FOOTNOTES
[1] “By the mouth of the clergy spoke the voice of the helpless, defenceless multitudes who shared with them in the misery of living in a time when law was the feeblest and most untrustworthy stay of right, and men held everything at the mercy of masters, who had many desires and less scruples, were quickly and fiercely quarrelsome, impatient of control, superiority and quiet, and simply indifferent to the suffering, the fear, the waste that make bitter the days when society is enslaved to the terrible fascination of the sword.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
“Unrestrained by religion, by principle or by policy, with no family interests to limit his greed, extravagance and hatred of his kind, a foul incarnation of selfishness in its most abhorrent form, the enemy of God and man, William Rufus gave to England and Christendom a pattern of absolutism.”—Stubbs, Constitutional History. Vol. I.
[2] No Archbishop of Canterbury has received the pallium since Cranmer, but the sign of it remains in the archiepiscopal arms of Canterbury.
[3] “No one in those days imagined Christianity without Christendom, and Christendom without a Pope: and all these bishops understood exactly as Anselm did the favourite papal text, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.’ Nobody in those days doubted the divine authority of the Pope.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
[4] “The boldness of Anselm’s attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical servitude, but infused through the nation at large a new spirit of independence.”—J. R. Green.
[5] “When in Anglo-Norman times you speak of the ‘King’s Court,’ it is only a phrase for the king’s despotism.”—Sir F. Palgrave, History of Normandy and England.
[6] “The see of St. Peter was the acknowledged constitutional centre of spiritual law in the West.... It was looked upon as the guide and regulator of teaching, the tribunal and court from which issued the oracles of right and discipline, the judgment seat to which an appeal was open to all, and which gave sentence on wrong and vice without fear or favour, without respect of persons, even the highest and the mightiest.... If ever there was a time when the popes honestly endeavoured to carry out the idea of their office, it was just at this period of the Middle Ages. They attempted to erect an independent throne of truth and justice above the passions and the force which reigned in the world around.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
“Under the rule of William the Red, law had become unlaw, and in appealing from him to the apostolic throne Anselm might deem he was appealing from mere force and fraud to the only shadow of right that was still left on earth.”—Freeman, Norman Conquest, Vol. V.
[7] “In England Anselm had stood only for right and liberty; he, the chief witness for religion and righteousness, saw all round him vice rampant, men spoiled of what was their own—justice, decency, honour trampled under foot. Law was unknown, except to ensnare and oppress. The King’s Court was the instrument of one man’s selfish and cruel will, and of the devices of a cunning and greedy minister. The natural remedies of wrong were destroyed and corrupted; the king’s peace, the king’s law, the king’s justice, to which men in those days looked for help, could only be thought of in mocking contrast to the reality. Against this energetic reign of misrule and injustice, a resistance as energetic was wanted; and to resist it was felt to be the call and bounden duty of a man in Anselm’s place. He resisted, as was the way in those days, man to man, person to person, in outright fashion and plain-spoken words. He resisted lawlessness, wickedness, oppression, corruption. When others acquiesced in the evil state, he refused; and further, he taught a lesson which England has since largely learned, though in a very different way. He taught his generation to appeal from force and arbitrary will to law. It was idle to talk of appealing to law in England; its time had not yet come.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
[8] “No discipline restrained them (the king’s attendants); they plundered, they devastated, they destroyed. What they found in the houses which they invaded and could not consume, they took to market to sell for themselves or they burnt it. If it was liquor they would bathe the feet of their horses in it or pour it on the ground. It shames me to recall the cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families and the insults on their wives and daughters. And so, whenever the king’s coming was known beforehand, people fled from their houses and hid themselves and their goods, as far as they could, in the woods or wherever safety might be found.”—Eadmer.
[9] “If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king’s whom it annointed, or if the struggle had terminated in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism.”—Acton, History of Freedom in Christianity.
