10 - Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton

In Short History of England, Gilbert Keith Chesterton offers a captivating exploration of history through the lens of human interaction, framing it as an enduring struggle between civilization and barbarism. His insightful critique reveals the stark contrast between the narratives of recent centuries and the rich tapestry of the medieval era, which is often overlooked in popular histories. Chesterton‚As sharp intellect and mastery of paradox illuminate the absurdities in conventional arguments, making his reflections both thought-provoking and entertaining. This is not just a study of dates and events; it is a profound journey that challenges modern misconceptions while remaining relevant to today‚As world. (Summary by Ray Clare)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,

(00:25):
Chapter ten, The War of the Usurpers. The poet Pope,
though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats, Bolingbroke
necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism was Whiggish,
and the Whig as a wit, never expressed his political

(00:46):
point more clearly than in Pope's line, which ran the
right divine of kings to govern wrong. It will be
apparent when I deal with that period that I do
not palliate the real unreason in the divine right as
Filmer and some of the pedantic cavaliers construed it. They
professed the impossible ideal of non resistance to any national

(01:09):
and legitimate power, though I cannot see that even that
was so servile and superstitious as the more modern ideal
of non resistance even to a foreign and lawless power.
But the seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is,
of fads, and the film rights made a fad or

(01:30):
divine right. Its roots were older equally religious, but much
more realistic, and though tangled with many other and even
opposite things of the Middle Ages, ramify through all the
changes we have now to consider. The connection can hardly
be stated better than by taking Pope's easy epigram and

(01:51):
pointing out that it is, after all, very weak in philosophy.
The right divine of kings to govern wrong considered as
a sneer, really evades all that we mean by a right.
To have a right to do a thing is not
at all the same as to be right in doing it.
What Pope says satirically about a divine right is what

(02:14):
we all say quite seriously about a human right. If
a man has a right to vote, has he not
a right to vote wrong? If a man has a
right to choose his wife, has he not a right
to choose wrong? I have a right to express the
opinion which I am now setting down, but I should
hesitate to make the controversial claim that this proves the

(02:36):
opinion to be right. The medieval monarchy, though only one
aspect of medieval rule, was roughly represented in the idea
that the ruler had a right to rule. As a
voter has a right to vote, he might govern wrong,
but unless he governed horribly and extravagantly wrong, he retained

(02:58):
his position of right. As a private man retains his
right to marriage and locomotion unless he goes horribly and
extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so
simple as this, For the Middle Ages were not, as
it is often the fashion, to fancy, under a single
and steely discipline. They were very controversial and therefore very complex.

(03:24):
And it is easy by isolating items, whether about just
divinum or primus inter pares, to maintain that the Medievals
were almost anything. It has been seriously maintained that they
were all Germans. But it is true that the influence
of the Church, though by no means of all the
great churchmen, encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament

(03:46):
of government, which was meant to make the monarch terrible,
and therefore often made the man tyrannical. The disadvantage of
such despotism is obvious enough. Precise nice nature of its
advantage must be better understood than it is not for
its own sake, so much as for the story we

(04:07):
have now to tell the advantage of divine right or
irremovable legitimacy is this that there is a limit to
the ambitions of the rich roy ne puis. The royal power,
whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was,

(04:29):
in one respect like the power of heaven. It was
not for sale. Constitutional moralists has often implied that a
tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It has
perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble
most emphatically have the same virtues, and one virtue which
they very markedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles

(04:52):
are snobs. They do not care a button what they
do to wealthy people. It is true that tyranny with
some times treated as coming from the heavens, almost in
the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky.
A man had no more expected to be the king
than to be the west wind or the morning star.
But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind

(05:15):
to turn only his own mill, no pedantic scholar can
trim the morning star to be his own reading land.
Yet something very like this is what really happened to
England in the later Middle Ages, and the first sign
of it, I fancy was the fall of Richard the Second.
Shakespeare's historical plays are something truer than historical. They are traditional,

(05:40):
the living memory of many things lingered, though the memory
of others was lost. He is right in making Richard
the Second incarnate the claim to divine ride, and bolingbroke
the baronial ambition, which ultimately broke up the old medieval order.
A divine ride had become at once drier and more
fantastic by the time of the tutors. Shakespeare could not

(06:04):
recover the fresh and popular part of the thing, for
he came at a later stage in a process of stiffening,
which is the main thing to be studied in later medievalism.
Richard himself was possibly a wayward and exasperating prince. It
might well be the weak length that snapped in the
strong chain of the Plantagenets. There may have been a
real case against the coupdetta which he affected in thirteen

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ninety seven, and his kinsman Henry of Bolingbroke, may have
had strong sections of disappointed opinion on his side when
he effected in thirteen ninety nine the first true usurpation
in English history. But if we wish to understand that
larger tradition which even Shakespeare had lost. We must glance
back at something which befell Richard even in the first

