A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

by Hilaire Belloc

With the Reformation the chief motive of my examination disappears and the main matter of it. For I set out to examine whether Mr. Wells were competent as an historian to attack the Faith of Christian men, and the matter to my hand was his attitude towards the main doctrines of Faith and his acquaintance with the rise and character of the thing he hates so much.

The essential work is over when we come to the end of the great disruption which broke up the Unity of our Civilization and has bred the increasing ills from which we suffer.

I shall, therefore, do no more in this, the close of my book, than very briefly survey Mr. Wells’s competence to deal with the modern world since, say, 1600: testing that competence by one or two special points. I shall conclude with a Summary.

Since the Reformation Western Europe has stood divided into a Catholic and a Protestant culture. This does not to-day mean a division into two groups of opposing religious profession. It means two whole social developments proceeding from original Religious differences. Your Atheist of the Protestant culture is a different man altogether from your Atheist of the Catholic culture.

Mr. Wells writes in the midst of the Protestant culture. He knows nothing of the Catholic. He understands the motives and general character of that Protestant part of our civilization to which he himself belongs. He understands it more or less when it is Prussian, better when it is English, and best of all when it is of the neighbourhood of London. When he is dealing with such things he does his job reasonably well. With the other part of modern Europe and the Catholic part of all Europe he deals ill; for it thinks and talks in what is to him spiritually a foreign and unknown language, and he even deals ill with that part of his own region—e.g. the new English Aristocratic State produced by the Reformation—which requires a feeling for tradition.

I select three points. First, an examination of what may be called the wind-up of the Reformation in England; to wit, the destruction of the English Monarchy in the seventeenth century and its replacing by an oligarchy of the well-to-do; for by the way in which a man treats that development, his general culture in the field of modern European history may very well be tested. Secondly, the corresponding Continental modern movement, ending with the French Revolution. Thirdly, what he has to say (and he says it very badly) about the effects upon the European mind, and particularly upon religion, of our physiological and biological discoveries, theories and blunders in the nineteenth century.

First, then, to the victory of the governing classes in England over the Crown, which was the final effect of the Reformation here.

Mr. Wells repeats upon the origins of Parliament what may be called the elementary-school-textbook legend. It is, of course, erroneous, and it is a type of those errors which, though apparently unconnected with error in religion, are really dependent upon such error. For it proceeds from a lack of comprehension of that united Catholic Europe of Middle Ages from which we all spring.

He tells us, to begin with, that monarchy in England was surrounded, after the breakdown of the Roman Empire, by Magnates who watched the common interests and modified the power of the monarch, but he adds that this was due to the presence of northern and Germanic blood. This is, of course, mere repetition of what is still written in a great many of our popular textbooks. It is, therefore, natural that Mr. Wells should repeat it. None the less it shows ignorance of essentials. It contains, like so many popular myths, a truth and a falsehood combined.

Local governments, after the breakdown of central rule from Rome, were invariably a combination of the local general and a group of Magnates round him. That is true. But the second statement—that one of the two which is important—is quite false. So little had this grouping of Magnates round the king to do with Germanic blood, that you find it everywhere the same throughout Europe, and actually weaker in the Germanies than anywhere else.