The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) π
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be
found in the realm was of less value than the property which some
single parishes now contain. Manufactures were rude; credit was
almost unknown. Society, therefore, recovered from the shock as
soon as the actual conflict was over. The calamities of civil war
were confined to the slaughter on the field of battle, and to a
few subsequent executions and confiscations. In a week the
peasant was driving his team and the esquire flying his hawks
over the field of Towton or of Bosworth, as if no extraordinary
event had interrupted the regular course of human life.
More than a hundred and sixty years have now elapsed since the
English people have by force subverted a government. During the
hundred and sixty years which preceded the union of the Roses,
nine Kings reigned in England. Six of these nine Kings were
deposed. Five lost their lives as well as their crowns. It is
evident, therefore, that any comparison between our ancient and
our modern polity must lead to most erroneous conclusions, unless
large allowance be made for the effect of that restraint which
resistance and the fear of resistance constantly imposed on the
Plantagenets. As our ancestors had against tyranny a most
important security which we want, they might safely dispense with
some securities to which we justly attach the highest importance.
As we cannot, without the risk of evils from which the
imagination recoils, employ physical force as a check on
misgovernment, it is evidently our wisdom to keep all the
constitutional checks on misgovernment in the highest state of
efficiency, to watch with jealousy the first beginnings of
encroachment, and never to suffer irregularities, even when
harmless in themselves, to pass unchallenged, lest they acquire
the force of precedents. Four hundred years ago such minute
vigilance might well seem unnecessary. A nation of hardy archers
and spearmen might, with small risk to its liberties, connive at
some illegal acts on the part of a prince whose general
administration was good, and whose throne was not defended by a
single company of regular soldiers.
Under this system, rude as it may appear when compared with those
elaborate constitutions of which the last seventy years have been
fruitful, the English long enjoyed a large measure of freedom and
happiness. Though, during the feeble reign of Henry the Sixth,
the state was torn, first by factions, and at length by civil
war; though Edward the Fourth was a prince of dissolute and
imperious character; though Richard the Third has generally been
represented as a monster of depravity; though the exactions of
Henry the Seventh caused great repining; it is certain that our
ancestors, under those Kings, were far better governed than the
Belgians under Philip, surnamed the Good, or the French under
that Lewis who was styled the Father of his people. Even while
the wars of the Roses were actually raging, our country appears
to have been in a happier condition than the neighbouring realms
during years of profound peace. Comines was one of the most
enlightened statesmen of his time. He had seen all the richest
and most highly civilised parts of the Continent. He had lived in
the opulent towns of Flanders, the Manchesters and Liverpools of
the fifteenth century. He had visited Florence, recently adorned
by the magnificence of Lorenzo, and Venice, not yet bumbled by
the Confederates of Cambray. This eminent man deliberately
pronounced England to be the best governed country of which he
had any knowledge. Her constitution he emphatically designated as
a just and holy thing, which, while it protected the people,
really strengthened the hands of a prince who respected it. In no
other country were men so effectually secured from wrong. The
calamities produced by our intestine wars seemed to him to be
confined to the nobles and the fighting men, and to leave no
traces such as he had been accustomed to see elsewhere, no ruined
dwellings, no depopulated cities.
It was not only by the efficiency of the restraints imposed on
the royal prerogative that England was advantageously
distinguished from most of the neighbouring countries. A:
peculiarity equally important, though less noticed, was the
relation in which the nobility stood here to the commonalty.
There was a strong hereditary aristocracy: but it was of all
hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had
none of the invidious character of a caste. It was constantly
receiving members from the people, and constantly sending down
members to mingle with the people. Any gentleman might become a
peer. The younger son of a peer was but a gentleman. Grandsons of
peers yielded precedence to newly made knights. The dignity of
knighthood was not beyond the reach of any man who could by
diligence and thrift realise a good estate, or who could attract
notice by his valour in a battle or a siege. It was regarded as
no disparagement for the daughter of a Duke, nay of a royal Duke,
to espouse a distinguished commoner. Thus, Sir John Howard
married the daughter of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. Sir
Richard Pole married the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of
George, Duke of Clarence. Good blood was indeed held in high
respect: but between good blood and the privileges of peerage
there was, most fortunately for our country, no necessary
connection. Pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to be
found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who
bore the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to be
descended from knights who had broken the Saxon ranks at
Hastings, and scaled the walls of Jerusalem. There were Bohuns,
Mowbrays, DeVeres, nay, kinsmen of the House of Plantagenet, with
no higher addition than that of Esquire, and with no civil
privileges beyond those enjoyed by every farmer and shopkeeper.
