Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die.
The Princess.
Introductory.In teaching history our aim should be not to miss the “spirit” of the period we are taking. We have to inquire what forces are at work moulding the character of the nation, and to estimate the results they produce. We have to find the place our period holds in building up the national history. Each period has a heritage from the past, each hands on its legacy for the future—of warning from failure or from a success which is more disastrous than failure—of encouragement from victories, not necessarily of the battlefield, and which perhaps were won at the cost of noble lives willingly, even joyfully, offered.
There have been periods of ignoble wars, such as the Hundred Years’ War, when Englishmen were brutalised by murder and rapine, ruining a people too deeply sunk in misery to defend themselves. And retribution overtook the nation as it overtakes the individual. Our own Wars of the Roses were the fruit of the unjust wars in France. There have been periods of ignoble peace, when “peace with dishonour” might have been England’s motto, when foreign troops were subsidised to protect the shores that Englishmen were too craven-hearted to defend themselves, when enthusiasm was ridiculed as “mock patriotism,” and political reformers were nicknamed “boy patriots”. Corruption was reduced to a system, and Walpole believed that every man had his price. The Church was paralysed by spiritual deadness.
Individual men stand out as warnings or examples. Richard II. appears first as full of noble impulses, a born leader of men, but his crime determines his life. To rid himself of the man who knows his crime, he banishes Norfolk for life; the other, who suspects it, he banishes for a term of years, and this is reduced at the intercession of old Gaunt. Either the punishment was, or was not, just. If just, it ought not to have been reduced on petition; if unjust, it ought never to have been inflicted. Henceforward Richard rapidly deteriorates: he seizes Gaunt’s lands in spite of his promise to the absent Bolingbroke, in spite of the warning of his uncle York:—
Take Hereford’s rights away and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights...
You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,