt that the Government had 
 nothing to do with the decree, that it was the 
 work of a few exalted spirits, made in a burst 
 of enthusiasm, and without discussion. Pitt 
 concluded by urging Maret not to lose a 
 moment in communicating with Lebrun. 
 
 This interview shows that on December 1st 
 peace between the two countries was quite pos- 
 sible, that it was ardently desired by Pitt, and 
 that the really burning question was the invasion 
 of Holland, whereas the other two grievances of 
 the Scheldt and of the decree of November 19th 
 might have been satisfactorily arranged. It is 
 tantalizing to reflect how nearly the arrange- 
 ment which Pitt suggested was taking effect. 
 On December 7th Lebrun determined to move 
 Chauvelin to the Hague, and to authorize Maret 
 to treat secretly with the English Government. 
 He presents his project at the meeting of the 
 executive council, but by some wave of infatua- 
 tion it is rejected. We may read in the archives 
 of the French Foreign Office the original minute 
 of the Conseil Executif Provisoire, signed by 
 Danton, Bariere, and others, which runs in these 
 terms : " The Conseil Executif Provisoire de- 
 
170 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 termines that, while making no declaration about 
 Holland, the conference with Pitt may be con- 
 tinued, provided that it is done through Chau- 
 velin, the accredited Minister." The French 
 Government probably thought that England 
 could be terrified, that the Opposition were as 
 powerful as they represented themselves to be, 
 and that a revolution in Ireland was imminent 
 — a revolution which Lebrun had certainly been 
 at infinite pains to stir up. Can we wonder that 
 the face of Pitt appeared to Chauvelin to ex- 
 press anxiety, embarrassment, and disquietude? 
 On December 14th Maret saw Pitt again at eight 
 o'clock in the evening. The interview was short. 
 After a few words Pitt said : " Our conversation 
 must be a private one. I am not authorized to 
 say any more on State affairs." 
 
 There exists in the English Record Office 
 proof that the English Government was sincere 
 in desiring the resumption of friendly relations 
 with France, and that in spite of Burke and the 
 emigres they now contemplated sending a Minis- 
 ter to Paris. At the end of the volume of 
 French papers for December, 1792, are the im- 
 perfect drafts of two despatches intended for 
 some one proceeding as envoy to France. It 
 does not appear for whom they were intended, 
 and they have no date. But from internal evi- 
 dence they may be referred to December, 1792. 
 
 On December 15th, the day after Pitt's second 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. I7I 
 
 interview with Maret, the Alien Bill was intro- 
 duced by Lord Grenville in the House of Lords. 
 The conditions of the Bill were stringent : an 
 account and description of all foreigners arriv- 
 ing in the kingdom was to be taken at the 
 several ports ; foreigners were not to bring with 
 them arms or ammunition ; they were not to 
 depart from the place in which they first arrived 
 without a passport from the chief magistrate or 
 the justice of the peace specifying the place they 
 are going to ; on altering a passport or obtain- 
 ing it under a false name they were to be 
 banished the realm, and if they returned be 
 transported for life ; the Secretary of State 
 might give any suspected aliens in charge to one 
 of his Majesty's messengers, to be by him con- 
 ducted out of the realm ; his Majesty may, by 
 proclamation, order in Council, or sign-manual, 
 direct all aliens who arrived since January, 1792, 
 other than merchants and their menial servants, 
 to reside in such districts as he shall think neces- 
 sary for the public security; they were then 
 only to reside in these places under certain 
 stringent conditions. This measure was strongly 
 resisted in Parliament by Fox and the Opposi- 
 tion, on the ground that the dangers against 
 which it was directed were imaginary, or at least 
 greatly exaggerated. It was supported with 
 vehemence by Burke, who in this debate threw 
 a Brummagem dagger on the floor of the House, 
 
I7 2 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 saying that we must keep French principles 
 from our minds and French daggers from our 
 hearts. 
 
 Events moved hastily toward war. The 
 troubled state of Europe justified calling out 
 the militia. Parliament, which by statute must be 
 summoned shortly after this, met on December 
 13th. On December 15th Noel writes to Lebrun 
 that he has had an affecting interview with 
 William Smith, who is terribly distressed. " It 
 is absolutely impossible for the British Govern- 
 ment to bear with Chauvelin ; every one says 
 so. Why are you so obstinate? Why plunge 
 two nations into a war? " He writes again on 
 the following day that he has seen Smith again, 
 and urges some concessions with regard to the 
 Scheldt. It was afterward suggested that this 
 question might safely sleep if the executive 
 council did nothing to enforce their decree. 
 The French Government persevered in their 
 system. On January 7th, letters of credence were 
 despatched to Chauvelin, and he was ordered to 
 present them. Chauvelin had an interview 
 with Lord Grenville with regard to this on 
 January 13th. Both the French and English 
 accounts of this conversation are before us, and 
 they show that Chauvelin was not entirely 
 veracious. His position was indeed a difficult 
 one. The face of Lord Grenville grew dark at 
 the proposal, and he said that he must refer it 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 73 
 
 to his colleagues. Chauvelin began to feel 
 that peace was impossible, and begged for his 
 recall. 
 
 On January 20th he received a letter from 
 Lord Grenville, which must have removed any 
 lingering doubt. He had written to ask — first 
 whether his letters of credence would be re- 
 ceived ; and, secondly, whether the provisions 
 of the Alien Bill are to apply to him or not ; in 
 his present position he cannot possibly be re- 
 garded as subject to this law ; it would be an 
 insult to his nation. Lord Grenville answers 
 that his letters of credence cannot be received ; 
 that as Minister from the most Christian King 
 he would have enjoyed all the exemptions 
 which the law grants to public Ministers, but 
 that, as a private person, he cannot but return 
 to the general mass of foreigners resident in 
 England. 
 