[10] “By the surrender of the significant ceremony of delivering the bishopric by the emblematic staff and ring, it was emphatically put on record that the spiritual powers of the bishop were not the king’s to give; the prescription of feudalism was broken.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
[11] “With regard to Thomas’ dealings with the Church, if one thing is clear it is this—that he was not in the least a man who pushed his Order at the expense of his loyalty. More than once he refused to listen to an ecclesiastical claim against the king, even when his old friend Theobald was behind it: he was perfectly impartial: he taxed churchmen as he taxed laymen, and in fact, so loyal and reasonable was he that Henry, when he made him archbishop, seems to have thought that he was wholly on his side. There were innumerable questions to be decided between Church and State. Again and again small points came up as to the appointment of this man or the other, as to the infliction or remission of a fine; and again and again Thomas decided the cause and advised the king on the merits of the case.... He was as zealous now for the State as he was for the Church afterwards. There he stood Chancellor of England; his business was to administer the laws, and he knew and did his business.”—R. H. Benson, St. Thomas of Canterbury.
[12] “The only instance which has occurred of the chancellorship being voluntarily resigned either by layman or ecclesiastic.”—Campbell, Lives of the Chancellors.
[13] “It must be held in mind that the archbisholp had on his side the Church or Canon Law, which he had sworn to obey, and certainly the law courts erred as much on the side of harshness and cruelty as those of the Church on that of foolish pity towards evil-doers.”—F. York Powell.
“We have to take ourselves back to a state of society in which a judicial trial was a tournament, and the ordeal an approved substitute for evidence, to realise what civilization owes to the Canon Law and the canonists, with their elaborate system of written law, their judicial evidence, and their written procedure.”—Rashdall, Universities of Europe during the Middle Ages.
[14] W. H. Hutton.
[15] This conversation is reported by Roger of Pontigny, who ministered to St. Thomas when the latter was in exile at that place.
[16] Garnier was a poet, and he protests passionately against this law, maintaining that God has called us all to His service. Much more worth is the villein’s son who is honourable than a nobleman’s son who is false.
[17] W. FitzStephen.
[18] W. FitzStephen.
[19] Dean Stanley.
[20] Freeman, Historical Essays. First series.
[21] “Hubert was very gracious in the eyes of all the host that lay before Acre, and in warlike things so magnificent that he was admired even by King Richard. He was in stature tall, in council prudent, and though not having the gift of eloquence, he was an able and shrewd wit. His mind was more on human than divine things, and he knew all the laws of the realm.”—Gervase.
[22] It is notable that in our day only peerages and knighthoods are sold, and these by political leaders to their partisans. Government offices, the judicial bench and bishoprics are still fortunately not in the market, though frequently allotted for partisan reasons.
[23] “Owing to the craft of the richer citizens the main part of the burden fell on the poor.”—Matthew Paris.
[24] Some writers say 50,000.
[25] William of Newburgh.
[26] “Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a shrewd financier, and an honourable, conscientious statesman; but as a prelate he is noted chiefly for his quarrels with his chapter.”—W. H. Hutton, Social England.
[27] Matthew Paris.
[28] “If he was to give up all for which he had been fighting, and fighting successfully, against the pope and the Church for the past six years, he must make quite sure of gaining such an advantage as would be worth the sacrifice. Mere release from excommunication and interdict was certainly, in his eyes, not worth any sacrifice at all. To change the pope from an enemy into a political friend was worth it, but—from John’s point of view—only if the friendship could be made something much more close and indissoluble than the ordinary official relation between the pope and every Christian sovereign. He must bind the pope to his personal interest by some special tie of such a nature that the interest of the papacy itself would prevent Innocent from casting it off or breaking it.... To outward personal humiliation of any kind John was absolutely indifferent, when there was any advantage to be gained by undergoing it. To any humiliation which the crown or the nation might suffer in his person, he was indifferent under all circumstances. His plighted faith he had never had a moment’s hesitation in breaking, whether it were sworn to his father, his brother, his allies or his people, and he would break it with equal facility when sworn to the supreme pontiff.... There seems, in short, to be good reason for believing that John’s homage to the pope was offered without any pressure from Rome and on grounds of deliberate policy.”—K. Norgate, John Lackland.
[29] K. Norgate, John Lackland.
[30] “By the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with several of his bishops and some barons, a sort of peace (quasi pax) was made between the king and the barons.”—Ralph of Coggeshall.
