History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume II (of 2) / Revised Edition

by John William Draper

Religious feeling of the nation changed.Henry VIII. cannot, therefore, be properly considered as the author of the downfall of ecclesiasticism in England, though he was the instrument by which it was ostensibly accomplished. The derisive insinuation that the Gospel light had flashed upon him from Anna Boleyn's eyes was far from expressing all the truth. The nullity of papal disciplines, excommunications, interdicts, penances, proved that the old tone of thought was utterly decayed. This oblivion of old emotions, this obsoleteness of old things, was by no means confined to England. On the Continent the attacks of Erasmus on the monks were everywhere received with applause. In 1527 one printer issued an edition of 24,000 copies of the Colloquies of Erasmus, and actually sold them all. He understood the signs of the times.

State of England at the close of the seventeenth century.From this digression on parties and policy in England, let us again return to special details, descending for that purpose to the close of the seventeenth century. For a long time London had been the most populous capital in Europe; yet it was dirty, ill built, without sanitary provisions. The deaths were one in twenty-three each year; now, in a much more crowded population, they are not one in forty. Much of the country was still heath, swamp, warren. Wild state of the country. Almost within sight of the city was a tract twenty-five miles round nearly in a state of nature; there were but three houses in it. Wild animals roamed here and there. It is incidentally mentioned [239] that Queen Anne, on a journey to Portsmouth, saw a herd of five hundred red deer. With such small animals as the marten and badger, found everywhere, there was still seen occasionally the wild bull.

Locomotion: the roads and carriages.Nothing more strikingly shows the social condition than the provisions for locomotion. In the rainy seasons the roads were all but impassable, justifying the epithet often applied to them of being in a horrible state. Through such gullies, half filled with mud, carriages were dragged, often by oxen, or, when horses were used, it was as much a matter of necessity as in the city a matter of display to drive half a dozen of them. If the country was open the track of the road was easily mistaken. It was no uncommon thing for persons to lose their way, and have to spend the night out in the air. Between places of considerable importance the roads were sometimes very little known, and such was the difficulty for wheeled carriages that a principal mode of transport was by pack-horses, of which passengers took advantage, stowing themselves away between the packs. We shall probably not dissent from their complaint that this method of travelling was hot in summer and cold in winter. The usual charge for freight was fifteen pence per ton per mile. Toward the close of the century what were termed "flying coaches" were established; they could move at the rate of from thirty to fifty miles in a day. Many persons thought the risk so great that it was a tempting of Providence to go in them. The mails; penny-post disliked. The mail-bag was carried on horseback at about five miles an hour. A penny-post had been established in the city, but with much difficulty, for many long-headed men, who knew very well what they were saying, had denounced it as an insidious "popish contrivance."

Only a few years before the period under consideration Parliament had resolved that "all pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of Jesus or the Virgin Mother should be burnt; Greek statues were delivered over to Puritan stone-masons to be made decent." Lewis Muggleton; his doctrines. A little earlier, Lewis Muggleton had given himself out as the last and greatest of the prophets, having power to save or damn whom he [240] pleased. It had been revealed to him that God is only six feet high, and the sun only four miles off. The country beyond the Trent was still in a state of barbarism, and near the sources of the Tyne there were people scarcely less savage than American Indians, their "half-naked women chanting a wild measure, while the men, with brandished dirks, danced a war-dance."

Printing-presses and private libraries. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were thirty-four counties without a printer. The only press in England north of the Trent was at York. As to private libraries, there were none deserving the name. "An esquire passed for a great scholar if 'Hudibras,' 'Baker's Chronicle,' 'Tarleton's Jests,' and the 'Seven Champions of Christendom' lay in his hall-window." It might be expected that the women were ignorant enough when very few men knew how to write correctly or even intelligibly, and it had become unnecessary for clergymen to read the Scriptures in the original tongues.