 On January 21st Louis XVI was executed. 
 It is a mistake to suppose that this event of 
 itself caused the war, although undoubtedly it 
 profoundly affected George III. It was rather 
 used by the Ministry as a popular opportunity 
 for taking a step which had been already de- 
 cided. The news reached London at five o'clock 
 on January 23d. The king and queen, who 
 were going to the theatre, gave up their inten- 
 tion. At the Haymarket it was announced that 
 there would be no performance the next day ; 
 
174 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 upon which the audience shouted, " No farce, 
 no farce ! " and rose and went out. On January 
 24th Chauvelin was peremptorily bidden by an 
 Order in Council to leave the kingdom. He 
 writes, on receiving it, that it will certainly be 
 regarded as a declaration of war, and that it was 
 an unexpected step. This dismissal of Chauve- 
 lin cannot be defended. It was a punishment 
 of an insulting nature inflicted on the French 
 nation for having done what the English nation 
 had done a century and a half before — executed 
 their King after trial. To drive an accredited 
 Minister from the country as a suspected alien 
 was a blow which no nation could brook, and 
 which the French would certainly not put up 
 with in their present state of feverish excite- 
 ment. It was, as Chauvelin said, " un coup de 
 canon" equivalent to a declaration of war. It 
 bears rather the trace of the vehemence of 
 Burke and the narrow obstinacy of the King 
 than of the calm self-restraint of the Prime 
 Minister. 
 
 If the Government had waited a little 
 longer, this hasty step would have been un- 
 necessary. 
 
 On January 22d, two days before Lord Gren- 
 ville's letter, Chauvelin was ordered by his own 
 Government to leave London without delay. 
 Chauvelin met the courier conveying this de- 
 spatch at Blackheath. He was to send a note 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 175 
 
 to Lord Grenville, saying that the French are 
 still willing to preserve a good intelligence, and 
 to avoid a rupture. Maret, who was known to 
 be popular with the English Government, was 
 sent as charge d ' affaires to pave the way for 
 Dumouriez, who was to come to England after 
 he had visited Holland. The cause of this 
 sudden change must be sought in the internal 
 politics of Paris. The Government was divided 
 between the Girondists and the Jacobins, the 
 first somewhat weakened by their defeat on the 
 King's trial, but still able to hold their own, and 
 anxious for peace with England. The most 
 active of the Girondists was General Dumouriez, 
 who knew that Chauvelin was distasteful to the 
 English Ministry, and he persuaded the execu- 
 tive council to recall him, and to send Maret in 
 his place. 
 
 Maret passed Chauvelin on the way from 
 Paris to Calais, close to Montreuil. He and his 
 servants were asleep in their carriages, and they 
 did not notice Chauvelin's liveries, so that it was 
 not until his arrival at Dover on the 29th that 
 he heard of Chauvelin's dismissal. Whatever 
 instructions had been given to him were now 
 useless. He sent a note to Lord Grenville to 
 announce his arrival in England, and waited for 
 new despatches from Lebrun and for the coming 
 of Dumouriez. It is difficult to say whether 
 peace was still possible. Some statesmen, in- 
 
176 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 eluding Lord Lansdowne, were not without 
 hope of averting war ; not so, however, the 
 Prince of Wales. Some one meeting him at 
 supper with the Duchess of York, said : " There 
 is a curious report abroad that Maret is come 
 to London. The Frenchman who has arrived 
 is a very different person." Upon which the 
 Prince replied : " We know that well ; but if he 
 were God Almighty himself he comes too late, 
 and perhaps they will ask him to go away. 
 Before three weeks war will be declared. Five 
 of my brothers will fight at sea, I shall leave on 
 March 10th to put myself at the head of the 
 troops on the coast, and 50,000 foreign troops 
 will enter Holland. The time is past ; we must 
 make an end of these murderers." At the same 
 time Maret's presence in England caused con- 
 siderable alarm to the dmigrte. Maret himself 
 was not without hopes of peace. He said that 
 the sudden dismissal of Chauvelin was regretted 
 by the Ministry as a precipitate act. 
 
 In the meantime Chauvelin had arrived at 
 Paris. His report decided the vacillating com- 
 mittee. Dumouriez was ordered to proceed to 
 Antwerp and to invade Holland, and on Febru- 
 ary 1st war was declared against England and 
 Holland. 
 
 We are now in a position to decide the ques- 
 tion as to who was most to blame for the rupture. 
 No doubt the English had ample provocation, 
 
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN 1793. 1 77 
 
 but it may be questioned whether the English 
 Government maintained to the last that system 
 of dignified abstention and neutrality which 
 they had at first displayed. The death of the 
 King was not so entirely different to the events 
 which had preceded it — the riots of October 
 5th, the acceptance of the new constitution, the 
 storming of the Tuileries on August 10th — as 
 to justify action of a new and violent kind. The 
 Ministry exaggerated the importance of French 
 bombast and of English sedition. By allying 
 ourselves with the small but distinguished mi- 
 nority in the French Government we might have 
 restrained their impetuous rivals from provoking 
 two new and dangerous enemies. We ought to 
 have accredited a minister to the French Re- 
 public, we ought to have continued diplomatic 
 relations with Chauvelin, we certainly ought not 
 to have ordered him out of the country as a 
 suspected alien. The influence of Burke and 
 the emigres was very powerful, but they warned 
 us against the wrong dangers. We needed pro- 
 tection, not against the poison of French Re- 
 publicanism, but against the rapacity of French 
 armies and of the statesmen who directed them. 
 Could we have remained neutral France would 
 not have invaded Holland, and the history of Eu- 
 rope might not have been sullied with the crimes 
 of Napoleon. These speculations are of little 
 use ; but even to those who believe that what has 
 
178 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 happened must have happened, it is interesting 
 to trace the momentous effect of small diver- 
 gencies, and to place our finger on the point at 
 which the scale of fate seemed to tremble as it 
 swerved. 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 
 