There was therefore here no line like that which in some other
countries divided the patrician from the plebeian. The yeoman was
not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children
might rise. The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into
which his own children must descend.
After the wars of York and Lancaster, the links which connected
the nobility and commonalty became closer and more numerous than
ever. The extent of destruction which had fallen on the old
aristocracy may be inferred from a single circumstance. In the
year 1451 Henry the Sixth summoned fifty-three temporal Lords to
parliament. The temporal Lords summoned by Henry the Seventh to
the parliament of 1485 were only twenty-nine, and of these
several had recently been elevated to the peerage. During the
following century the ranks of the nobility were largely
recruited from among the gentry. The constitution of the House of
Commons tended greatly to promote the salutary intermixture of
classes. The knight of the shire was the connecting link between
the baron and the shopkeeper. On the same benches on which sate
the goldsmiths, drapers, and grocers, who had been returned to
parliament by the commercial towns, sate also members who, in any
other country, would have been called noblemen, hereditary lords
of manors, entitled to hold courts and to bear coat armour, and
able to trace back an honourable descent through many
generations. Some of them were younger sons and brothers of
lords. Others could boast of even royal blood. At length the
eldest son of an Earl of Bedford, called in courtesy by the
second title of his father, offered himself as candidate for a
seat in the House of Commons, and his example was followed by
others. Seated in that house, the heirs of the great peers
naturally became as zealous for its privileges as any of the
humble burgesses with whom they were mingled. Thus our democracy
was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our
aristocracy the most democratic in the world; a peculiarity which
has lasted down to the present day, and which has produced many
important moral and political effects.
The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his
grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the
Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the
difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the
men and women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power
during a period of a hundred and twenty years, always with
vigour, often with violence, sometimes with cruelty. They, in
imitation of the dynasty which had preceded them, occasionally
invaded the rights of the subject, occasionally exacted taxes
under the name of loans and gifts, and occasionally dispensed
with penal statutes: nay, though they never presumed to enact any
permanent law by their own authority, they occasionally took upon
themselves, when Parliament was not sitting, to meet temporary
exigencies by temporary edicts. It was, however, impossible for
the Tudors to carry oppression beyond a certain point: for they
had no armed force, and they were surrounded by an armed people.
Their palace was guarded by a few domestics, whom the array of a
single shire, or of a single ward of London, could with ease have
overpowered. These haughty princes were therefore under a
restraint stronger than any that mere law can impose, under a
restraint which did not, indeed, prevent them from sometimes
treating an individual in an arbitrary and even in a barbarous
manner, but which effectually secured the nation against general
and long continued oppression. They might safely be tyrants,
within the precinct of the court: but it was necessary for them
to watch with constant anxiety the temper of the country. Henry
the Eighth, for example, encountered no opposition when he wished
to send Buckingham and Surrey, Anne Boleyn and Lady Salisbury, to
the scaffold. But when, without the consent of Parliament, he
demanded of his subjects a contribution amounting to one sixth of
their goods, he soon found it necessary to retract. The cry of
hundreds of thousands was that they were English and not French,
freemen and not slaves. In Kent the royal commissioners fled for
their lives. In Suffolk four thousand men appeared in arms. The
King's lieutenants in that county vainly exerted themselves to
raise an army. Those who did not join in the insurrection
declared that they would not fight against their brethren in such
a quarrel. Henry, proud and selfwilled as he was, shrank, not
without reason from a conflict with the roused spirit of the
nation. He had before his eyes the fate of his predecessors who
had perished at Berkeley and Pomfret. He not only cancelled his
illegal commissions; he not only granted a general pardon to all
the malecontents; but he publicly and solemnly apologised for his
infraction of the laws.