[31] Matthew Paris, Greater Chronicle, quoted by K. Norgate.
[32] “The Charter was a treaty between two powers neither of which trusted, or even pretended to trust, the other.”—Stubbs, Constitutional History. Vol. II.
[33] Luard. Preface to Grosseteste’s Letters. Rolls’ Series. 1861.
[34] A well-known passage in Matthew Paris, vol. v, gives the monk’s point of view of Grosseteste, the reformer:—“At this time the Bishop of Lincoln made a visitation of the religious houses in the diocese. If one were to tell all the acts of tyranny he committed therein, the bishop would seem not merely unfeeling but inhuman in his severity. For amongst other things when he came to Ramsey he went round the whole place, examined each one of the monks’ beds in the dormitory, scrutinized everything, and if he found anything locked up destroyed it. He broke open the monks’ coffers as a thief would, and if he found any cups wrought with decoration and with feet to stand on he broke them to pieces, though it would have been wiser to have demanded them unbroken for the poor. He also heaped the terrible curses of Moses on the heads of those who disobeyed his injunctions and the blessings of Moses on those who should observe the same.... And it is believed all this he hath done to restrain from sin those over whom he hath authority, and for whose souls he must give account.” This was written in 1251, when Grosseteste had been sixteen years at Lincoln.
[35] Wright, Political Songs. Camden Society, 1839.
[36] Grosseteste had been unable to get his way with the barons on the question of legitimacy of children before legal wedlock. By the old church law marriage made such children legitimate, and at the council of Merton, in 1236, Grosseteste, with the bishops, tried to bring the common law into union with the church view on this matter. He was defeated, and to this day these children are illegitimate. “It would indeed have been better if the independence exhibited by the majority who opposed the prelates at Merton had been reserved for another occasion; for it cannot be deemed that the perpetuation of a law contrary to that which prevails on the subject in almost every European country, and which still differentiates Scotland from England by abroad, though unintelligible line of demarcation, has been open to grave objection on grounds of public convenience, apart from any inherent merits or demerits it may possess.”—F. S. Stevenson, Robert Grosseteste.
[37] “Grosseteste, then, may be regarded in a threefold aspect; first, as a reformer who sought to reform the Church from within and not from without, by the removal of existing abuses, by the encouragement he gave to the great religious revival of the early part of the 13th century, and by the example of unflinching fearlessness and rectitude which he set in his performance of the episcopal office; secondly, as the teacher who guided the rising fortunes of the University of Oxford; and thirdly, as the statesman who, applying to new conditions the policy associated with the name of Stephen Langton, endeavoured to combine into one effort the struggle of the clergy for the liberties of the Church with the struggle of the laity for the liberties of the nation, imbued Simon de Montfort with principles of ‘truth and justice’ which went far beyond the mere maintenance of the privileges of his own order, and at the same time, by his effort to reconcile him with his sovereign, and by the whole tenour of his actions, showed that had he lived a few years longer, his influence would have been directed to the task of achieving by peaceful means the constitutional advance brought about by those who, taking the sword, perished by the sword.”—Stevenson, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln.
[38] See recent article on “Grosseteste” in Catholic Encyclopædia.
[39] Yet out of this letter and out of his great knowledge and love of the Scriptures a notion has been current that Grosseteste was a forerunner of Protestantism, and “a harbinger of the Reformation.” “If this implies that he had any tendency towards the doctrinal changes brought about in the Church at the Reformation, or that he evidenced any idea of a separation of the Church of England from that of Rome, a more utterly mistaken statement has never been made.”—Luard, Preface to Grosseteste’s Letters. (Rolls Series.)
As for Grosseteste’s Scriptural knowledge, “The thorough familiarity with the Old Testament is, perhaps, only what we might expect; but the use which is made of the actions of all the characters of Scripture, and the forced and sometimes outrageous way in which they are introduced to illustrate his argument, show how thoroughly ‘biblical’ the age was, and how completely the Old Testament history was regarded rather as the guide of men’s conduct in Christian times, than as a mere historical record of past events.”—Ibid.
[40] “The king acted as if he had sent him abroad simply to ruin his fortunes and wreck his reputation.”—Stubbs.