 The premature death of the one great sol- 
 dier produced by France, in 1870-1, induces 
 us briefly to review his exploits. From 
 the moment when he attained command, intel- 
 ligent observers of the fierce contest which was 
 being waged in the region of the Loire, per- 
 ceived that Chanzy was no ordinary man ; and, 
 as the strife deepened, the magnificent stand he 
 made against the huge German hosts, gained 
 the respect, nay, the admiration, of Europe. 
 The knowledge acquired since the war ended 
 has elevated him even more in opinion, and it 
 is now acknowledged that this eminent man 
 had many of the gifts of a great commander. 
 It is not only, though that is much, that Chanzy 
 thoroughly understood his profession, and com- 
 prehended in its various details the difficult 
 practice of modern war ; in these respects he 
 was perhaps equalled by the skilful Faidherbe, 
 and the well-read Trochu. Nor was it only that 
 he possessed the faculty of directing operations 
 in the field ably, nor yet that he made himself 
 conspicuous in organizing and preparing armies ; 
 MacMahon could fight an excellent battle, and 
 179 
 
l8o HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 D'Aurelle was capable of forming troops ; yet 
 neither chief could be compared with him. The 
 qualities that distinguished Chanzy raised him 
 high above generals of these types : and we feel 
 assured that had he had the resources, and the 
 opportunity of more fortunate men, he would 
 have ranked among the masters of war. His 
 strategic conceptions, we see, were equal to com- 
 binations on the largest scale, and were brilliant 
 and sound alike ; and had he been allowed to 
 carry out his plans, nay, had his advice been 
 even followed, the efforts of France, on two oc- 
 casions at least, might not improbably have 
 been crowned with success, with ultimate con- 
 sequences perhaps momentous. How admir- 
 able was his conduct in the field, was made evi- 
 dent in his memorable campaign between the 
 Loire, the Sarthe, and the Mayenne, when at 
 the head of a defeated army, composed largely 
 of young levies, and suffering from every kind 
 of privations, he more than once baffled the 
 German legions, fought, and all but won one 
 great pitched battle, and finally drew off in a 
 masterly retreat a force still unbroken and even 
 formidable ; and it may fairly be said that this 
 grand resistance, described by Von Moltke 
 himself as " amazing," and which utterly discon- 
 certed the German chiefs, was the most perfect 
 specimen of tactical skill shown on either side 
 in the war of 1870. Chanzy, too, possessed in 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. l8l 
 
 no ordinary degree one of the finest qualities of 
 a true warrior — he inspired confidence and won 
 the hearts of his troops ; it was observed of him 
 that he could obtain more from his improvised 
 army than any one else ; and though he was 
 strict, nay, severe, in discipline, his officers and 
 men were devoted to him. Yet we have still to 
 notice the most distinctive and noblest feature 
 of this great character. Alone of all the soldiers 
 of France, Chanzy remained superior to adverse 
 fortune, after the catastrophe of Bourbaki's 
 army, and the calamitous end of the siege of 
 Paris ; and alone he declared that it was still pos- 
 sible, were but the nation to be true to itself, to 
 maintain a contest that seemed to others hope- 
 less. Nor was this heroic constancy foolhardi- 
 ness; the plans of Chanzy were deeply laid, and 
 had he been invested with the supreme com- 
 mand, we shall not affirm that his resistance 
 would not have worn the invaders out and have 
 at least gained better terms for France than 
 those imposed on her by the Peace of Frank- 
 fort. 
 
 Though long known as a soldier of promise, 
 Chanzy was passed over by Napoleon III, and 
 had only a brigade when the war began. When 
 France rose to arms, after the disaster of Sedan, 
 he was given a division of the 16th Corps, 
 one of those improvised bodies with which 
 Gambetta hoped to stem the tide of the Ger- 
 
1 82 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 man invasion. This promotion, it is said, was 
 due to a letter from MacMahon, then a prisoner 
 of war, who had formed a high estimate of 
 Chanzy's powers ; and in this, as in other in- 
 stances, the Duke of Magenta showed that he 
 had the interests of his country at heart. Within 
 a few weeks Chanzy was placed at the head of 
 the 1 6th Corps, now north of the Loire ; the 
 quality of his troops, and their fitness for the 
 field, may be estimated from the following 
 passage : " Discipline scarcely existed ; the 
 soldiers had fallen into the habit of doing as 
 they pleased, without minding their orders. 
 . . . Drunkenness, too, had made great prog- 
 ress ; obscene songs and the ' Marseillaise ' re- 
 sounded in the ranks. . . . Some of the 
 regiments are in a state of extreme want. . . ." 
 Under the admirable direction of General 
 D'Aurelle, but with Chanzy in immediate com- 
 mand, a new spirit was breathed into this mass ; 
 and before long, so remarkable are the instincts 
 of the French race for war, it became a far from 
 contemptible force. The 16th, joined with the 
 15 th Corps, was now given the name of the 
 Army of the Loire ; and by the first week of 
 November, 1870, it held the country to the 
 north of the river, between Beaugency, Blois, 
 and Marchenoir. D'Aurelle now resolved to 
 march on Orleans, which had been captured by 
 a raid from Paris, and, if possible, to cut off a 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 1 83 
 
 Bavarian detachment, which was the only hos- 
 tile body in his path ; and for this purpose he 
 advanced his two corps, combining his opera- 
 tions with a French division, which was to de- 
 scend on Orleans from the Upper Loire. These 
 movements led to the Battle of Coulmiers, the 
 one French victory gained in the war ; and, 
 though, owing to the delay of the distant French 
 wing, the Bavarians contrived to make their 
 escape, they were rudely handled and badly 
 beaten. Chanzy was in command of the French 
 left, but through the mistake of a cavalry leader 
 his operations were not brilliant. His troops, 
 however, had fought well ; and it is astonishing 
 how the Army of the Loire could have attained 
 efficiency in so brief a time. We quote from 
 his report : " Our troops of the Loire and of 
 the Garde Mobile, who, for the most part, had 
 been in action for the first time, had behaved 
 
 admirably The artillery deserved high 
 
 praise ; and the cavalry had done very well ; its 
 only mistake was that it did not understand the 
 important part it might have played at the end 
 of the battle." 
 
