The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

As against Mr. Lecky's indiscriminate panegyric of the English nobility, it is instructive to note Hallam's judgment on the peerage under Henry VIII: "They yielded to every mandate of his imperious will ... they are responsible for the illegal trial, for the iniquitous attainder, for the sanguinary statute, for the tyranny which they sanctioned by law, and for that which they permitted to subsist without law. Nor was this selfish and pusillanimous subserviency more characteristic of the minions of Henry's favour than of the representatives of ancient and honourable houses, the Norfolks, the Arundels, and the Shrewsburys. We trace the noble statesmen of these reigns concurring in all the inconsistencies of the revolutions; supporting all the religions of Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth; adjudging the death of Somerset to gratify Northumberland, and of Northumberland to redeem their participation in his fault; setting up the usurpation of Lady Jane, and abandoning her on the first doubt of success, constant only in the rapacious acquisition of estates and honours from whatever source, and in adherence to the present power" (Constitutional History, 10th ed. i, 48).

§ 6

And now effectively arose the new political force of Protestant and Bible-worshipping fanaticism, turning the democratic instinct into its channel, and complicating afresh the old issues of classes. It is not to be forgotten that this was a beginning of popular culture, inasmuch as the desire to read the worshipped book must have counted for more than anything else in making reading common.[1059]

Practically, however, the opposed causes of Lollardism and orthodoxy may at the outset be regarded as the democratic and the conservative instincts, taking these channels in the absence of political development and knowledge.[1060] In imperial Rome, the spread of Christianity was substantially a movement of class cohesion among the illiterate slaves, aliens, and workers, the instinct of attraction taking this form when political grounds of union were lacking. So it was in the England of the period under notice; but whereas in imperial Rome the autocracy went far to annul class distinctions, and so helped the slaves' cult to absorb superstitious patricians, especially women, whose wealth maintained the poor of the Church as the emperor's doles had maintained the poor of the State, in England the vigour of class distinctions fostered differences of sect. The phenomena of political Protestantism in the Reformation era in England, as in Germany, offer many parallels to those of the French Revolution. The revolt of many priests from the routine and restrictions of their office is notable in both epochs. On the other hand, the mass of the well-to-do classes, being unprepared for change by any educative process, were as ready to restore Catholic usages as were those of France later; and when the innovating forces, consisting in a little reasoning and much rapine, had run to seed and to corruption under the Protectorate and Edward VI, the reaction towards the old forms set in powerfully. Nothing, however, could carry it to the length of restoring the Catholic Church's property; and the failure of Mary was due not nearly so much to Protestant dislike of the ceremonial of Rome as to the grip of the new owners on the confiscated lands. In England as in Scotland, in Germany, in the Scandinavian States, and in Switzerland, though Henry stood for a special initiative, the driving forces of the Reformation were mainly those of wealth-seeking; and the financial records of the Protectorate show a conspiracy of plunder to which the annals of monarchy could offer no parallel. The Protestant aristocracy simply encouraged the new Lollardism by way of gaining their personal ends, as they had crushed the old because it menaced their property.

"Crown lands to the value of five millions of our modern money had been granted away to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The royal expenditure had mounted in seventy years to more than four times its previous total" (Green, ch. vii, § 1, and p. 353). A system of wholesale corruption and waste had grown up under Henry VIII, who, after all his confiscations, was fain to seek funds by adulterating his coin. So Edward VI, the church and college plunder being gone, had to be granted taxes on manufactures which tended to stop them. "Yet I cannot find," says Sir Roger Twysden, "all this made the crown rich. Hayward observes Edward's debts were £251,000—at least said to be so. Camden, that Queen Elizabeth received the crown afflictissima ... aere alieno quod Henricus VIII et Edwardus VI contraxerant oppressa.... I cannot but reckon the treasure spent in fifteen years, more than half the kingdom to be sold" (Historical Vindication of the Church of England, ed. 1847, pp. 4, 5). So obviously had the treasure gone into the pockets of courtiers and their hangers-on, that the fact gives some excuse for the habitual miserliness of Elizabeth.