[41] Matthew Paris.
[42] Rishanger, the chronicler for St. Albans, puts the case for the national party:—
“The king that tries without advice to seek his people’s weal
Must often fail, he cannot know the wants and woes they feel.
The Parliament must tell the king how he may serve them best,
And he must see their wants fulfilled and injuries redressed.
A king should seek his people’s good and not his own sweet will,
Nor think himself a slave because men hold him back from ill.
For they that keep the king from sin serve him the best of all,
Making him free that else would be to sin a wretched thrall.
True king is he, and truly free, who rules himself aright,
And chooses freely what he knows will ease his people’s plight.
Think not it is the king’s goodwill that makes the law to be,
For law is steadfast, and a king has no stability.
No! law stands high above the king, for law is that true light
Without whose ray the king would stray and wander from the right.
When a king strays he ought to be called back into the way
By those he rules, who lawfully his will may disobey
Until he seeks the path, but when his wandering is o’er,
They ought to help and succour him and love him as before.”
(Translated by F. York Powell.)
[43] “The new form of government bears evidence of its origin; it is intended rather to fetter the king than to extend or develop the action of the community at large. The baronial council clearly regards itself as competent to act on behalf of all the estates of the realm, and the expedient of reducing the national deliberations to three sessions of select committees, betrays a desire to abridge the frequent and somewhat irksome duty of attendance in parliament rather than to share the central legislative and deliberative power with the whole body of the people. It must however be remembered that the scheme makes a very indistinct claim to the character of a final arrangement.”—Stubbs.
[44] A board of twenty-four—half chosen by the king and half by the barons—had laid a body of resolutions before the Oxford Parliament, and the first of these resolutions declared that all castles and estates alienated from the crown should be at once resumed.
[45] “The first time, as far as we know, English was used in any public document.”—Blaauw, The Barons’ War.
“End, O Earl of Gloster, what thou hast begun!
Save thou end it fitly, we are all undone.
Play the man, we pray thee, as thou hast promised,
Cherish steadfastly the cause of which thou wast the head.
He that takes the Lord’s work up, and lays it down again,
Shamed and cursed may he be, and all shall say Amen.
Earl Simon, thou of Montfort, so powerful and brave,
Bring up thy strong companies thy country now to save,
Have thou no fear of menaces or terrors of the grave,
Defend with might the nation’s cause, naught else thine own needs crave.”
—Rishanger, Political Songs.
[47] Stubbs.
[48] “The Song of Lewes”—Political Songs.
[49] I am indebted to my friend Fr. Bede Jarrett, O.P., for this interesting and, I believe, hitherto unpublished suggestion.
[50] It was to a Dominican Convent at Montargis that Simon’s widow, the Princess Eleanor, retired after the fatal battle of Evesham.
[51] An appeal was lodged at Rome by several English bishops against the threatened excommunication, but the papal legate himself became pope early in 1265, and, as Pope Clement V., was the strongest enemy of Simon and the national cause. It was only after Evesham and the death of Simon that Clement urged a wise policy of mercy on Henry and the royalists.
[52] “In this year, while Edward, the king’s son, was still held in ward in the Castle of Hereford, dissension arose between Simon, Earl of Leicester, and Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester....
“For which cause the old friendship was turned into hate, so much so that neither the consideration of his oath nor former devotion could thenceforth pacify the said Gilbert.... An endeavour was made by certain prelates to restore the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester to their former union; but they could in no wise succeed.”—W. Rishanger.
[53] J. R. Green, “The Ban of Kenilworth,” Historical Studies.
[54] “The triumph over Earl Simon had been a triumph over the religious sentiment of the time, and religion avenged itself in its own way. Everywhere the earl’s death was viewed as a martyrdom, and monk and friar, however they might quarrel on other points, united in praying for the souls of the dead as for ‘soldiers of Christ.’”—J. R. Green, “The Ban of Kenilworth,” Historical Studies.
[55] Chronicles of Melrose.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Wright, Political Songs.
[58] See J. R. Green, “Annals of Osney and Wykes,” Historical Studies.
[59] “The project was clearly to set up a new order of things founded on social equality—a theory which in the whole history of the Middle Ages appears for the first time in connection with this movement.”—Gairdner.
