The original difference of race between the clergy and the Teutonic conquerors, which I have already pointed out to you, had a curious effect, which lingers to this day. It placed the Church in antagonism, more or less open, to the civil administration of justice. The criminal was looked on by the priest rather as a sufferer to be delivered, than an offender to be punished. All who are conversant with the lives of saints must recollect cases in which the saint performs even miracles on behalf of the condemned. Mediæval tales are full of instances of the same feeling which prompted the Italian brigands, even in our own times, to carry a leaden saint’s image in his hat as a safeguard. In an old French fabliau, for instance, we read how a certain highway-robber was always careful to address his prayers to the Blessed Virgin, before going out to murder and steal; and found the practice pay him well. For when he was taken and hanged, our Lady put her ‘mains blanches’ under his feet, and supported him invisibly for a whole day, till the executioner, finding it impossible to kill him, was forced to let him retire peaceably into a monastery, where he lived and died devoutly. We may laugh at such fancies; or express, if we will, our abhorrence of their immorality: but it will be more useful to examine into the causes which produced them. They seem to have been twofold. In the first place, the Church did not look on the Teutonic laws, whether Frank, Burgund, Goth or Lombard, as law at all. Her law, whether ecclesiastical or civil, was formed on the Roman model; and by it alone she wished herself, and those who were under her protection, to be judged. Next—and this count is altogether to her honour—law, such as it was, was too often administered, especially by the Franks, capriciously and brutally; while the servile population, always the great majority, can hardly be said to have been under the protection of law at all. No one can read the pages of Fredegarius, or Gregory of Tours, without seeing that there must have been cases weekly, even daily, which called on the clergy, in the name of justice and humanity, to deliver if possible, the poor from him that spoiled him; which excused fully the rise of the right of sanctuary, and of benefit of clergy, afterwards so much abused; which made it a pious duty in prelates to work themselves into power at court, and there, as the ‘Chancellors’ of princes, try to get something like regular justice done; and naturally enough, to remodel the laws of each nation on the time-honoured and scientific Roman form. Nevertheless, the antagonism of the Church to the national and secular law remained for centuries. It died out first perhaps, in England, after the signature of Magna Charta. For then the English prelates began to take up that truly Protestant and national attitude which issued in the great Reformation: but it lingers still in Ireland and in Italy. It lingered in France up to the French revolution, as may be seen notably in the account of the execution of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, by the priest who attended her. Horror at her atrocious crimes is quite swallowed up, in the mind of the good father, by sympathy with her suffering; and the mob snatch her bones from the funeral pile, and keep them as the relics of a saint.
But more. While the Roman clergy did real good to Europe, in preserving the scientific elements of Roman law, they did harm by preserving therewith other elements—Roman chicane, and Roman cruelty. In that respect, as in others, ‘Rome conquered her conquerors;’ and the descendants of those Roman lawyers, whom the honest Teutons called adders, and as adders killed them down, destroyed, in course of time, Teutonic freedom.
But those descendants were, alas! the clergy. Weak, they began early to adopt those arms of quibbling and craft, which religious men too often fancy are the proper arms of ‘the saints’ against ‘the world.’ Holding human nature in suspicion and contempt, they early gave way to the maxim of the savage, that every one is likely to be guilty till proved innocent, and therefore licensed the stupid brutalities of torture to extract confession. Holding self-degradation to be a virtue, and independence as a carnal vice; glorying in being slaves themselves, till to become, under the name of holy obedience, ‘perinde ac cadaver,’ was the ideal of a good monk; and accustomed, themselves, to degrading corporal punishment; they did not shrink from inflicting, even on boys and women, tortures as dastardly as indecent. Looking on the world, and on the future of the human race, through a medium compared with which the darkest fancies of a modern fanatic are bright and clear, they did not shrink from inflicting penalties, the very mention of which makes the blood run cold. Suspecting, if not alternately envying and despising, all women who were not nuns; writing openly of the whole sex (until unsexed) as the snare and curse of mankind; and possessed by a Manichæan belief in the power and presence of innumerable demons, whose especial victims were women; they erected witch-hunting into a science; they pandered to, and actually formalized, and justified on scientific grounds, the most cruel and cowardly superstitions of the mob; and again and again raised literal crusades against women, torturing, exposing, burning, young and old, not merely in the witch-mania of the 17th century, but through the whole middle age. It is a detestable page of history. I ask those who may think my statement exaggerated, to consult the original authorities. Let them contrast Rothar’s law about the impossibility of witchcraft, with the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum, Nider’s Fornicarium, or Delrio the Jesuit, and see for themselves who were the false teachers. And if they be told, that the cruelties of the Inquisition were only those in vogue according to the secular law of the day, let them recollect that the formulizers of that law were none other than the celibate Roman clergy.