A new channel had thus been made for the forces of union and strife. An instructive part of the process was the movement towards a new sacerdotalism on the side of the new Calvinistic clergy—a movement much more clearly visible in Scotland than in England. Whether or not it be true that "it was by no means the intention of Knox and his fellow-labourers to erect a new hierarchy upon the ruins of the old,"[1061] it is clear that his immediate successors counted on wielding a power strictly analogous to that of the papacy. Andrew Melville, in haughty colloquy with King James and his councillors, threw down his Hebrew Bible on the table as his authority for his demands. Since all alike professed to accept it, the next step in the argument plainly was that it lay with the presbyter to interpret the sacred book;[1062] and Melville, who took the king by the sleeve and called him "God's silly [= weak] vassal," was quite ready to play Gregory to James's Henry had he been able. The effective check lay in the new Church's lack of revenue, the lands of the old Church having of course been retained by the nobles, who carried through the Reformation simply in order to get them. But even in its poverty, with an indifferent nobility[1063] in possession of the feudal power, the Scottish clergy were nearly as tyrannous socially as their teacher Calvin had been at Geneva; and for nearly two hundred years Scottish life was no freer and much more joyless, under the new presbyter, than under the old priest, though the democratic machinery of the Kirk obviated any need or opportunity for fiscal exaction.

§ 7

As it is with the Reformation period that the play of sheer opinion begins to appear distinctly in English politics, so it is in this period that the phenomena of reactions first begin to be in a manner traceable as distinct from military fluctuations. All faction, of course, is a form of the play of opinion; but after the fading away of feudalism the opinion is more easily to be contemplated as a force in itself, alongside of the simpler instincts; and the ebbing and flowing of causes suggests a certain consequence of action and reaction in human affairs. The gain-getting Protestant movement under the Protectorate was followed by the Catholic reaction under Mary; which again bred reaction by ferocity. Catholics grew cold in their allegiance when Romanism yielded such bloody fruits. Protestantism, besides, flourished on the continual poverty of the lower orders, and on the abeyance of international strife—conditions which necessarily set up new movements of combination and repulsion; and when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, she served to represent, however incongruously, the religious leanings of the democracy, as well as to unite them in the name of patriotism against Rome and Spain. She, again, profited by the monarchic superstition, while she was menaced by its inversion; and it is to be observed that as a woman she gained immunity with her subjects for flaws of character which in a man would have been odious and despicable, where her rival, Mary of Scotland, suffered deposition for actions of a kind which in a man would have been almost spontaneously forgiven. Mary's complicity in the assassination of a base and unfaithful husband was an unpardonable crime from the reigning ethical point of view, which was purely masculine; and the same ethic held in amused toleration the constant bad faith and personal absurdity of Elizabeth,[1064] which rather flattered than endangered the pride of sex. Thus could monarchic politics be swayed by the prevailing psychology of a period, as well as by its class preponderances and interests. The personality of the monarch always counted for much in the determination of his power.