[60] It may be said that to-day the idea of political and social equality is generally accepted and that of brotherhood denied. In the fourteenth century brotherhood was esteemed, but equality was a strange, intruding notion.
[61] “The bias of Wyclif in theory and practice is secular, and aristocratic, and royalist: it is not really socialistic or politically revolutionary,”—Figgis, Studies of Political Thought. Nevertheless, many writers have tried to discredit Lollardy by associating it with social revolt, just as others have tried to discredit John Ball by making him out a “heretic,” and a follower of Wycliff.
[62] Froissart seems to be mainly responsible for the belief that this John Tyler became the great leader of the movement, confusing him with Wat Tyler, of Maidstone, the real leader. Several writers allege the indecency of the tax-collectors.
[63] “Tyler, according to Walsingham, was a man of ready ability and good sense. Save in some excesses, which, perhaps, were politic, possibly unavoidable, and certainly exaggerated, the rebels under him are admitted to have kept good order, and to have readily submitted to discipline.”—Thorold Rogers. To Froissart Tyler appears merely as “a bad man, and a great enemy of the nobility.”
[64] “Fearful lest their voyage should be prevented, or that the populace should attack them, they heaved their anchors and with some difficulty left the harbour, for the wind was against them, and put to sea, when they cast anchor for a wind.”—Froissart.
[65] Two names at least have been preserved—Squire Bertram Wilmington of Wye and John Corehurst of Lamberhurst.
[66] Seven years later this Earl of Salisbury, fleeing from Henry Bolingbroke, was hanged in the streets of Cirencester at the hands of the people.
[67] This law of Winchester was the statute of Edward I., 1285, which authorised local authorities to appoint constables and preserve the peace. Tyler’s aim was to strengthen local government in the counties, making them as far as possible self-governing communes.
[68] “It was in the preaching of John Ball that England first listened to the knell of feudalism, and the declaration of the rights of man.”—J. R. Green.
[69] “Observe how fortunate matters turned out, for had the rebels succeeded in their intentions they would have destroyed the whole nobility of England, and after their success other countries would have rebelled.”—Froissart.
[70] See Durrant Cooper—John Cade’s Followers in Kent.
[71] “These two bishops were wonder covetous men, evil beloved among the common people and holden suspect of many defaults; assenting and willing to the death of the Duke of Gloucester, as it were said.”—(A Chronicle of Henry VI). According to Gasgoigne—Loci e Libro Veritatum—the people said of Ayscough: “He always kept with the king and was his confessor, and did not reside in his own diocese of Sarum with us, nor maintain hospitality.”
[72] “He himself asserted that he had been a captain under the Duke of York, and that his real name was Mortimer, which may possibly have been true, for there were several illegitimate branches of the house of March.”—Professor Oman, Political History of England.
[73] “A young man of a godly nature and right pregnant of wit.”—Holinshed. Shakspeare’s farcical account of the rising in King Henry VI., Part II., is, of course, entirely misleading.—See the author’s True Story of Jack Cade.
[74] See the letter of John Payn in the Paston Letters. But Payn wrote fifteen years afterwards, and seems to have been a person of no very scrupulous honesty.
[75] A special act of parliament was passed in 1452 to cancel all that Cade had accomplished.
[76] Cocke was a well-known supporter of Henry VI. and a man of note. He was sheriff of London 1453, alderman in 1456, and mayor and M.P. 1462–3. Knighted by Henry in 1465, he fell from his high estate when Edward IV. was king, and languished in prison on a charge of high treason, only escaping with his life on payment of £8,000.
[77] “What answer to this demand was returned I find not, but like it is the same was granted and performed; for I find not the said captain and Kentishmen at their being in the city to have hurt any stranger.”—Stow.
[78] When, by order of the Privy Council, the Exchequer seized all Cade’s goods, these jewels were sold with the rest. They fetched £114, and a payment of £86 7s. was subsequently made to the Duke of York. So the crown made some profit on the transaction, but Malpas was unrecompensed.—See Devon’s Exchequer Rolls.