I do not deny that there was in all this a just, though a terrible, Nemesis. What was the essential fault of these Lombard laws—indeed of all the Teutonic codes? This—that there was one law for the free man, another for the slave. Ecclesiastical dominion was necessary, to make one law for all classes, even though it were a law of common slavery. As the free had done to the slave, even so, and far worse, would the Roman clergy do to them. The Albigense persecutors, burning sixty ladies in one day; Conrad of Marpurg scourging his own sovereign, St. Elizabeth; shaving the Count of Saiym’s head; and burning noble ladies almost without trial; Sprenger and his compeers, offering up female hecatombs of the highest blood thoughout Germany; English bishops burning in Smithfield Anne Askew, the hapless court-beauty, and her fellow-courtier Mr. Lascelles, just as if they had been Essex or Berkshire peasants;—all these evildoers were welding the different classes of the European nations, by a community of suffering, into nations; into the belief that free and slave had one blood, one humanity, one conscience, one capacity of suffering; and at last, one capacity of rebelling, and making common cause, high and low alike, against him who reigned in Italy under the ‘Romani nominis umbram.’
And if our English law, our English ideas of justice and mercy, have retained, more than most European codes, the freedom, the truthfulness, the kindliness, of the old Teutonic laws, we owe it to the fact, that England escaped, more than any other land, the taint of effete Roman civilization; that she therefore first of the lands, in the 12th century, rebelled against, and first of them, in the 16th century, threw off, the Ultramontane yoke.
And surely it will be so, in due time, with the descendants of these very Lombards. We have seen them in these very years arise out of the dust and shame of centuries, and determine to be Lombards once again. We have seen a hero arise among them of the true old Teuton stamp, bearing worthily the name which his forefathers brought over the Alps with Alboin—Garibald, the ‘bold in war.’ May they succeed in the same noble struggle as that in which we succeeded, and returning, not in letter, but in spirit, to the old laws of Rothar and their free forefathers, become the leading race of a free and united Italy!
LECTURE XI—THE POPES AND THE LOMBARDS
‘Our Lady the Mother of God, even Virgin Maria, together with us, protests to you, adjuring you with great obligations, and admonishes and commands you, and with her the thrones, dominations, all the heavenly angels, the martyrs and confessors of Christ, on behalf of the Roman city, committed to us by the Lord God, and the sheep of the Lord dwelling in it. Defend and free it speedily from the hands of the persecuting Lombards, lest my body which suffered torments for Christ, and my home in which it rests by the command of God, be contaminated by the people of the Lombards, who are guilty of such iniquitous perjury, and are proud transgressors of the divine scripture. So will I at the day of judgment reward you with my patronage, and prepare for you in the kingdom of God most shining and glorious tabernacles, promising you the reward of eternal retribution, and the infinite joys of paradise.
‘Run, by the true and living God I exhort you, run, and help; before the living fountain, whence you were consecrated and born again, shall dry up: before the little spark remaining of that brilliant flame, from which you knew the light, be extinguished; before your spiritual mother, the holy Church of God, in which you hope to receive eternal life, shall be humiliated, invaded, violated, and defiled by the impious.
‘But if not, may your provinces in return, and your possessions, be invaded by people whom you know not. Separate not yourselves from my Roman people; so you will not be aliens, and separate from the kingdom of God, and eternal life. For whatever you shall ask of me, I will surely give you, and be your patron. Assist my Roman people, your brothers; and strive more perfectly; for it is written, No man receiveth the crown, unless he strive lawfully.