Social discipline; its barbarity.Social discipline was very far from being of that kind which we call moral. The master whipped his apprentice, the pedagogue his scholar, the husband his wife. Public punishments partook of the general brutality. It was a day for the rabble when a culprit was set in the pillory to be pelted with brickbats, rotten eggs, and dead cats; when women were fastened by the legs in the stocks at the market-place, or a pilferer flogged through the town at the cart-tail, a clamour not unfrequently arising unless the lash were laid on hard enough "to make him howl." In punishments of higher offenders these whippings were perfectly horrible; thus Titus Oates, after standing twice in the pillory, was whipped, and, after an interval of two days, whipped again. A virtuoso in these matters gives us the incredible information that he counted as many as seventeen hundred stripes administered. So far from the community being shocked at such an exhibition, they appeared to agree in the sentiment that, "since his face could not be made to blush, it was well enough to try what could be done with his back." Such a hardening of heart was in no little degree promoted by the atrocious punishments of [241] state offenders; thus, after the decapitation of Montrose and Argyle, their heads decorated the top of the Tolbooth; and gentlemen, after the rising of Monmouth, were admonished to be careful of their ways, by hanging in chains to their park gate the corpse of a rebel to rot in the air.

Private life in different classes of society.To a debased public life private life corresponded. The houses of the rural population were huts covered with straw-thatch; their inmates, if able to procure fresh meat once a week, were considered to be in prosperous circumstances. One-half of the families in England could hardly do that. Children six years old were not unfrequently set to labour. The lord of the manor spent his time in rustic pursuits; was not an unwilling associate of pedlars and drovers; knew how to ring a pig or shoe a horse; his wife and daughters "stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and made the crust for the venison pasty." Hospitality was displayed in immoderate eating, and drinking of beer, the guest not being considered as having done justice to the occasion unless he had gone under the table. The dining-room was uncarpeted; but then it was tinted with a decoction of "soot and small beer." The chairs were rush-bottomed. In London the houses were mostly of wood and plaster, the streets filthy beyond expression. After nightfall a passenger went at his peril, for chamber windows were opened and slop-pails unceremoniously emptied down. There were no lamps in the streets until Master Heming established his public lanterns. As a necessary consequence, there were plenty of shoplifters, highwaymen, and burglars.

General immorality and brutality. As to the moral condition, it is fearfully expressed in the statement that men not unfrequently were willing to sacrifice their country for their religion. Hardly any personage died who was not popularly suspected to have been made away with by poison, an indication of the morality generally supposed to prevail among the higher classes. If such was the state of society in its serious aspect, it was no better in its lighter. We can scarcely credit the impurity and immodesty of the theatrical exhibitions. What is said about them would be beyond belief if we did not remember [242] that they were the amusements of a community whose ideas of female modesty and female sentiment were altogether different from ours. Indecent jests were put into the mouths of lively actresses, and the dancing was not altogether of a kind to meet our approval. The rural clergy could do but little to withstand this flood of immorality. Degraded condition of the lower clergy. Their social position for the last hundred years had been rapidly declining; for, though the Church possessed among her dignitaries great writers and great preachers, her lower orders, partly through the political troubles that had befallen the state, but chiefly in consequence of sectarian bitterness, had been reduced to a truly menial condition. It was the business of the rich man's chaplain to add dignity to the dinner-table by saying grace "in full canonicals," but he was also intended to be a butt for the mirth of the company. "The young Levite," such was the phrase then in use, "might fill himself with the corned beef and the carrots, but as soon as the tarts and cheese-cakes made their appearance he quitted his seat, and stood aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast," the daintiest part of which he had not tasted. If need arose, he could curry a horse, "carry a parcel ten miles," or "cast up the farrier's bill." The "wages" of a parish priest were at starvation-point. The social degradation of the ecclesiastic is well illustrated by an order of Queen Elizabeth, that no clergyman should presume to marry a servant-girl without the consent of her master or mistress.

