CHAPTER XV. ENGLAND, 1645.
The American regards England with more than kindly eyes. Her history has been the history of our race. The sterling valor of the Englishman early made itself felt in the demands made by him upon the reluctant kings who ruled him. At no time in the history of Great Britain, from the Norman Conquest, had the peasantry and “Common People” been submerged as completely by the power of the privileged classes as has been the case in France, and, in fact, as in all of continental Europe. When John, known as “Lackland,” the younger brother of Richard Cœur de Lion, came to the throne of England (1109-1216), he ruled weakly and lost nearly all the English possessions in France. The peasants rose against the imbecile monarch and, joined by the barons and feudal lords, compelled him to sign the Magna-Charta or Great Charter, at Runnymede (1215).
By this immortal instrument the king gave up the right to demand money when he pleased, to imprison or punish when he pleased. He was to take money only when the barons granted the privilege, for public purposes, and no freeman was to be punished except when his countrymen judged him guilty of crime. The courts were to be open to all, and justice was not to be sold, refused, or withheld. The serf villein was to have his plow free from seizure. The church was secured against the interference of the king. No class was neglected, but each obtained some cherished right.
Thus, early in the history of England, we find the “Common People” of that nation from whom we derive our blood and many of our laws—the foundation, in fact of all of them—and much of our domestic and social conditions and manners, asserting rights for which Americans afterwards contended with the parent country, England. The Magna-Charta was wrested from King John not by the lords and barons alone—but by a union between the nobles and the “Common People.”
Thus early the “Common People” of England learned to appreciate their might and strength. And the Americans, as inheritors along with their blood of so many of the traditions and characteristics of the English, have not failed to possess themselves of that quality which is inherent in the Anglo-Saxon heart—the fearless demanding of the right to equality.
Pronouncedly did the American people, November 8, 1892, reiterate in an unmistakable manner the sentiment of the race who, in 1214, had forced from King John of England the Magna-Charta which has been, ever since, the foundation of English liberty.
English kings have continually tried to break the Magna-Charta, but have ever failed in the attempt. They have been compelled, during reigns succeeding that of King John, to confirm its provisions thirty-six times. The early assertion of the right to representation by the people is interesting as a step onward in the march of the Anglo-Saxon toward equality and liberty.
Henry II.’s foolish favoritism to foreigners caused a revolt, under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who defeated the king at Lewes. Earl Simon thereupon called together the Parliament, summoning, besides the barons, two knights from each county and two citizens from each city or borough to represent free-holders (1265). From this beginning, the English Parliament soon took on the form it has since retained of two assemblies—the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Thus, the thirteenth century became ever memorable in the history of the English-speaking people of the world, for the granting of the Magna-Charta and the forming of the House of Commons—that House of Commons, which, as its name indicates, was and is made up of the representatives of the “Common People,” and which has ever been the bulwark of the liberty of the “Common People” of England, resisting every attack of autocratic monarchs upon the rights of the people.
In the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377) the Normans and Saxons were fused completely, and created the English nationality; chivalry reached its highest exaltation; but the court and the upper classes were morally rotten. The laboring classes rose during this reign, and compelled their employers to pay them just wages, and rent to fragments the despotic edicts that effected them; just as the “Common People” will ever do, whether the attempt is made to beguile them by the cry of Protection, Free Trade, Force Bill, or other distracting exclamations.
Richard II. (1377-1399) was a tyrant, with neither the capacity nor courage of his father and grandfather. He lost all the respect and admiration with which the people of England had ever regarded his father and grandfather. One of Richard II.’s tax-gatherers insulted the daughter of one Watt Tyler, at Dartforth on Kent, in exactly the same manner as “Chappie” feels at liberty to do, by his glances, the daughters of the laboring men to-day. Watt Tyler, the wrathful father, killed the man with one blow, and a formidable revolt sprang at once into being.
The shouts of about 100,000 “Common People,” gathered on Black Heath, June 12, 1381, reverberated through the valley of Richard II. The vast horde poured into London, seized the Tower of London, put to death the Archbishop of Canterbury and others, and spared the cowering and cowardly King Richard II., only on his promise to abolish slavery and grant their demands.