[79] “Whereof he lost the people’s favour and hearts. For it was to be thought if he had not executed that robbery he might have gone far and brought his purpose to good effect.”—Fabyan.
[80] This church has long been pulled down. It was absorbed into St. Saviour’s parish the following year. St. Margaret’s Hill is now part of High Street, Borough, and the present St. George’s Church stands near the site of old St. Margaret’s Church.
[81] Acts of Privy Council, 1451.
[82] “In the interests of truth, I must declare at the outset that I cannot find the very slightest foundation for the assertion of Stapleton, copied by Cresacre More and many others, that in the course of time their friendship cooled. Abundant proofs of the contrary will appear.”—Rev. T. E. Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More.
[83] “Indeed, it was he who pushed me to write the Praise of Folly, that is to say, he made a camel frisk.”—Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutten, 1519.
[84] “He had a purpose to be a priest, yet God had allotted him for another estate, not to live solitary, but that he might be a pattern to married men: how they should carefully bring up their children, how dearly they should love their wives, how they should employ their endeavour wholly for the good of their country, yet excellently perform the virtues of religious men, as piety, charity, humility, obedience and conjugal chastity.”—Cresacre More.
[85] Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutten.
[86] “It is clear that Sir Thomas had a little Utopia of his own in his family. He was making an experiment in education, and he was delighted with its success. The fame of his learned daughters became European through the praises of Erasmus, and was so great in England that in 1529, when they were all married ladies, they were invited by the king to hold a kind of philosophical tournament in his presence.... More will ever stand foremost in the ranks of the defenders of female culture.”—Rev. T. E. Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More.
[87] “He most warily retired from every opposition but that which conscience absolutely required. He displayed that very peculiar excellence of his character, which, as it showed his submission to be the fruit of sense of duty, gave dignity to that which in others is apt to seem to be slavish.”—Sir James Mackintosh, Life of More.
[88] “Parliament is discussing the revocation of all synods and other constitutions of the English clergy, and the prohibition of holding synods without express license of the king. This is a strange thing. Churchmen will be of less account than shoemakers, who have the power of assembling and making their own statutes.”—Chapuys, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. (Rolls Series).
[89] Chapuys, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. (Rolls Series).
[90] Lives of the Chancellors.
[91] Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. (Rolls Series).
[92] Roper.
[93] “To More a heretic was neither a simple man erring by ignorance, nor a learned man using his freedom in doubtful points: he was a man whose heart was ‘proud, poisoned, and obstinate,’ because he denied the Divine guidance of the Church while he claimed special Divine inspiration for himself.”—Rev. T. E. Bridgett.
[94] More’s English Works—Apology. It is only thirty years after his death that Foxe suggests More as a persecutor. All the evidence is in the opposite direction.
[95] Sir James Mackintosh, Life of More.
[96] See Dr. Jessop, The Great Pillage.
[97] See State Papers, Domestic, Edward VI.
[98] The common lands engrossed in the 15th and 16th centuries were the farm lands cultivated in common by the peasants. The enclosure of the commons was left to a later date, and took place between 1760 and 1830.
[99] This Flowerdew had distinguished himself at the destruction of the abbey at Wymondham by Henry VIII., by tearing off the lead from the roof of the church and pulling down the choir, for the sake of the stones, after the people had raised a large sum of money for the king in order to save the church.
[100] “By bearing a confident countenance in all his actions the vulgars took him (Ket) to be both valiant and wise and a fit man to be their commander.”—Sir John Hayward, Life of Edward VI.
“This Ket was a proper person to be a ringleader of mischief, for he was of a bold, haughty spirit, and of a cankered mind against the Government.”—John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.
[101] These two “were partly fain to agree, lest they being out of favour and place, others might come to bring all out of frame that now might partly be well framed, and the rather they assented to keep the people in better order during answer from the prince.”—Nicholas Sutherton.
[102] “That a populous and wealthy city like Norwich should have been for three weeks in the hands of 20,000 rebels, and should have escaped utter pillage and ruin speaks highly for the rebel leaders.”—W. Rye, Victoria County History of Norfolk.
