Moreover, the group of Magnates is hardly apparent at the beginning of the business when many of the local Roman generals, such as Theodoric, were of still unmixed Germanic blood. The Magnates only become strong much later in the centuries, and by that time the Germanic blood in the West had disappeared.
People of Northern Germanic blood have never shown any particular dislike to being governed absolutely by one man. Indeed they have been rather more docile under such a political condition than Southern people and Western people during and since the Dark Ages.
What made the gathering of Magnates round the Government a necessity during the Dark Ages was the return to primitive conditions, the comparative difficulty of communications, and the continual armament of a free society, which was perpetually in conflict either domestic or through resistance to the Mohammedans and the heathens. You do not find absolutely centralized monarchy anywhere in the Dark Ages. You find it no more in Ireland or in Brittany or Galicia than you find it in the Rhine Valley or in Scandinavia; and the reason that you do not find it is that, under primitive conditions, such a thing cannot exist. Absolute monarchy, to be exercised over great numbers, needs high organization.
Mr. Wells is right in saying that the presence of Knights of the Shire gave the British Parliament a special character; but he is quite at sea as to why they gave it a special character. The special character of the English Third Estate did not lie in the calling up to the King’s Council of men representing the smaller gentry. That happened all over France and Northern Spain, and it began abroad long before it began in England. The first parliaments of Europe were in the Pyrenees.
The special character of the English Commons House lay in the fact that the smaller gentry elsewhere sat in a house of their own, but here sat with the merchants of the towns; and this made at last an organized unit wherein the combined wealth of the country could act against the King, who was the common guardian of all, rich and poor. In other words, the special constitution of the English Third Estate was one tending towards aristocracy.
But England would never have become an aristocracy—as at last it did—nor would popular monarchy ever have been defeated and replaced by rule of the gentry had it not been for one economic factor of overwhelming importance of which Mr. Wells appears not to grasp the effect, I mean the dissolution of the monasteries. He does not even mention this prodigious economic revolution as having any connection with Parliament; yet it was the Dissolution which gave Parliament all its new power after the Reformation and enabled it to destroy the Crown.
The reason was this: the monastic land and a great deal of other Church endowment as well (the endowment of a great many schools and hospitals and confraternities of all kinds, and endowments for Masses, etc., and a great part of the Bishopric endowments) passed into the hands of the Squires and greater Burgesses—the gentry—and immensely increased their economic power, while the economic power of the English Crown was correspondingly depressed. That is the whole story.
The English Crown provided its own ruin by its ecclesiastical policy. It could no longer obtain the revenue necessary for running the country; the Squires and the great merchants had become much richer than it. Only by expedients could the King struggle on for a few years at a time by trying to put more land into the hands of the Government (resumption of the King’s rights over the forests), by selling monopolies, by reviving quaint old forgotten taxes, and (in one case and for several years) by accepting support from a foreign Government. The victory of the gentry over the Crown (which Mr. Wells seems to regard as a popular victory!) was the consequence of an economic revolution which had preceded it, and that economic revolution in its turn was a consequence of the Reformation.
Mr. Wells, whose tendency being materialism is all for exaggerating of the economic factor in history, should have spotted this; he has an acute and an original power of observation in such things. But he can well be excused through this fact that none of the ordinary official textbooks such as he would come across would put the truth before him.
In the same way, he evidently does not know who and what Oliver Cromwell was. To give us an idea of the man, he quotes one sentence about his “country cut clothes,” giving the impression (which is certainly Mr. Wells’s own) that Cromwell was a bluff “man of the people.” But the whole point of Cromwell was that he was a cadet of one of the very wealthiest of the new millionaire families. The “Cromwells” (an assumed name) had built up their enormous and ill-gotten fortune on the loot of religion. Cromwell’s real name was Williams. The original Williams, his great-grandfather, was the favourite nephew of that Thomas Cromwell, the moneylender, who was the author of the policy of looting religion, and who heavily endowed that favourite nephew with monastic lands. No fewer than five great foundations—apart from lesser pickings—swelled the gigantic wealth of the family. It is symbolic and typical of the whole affair that Oliver Cromwell should come from those traditions of wealth acquired at the expense of the Catholic Church. It is true he was only the son of a cadet and therefore enjoyed but a small part of the family fortunes—a few thousand a year as we should say nowadays. But he came out of the very heart of the new millionaires. When he is represented as some rough fellow sprung from the core of the populace it is history of the very worst sort; not only baldly wrong in fact, but in tendency and motive.