 It is, in fact not in courage, nor even in en- 
 ergy, but in endurance, and the power of cohe- 
 sion ; above all, in confidence after defeat, that 
 an improvised army like that of the Loire is so 
 inferior to a long-trained enemy. 
 
 This apparition of a victorious army, which 
 
1 84 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 seemed as if France could call up legions, so to 
 speak, from the earth if she stamped her foot, 
 perplexed the counsels of the Germans at Ver- 
 sailles ; and it is now known that the French 
 commander might have struck with great, per- 
 haps immense effect. The Bavarian detach- 
 ment, not 20,000 strong, was literally the only 
 hostile force between D'Aurelle and the capital 
 of France ; and had that general advanced 
 boldly with his 60,000 or 70,000 men, he would 
 almost certainly have crushed Von der Tann ; 
 very probably have defeated the Grand Duke 
 of Mecklenburgh, who was hurriedly sent off 
 with a few thousand men to attempt to reach 
 his Bavarian colleague ; and possibly might have 
 raised the siege of Paris, for Von Moltke con- 
 templated even this contingency. From the 
 following, though the language is cautious, we 
 see that Chanzy believed an operation possible, 
 which Napoleon, we are convinced, would have 
 tried. " It was perhaps possible, making good 
 use of the enthusiasm produced by our victory, 
 to have reached and beaten the army of Von 
 der Tann before it could have received aid from 
 the Grand Duke ; to have then assailed the 
 Grand Duke's force, and so to have defeated 
 the Germans in detail before the reinforcements, 
 under the command of Prince Frederick Charles, 
 could have arrived." 
 
 D'Aurelle, however, fell back on Orleans, his 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 1 85 
 
 object being to make the position an entrenched 
 camp of formidable strength, and a base for 
 future offensive movements. This resolve is 
 not to be wholly condemned ; but it deprived 
 France of one admirable chance ; it made the 
 attitude of the Army of the Loire feeble ; above 
 all, it permitted the Germans to collect a power- 
 ful force against their new-found enemy. Chanzy 
 protested against this timid caution ; urged his 
 chief to advance to the line of the Conlie, and 
 to be ready to assume the offensive ; and espe- 
 cially entreated him to" attack in detail Von der 
 Tann, the Grand Duke, and Prince Frederick 
 Charles, as, gathering together from wide dis- 
 tances, and presenting their flanks to their col- 
 lected enemy, these generals slowly converged 
 on Orleans. These counsels were beyond dis- 
 pute right ; and here we see the distinction 
 between bold, yet scientific, and mere waiting 
 strategy. Chanzy watched with impatience the 
 occasion that was let slip : " We ought — and the 
 chief of the 16th Corps insisted upon it — have 
 made use of the opportunity, and have vigor- 
 ously assailed the flank of the enemy, as . . . 
 he defiled before us to join Prince Frederick 
 Charles." 
 
 It is gratifying, however, to know that D'Au- 
 relle was not responsible for the defeats that 
 followed. By the close of November the 15th 
 and 16th Corps had been reinforced by the 17th, 
 
1 86 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 the 1 8th, and the 20th; and the French army, 
 200,000 strong, filled the region around and in 
 front of Orleans. The purpose of D'Aurelle 
 was to await the attack of the enemy in his en- 
 trenched camp, and he has left on record his 
 assured conviction that in this position success 
 was probable. Gambetta, however, who be- 
 lieved himself as capable in directing armies as 
 he certainly was in levying troops, having heard 
 that Trochu was about to make a great effort to 
 break out from Paris, insisted upon a general 
 movement in the very teeth of Prince Frederick 
 Charles; and for this purpose the 1 8th Corps 
 was prematurely thrown forward on Beaune-la- 
 Rolande, the 20th failing to give it support, 
 while the 15 th, the 16th, and the 17th were or- 
 dered to make what really was a flank march 
 within reach of a foe at this moment all but 
 concentrated. The 18th Corps was at once de- 
 feated ; and then the Prince, by a masterly 
 movement, combined with his supports on the 
 left, fell on the French centre, the 15th Corps, 
 and shattered it after a brave resistance. This 
 stroke forced Chanzy, who up to this time had 
 gained real, though slight advantages, to fall 
 back with the 16th on the 17th Corps; and 
 as the German commander followed up his 
 success with characteristic energy and skill, 
 the result was that the 15th Corps was all 
 but ruined as a military force ; that Orleans 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 1 87 
 
 and the entrenched camp were carried and 
 that the Army of the Loire was rent in 
 twain, the 18th and 20th Corps being driven 
 across the river, while the 16th, 17th, and 
 the wreck of the 15th were rallied by Chanzy 
 on the northern bank. A succession, in short, 
 of false movements had inflicted a ruinous de- 
 feat on France ; neither the defensive strategy 
 of D'Aurelle, nor the bolder plans of his able 
 lieutenant, had been given a chance of being 
 carried out ; and it is a mere mistake to ascribe 
 the issue to the quality alone of the French army. 
 How badly Chanzy thought of Gambetta's 
 projects we see from the following : " The gen- 
 erals did all that was in their power to explain 
 the danger of these operations . . . but the 
 general plan was treated as a positive order of 
 the Government, and we only discussed the 
 means of executing it." 
 