[103] A few years later, and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, now Duke of Northumberland, again visited East Anglia to proclaim his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England. No one rose at his call. Neither peasant nor landowner responded to the proclamation; and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, died, as his father before him had died, convicted of treason, beheaded by the executioner’s axe on Tower Hill. It was August 22nd, 1553, just four years after the suppression of the peasants’ rising in Norfolk when Northumberland was put to death.
[104] “Robert Ket was not a mere craftsman: he was a man of substance, the owner of several manors: his conduct throughout was marked by considerable generosity: nor can the name of patriot be denied to him who deserted the class to which he might have belonged or aspired, and cast in his lot with the suffering people.”—Canon Dixon, History of the Church of England.
In 1588 a grandson of Robert Ket was burnt as a Nonconformist heretic by order of Elizabeth.
[105] The three were Oxford men. Sir John Eliot was at Exeter (1607), Hampden at Magdalen (1609) and Pym at Broadgate Hall, afterwards called Pembroke (1599).
[106] “In Eliot’s composition there was nothing of the dogmatic orthodoxy of Calvinism, nothing of the painful introspection of the later Puritans. His creed, as it shines clearly out from the work of his prison hours, as death was stealing upon him—The Monarchy of Man—was the old heathen philosophic creed, mellowed and spiritualised by Christianity. Between such a creed and Rome there was a great gulf fixed. Individual culture and the nearest approach to individual perfection for the sake of the State and the Church, formed a common ground on which Eliot could stand with the narrowest Puritan.”—S. R. Gardiner.
[107] Eliot’s argument “was a claim to render ministerial responsibility once more a reality, and thereby indirectly to make parliament supreme.”—S. R. Gardiner.
[108] “He (Eliot) was to the bottom of his heart an idealist. To him the parliament was scarcely a collection of fallible men, just as the king was hardly a being who could by any possibility go deliberately astray. If he who wore the crown had wandered from the right path, he had but to listen to those who formed, in more than a rhetorical sense, the collective wisdom of the nation.”—S. R. Gardiner.
[109] “His (Hampden’s) distinction lay in his power of disentangling the essential part from the non-essential. In the previous constitutional struggle he had seen that the one thing necessary was to establish the supremacy of the House of Commons.”—S. R. Gardiner.
[110] Clarendon.
[111] “The same men who, six months before, were observed to be of very moderate tempers, and to wish that gentle remedies might be applied, talked now in another dialect both of kings and persons; and said that they must now be of another temper than they were in the last parliament.”—Clarendon.
[112] The Nineteen Propositions fairly express the views of Pym and Hampden at this time on the supremacy of the Commons. The main proposals were the authority of parliament: in the sole choice of the ministers of the crown, in the regulation of state policy, in the management of the militia, in the education of the royal children, in the remodeling of the discipline of the Church of England; and the guardianship by parliament of all forts and castles. It was of first importance in Pym’s mind that parliament should have the control in military matters. Without the power of the sword the House of Commons could not ensure the personal safety of its members or the privileges of free debate against the enmity of the king. To command the army was to govern the country.
[113] See G. P. Gooch, History of Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century.
[114] “By its injudicious treatment of the most popular man in England, parliament was arraying against itself a force which only awaited an opportunity to sweep it away.”—G. P. Gooch, History of Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century.
[115] “Advocating direct government by a democratic Parliament and the fullest development of individual liberty, the Levellers looked with suspicion on the Council of State as a body which might possibly be converted into an executive authority independent of parliament, and thoroughly distrusted Cromwell as aiming at military despotism. Well-intentioned and patriotic as they were, they were absolutely destitute of political tact, and had no sense of the real difficulties of the situation, and, above all, of the impossibility of rousing the popular sympathy on behalf of abstract reasonings.”—S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.
[116] S. R. Gardiner.
[117] The movement “had sprung into existence in response to a widely spread apprehension that the victory of the people might be rendered fruitless. Its call had found an echo in the ranks of the army, and by its admirable organization it had insisted that the leaders should hear what it had to say. It had powerfully influenced their conduct and had introduced a radical element into their programme. When this had been done, the soldiers felt that its raison d’être as a separate party had come to an end. The battle had been fought, and the victory, at least for the time, had fallen to Ireton.”—G. P. Gooch, History of Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century.