Where Elizabeth gained, however, James lost. Her power was consolidated by the triumph over the Armada, which in the old fashion fused religious strifes in a common warlike exultation, and definitely made England Protestant by setting her in deadly enmity towards the great Catholic power;[1065] just as the state of aggressive hostility towards France under Edward I and Edward III drew Englishmen of all classes into the habit of speaking English and discarding the hitherto common use of French. At the same time the Queen's collisions with Parliament and people were always the less dangerous because she was a woman, and so could yield without indignity where a man would have been humiliated and discredited—an advantage overlooked by the historians who praise her sagacity. Such as it was, it was in large part the sagacity of unscrupulousness; and her success is much more the measure of popular infatuation than of her wisdom. All the while, she had wiser councillors than almost any English monarch before or since; and much of her sagacity was theirs, perhaps even down to some of the unscrupulousness; though on the other hand her fickleness often put them in an evil aspect. Burghley might say what he would, in the loyalist manner, about her inspired judgment; but he knew that she imposed Leicester on the Dutch expedition against his advice, then starved her troops, then upset everything because of the easily predictable disobedience of Leicester in accepting the title of Governor-General from the Dutch.[1066] To say in the face of such methods, as does Mr. Green, that while she had little or no political wisdom, "her political tact was unerring," is to frame a spurious paradox. The more than countervailing admission that "in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom" is perhaps overcharged: she could not lie more habitually and systematically than did Philip; but in both alike the constant resort to falsehoods for which their antagonists were more or less prepared, is a proof of want of political tact, no less than of want of wisdom.[1067] That she should have been idolised as she was is one of the best proofs of the power of the monarchic feeling; for there has rarely been a less trustworthy woman on a throne. In any circle of sound human beings she would have been disliked and distrusted; yet English tradition celebrates her as admirably English, in the act of blackening by comparison foreign rulers who were at least not conspicuously falser,[1068] meaner,[1069] or more egotistic. What is true is that many of the forces with and against which she intrigued were either unscrupulous or irrational, and that her home tyrannies were no worse than those which would have been committed by Puritans or Catholics or Churchmen had these been free to go at each other's throats as religion bade. Her trickeries on the whole kept things in equilibrium. But conscienceless trickeries they were, and, as such, singular grounds for historical enthusiasm. And it cannot have been any concern for her celibacy, or subtle intuition of its effects on her character, that endeared her to her subjects; for her often alleged virginity, despite the gross scandals to the contrary, was an element in the hallucination concerning her. "Loyalty" haloed her personality. When, however, she was succeeded by a man certainly not worse or more ungenerous, the spell was for the most part broken. James was a Scotchman—a member, albeit a king, of a hostile nation long evilly spoken of; a prince without personal dignity; a pedant without gravity; and the indulgence paid to falsehood and folly in the capriciously headstrong Elizabeth ceased to be accorded to the unmanly and unregal ways of her not unconscientious successor, whose plans for pacifying Europe were much more creditable to him than were her diplomacies to her. But the very preservation of peace served to undo the king's prestige, inasmuch as it furthered the growth of sects and the spirit of criticism. And there can be no doubt that the psychological shrinkage of the monarchy in public esteem in the person of James prepared the way for the resistance to it in the reign of his son.

As against the foregoing views of Henry's and Elizabeth's characters, note should be taken of the doctrine of Dr. Gardiner (History, as cited, i, 43) that "Henry VIII must be judged by" [i.e. in view of the merits of] "the great men who supported his daughter's throne, and who defended the land which he set free when 'he broke the bonds of Rome.' Elizabeth must be judged by the Pyms and Cromwells, who ... owed their strength to the vigour with which she headed the resistance of England against Spanish aggression. She had cleared the way for liberty, though she understood it not." It seems necessary to enter a demurrer to such moral philosophy, of which there is too much in recent English historiography. Considering that the action of Henry towards all who thwarted him was one of brutal terrorism, and that, save as regards his bribes, he cowed alike his peers and his people, the courage shown by their descendants might as rationally be credited to Philip of Spain as to him. And to credit Elizabeth personally with the defeat of the Armada, and consequently with the strength of the later Pyms and Cromwells, is not only to reiterate the same paralogism but to negate common sense as regards the facts of the Armada episode, in which the nation did one half of the work, and the storm the other. Dr. Gardiner, like Mr. Froude, who preaches a similar doctrine, overlooks the consequence that Catholicism on these principles must be credited with the production of Henry and Elizabeth, and therefore with their alleged services. As against such an unmeaning theory we may note another verdict of Dr. Gardiner's (p. 33): "Elizabeth has a thousand titles to our gratitude, but it should never be forgotten that she left, as a legacy to her successor, an ecclesiastical system which, unless its downward course were arrested by consummate wisdom, threatened to divide the nation into two hostile camps, and to leave England, even after necessity had compelled the rivals to accept conditions of peace, a prey to theological rancour and sectarian hatred." How then is the account to be balanced? Dr. Cunningham, we may note, sums up as to the preceding reigns that "the scandalous confiscations of Henry VIII and Edward VI were fatal to rural economy and disastrous to mercantile dealings. The disintegration of society became complete; ... with some exceptions in regard to shipping and possibly in regard to the repair of the towns, there is no improvement, no reconstruction which can be traced to the reign of the Tudor kings" (English Industry, i, 433). Cp. Prof. Rogers's Industrial and Commercial History, p. 12.