That, my good and would-be lords and barons, is but another evidence of the Anglo-Saxon blood and its resentment of insult when offered to the female members of the race. Women ever have occasioned, in the Anglo-Saxon bosom, just and righteous indignation when insulted. The slights, sneers, and snubbing of the women of America by the snobs and sham aristocrats produced the reappearance of the same traits of character as led Watt Tyler and his horde of peasants to London. The women of America had become Democratic, and the result of their influence upon the voters of our country was revealed, November 8th, in an unmistakable manner.
James I. (1603-1625), the first Stuart to reign in England, was stubborn, conceited, weak, slovenly, dissipated, and cowardly. In his reign was first heard the prattle about “the divine right of kings, and the passive obedience of the subject.” He ostentatiously opposed his will to that of the people, and during his reign was in constant conflict with Parliament. He was obliged to beg the House of Commons for money, and that body adopted the principle, now one of the cornerstones of the British Constitution, that “a redress of grievances must precede a granting of supplies.”
Charles I. (1625-1649), the son of James I., was more refined and held more exalted ideas of his prerogatives; he repeatedly broke his promises made to the people; his reign was one long struggle with Parliament.
He was not as frivolous and false as his son Charles II., but James I., his father, had brought the idiotic doctrine of the divine right of kings into England along with the rest of his peculiar Stuart eccentricities,—for eccentric it was to the Anglo-Saxon people, who had forced from John the Magna-Charta at Runnymede before the amalgamation of the Norman and Saxon into one homogeneous race had been completed; who, while there still existed internal dissensions and race distinction, had been united upon the one great subject for which the Anglo-Saxon people, best and bravest representatives of the Aryan race, have ever fought—the equality of man in the representation in the legislation of the people.
Strange to the ear of the masses was the doctrine of the Stuart, that the king was one of the Lord’s anointed and could do no wrong. They had seen kings do wrong when cursed with a wrong-doer as king, and supported any aspirant to the crown of England, no matter how slender may have been the thread of his claim thereto. Richard II. had played the autocratic ruler. Englishmen had resisted by espousing the cause of the first claimant who appeared upon the field. The assumption by the Stuarts of a divine right was the first stab that they gave to their own existence as the ruling House of an Anglo-Saxon people. Charles I. reaped where James I. had sown. The English people had forgiven before the bad faith of their sovereign, as they have since. They have endured the waste of their money because the Anglo-Saxon, whence we Americans derive the source of blood and laws, has not his tender spot upon the pocketbook, but in his heart, his home, his pride, believing himself, each man, equal to any other man.
In 1628, Parliament wrested from Charles I. the famous Petition of Rights, the second great charter of English liberty. It forbade the kings to levy taxes without the consent of Parliament, to imprison a subject without trial, or to billet soldiers in private houses. As usual, Charles disregarded his promises, and then for eleven years ruled like an autocrat.
During that period no Parliament was convoked, a thing unparalleled in English history. Buckingham having been assassinated by a Puritan fanatic, the Earl of Stafford and Archbishop Laud became its royal advisers. The Earl contrived a plan for making the king absolute. All who differed from Laud were tried in the High Commissioner’s Court, while the Star Chamber Court fined, whipped, and imprisoned those who spoke ill of the king’s policy or refused to pay the money he illegally demanded. The bitter persecution of the Puritans drove them to America. In Scotland, Charles carried matters with a high hand. Laud attempted to abolish Presbyterianism and introduce a liturgy. The Scotch rose en masse, and signed (some of them with their own blood) a covenant binding themselves to resist every innovation directed against their religious rights. Finally, an army of Scots crossed the border into England, and Charles was forced to assemble the famous “Long Parliament” (1640), which lasted twenty years. The old battle was renewed. Stafford, and afterward Laud, were brought to the block; the Star Chamber and High Commissioners’ Courts were abolished, and Parliament voted that it could not be adjourned without its own consent. Charles attempted to arrest five of the leaders of Parliament in the House of Commons itself. They hid in the City of London, whence a week later they were brought back to the House of Commons in triumph. Charles hastened Northward, and unfurled the royal banner. For a time his supporters swept everything before them.