 After the defeat of D'Aurelle — he was cruelly 
 dismissed for a failure not to be ascribed to him 
 — the divided parts of the Army of the Loire 
 were separated into two bodies, the First Army, 
 given to Bourbaki, and the Second remaining 
 under Chanzy. From this period we follow the 
 career of Chanzy as a commander-in-chief ; 
 and, as always happens with great men, he shone 
 the more the higher he rose. His war-worn 
 forces had been strengthened by the 21st Corps, 
 moved up from the west, and by a flying column 
 
1 88 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 from Tours ; and by the 6th of December he 
 had placed the army between Marchenoir, 
 Josnes, and Beaugency, having skilfully chosen 
 a strong defensive line, with his flanks covered 
 by a great forest and the Loire. He was forth- 
 with attacked by Prince Frederick Charles, who, 
 having entered Orleans on the 4th and 5th, 
 turned against the enemy hanging on his flank, 
 no doubt confident of easy success ; but his 
 calculations were completely baffled. In a series 
 of stern and sustained engagements, Chanzy for 
 four whole days repelled his assailant, inflicting 
 on him considerable loss ; and though the Prince 
 was reinforced from Orleans by a detachment 
 under the Grand Duke of Mecklenburgh, he 
 made no impression on his heroic enemy, until 
 a demonstration from the Loire and Blois placed 
 a German corps on the French rear. The terri- 
 ble character of these battles may be estimated 
 from this significant anecdote : " During the 
 stern days of Josnes, a German officer of high 
 rank who had been made prisoner, made no 
 secret of the astonishment caused by the resist- 
 ance of our young troops. He compared these 
 battles on the plains of the Beauce to those of 
 1866, in which he had taken part, and acknowl- 
 edged that these last seemed but child's play to 
 the incessant and obstinate contest which the 
 Germans were compelled to maintain, in order 
 to reduce to submission a nation believed, after 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 1 89 
 
 its disasters, to have been at the end of its 
 resources." 
 
 The tactics of Chanzy in these actions were 
 fine specimens of military skill. He had, no 
 doubt, the superiority in mere numbers, but his 
 young and lately-defeated army was very inferior 
 to the German legions. The strength of his 
 well-chosen position enabled him to baffle the 
 turning movements, so often successful with the 
 German chiefs, and so formidable to immature 
 troops ; and he compelled the Prince to attack 
 in front, where the defensive had a decided ad- 
 vantage. But like all generals who understand 
 war, he avoided a mere passive defence — espe- 
 cially trying to French soldiers — and on every 
 occasion that seemed favorable, he assumed a 
 bold yet judicious offensive. An English cor- 
 respondent in the German camp, with marked 
 sympathies on the German side, wrote thus of 
 this remarkable passage of arms : " The French 
 have the choice of positions, and possess a gen- 
 eral who knows how to occupy and hold a good 
 one. The actions of the last four days have, no 
 doubt, encouraged the French, for they have 
 been so long unaccustomed to victory that they 
 will become hopeful at not being beaten. They 
 have been fighting altogether eight days out of 
 ten ; and troops of new formation, who can do 
 this against veterans, and hold their own to the 
 last, have a right to expect that fortune will 
 
I90 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 turn in their favor. The Germans, on the other 
 hand, are stupefied by this extraordinary re- 
 sistance." 
 
 Chanzy's skill was not more remarkable than 
 his confidence and tenacious energy ; his pres- 
 ence electrified his young levies, and from this 
 moment he held absolute sway over the hearts 
 of officers and men alike. Gambetta, too, who 
 with all his faults appreciated talent and force 
 of character, thenceforward gave him his whole 
 confidence. The following is worthy of both 
 men, each great, yet with a different kind of 
 greatness : " We congratulate you on your firm 
 attitude, and have but one wish — that you may 
 succeed in breathing your spirit into those who 
 surround you." 
 
 The astonishing efforts made by Chanzy once 
 rnore disconcerted the strategists of Versailles. 
 The great sortie from Paris had, no doubt, failed ; 
 but it had cost the Germans thousands of lives, 
 and the proud city still defied its enemy. So, 
 too, D'Aurelle had succumbed with Orleans ; 
 but a fresh army had arisen from the wreck, and 
 it had found a chief who could make it accom- 
 plish feats that seemed impossible to profes- 
 sional soldiers. The position of the invaders 
 became again perilous ; and this telegram, from 
 an English source at Berlin, shows what was 
 thought at the Prussian War Office of the situ- 
 ation at this conjuncture : " The military posi- 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 191 
 
 tion of affairs is deemed critical in well-informed 
 quarters. Uneasiness is felt as to the final issue 
 of the contest." 
 
 The superiority of Chanzy will at once be 
 evident, if we compare his conduct with that of 
 Bourbaki. The First Army had not suffered 
 more than the Second in the defeats round Or- 
 leans ; it had not been molested in its retreat ; 
 and it had had some days to recruit its strength. 
 Yet while Chanzy was making his heroic stand, 
 exposed to the whole weight of his enemy's 
 force, Bourbaki literally did nothing, and de- 
 clared that he could not detach a man from his 
 quarters at Bourges, to aid his colleague. This 
 unpardonable remissness enabled the Germans to 
 make the movement along the Loire which, as 
 we said, endangered the flank of Chanzy, when 
 it had been found impossible to break his front. 
 From the following we see what his feelings 
 were, and what doubtless he thought of the con- 
 duct of a man who, though an accomplished 
 soldier, was utterly unfit for chief command : 
 
 " The movement which is possible, and in- 
 dispensable to restore the situation of affairs, is 
 this : whatever the risk, to march from Bourges 
 to Vierzon ; to press forward the main body of 
 the First Army by Romorantin upon Blois ; 
 and to take a position between the Loire and 
 the Cher, in order to interrupt the communi- 
 cations of the enemy between Orleans and his 
 
192 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 troops near Tours, and to cut these last from 
 their base of operations. If this be done, I 
 promise that I will hold my own on the right 
 bank of the Loire." 
 
