Edward I is one of the noblest monarchs who ever sat upon an earthly throne; brave, and dutiful, and true. But we have only to think of his lawyerlike, almost tradesmanlike, way of suing for his pound of flesh on the letter of his bond, and then recall Alfred’s comment on the golden rule: ‘by this one law every one may know how he ought to judge another, he needs no other law book[945],’ in order to feel the difference between them.
St. Louis.
It is only when I think of St. Louis that my heart becomes a little divided. St. Louis is, to my thinking, one of the most beautiful characters in the whole of history. His saintliness is no doubt of the mediaeval type. But this is not surprising, seeing that he lived in the thirteenth century, the central and culminating period of the Middle Ages. Dante, and Joan of Arc, and Thomas à Kempis are mediaeval too. And he went on Crusade, when, according to every utilitarian standard, he would have been better employed in governing his own kingdom. Yet I, at least, cannot love him less, because as a ‘young man’ he ‘saw visions,’ and went on the quest of the Holy Grail. And he was fortunate in his biographer. What would we not give to have, instead of Asser’s stilted and confused Latin, a memoir of Alfred in our native tongue which might rank with Joinville’s picture of his master? And yet in some ways the very saintliness of Louis became a curse to France; for it shed a consecration on an evil despotism, which finally exploded in one of the most hideous convulsions in history:
‘Sword and fire,
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws[946].’
It seems a hard thing to say, but there is a very real connexion between St. Louis and the French Revolution.
No deductions to be made from Alfred.
Alfred on the other hand is one of the very few rulers whose work in life, and whose memory after death have been, as far as may be said of anything here below, an unmixed blessing to their peoples. Alfred’s aspiration has indeed been abundantly fulfilled: ‘My will was to live worthily as long as I lived; and after my life to leave to them that should come after my memory in good works[947].’ If I have done something in these lectures to place so great a memory in a clearer light, and to sweep away some of the false traditions by which it has been obscured, I shall regard myself as having done a real, if humble, service, not only to historical truth, but also to the national life. We need to keep our historical memories not only fresh but true. For, in the words of the great historian, with the remembrance of whom I began these lectures: ‘The healthy nation has a memory as well as aspirations involved in the consciousness of its identity; it has a past no less living than its future[948].’