His conduct, on this occasion, well illustrates the whole policy
of his house. The temper of the princes of that line was hot,
found in the realm was of less value than the property which some
single parishes now contain. Manufactures were rude; credit was
almost unknown. Society, therefore, recovered from the shock as
soon as the actual conflict was over. The calamities of civil war
were confined to the slaughter on the field of battle, and to a
few subsequent executions and confiscations. In a week the
peasant was driving his team and the esquire flying his hawks
over the field of Towton or of Bosworth, as if no extraordinary
event had interrupted the regular course of human life.
More than a hundred and sixty years have now elapsed since the
English people have by force subverted a government. During the
hundred and sixty years which preceded the union of the Roses,
nine Kings reigned in England. Six of these nine Kings were
deposed. Five lost their lives as well as their crowns. It is
evident, therefore, that any comparison between our ancient and
our modern polity must lead to most erroneous conclusions, unless
large allowance be made for the effect of that restraint which
resistance and the fear of resistance constantly imposed on the
Plantagenets. As our ancestors had against tyranny a most
important security which we want, they might safely dispense with
some securities to which we justly attach the highest importance.
As we cannot, without the risk of evils from which the
imagination recoils, employ physical force as a check on
misgovernment, it is evidently our wisdom to keep all the
constitutional checks on misgovernment in the highest state of
efficiency, to watch with jealousy the first beginnings of
encroachment, and never to suffer irregularities, even when
harmless in themselves, to pass unchallenged, lest they acquire
the force of precedents. Four hundred years ago such minute
vigilance might well seem unnecessary. A nation of hardy archers
and spearmen might, with small risk to its liberties, connive at
some illegal acts on the part of a prince whose general
administration was good, and whose throne was not defended by a
single company of regular soldiers.
Under this system, rude as it may appear when compared with those
elaborate constitutions of which the last seventy years have been
fruitful, the English long enjoyed a large measure of freedom and
happiness. Though, during the feeble reign of Henry the Sixth,
the state was torn, first by factions, and at length by civil
war; though Edward the Fourth was a prince of dissolute and
imperious character; though Richard the Third has generally been
represented as a monster of depravity; though the exactions of
Henry the Seventh caused great repining; it is certain that our
ancestors, under those Kings, were far better governed than the
Belgians under Philip, surnamed the Good, or the French under
that Lewis who was styled the Father of his people. Even while
the wars of the Roses were actually raging, our country appears
to have been in a happier condition than the neighbouring realms
during years of profound peace. Comines was one of the most
enlightened statesmen of his time. He had seen all the richest
and most highly civilised parts of the Continent. He had lived in
the opulent towns of Flanders, the Manchesters and Liverpools of
the fifteenth century. He had visited Florence, recently adorned
by the magnificence of Lorenzo, and Venice, not yet bumbled by
the Confederates of Cambray. This eminent man deliberately
pronounced England to be the best governed country of which he
had any knowledge. Her constitution he emphatically designated as
a just and holy thing, which, while it protected the people,
really strengthened the hands of a prince who respected it. In no
other country were men so effectually secured from wrong. The
calamities produced by our intestine wars seemed to him to be
confined to the nobles and the fighting men, and to leave no
traces such as he had been accustomed to see elsewhere, no ruined
dwellings, no depopulated cities.
It was not only by the efficiency of the restraints imposed on
the royal prerogative that England was advantageously
distinguished from most of the neighbouring countries. A:
peculiarity equally important, though less noticed, was the
relation in which the nobility stood here to the commonalty.
There was a strong hereditary aristocracy: but it was of all
hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had
none of the invidious character of a caste. It was constantly
receiving members from the people, and constantly sending down
members to mingle with the people. Any gentleman might become a
peer. The younger son of a peer was but a gentleman. Grandsons of
peers yielded precedence to newly made knights. The dignity of
knighthood was not beyond the reach of any man who could by
diligence and thrift realise a good estate, or who could attract
notice by his valour in a battle or a siege. It was regarded as
no disparagement for the daughter of a Duke, nay of a royal Duke,
to espouse a distinguished commoner. Thus, Sir John Howard
married the daughter of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. Sir
Richard Pole married the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of
George, Duke of Clarence. Good blood was indeed held in high
respect: but between good blood and the privileges of peerage
there was, most fortunately for our country, no necessary
connection. Pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to be
found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who
bore the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to be
descended from knights who had broken the Saxon ranks at
Hastings, and scaled the walls of Jerusalem. There were Bohuns,
Mowbrays, DeVeres, nay, kinsmen of the House of Plantagenet, with
no higher addition than that of Esquire, and with no civil
privileges beyond those enjoyed by every farmer and shopkeeper.
