“But,” say the few observers and the crowd of compilers, “only a servile parliament would have given the king permission to issue proclamations having the authority of law.” But the people, it cannot be too emphatically repeated, were neither creatures crawling in the mire nor red-tapists terrified at every innovation; they trusted the king, and he did not violate their trust. The proclamations, so it was stipulated, were not to tamper with existing laws; they were to meet exigencies in an epoch of exigencies, and they met them with a wisdom and a promptness which parliament could not come near. It is physiological proclivities—not red tape, not parchment clauses, not Magna Chartas—which keep a people free. It is rather red tape, and not the occasional snapping of red tape which enfeebles liberty. If the non-conformists, who by the bye detested Romanism more than they loved religion, had not rejected the declaration of indulgence of Charles II.—a declaration which gave to Romanists leave of worship as well as to non-conformists—does any sane person believe that English freedom would have been less than it now is? In our time a body of men who hate England more than they love Ireland have, of set purpose, tumbled parliament into the dust: now, if a capable and firm authority were entrusted for twelve months with exceptional yet absolute control over parliamentary procedure, does any sane person suppose that the English passion for free parliaments would be lulled to sleep? Rule has often to be cruel in order to be kind. Alas, the multitude is made up not of Cromwells, is indeed afraid of Cromwells. In total ignorance of racial proclivities, it foolishly believes that a Cromwellian speaker for twelve months would mean a Cromwellian speaker for ever.
NOTE ON HENRY AND THE REFORMATION.
NOTE IX.
It is a singular misreading of history to say that Henry did much directly or indirectly to help on the Reformation of the Church in this country, although the part he played was not a small one. Neither was the Reformation itself, grave and critical as it was, so sudden and volcanic an upheaval as is generally believed.
Luther himself did not put forward a single new idea. No man is thinker and fighter at once; at any rate, no man thinks and fights at the same moment. Luther struck his blows for already accomplished thought. Curious ideas of unknown dates—for history reveals mergings only, not beginnings, not endings, and the student of men and movements might well exclaim “nothing begins and nothing ends,”—ideas of unknown dates and unknown birth-places had slowly come into existence. In Teutonic Europe at least, the older ideas were becoming trivial and inadequate. It was the northern Europe, which from the earliest times had been dogged in its courage both bodily and mental; the Europe strong in that reverence for truth which rests on courage, which is inseparable from courage, which never exists apart from courage; the Europe strong in its respect for women; strong in its fearlessness of death, of darkness, of storm, of the sea-lion, the land monster, the unearthly ghost, and which was strong therefore in its fearlessness of hell-fire and priestly threats. Celtic Europe, especially Celtic Ireland, slept then and sleeps now the unbroken slumber of credulity. Credulity and fear are allied. Celtic Ireland was palsied then, and is palsied still, by the fear of what we may now call Father Furniss’s hell. It is surely not difficult to recall and therefore not difficult to foretell the history of so widely differing races. Everywhere throughout Teutonic Europe, in castle and monastery, in mansion and cottage, the old-new ideas were talked over, drunk over, quarrelled over, shaken hands over, slept over. Everywhere the poets—the peoples’ voices then, for the printed sheet, the coffee house, the club, were yet far off,—the poets, Lindsay, Barbour and others in Scotland; Langland, Skelton and others in England had, long before, pelted preachers and preaching with their bitterest gibes. Those poets little knew how narrowly they escaped with their lives; they escaped because they shouted their fierce diatribes just before not just after the strife of battle. They had flashed out the signals of undying warfare, but before the signals could be interpreted the signallers had died in their beds. Thought, inquiry, discussion, printing, poetry, the new learning, the older Lollardry had moved on with quiet steps. A less quiet step was at hand, but this also, if less quiet, was as natural and as inevitable as the stealthiest of preceding steps. Europe had gradually become covered with a network of universities, and students of every nationality were constantly passing from one to another. One common language, Latin, bound university to university and thinking men to thinking men. He who spoke to one spoke to all. The time was a sort of hot-house, and the growth of man was “forced.” Reaction attends on action, but in the main, studious men made the universities—not universities the studious men; in like-manner good men have made religions, not religions so much good men. Ideas and opinions quickly became common property; sooner or later they filtered down from the Latin phrase to home-spun talk; filtered down also from the university to the town, village, and busy highway.
The Papacy itself had made Papal rule impossible to vigorous peoples. With curiously narrow ambition Popes have always preferred even limited temporal importance to unlimited spiritual sway. Two Popes, nay at one time three, had struggled not for the supremacy of religion but for merely personal pre-eminence. Popes had fought Popes, councils had fought councils, and each had called in the friendly infidel to fight the catholic enemy. The catholic sack of catholic Rome had been accompanied by greater lust and more copious bloodshed than the sack of Rome in olden time by northern Infidels. The teachings, claims, and crimes native to Rome, nay, even the imported refinements of the arts and letters and elegancies of Paganism did what legions of full-blown Luthers could not have done.
The Reformation, with its complex causes, its complex methods, its complex products, is, more than other great movements, brimful of matter for observation, thought, and inference.
The French Revolution was but one of a series of fierce uprisings of a race which rises and slaughters whenever it has a chance. French history teems with slaughters both in time of peace and time of war. Mediæval French Kings dared not arm their peasants with bows and arrows, for otherwise not a nobleman or a gentleman would have been left alive. At the close of the eighteenth century in France the oppression was heavy, the opportunity was large, and the uprising was ferocious. No other people have ever shown such a spectacle, and it is therefore idle to compare other great national movements with it. French history stands alone: no oppressor can oppress like the French oppressor; no retaliator can retaliate like the French retaliator. It is a question much less of politics than of organisation and race. But to return.