The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

It is important to note, finally, that it was in the age of raised standard of comfort that there occurred the first wide diffusion of critical heresy in England. Wiclif's popular Lollardry was one phase of a movement that went deeper in thought and further afield in social reform than his, since he himself felt driven to confute certain opponents of belief in the Scriptures, and at the same time to repudiate the doctrine that vassals might resist tyrant lords.[1041] Had he not done so, he might have had a less peaceful end; but it is clear that many men were in the temper to apply to lay matters the demand for reform which he restricted to matters ecclesiastical.[1042] John Ball's rising, however, promptly elicited the much superior strength of the feudal military class; and though in 1395 there were still Lollards to petition to Parliament for the abolition of "unnecessary trades," as well as war and capital punishment and the Catholic practices afterwards rejected by Protestantism, their Utopia was as hopeless as that of the insurgent peasants. Even had the invasion of France not come about to bribe and demoralise the nation at large, turning it from domestic criticism to the plunder of a neighbouring State, the nobility of the period were utterly incapable of an intellectual ideal; and any sympathy shown by any section of them for Lollardry was the merest opportunism, proceeding on resentment of Papal exactions or on a premature hope of plundering the Church.[1043] The moment Lollardry openly leant towards criticism of nobility as well as clergy, they were ready to give it up to destruction; and the determining cause of the fall of Richard II was that, besides alienating the nobles at once by maintaining a peace policy, and by refusing to let them go to all lengths in oppressing the labourers, he alienated the clergy by sheltering the Lollards.[1044] It was the clergy who turned the balance, embracing the cause of Henry IV, who in turn systematically supported them,[1045] as did his son after him. Henry V, the national hero-king, and his father were the first burners of "Protestant" heretics; and it was under Henry IV, in 1401, that there was passed the Act suppressing the voluntary schools of the Lollards.[1046] Doubtless it was a push of the Lollards that carried the later Act of 1406, permitting all men and women to send their sons and daughters "to any school that pleaseth them in the realm;"[1047] but the limitation of school-keeping to the Church was an effective means of limiting the education given; and "by 1430 the Church had recovered from the Lollard revolt against her universal authority."

Mr. Lecky, in his theory of the English aristocracy, credits the nobility with an "eminently popular character" from time immemorial, and cites Comines as to "the singular humanity of the nobles to the people during the civil wars" (History of England in the Eighteenth Century, small ed. i, 212, 213). The nobility, in the circumstances, had need to treat the people better than those of France normally did (which was what Comines was thinking of). Their own wealth—what was left of it—came from the people, to whom, further, they looked for followers. And Comines in the same passage (bk. v, ch. xx) notes that the English people were "more than ordinarily jealous" of their nobility. Of course, the difference between French and English practice dates further back, as above noted.

Similarly misleading is Mr. Lecky's statement that "the Great Charter had been won by the barons, but ... it guaranteed the rights of all freemen." Mr. Gardiner expressly points out (Student's History, p. 182; cp. his Introduction to English History, pp. 66-67) that the Charter "was won by a combination between all classes of freemen." London had harboured and aided the barons' force; and the clergy were closely concerned. (Cp. McKechnie, Magna Carta, 1905, p. 41.) The representative assembly summoned by John in 1213 stood for the combination of the three classes. Green (Short History, illust. ed. i, 242, 243) uses language which countenances Mr. Lecky, but shows (pp. 235-43) the need the barons felt for aid, and the influence of the Church and the traders. Compare the language of his longer history (1885, i, 244), and his express admission as to the depression the baronage had undergone a century later (id. p. 300). Dr. Stubbs (Const. Hist. i, 571, 583) also indicates that the people co-operated, though he uses expressions (pp. 570, 579) which obscure the facts in Mr. Lecky's favour. Guizot (Essais, p. 282) recognises that the movement was national. Buckle, too, made the point clear long ago (3-vol. ed. ii, 114-20; 1-vol. ed. pp. 350-54). But it is noted even in what he called "the wretched work of Delolme," and was in Buckle's day a generally accepted truth. Cp. Ch. de Rémusat, L'Angleterre du 18ième siècle, 1856, i, 33.

It is worth noting in this connection that the Magna Carta, considered in itself, is a rather deceptive historical document. Not only did it need the defeat of John and his German and Flemish allies by the French at Bouvines to enable even the combined lords and commons and clergy to extort the Charter, but the combination was being progressively destroyed by John, by means of his army of French mercenaries, when the barons in despair persuaded the French king to send an invading force, which was able to land owing to the ruin of John's fleet in a storm. Thereupon John's French troops deserted him. Cp. Green, pp. 122-26; Stubbs, ii, 3, 9-16; and McKechnie, pp. 53-57, as to the King's energy and the weakness and inner divisions of the national combination. Thus it was indirectly to French action that England owed first the Magna Carta and then the check upon the King's vengeance, as it was to the Frenchman, Simon de Montfort, later, that it owed the initiative of a three-class Parliament. And, indeed, but for the King's death, the constitutional cause might well have collapsed in the end.