 The hostile movement in Chanzy's flank 
 compelled him to leave his position on the 
 Loire. This retreat, however, was in no sense 
 retiring before a victorious enemy ; it was a 
 purely strategic move, with important ulterior 
 plans in view. The great object of the French 
 Government was to direct a relieving force on 
 Paris, already besieged for four months ; and 
 whether this project was best or not, Gam- 
 betta would hear of nothing else. Accordingly 
 Chanzy resolved to ascend from the Loire, 
 toward the capital, by the northwest ; and for 
 his immediate purpose drew off his army to the 
 Loir, an affluent of the great river. His re- 
 treat across the plains of the Beauce might 
 have been made perilous by a daring enemy ; 
 but it was conducted with remarkable skill ; 
 and the Germans were very much exhausted. 
 By the 13th of December the French army was 
 in position around Vendome, having scarcely 
 been molested on the way. Chanzy remarked 
 with truth : " The retreat of the Second Army 
 from Josnes to Vendome, under the conditions 
 of bad weather, fatigue, and dangers which 
 attended it, was most honorable to the troops. 
 It had sufficiently imposed on the enemy to 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 1 93 
 
 prevent him from disturbing it, and availing 
 himself of chances of destroying it, which might 
 have presented themselves had he known how 
 to seize them." 
 
 The object of the movement is thus de- 
 scribed : " By its establishment on the Loire, 
 the army threatened the flank of the enemy, if 
 he descended from Orleans on Tours, without 
 going far away from Chartres, in which place it 
 was possible to move by Chateaudun remain- 
 ing thus upon one of the chief lines which it 
 would be necessary to follow, in order to begin 
 again operations toward Paris, as soon as these 
 should become possible." On the 15th, Chanzy 
 was attacked again, Prince Frederick Charles 
 having rightly judged that he was the foe to 
 strike down at all cost. The French made a 
 gallant resistance ; but on the second day their 
 right wing was turned, and shattered by an 
 attack in flank. Chanzy decided on a retreat 
 to Le Mans, a strong position upon the Huisne, 
 and a strategic point of no little value, his 
 object being still to attain Paris. He drew off 
 his army without difficulty : " The Second 
 Army had again effected a retreat as difficult 
 as the preceding ones, and which was as honor- 
 able to it. The enemy, kept back on all points, 
 had become less and less enterprising ; it was 
 easy to perceive that, no more than our own, 
 were his troops able to resist their fatigues ; 
 
194 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 they were, besides, demoralized by the continu- 
 ation of a struggle which they had thought 
 ended, but which was perpetually being kept 
 up." 
 
 The invaders, in fact, had immensely suffered ; 
 and needed rest as much as their foes. The 
 following from Gambetta is overdrawn, but it 
 was an exaggeration only of truth : " You have 
 decimated the men of Mecklenburgh ; the 
 Bavarians have ceased to exist; the German 
 army is already disquieted and worn out. Let 
 us persist and we shall drive these hordes empty- 
 handed out of France." 
 
 Having been reinforced by a Breton detach- 
 ment, Chanzy reached Le Mans on the 20th of 
 December. During three weeks of incessant 
 righting he had held the main German army at 
 bay ; he had baffled completely its most brill- 
 iant chief; he was nearer Paris, his real objec- 
 tive, than when he had assumed the command 
 on the Loire. A great general only could have 
 done these things ; and he still held the capital 
 steadily in view. " It was now within the power 
 of the Second Army, if it were ready for the 
 field, and had not too strong an enemy in its 
 front, to ascend the Huisne rapidly, as if to 
 menace Chartres — this place was held in force 
 by the Germans, — and then, having masked the 
 town, to move northward to throw its left 
 upon the Seine, on the line of Mantes, in order 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 195 
 
 to assist a flotilla charged to revictual Paris, to 
 threaten Versailles, and to make a combined 
 effort with the defenders of the capital to break 
 through the investment." 
 
 Chanzy had soon established his army on the 
 Huisne, throwing out posts to the Braye and 
 the Loire. Meanwhile Prince Frederick Charles 
 had fallen back, holding a long line from 
 Chartres to Orleans, his worn-out troops being 
 in sore distress. A pause in the contest now 
 occurred ; and the belligerents on either side 
 prepared to repair their forces, and to renew 
 the struggle. A glance at the situation shows 
 that if Germany was still, on the whole, success- 
 ful, the position of France was very far from 
 hopeless. The invaders, no doubt, still invested 
 Paris ; they had hitherto been able to defeat 
 or keep back the vast armed masses directed 
 against them, with untiring energy, from many 
 points ; and they had the advantages of a cen- 
 tral position, of interior lines on the whole 
 theatre, of a master of war in supreme com- 
 mand, and of troops very superior to their foes. 
 Nevertheless, imposing as seemed their atti- 
 tude, they were exposed to peril of no ordinary 
 kind, for they were thrown for leagues around a 
 huge fortress, liable to fierce attacks from 
 within and without ; they were plunged in the 
 depths of a hostile country, a whole nation 
 rising in arms against them ; and at this 
 
19 6 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 moment they were outnumbered in the field, 
 since 300,000 men were required to hold Paris 
 and the communications with the Rhine ; there 
 were probably not 1 50,000 available for opera- 
 tions elsewhere ; and their chiefs had been com- 
 pelled to send for large reinforcements still far 
 distant. On the other hand, Paris was still able 
 to resist, and had a powerful army within its 
 walls ; Faidherbe in the north had become 
 menacing; Bourbaki on the Loire was giving 
 signs of life ; Chanzy in the west was at the 
 head of forces which every effort had failed to 
 subdue ; and it was not impossible that 300,000 
 men might be directed to the relief of the capi- 
 tal, where a single victory might accomplish 
 wonders. How Chanzy perceived the true 
 state of affairs appears in a long despatch to 
 Gambetta, which proves that he was no mean 
 strategist. We have space only for a few sen- 
 tences : " The resistance of Paris has a limit 
 known to you; the time is pressing; and the 
 great effort we must make can only succeed if 
 all our forces co-operate skilfully according to a 
 carefully-arranged plan. . . . With the ad- 
 vantages he possesses the enemy evidently tries 
 to attack successively, and in force, each of our 
 armies ; he manoeuvres with great ability, and 
 we are not well informed as to his principal 
 movements, which he masks with remarkable 
 skill." 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 1 97 
 
