The same lack of general comprehension appears in Mr. Wells’s quite honestly held idea of the Parliamentary army—particularly of the “new model.” He thinks of it as a sort of democratic force. It was, as a fact, a very highly paid professional body, especially its cavalry, which was its decisive arm. Of course, there were many people of no origin in it, and a few, not many, people of low birth even held commands in it as officers. But it had a very large proportion of the wealthy classes in such positions. Nor is it true to say that this highly paid cavalry, well disciplined though it was, and containing excellent personnel, “swept the cavaliers before them from Marston Moor to Naseby.” That is typical of the quite wrong old-fashioned textbook history from which such judgments are still drawn. Cavalry was the great strength of Charles; and if there had only been cavalry on either side, Charles would have won. It was the cavaliers who generally swept the mounted part of the “new model” before them, and particularly at Naseby, but the counter-charge was fatal to the increasingly weak infantry of the King.
Naseby was won by Oliver Cromwell, leading his cavalry in person against shaken infantry. The Parliamentary horse was badly mauled by Rupert’s horse on the left, but Cromwell on the right, checking the usual sweep of the counter-charge, gave up the following-up of the horse, wheeled to the left, and destroyed the badly trained, ill-disciplined and numerically weak Welsh footmen of the centre. The cavalry part of the few years’ fighting, when against cavalry, was in Charles’s favour, but Charles’s infantry got weaker and weaker; and the reason that Charles grew weaker and weaker in quality and numbers of infantry was lack of money. His cavalry was composed largely of noble-hearted and devoted volunteers, a good part of whom, popularly said to be half, were Catholic; but his infantry he had to hire as best he could.
I only pick out these points (small in themselves) because they are typical. They show the way in which the old conventional schoolboy history of a lifetime ago is the only one our author possesses; and that explains also his quite erroneous view of what the Reformation was in England. He perpetuates what was once the official legend; naturally, no doubt, for he has never heard the modern destructive criticism levelled against it.
We have exactly the same thing in what he says of James II, that he “set himself to force the country into a reunion with Rome.” That, again, is the regular conventional stuff of his boyhood and mine, but it is utterly unhistorical. James II set himself the task of procuring toleration for that still very large proportion of the English people who were Catholic, and incidentally for other dissenting bodies as well. He insisted that the remaining minority of Catholics, who still heroically practised their Religion after a century and half of persecution unparalleled in any other country should be allowed ordinary civic advantages. They were at least one-eighth of the population (and had the sympathy of at least another eighth, if not more), and James, himself a Catholic, proposed they should enjoy the benefits of the national universities, should be allowed to enter the public services, and should have as good chances as others in the legal profession. If freedom for Catholics was likely to result in a great many conversions, and thus largely to undo the work of the Reformation, the fault was not with the policy of toleration, but with the spiritual power of the Catholic Church. To say that James II was attempting to force upon his Protestant subjects an unnatural revolution in their religion, is about as historical as it would be to say that the modern French Government is attempting to force Communism upon France because it offers (unlike most other Governments) the fullest liberty to Communist printing and to the exposing of Communist ideas through the Press. Or it is like saying that the Canadian Government, because it tolerates the use of French and English indifferently, is trying to force French (or English) upon the whole community.
The whole policy of James was a policy of toleration and the whole of the opposition he had to meet was a fanatical (and interested) refusal of toleration.
Where Mr. Wells deals with the Continental movement, which has weakened or destroyed Monarchy and broken up the religious unity of various nations, we have again the same confused attitude which we find in his dealing with the English one, only it is rather more remarkable that he should be so wrong about the foreign business. For, after all, it is natural enough for a man attempting to write a broad outline of History to go wrong upon the modern English record, seeing that the modern English record was not only everywhere taught officially, conventionally and wrongly in Mr. Wells’s boyhood, but is still in the main so taught. On English matters from the Reformation onward all our official History is propaganda: The Stuarts always wrong, Magna Charta a whig document, Cromwell a noble-hearted hero (and poor), etc. etc. etc. Only a good deal of original reading among modern writers and hard thinking of one’s own as well, can set one right upon it. But the Continental record has been dealt with by the greatest scholars from all points of view and with the fullest freedom for two generations. There is no excuse for going wrong upon its main lines.
For instance, the tremendous struggle between the more civilized traditional part of Germany, led by the Emperor, and the less civilized northern part, led by the Protestant Princes, was decided adversely to the Catholic Church at the Peace of Westphalia. Mr. Wells prints a good little map of the results of that Peace. But what he certainly does not understand, and probably has never heard of is that those results were due to French policy. It was French deliberate support of the anti-Catholic side in the Empire towards the end of the struggle which prevented the evil of the Reformation in Germany from being undone, and which left the Catholic civilization and tradition of the German Empire in ruins.
He is also lacking in what should be part of the mental furniture of every educated man, and that is the history and quality of what is called religious toleration in the struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whether religious toleration be necessarily a good thing may be left to debate; whether Mr. Wells regards it as a good thing no man can tell, because he is all for it where a Catholic culture is tolerating anti-Catholicism in its midst, and yet quite indifferent to an anti-Catholic culture oppressing Catholicism in its midst. That is a very frequent phenomenon in men who feel strongly and think weakly. I have heard men propounding with violence the duty of the State to forbid tobacco, wine, large families, free marriage of the poor, socialistic literature, Sunday trading, and Heaven knows how many other things—and everyone of them would have told you that he loved toleration!
Here we have Mr. Wells’s pronouncement that the “more tolerating countries” became Protestant with happy little Catholic lumps inside them, while the “less tolerating countries—France, Italy and Spain,” produced societies in which men are either definitely Catholic or Atheist, or, at any rate, strongly anti-Catholic.
A man who writes sentences of that sort about the processes which have produced modern Europe, singling out France, Spain and Italy(!) as specially intolerant, does not know what he is talking about. The Protestant countries persecuted religion with a ferocity unknown elsewhere. You find that persecution rampant in the exclusion of Catholicism in the early laws of the Protestant culture in North America as in England. The whole story of the Cecils is a story of drastic and murderous persecution, the determination of the new Reformation millionaires under Elizabeth and James I to stamp out the last vestiges, and the first beginnings, of Catholic truth. Persecution of the most extreme kind, relentless and overwhelming, is the one striking characteristic of later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Does Mr. Wells imagine that he could find in any province under the Princes of France, Italy or Spain the wholesale confiscation that went on in Ireland: a whole people dispossessed of their land in the effort to crush out the Church? Did the Valois or Louis XIII string up and disembowel Protestant pastors for no other crime than the reciting of their service?