The clergy, however, had not fallen into this condition without in a measure deserving it. Their time had been too much occupied in persecuting Puritans and other sectaries, with whom they would have gladly dealt in the same manner as they had dealt with the Jews, who, from the thirteenth century till Cromwell, were altogether interdicted from public worship. Burning of books and persecution of preachers. The University of Oxford had ordered the political works of Buchanan, Milton, and Baxter to be publicly burnt in the court of the schools. The immortal vagabond, Bunyan, had been committed to jail for preaching the way of salvation to the common [243] people, and had remained there twelve years, the stout old man refusing to give his promise not to offend in that manner again. The great doctrine inculcated from the pulpit was submission to temporal power. Men were taught that rebellion is a sin not less deadly than witchcraft. The Puritan's hatred of orthodoxy. On a community thirsting after the waters of life were still inflicted wearisome sermons respecting "the wearing of surplices, position at the Eucharist, or the sign of the cross at baptism," things that were a stench in the nostrils of the lank-haired Puritan, who, with his hands clasped on his bosom, his face corrugated with religious astringency, the whites of his eyes turned upward to heaven, rocking himself alternately on his heels and the tips of his toes, delivered, in a savoury prayer uttered through his nose, all such abominations of the Babylonish harlot to the Devil, whose affairs they were.

Brutal administration of the law.In administering the law, whether in relation to political or religious offences, there was an incredible atrocity. In London, the crazy old bridge over the Thames was decorated with grinning and mouldering heads of criminals, under an idea that these ghastly spectacles would fortify the common people in their resolves to act according to law. The toleration of the times may be understood from a law enacted by the Scotch Parliament, May 8, 1685, that whoever preached or heard in a conventicle should be punished with death and the confiscation of his goods. That such an infamous spirit did not content itself with mere dead-letter laws there is too much practical evidence to permit any one to doubt. A silly labouring man, who had taken it into his head that he could not conscientiously attend the Episcopal worship, was seized by a troop of soldiers, "rapidly examined, convicted of non-conformity, and sentenced to death in the presence of his wife, who led one little child by the hand, and it was easy to see was about to give birth to another. He was shot before her face, the widow crying out in her agony, 'Well, sir, well, the day of reckoning will come.'" Shrieking Scotch Covenanters were submitted to torture by crushing their knees flat in the boot; women were tied to stakes on the sea-sands and drowned by the slowly [244] advancing tide because they would not attend Episcopal worship, or branded on their cheeks and then shipped to America; gallant but wounded soldiers were hung in Scotland for fear they should die before they could be got to England. In the troubles connected with Monmouth's rising, in one county alone, Somersetshire, two hundred and thirty-three persons were hanged, drawn and quartered, to say nothing of military executions, for the soldiers amused themselves by hanging a culprit for each toast they drank, and making the drums and fifes play, as they said, to his dancing. It is needless to recall such incidents as the ferocity of Kirk's lambs, for such was the name popularly given to the soldiers of that colonel, in allusion to the Paschal lamb they bore on their flag; or the story of Tom Boilman, so nicknamed from having been compelled by those veterans to seethe the remains of his quartered friends in melted pitch. Women, for such idle words as women are always using, were sentenced to be whipped at the cart's-tail through every market town in Dorset; a lad named Tutching was condemned to be flogged once a fortnight for seven years. Eight hundred and forty-one human beings judicially condemned to transportation to the West India islands, and suffering all the horrible pains of a slave-ship in the middle passage, "were never suffered to go on deck;" in the holds below, "all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease, and death." One fifth of them were thrown overboard to the sharks before they reached their destination, and the rest obliged to be fattened before they could be offered in the market to the Jamaica planters. The court ladies, and even the Queen of England herself, were so utterly forgetful of womanly mercy and common humanity as to join in this infernal traffic. That princess requested that a hundred of the convicts should be given to her. "The profit which she cleared on the cargo, after making a large allowance for those who died of hunger and fever during the passage, cannot be estimated at less than a thousand guineas."