 The following was the plan proposed by 
 Chanzy for the relief of the capital. It may be 
 left with confidence to judges of war : " It is in- 
 dispensable that the First and the Second Armies 
 and that under the command of General Faid- 
 herbe, should march simultaneously ; the Sec- 
 ond from Le Mans to establish itself on the 
 Eure between the Evreux and Chartres ; the 
 First from Chatillon-sur-Seine in order to hold 
 positions between the Marne and Seine, from 
 Naquet to Chateau Thierry ; the Army of the 
 North from Arras to place itself from Com- 
 peigne to Beauvais. In addition to these three 
 main operations, and to aid them, the divisions 
 from Cherbourg would advance and cover the 
 left of the Second Army. . . . Once our 
 three principal armies shall have attained these 
 positions, we must communicate with Paris and 
 combine our efforts to reach the common ob- 
 jective, the Army of Paris making at the same 
 time vigorous sorties. ... By these means 
 the enemy may be driven from his lines ; and 
 then renewed efforts by the united armies, 
 without and within Paris, may lead to the de- 
 liverance of France from the invaders." 
 
 Conjecture is useless whether this plan would 
 have been attended with success or not. Von . 
 Moltke, moving on shorter lines, might perhaps 
 have maintained his grasp on the capital, and 
 driven the armies of relief back ; or he might at 
 
198 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 some point have been defeated, with conse- 
 quences, in that event, momentous. What can, 
 however, be fairly said is, that Paris being the 
 main objective, the plan of Chanzy was admira- 
 bly laid : it contemplated a great concentric 
 movement against the forces covering the siege, 
 especially aiming at Prince Frederick Charles ; 
 and it had the special merit of securing a re- 
 treat on every line in the event of defeat. In 
 an ill-omened hour, however, for France, Gam- 
 betta rejected this judicious scheme, and 
 adopted the fatal and wild project of detaching 
 the First Army far to the east, in order to raise 
 the siege of Belfort, and to reach the German 
 communications with the Rhine. This move- 
 ment, even in theory, false, and, in existing 
 circumstances, as foolish as that which ended in 
 the ruin of Sedan, was opposed by Chanzy, in 
 an able paper ; but his protests might have been 
 more vehement ; and he might have recollected 
 how the youthful Bonaparte had refused to at- 
 tempt an operation of the kind, which would 
 have marred the immortal campaign of Italy. 
 Yet we must not forget that, on two occasions, 
 before Orleans, and at Le Mans, Chanzy gave 
 counsels which, if followed, might have made 
 the issue of the war different ; and he had not 
 the authority nor, we must add, the unscrupu- 
 lousness of the warrior of 1796. He wrote thus 
 to Gambetta : " I wished to make a last effort 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 1 99 
 
 to prevent this operation. I insisted for the 
 adoption and execution of the plan I had pro- 
 posed." 
 
 The eccentric movement which sent off Bour- 
 baki to destruction amidst the snows of the 
 Jura, freed Prince Frederick Charles from an 
 enemy on his flank, and enabled him to turn his 
 whole forces against the one chief he had found 
 invincible. Drawing together his army and 
 that of the Grand Duke — they had received 
 considerable additional strength — the German 
 commanders, in the first week of January, 
 began to move toward Le Mans and the 
 Huisne, approaching each other from Chartres 
 and Orleans. The advanced posts of Chanzy 
 were gradually driven in, though not without a 
 tenacious resistance ; but his trust was in his 
 positions on the Huisne, which he had strength- 
 ened with remarkable skill, and he fell back on 
 them with unabated confidence. He had still, 
 perhaps, 90,000 men against 60,000 or 70,000 
 Germans ; but, as his troops were not to be 
 compared to their foes, he was very inferior in 
 real force. The attack began on the 10th of 
 January, but the decisive effort was made next 
 day ; and the Prince struck home with his full 
 strength. The defence, however, was stern and 
 sustained ; the tenacity of Chanzy and his 
 strong positions made up for the defects of his 
 soldiers ; and after ten hours of desperate fight- 
 
200 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 ing the French were still in possession of their 
 lines. Chanzy thus described the results of the 
 battle : had he been in the place of the sluggish 
 Bazaine, how different might have been the fate 
 of Gravelotte ! — " The action continued along 
 the whole line up to six o'clock. The night 
 had arrived ; we had remained masters of all 
 our positions, both on the plateau of Auvours 
 and on the right bank of the Huisne. The only 
 serious check we had sustained was the evacua- 
 tion of Auvours for a moment, but this had 
 been brilliantly and quickly repaired by the fine 
 conduct of General Goujard at the head of a 
 part of his Breton division, and of the troops of 
 the 17th Corps which he had rallied. The 
 enemy had made great efforts against the whole 
 front of our lines from the Tertre Rouge to 
 the left of the 21st Corps. If our losses had 
 been serious, his had been even more considera- 
 ble, owing to the advantage of our positions 
 and the preparations we had made for defence." 
 A sudden attack, made after nightfall, unex- 
 pectedly by a German corps, discomfited, how- 
 ever, the Breton levies, and placed a hostile 
 force upon Chanzy's flank. Scenes of confusion 
 and panic followed too characteristic of a raw 
 army ; an effort to drive the enemy away failed ; 
 and Chanzy, in order to avoid a disaster, was 
 compelled to make a general retreat. The 
 movement, however, was no rout ; the Germans, 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 201 
 
 in fact, were, for several hours, unaware of the 
 real state of affairs, and of the great success, 
 they had gained ; and though part of the French 
 army disbanded, and several thousand prisoners 
 were made, it was in tolerable order within two 
 days. By the 20th, having been scarcely 
 pursued, so heavy had been the loss of the 
 Germans, Chanzy was once more in a good posi- 
 tion, around Laval and upon the Mayenne ; 
 and having been joined by a new corps, he was 
 still formidable and with unbroken force. Calm, 
 stern, and self-possessed as ever, he still looked 
 forward to a march on Paris : " This army, 
 which might have been supposed ruined, thus 
 appeared once more, in renewed strength, ready 
 to advance with four corps, numbering about 
 1 50,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and 54 batteries 
 of artillery without reckoning the Breton mo- 
 biles, who were being organized, and who when 
 drilled would swell our forces in the west to 
 235,000 men. . . . Our course, therefore, 
 was to make as quickly as possible good use of 
 this force, and to march to the relief of Paris." 
 The fall of Paris on the 28th of January, and 
 the catastrophe of Bourbaki's army, prevented 
 Chanzy from attempting this march. During 
 the armistice that ensued he was invited to 
 present a scheme of operations to the French 
 Government in the event of a renewal of war. 
 We shall quote a few passages from his masterly 
 