§ 4

The Wars of the Roses, by destroying in large part the nobility, relatively advantaged the middle class,[1048] as well as the king whose reign followed. Already under Edward IV the powers of Parliament were much curtailed, and indeed paralysed;[1049] this, which is charged as a sin upon the monarch, being the natural result of his gain of power on the ruin of the baronage. Edward IV only did what Edward I and III would have done if in their situation it had been possible, and what Edward II and Richard II sought to do, but were too weak to compass. The fourth Edward's situation and his force of will together made his power. Not only was the nobility half exterminated, but the trading and middle classes alike desired a strong ruler who should maintain order, by whatever straining of constitutional forms—the invariable sequel of anarchy—at least up to the point of intolerable taxation.[1050] The actual increase of commerce during the wars[1051] is a good proof of the separateness of class interests, and of the decline of the military ideal. Much of it would seem to have been due to the example set by the Hansa merchants, who had factories at London,[1052] Boston, and Lynn, and whose famous League was then powerful enough to force from Edward IV a renewal of its English privileges in return for a concession of a share in the Baltic trade.[1053] In any case, the new development was on the old lines of energetic self-seeking; and already in the reign of Edward IV the cloth manufacture was carried on by capitalists in the modern spirit.[1054] And as the tyrannies of the king were less general and oppressive than the tyrannies of the nobles, the erection of the regal power on the collapse of the old class cohesion gave a new scope for the strife of classes among and for themselves. No national ideal existed (as apart from the readiness to unite in hate of a foreign nation) in monarchic England any more than in old republican Greece or modern republican Italy. The trade gilds were strictly self-seeking institutions, aiming at keeping down the number of competitors in each trade, without providing in any way for the aspirants. Unitary egoism was the universal mainspring. The Church sought above all things to be protected against heresy; the town and trade corporations sought protection for their privileges; and the landowners sought to be supported against the labourers, who from the time of Henry VI are found revolting against enclosures of public land, and were temporarily reinforced by the disbanded retainers of the barons. Every modern force of social disintegration was already nascent.

Cp. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 395-96, 413, 425; Stubbs, Constitutional History, §§ 486-92 (iii, 586-616). "In every great town there was, every few years, something of a struggle, something of a crisis ... between trade and craft, or craft and craft, or magistracy and commons" (Stubbs, iii, 616). Prof. Ashley (Introd. to Econ. Hist. i, 79) disputes that there was "any such contest in this country between burghers and artisans" as took place on the continent; and cites another passage from Bishop Stubbs (§ 131; i, 453) partly suggesting such a view. But Prof. Ashley goes on (pp. 79-84) to show that there was a good deal of struggling even in England between burghers and artisans. Cp. his conclusions, pp. 6-10, 42, as to the process of evolution towards at least formal unity. It is to be noted that the gilds dispensed charity (Stubbs, iii, 616, 619).

§ 5

Under Henry VII the same conditions subsisted. There was no sufficiently strong body of aristocracy left to rebel effectually against his exactions, though exactions had always been the great cause of discontent; and, all rivals collapsing, there grew up round the new dynasty that hedging superstition which had always counted for much, and which was in England to become a main factor in politics. Henry VII wrought assiduously and astutely to build up his power, seeking no less to increase the merchant class than to depress the aristocracy. From both he thus drew his revenue; from the latter by exaction; from the former by customs duties on the trade he carefully encouraged (as Richard had done before him), finding in such revenue his surest income.[1055] Gradually the monarchic system was made firm. Richard III owed his failure mainly to the sense of the illegality of his position; and the same inversion of the superstition troubled Henry VII in turn, as it had done Henry IV. It seems to have been his possession of the one train of artillery in the kingdom that mainly preserved his power against rebels.[1056] But with Henry VIII the dynasty was secure; and from this point onward the monarchic spell can be seen very clearly in English affairs. The instinct of "loyalty," a moral prepossession religiously sanctioned, becomes a social force as truly as the simpler instincts of self-seeking and class spirit. By virtue of it, and of his own force of brute will, Henry VIII could commit violences of almost every description, his own personality having some of the characteristics most likely to intensify the spell. Energy such as his hypnotised or terrorised all but the strongest. Even his crimes were not such as revolted average sympathy: the suppression of the Church, as in nearly all the "Teutonic" countries, was a direct bribe to many of the nobles and landowners,[1057] and for the multitude meant the overthrow of an alien jurisdiction; and his domestic procedure satisfied the popular ethic which demurs to mistresses but respects bigamy, and finds a wife's adultery more criminal than her husband's murder of her. For the rest, he had at the beginning of his reign executed his father's minions, and conciliated the scholars, who made opinion. Yet under Henry VIII we find middle-class England, heavily taxed for war, beginning to stand on its rights as upper-class England had done in earlier times; and in the new England as in the old the weakest class went to the wall. The ever-increasing mass of poor, thrown idle and hungry by the continuous rise of sheep-farms in the place of tillage, were the natural enemies of the governing class as well as of the landowners; and in cruelly repressing them the monarchy strengthened the landowners' allegiance.

Thus arose the typical personal monarchy, employing middle-class ministers, who served it zealously and with increasing power, Thomas Cromwell far outgoing Wolsey. The passing coalition of nobles and yeomen in the north in the cause of the old religion was followed by the crushing of the remains of the old nobility, now being rapidly replaced by the new, established on the plunder of the Church. It is to be noted that in England, as in so many other countries, the virtual subjection of the old nobility to the crown was for a time followed by stirrings of new life in all directions, as if feudalism had everywhere meant a repression of possible energy. The process is seen in Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella;[1058] in France under Richelieu and Mazarin; in Sweden under Gustavus Vasa; and is thus plainly a product not of doctrinal Protestantism, as some suppose, but of the comparative social and political liberty that follows on the restriction of ubiquitous feudal tyranny, so much more searching and pervasive a force than the simpler tyranny of the feudal king. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the Tudor suppression of the power of the old aristocracy was not as vital a determination of the nation's course as the overthrow of the Catholic Church.