There was therefore here no line like that which in some other
countries divided the patrician from the plebeian. The yeoman was
not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children
might rise. The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into
which his own children must descend.
After the wars of York and Lancaster, the links which connected
the nobility and commonalty became closer and more numerous than
ever. The extent of destruction which had fallen on the old
aristocracy may be inferred from a single circumstance. In the
year 1451 Henry the Sixth summoned fifty-three temporal Lords to
parliament. The temporal Lords summoned by Henry the Seventh to
the parliament of 1485 were only twenty-nine, and of these
several had recently been elevated to the peerage. During the
following century the ranks of the nobility were largely
recruited from among the gentry. The constitution of the House of
Commons tended greatly to promote the salutary intermixture of
classes. The knight of the shire was the connecting link between
the baron and the shopkeeper. On the same benches on which sate
the goldsmiths, drapers, and grocers, who had been returned to
parliament by the commercial towns, sate also members who, in any
other country, would have been called noblemen, hereditary lords
of manors, entitled to hold courts and to bear coat armour, and
able to trace back an honourable descent through many
generations. Some of them were younger sons and brothers of
lords. Others could boast of even royal blood. At length the
eldest son of an Earl of Bedford, called in courtesy by the
second title of his father, offered himself as candidate for a
seat in the House of Commons, and his example was followed by
others. Seated in that house, the heirs of the great peers
naturally became as zealous for its privileges as any of the
humble burgesses with whom they were mingled. Thus our democracy
was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our
aristocracy the most democratic in the world; a peculiarity which
has lasted down to the present day, and which has produced many
important moral and political effects.
The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his
grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the
Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the
difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the
men and women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power
during a period of a hundred and twenty years, always with
vigour, often with violence, sometimes with cruelty. They, in
imitation of the dynasty which had preceded them, occasionally
invaded the rights of the subject, occasionally exacted taxes
under the name of loans and gifts, and occasionally dispensed
with penal statutes: nay, though they never presumed to enact any
permanent law by their own authority, they occasionally took upon
themselves, when Parliament was not sitting, to meet temporary
exigencies by temporary edicts. It was, however, impossible for
the Tudors to carry oppression beyond a certain point: for they
had no armed force, and they were surrounded by an armed people.
Their palace was guarded by a few domestics, whom the array of a
single shire, or of a single ward of London, could with ease have
overpowered. These haughty princes were therefore under a
restraint stronger than any that mere law can impose, under a
restraint which did not, indeed, prevent them from sometimes
treating an individual in an arbitrary and even in a barbarous
manner, but which effectually secured the nation against general
and long continued oppression. They might safely be tyrants,
within the precinct of the court: but it was necessary for them
to watch with constant anxiety the temper of the country. Henry
the Eighth, for example, encountered no opposition when he wished
to send Buckingham and Surrey, Anne Boleyn and Lady Salisbury, to
the scaffold. But when, without the consent of Parliament, he
demanded of his subjects a contribution amounting to one sixth of
their goods, he soon found it necessary to retract. The cry of
hundreds of thousands was that they were English and not French,
freemen and not slaves. In Kent the royal commissioners fled for
their lives. In Suffolk four thousand men appeared in arms. The
King's lieutenants in that county vainly exerted themselves to
raise an army. Those who did not join in the insurrection
declared that they would not fight against their brethren in such
a quarrel. Henry, proud and selfwilled as he was, shrank, not
without reason from a conflict with the roused spirit of the
nation. He had before his eyes the fate of his predecessors who
had perished at Berkeley and Pomfret. He not only cancelled his
illegal commissions; he not only granted a general pardon to all
the malecontents; but he publicly and solemnly apologised for his
infraction of the laws.
His conduct, on this occasion, well illustrates the whole policy
of his house. The temper of the princes of that line was hot,
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