202 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 despatch, the whole of which should, however, 
 be studied. Without concealing the perils of 
 France, Chanzy showed with truth that she had 
 still great resources : " We had immediately 
 available, 222,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, 
 33,900 artillery-men, 1,332 field-pieces with 242 
 rounds for each piece, and 4,000 wagons for 
 parks ; and, as resources to be organized, 
 354,000 men in the territorial divisions and in 
 the depots of Algeria, 132,000 recruits of the 
 class of 1 87 1, 443 guns, mounted, though with- 
 out horses, 398,000 projectiles, 1,200 wagons in 
 our arsenals, and 12,000 horses which could be 
 delivered within six weeks. . . . Finally, 
 we possessed a country with a population of 
 twenty-five millions of souls on which the in- 
 vader had not set foot." 
 
 A universal and fierce resistance, like that 
 which Spain opposed to Napoleon, which, avoid- 
 ing general engagements in the field, should 
 compel the Germans to divide their forces, and 
 to maintain armies at many points, and should 
 aim at wearying them out at last, was obviously 
 the true course to follow : " The troops at our 
 disposal, we must not forget, have not, as yet, 
 either sufficient organization or coherence, and 
 are not sufficiently trained to war, to form 
 armies capable of manoeuvring, and fighting 
 persistently against those which the enemy can 
 array in at least equal numbers. We must 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 203 
 
 therefore avoid battles which might become 
 decisive. The object to aim at, is to make 
 resistance national, and continuous at all points, 
 and thus to force the enemy to disseminate 
 his troops, to compel Germany to maintain in 
 France an army of at least 500,000 men, and to 
 subject her to losses which at last will tire her 
 out. So we can await the time when, with 
 organized forces, we shall be equal to a great 
 effort, and shall be able, under less unfavorable 
 conditions, to expel the enemy from the coun- 
 try." 
 
 A guerilla warfare of this kind, however, re- 
 quired a real army in the field to maintain a 
 solid and lasting defensive, and continually to 
 hold the army in check. For this purpose 
 Chanzy proposed to move the Second Army to 
 the south of the Loire, and thus to make head 
 against the invaders. The ability with which 
 he marked out the lines of defence for this 
 supreme contest, and the stern confidence with 
 which he declared that he would carry the war 
 to the last man of France, without doubt of the 
 final issue, if the nation was worthy of its old 
 renown, reminds us of Wellington at Torres 
 Vedras : " Our organized armies, established on 
 strong positions prepared for defence, could thus 
 resist as long as possible, yielding ground when 
 forced to do so, but only retreating upon new 
 positions chosen beforehand, and so obtaining 
 
204 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 the result which we must aim at, the prolonga- 
 tion of the contest. This resistance could be 
 carried in parts of the country, in succession, 
 which would present increasing difficulties to the 
 enemy, especially in Auvergne, and so we should 
 acquire solidity and strength, for we should gain 
 time to organize and maintain our resources. " 
 
 Recollecting what Chanzy had accomplished, 
 who shall say that this project was chimerical, 
 had this great soldier been in supreme com- 
 mand ? Chanzy believed that ultimate success 
 was probable ; and after the war declared that 
 France had fallen from want of reliance on her- 
 self : " We found, even in our improvised 
 soldiers, the great military qualities which are 
 the inalienable heritage of our race ; and the 
 principal cause of our final overthrow was a 
 want of confidence in ourselves." 
 
 Chanzy, however, added these words of cau- 
 tion against that mischievous popular fallacy, 
 that a nation may trust for its defence on 
 armies formed of young levies : " Yet let us 
 not suppose that improvised armies are a suffi- 
 cient security in the great crises of war which 
 may again happen. The events in which we 
 have taken part demonstrate beyond question, 
 that a nation can only be sure of its indepen- 
 dence, and really strong, when its military organi- 
 zation is carefully matured, complete, and 
 powerful." 
 
GENERAL CHANZY. 205 
 
 As is well known, this eminent man had not 
 an opportunity to carry out his projects, for 
 the war ended with the Fall of Paris. France, 
 however, appreciated his great deeds ; she felt 
 that he had redeemed her honor ; and he re- 
 ceived the thanks of the Assembly at Versailles. 
 Chanzy held afterward high command ; he 
 showed great capacity of organization, and of 
 preparing the new army of France ; and had 
 war with Germany broken out again, he would 
 certainly have been commander-in-chief. He 
 was esteemed, too, by his late enemy ; was re- 
 ceived at Berlin with extreme courtesy ; and 
 Moltke has placed this opinion on record, that 
 his " reiterated efforts surpassed belief." He 
 has passed away, and it was not given him to 
 attempt to avenge the disasters of France, and 
 to bring victory back to her standards. The 
 vulgar opinion may be that success is necessary 
 to make a general great ; but this is not the 
 judgment of true critics ; and Chanzy will rank 
 among captains, like William of Orange, Villars, 
 and Washington — men who never won a great 
 pitched battle, yet whose martial qualities and 
 heroic constancy, conspicuously shown in adverse 
 fortune, entitled them to the admiration of man- 
 kind. 
 
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