It is worth while here to correct another error which is quite commonly entertained in the United States. It is the error of supposing that in Great Britain there are distinct orders of society, or that there exists anything like a sharp and well defined line between the nobility and the commonalty. The American reader is apt to imagine a “peerage,” the members of which have from time immemorial constituted a kind of caste clearly marked off from the great body of the people, and into which it has always been very difficult for plain people to rise. In this crude conception the social differences between England and America are greatly exaggerated. In point of fact the British islands are the one part of Europe where the existence of a peerage has not resulted in creating a distinct upper class of society. The difference will be most clearly explained by contrasting England with France. In the latter country, before the Revolution of 1789, there was a peerage consisting of great landholders, local rulers and magistrates, and dignitaries of the church, just as in England. But in France all the sons and brothers of a peer were nobles distinguished by a title and reckoned among the peerage, and all were exempt from sundry important political duties, including the payment of taxes. Thus they constituted a real noblesse, or caste apart from the people, until the Revolution at a single blow destroyed all their privileges. At the present day French titles of nobility are merely courtesy titles, and through excessive multiplication have become cheap. On the other hand, in England, the families of peers have never been exempt from their share of the public burdens. The “peerage,” or hereditary right to sit in the House of Lords, belongs only to the head of the family; all the other members of the family are commoners, though some may be addressed by courtesy titles. During the formative period of modern political society, from the fourteenth century onward, the sons of peers habitually competed for seats in the House of Commons, side by side with merchants and yeomen. This has prevented anything like a severance between the interests of the higher and of the lower classes in England, and has had much to do with the peaceful and healthy political development which has so eminently characterized our mother country. England has never had a noblesse. As the upper class has never been sharply distinguished politically, so it has not held itself separate socially. Families with titles have intermarried with families that have none, the younger branches of a peer’s family become untitled gentry, ancient peerages lapse while new ones are created, so that there is a “circulation of gentle blood” that has thus far proved eminently wholesome. More than two thirds of the present House of Lords are the grandsons or great-grandsons of commoners. Of the 450 or more hereditary peerages now existing, three date from the thirteenth century and four from the fourteenth; of those existing in the days of Thomas Becket not one now remains in the same family. It has always been easy in England for ability and character to raise their possessor in the social scale; and hence the middle class has long been recognized as the abiding element in England’s strength. Voltaire once compared the English people to their ale,—froth at the top and dregs at the bottom, but sound and bright and strong in the middle. As to the last he was surely right.
Respect paid to industry in England.
One further point calls for mention. In mediæval and early modern England, great respect was paid to incorporated crafts and trades. The influence and authority wielded by county magnates over the rural population was paralleled by the power exercised in the cities by the livery companies or guilds. Since the twelfth century, the municipal franchise in the principal towns and cities of Great Britain has been for the most part controlled by the various trade and craft guilds. In the seventeenth century, when the migrations to America were beginning, it was customary for members of noble families to enter these guilds as apprentices in the crafts of the draper, the tailor, the vintner, or the mason, etc. Many important consequences have flowed from this. Let it suffice here to note that this fact of the rural aristocracy keeping in touch with the tradesmen and artisans has been one of the safeguards of English liberty; it has been one source of the power of the Commons, one check upon the undue aspirations of the Crown. It indicates a kind of public sentiment very different from that which afterward grew up in our southern states under the malignant influence of slavery, which proclaimed an antagonism between industry and gentility that is contrary to the whole spirit of English civilization.
The Cavalier exodus.
With these points clear in our minds, we may understand the true significance of the arrival of the Cavaliers in Virginia. The date to be remembered in connection with that event is 1649, and it is instructive to compare it with the exodus of Puritans to New England. The little settlement of the Mayflower Pilgrims was merely a herald of the great Puritan exodus, which really began in 1629, when Charles I. entered upon his period of eleven years of rule without a parliament, and continued until about 1642, when the Civil War broke out. During those thirteen years more than 20,000 Puritans came to New England. The great Cavalier exodus began with the king’s execution in 1649, and probably slackened after 1660. It must have been a chief cause of the remarkable increase of the white population of Virginia from 15,000 in 1649 to 38,000 in 1670.
Political complexion of Virginia before 1649.
The great exchange of 1649.
The period of the Commonwealth in England thus marks an important epoch in Virginia, and we must be on our guard against confusing what came after with what preceded it. As to the political complexion of Virginia in the earliest time, it would be difficult to make a general statement, except that there was a widespread feeling in favour of the Company as managed by Sandys and Southampton. This meant that the settlers knew when they were well governed. They did not approve of a party that sent an Argall to fleece them, even though it were the court party. So, too, in the thrusting out of Sir John Harvey in 1635 we see the temper of the councillors and burgesses flatly opposed to the king’s unpopular representative. But such instances do not tell us much concerning the attitude of the colonists upon questions of English politics. The fortunes of the Puritan settlers in Virginia afford a surer indication. At first, as we have seen, when the Puritans as a body had not yet separated from the Church, there were a good many in Virginia; and by 1640 they probably formed about seven per cent. of the population. The legislation against them beginning in 1631 seems to indicate that public sentiment in Virginia favoured the policy of Laud; while the slackness with which such legislation was enforced raises a suspicion that such sentiment was at first not very strong. It seems probable that as the country party in England came more and more completely under the control of Puritanism, and as Puritanism grew more and more radical in temper, the reaction toward the royalist side grew more and more pronounced in Virginia. If there ever was a typical Cavalier of the more narrow-minded sort, it was Sir William Berkeley, who at the same time was by no means the sort of person that one might properly call a “butterfly.” If the eloquent Mr. Grigsby had once got into those iron clutches, he would have sought some other term of comparison. When Berkeley arrived in Virginia, and for a long time afterward, he was extremely popular. We have seen him acting with so much energy against the Puritans that in the course of the year 1649 not less than 1,000 of them left the colony. Upon the news of the king’s death, Berkeley sent a message to England inviting royalists to come to Virginia, and within a twelvemonth perhaps as many as 1,000 had arrived, picked men and women of excellent sort. Thus it curiously happened that the same moment which saw Virginia lose most of her Puritan population, also saw it replaced by an equal number of devoted Cavaliers.
Moderation shown in Virginia.
From this moment we may date the beginnings of Cavalier ascendency in Virginia. But for the next ten years that growing ascendency was qualified by the necessity of submitting to the Puritan government in England. In 1652 Berkeley was obliged to retire from the governorship, and the king’s men in Virginia found it prudent to put some restraint upon the expression of their feelings. But in this change, as we have seen, there was no violence. It is probable that there was a considerable body of colonists “comparatively indifferent to the struggle of parties in England, anxious only to save Virginia from spoliation and bloodshed, and for that end willing to throw in their lot with the side whose success held out the speediest hopes of peace. There is another consideration which helps to explain the moderation of the combatants. In England each party was exasperated by grievous wrongs, and hence its hour of triumph was also its hour of revenge. The struggle in Virginia was embittered by no such recollections.”[7]