[118] “In other words, not only Cromwell and Ireton, but also Fairfax, who had recently been elected a member of the House, were to be summarily cashiered.”—S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth.
[119] See the pamphlet “A Petition of Well-affected Women,” 1649. There is something curiously familiar in the exhortation to the women.
[120] “Unfortunately his friends, in petitioning for his release, rested their case on the ground that all sentences given by a court-martial were made illegal by the Petition of Right and the law of the land. Such a doctrine would have dissolved the army into chaos, and when Lilburne and Overton wrote to Fairfax, threatening him with the fate of Joab and Strafford, all chance of pardon was at an end. Lockyer firmly believed himself to be a martyr to the cause of right and justice.”—S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth.
[121] See Whitelocke’s Memorials, “The Army’s Martyr,” “A True Narrative,” and “The Moderate” (1649).
[122] “So die the Leveller corporals. Strong they, after their sort, for the liberties of England; resolute to the very death.”—Carlyle.
[123] Lilburne’s attitude to Winstanley’s propaganda was similar to the attitude of the political Chartists in the 19th century to Robert Owen’s socialism.
[124] “Then ensued a scene, the like of which had in all probability never been witnessed in an English court of justice, and was never again to be witnessed till the seven bishops were freed by the verdict of a jury from the rage of James II.”—S. R. Gardiner.
“In a revolution, where others argued about the respective rights of king and parliament, he spoke always of the rights of the people. His dauntless courage and his power of speech made him the idol of the mob.”—Professor C. H. Firth, “Lilburne,” Dictionary of National Biography.
[125] See L. A. Berens, Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth.
[126] Clarke Papers, vol. ii.
[127] Government rarely distinguishes between different schools of agitators.
[128] Between 1710 and 1867 the number of acres so enclosed was 7,660,439.
[129] Clarke Papers, vol. ii.
[130] See Graham Wallas, Life of Francis Place.
[131] “Disappointment bitter and wide-spread was following closely upon the inevitable failure of the extravagant expectations and overheated hopes which the agitation for parliamentary reform had kindled.”—F. York Powell, The Queen’s Reign: a Survey.
[132] See Graham Wallas, Life of Francis Place.
[133] Herbert Paul, History of Modern England.
[134] Ibid.
[135] “Want of leaders and organization, and the great difference in objects among the Chartists themselves, led to their failure. For a while Chartism was stayed.”—Professor T. F. Tout, England from 1689.
[136] The differences between the two became more acute when Feargus O’Connor started his land colonization schemes a few years later. O’Brien opposed these schemes, which all ended in heavy financial losses, and urged sticking to political reform. From 1842 O’Brien was practically outside the Chartist movement, though it was not till 1848 he formally retired. He died in poverty in 1864, after giving some help to the middle-class radical movement for household suffrage.
[137] A similar impulse fifty years later brought “Labour Churches” into existence.
[138] “The ministers had met the Chartist outbreaks with strong, repressive measures, and here they had the concurrence of parliament, which had no sympathy with the movement. The House of Commons, indeed, had little understanding of the processes that were maturing outside its walls. The industrial and the social evolution went on almost unnoticed by statesmen and politicians absorbed in the party controversy.”—Sidney Low and Lloyd Sanders, Political History of England, 1837–1901. See also Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates for these years.
[139] “The least satisfactory feature of English life in 1846 was the condition of the labouring classes. Politically they were dumb, for they had no parliamentary votes. Socially they were depressed, though their lot had been considerably improved by an increased demand for labour and by the removal of taxes in Peel’s great Budget of 1842. That was the year in which the misery of the English proletariat reached its lowest depth.”—Herbert Paul, History of Modern England.
[140] Stephens, a “hot-headed” Chartist preacher, put the case as he, a typical agitator of the day, saw it in 1839: “The principle of the People’s Charter is the right of every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness. The question of universal suffrage is after all a knife-and-fork question. It means that every workman has a right to have a good hat and coat, a good roof, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty.”—See R. G. Gamage, History of the Chartist Movement.
[141] Charles Kingsley, who is said to have signed the petition, gives his view of April 10th in Alton Locke.
[142] See Hansard, June, 1849.