Then arose Oliver Cromwell, a man of the “Common People,” who, with his Ironsides regiment at Marston Moor (1644), drove the cavaliers pell-mell from the field. Nasby (1645) was the decisive contest of the war. Cromwell swept the field, and the royal cause was irrevocably lost. Charles fled to the Scots, who gave him up to the Parliament; but the army of the “Common People,” led by Cromwell, soon got him into its possession, and he was condemned to death on the charge of treason, and was beheaded.
Thus, as has ever been the case when the “Common People” have been goaded by insult into a furious state of temper, some leader has aptly sprung, like Cromwell, from their ranks, and carried them triumphantly to victory. In the same way George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Grover Cleveland have each in turn led the hosts of the “Common People” to victory in their battles against “divine rights,” injustice, “caste,” and “sham aristocracy.”
England, by the execution of Charles I., was without a king. The authority was vested in the House of Commons (diminished by Pride’s Purge the expulsion of the Presbyterian minister) contemptuously styled “the Rump.” Cromwell, the man of the “Common People,” and his terrible army, composed of the “Common People,” were the actual rulers. In Ireland and Scotland the Prince of Wales was proclaimed as Charles II., whereupon the grim Ironsides—those representatives of the people, and their terrific earnestness when aroused—conquered Ireland as it never was conquered before. Crossing then to Scotland, the covenanters were routed at Dunbar, and again at Worcester.
Cromwell, while he had the power of a king, like Cæsar, dared not take the title. He recognized, what it would be well for the sham aristocrats to attentively regard, that the people MAKE and UNMAKE; hence, he did not dare offend the “Common People” by assuming the title of king, though exercising all the powers of a king. Under Cromwell, England’s glory became greater than under Elizabeth. The Barbarian pirates were punished; Jamaica was captured; Dunkirk was received from France in return for help against Spain; protecting the Protestants everywhere, Cromwell compelled the Duke of Savoy to cease persecuting the Baudois. The very name of England became terrible to the oppressor of the poor in every land. The people, in their might, were ruling England; because, even though Cromwell was styled “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth,” he still understood that his greatest power rested upon the will of the “Common People” as a foundation.
Upon the death of Oliver Cromwell there was no hand strong enough to seize the helm of the ship of State. His son Richard, who did not inherit the genius of his father, and did not hold the confidence of the “Common People” of England, was quickly put aside. And the English people—the “Common People”—casting about for an executive to place at the head of the nation, selected Charles II., whom they called to England to rule them, but not “by divine right;” simply as their king.
The popularity of Charles II., the most profligate, the most licentious and immoral ruler that Great Britain has ever had, arose because he was the people’s king. They had called him from over the sea; he ruled by no divine right, but through the affections of the people. He was to them their king, and though he sinned, erred, and wasted the money of the nation, he was of the people, and they forgave him. When James II. attempted to revive (as the people feared he would, and hated him in consequence, even before his succeeding Charles II.) “the divine right of kings,” and the privilege of doing anything, the idea that nothing that he did could be wrong, the people resented it. It was not Catholicism. Dear as religion may be in the heart of man, there is one thought that is dearer: it is his right to be a man, and equal to any other. Had James II. been a people’s man, as was Charles, his brother, it is quite possible that the House of Stuart might now reign in Great Britain. William of Orange was beloved by the people, because he was so thoroughly a people’s man, that even the proud Anglo-Saxons preferred to submit themselves to his rule, joined with a daughter of the House of Stuart, rather than to the legitimate successor of Charles II. The mighty voice of the people was heard resounding in the selection of the Prince of Orange with the same notes that marked the music of the march of a triumphant Democracy, on November 8, 1892; like the grains of wheat taken from the tombs of the Pharaohs, though gathered in a harvest of fifty centuries ago, when planted will produce the same crop as to-day.
History repeats itself continually, and nowhere more obvious is the repetition than in the record of the Anglo-Saxon race. The same causes which occasioned the unpopularity of Charles I., the popularity of Cromwell, the popularity of Charles II., were working to create Cleveland’s tremendous popularity and the overthrow of the Republican party November 8, 1892.