(06:49):
years of his reign. It was certainly the greatest event
of his reign, and it was possibly the greatest event
of all the reigns which are rapidly considered in this book.
The real English people, the men who work with their hands,
lifted their hands to strike their masters, probably for the
first and certainly for the last time in history. Pagans

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slavery had slowly perished, not so much by decaying as
by developing into something better. In one sense, it did
not die, but rather came to life. The slave owner
was like a man who should set up a row
of sticks for a fence, and then find that they
had struck root and were budding into small trees. They

(07:33):
would be at once more valuable and less manageable, especially
less portable. And such a difference between a stick and
a tree was precisely the difference between a slave and
a serf, or even the free peasant, which the serf
seemed rapidly tending to become. It was, in the best
sense of a battered phrase, a social evolution, and it

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had the great evil of one The evil was that
whilely was essentially orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is,
the emancipation of the commons had already advanced very far,
but it had not yet advanced far enough to be
embodied in a law. The custom was unwritten, like the

(08:15):
British Constitution, and like that evolutionary, not to say evasive,
entity could always be overridden by the rich, who now
drive their great coaches through acts of parliament. The new
peasant was still legally a slave, and was to learn
it by one of those turns of fortune which confound
a foolish faith in the common sense of unwritten constitutions.

(08:39):
The French Wars gradually grew to be almost as much
of a scourge to England as they were to France.
England was despoiled by her own victories. Luxury and poverty
increased at the extremes of society, and, by a process
more proper to an ensuing chapter, the balance of the
better medievalism was lost. Finally, a furious plague called the

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Black Death burst like a blast on the land, thinning
the population and throwing the work of the world into ruin.
There was a shortage of labor, a difficulty of getting luxuries,
and the great lords did what one would expect them
to do. They became lawyers and upholders of the letter
of the law. They appealed to a rule already nearly

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obsolete to drive the serf back to the more direct
servitude of the dark ages. They announced their decision to
the people, and the people rose in arms. The two
dramatic stories which connect Watt Tyler, doubtfully with the beginning
and definitely with the end of the revolt, are far

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from unimportant, despite the desire of our present prosaic historians
to pretend that all dramatic stories are unimportant. The tale
of Tyler's first blow is significant in the sense that
it is not only dramatic but domestic, an insult of
the family, and made the legend of the whole riot,
whatever its incidental indecencies, a sort of demonstration on behalf

(10:08):
of decency. This is important, for the dignity of the
poor is almost unneeding in modern debates, and an inspector
need only bring a printed form and a few long
words to do the same thing without having his head broken.
The occasion of the protest and the form which the
feudal reaction had first taken was a poll tax, but

(10:32):
this was but a part of a general process of
pressing the population to survile labor, which fully explains the
ferocious language held by the government after the rising had failed,
the language in which it threatened to make the state
of the serf more servile than before. The facts attending
the failure in question are less in dispute. The medieval

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populace showed considerable military energy and cooperation, stormed its way
to London, and was met outside the city by a
company containing the King and the Lord Mayor, who were
forced to consent to a parley. The treacherous stabbing of
Tyler by the mayor gave the signal for battle and massacre.
On the spot, the peasants closed in roaring, they have

(11:14):
killed our leader. When a strange thing happened, something which
gives us a fleeting and a final glimpse of the
crowned sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For one wild moment,
divine right was divine. The king was no more than
a boy. His very voice must have rung out to
that multitude, almost like the voice of a child. But

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the power of his fathers and the great Christendom from
which he came, fell in some strange fashion upon him,
and riding out alone before the people, he cried out,
I am your leader, and himself promised to grant them
all they asked. That promise was afterwards broken. But those
who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness
of the young, frivolous king are not only shall but

(12:00):
utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend of the time.
The point must be seized, if subsequent things are to
be seen as they are, is that parliaments certainly encouraged,
and parliament almost certainly obliged the king to repudiate the people.
For when after the rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were betrayed,

(12:21):
the King urged a humane compromise on a parliament, and
the parliament furiously refused it. Already, parliament is not merely
a governing body, but a governing class. Parliament was as
contemptuous of the peasants in the fourteenth as of the
chartists in the nineteenth century. This council, first summoned by

(12:41):
the King, like juries and many other things, to get
from plain men rather reluctant evidence about taxation, has already
become an object of ambition, and is therefore an aristocracy.
There is already war in this case, literally to the knife,
between the commons with a large sea and the commons
with a small one. Talking about the knife, it is

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notable that the murderer of Tyler was not a mere noble,
but an elective magistrate of the mercantile oligarchy of London,
though there is probably no truth in the tale that
his blood stained dagger figures on the arms of the
city of London. The medieval Londoners were quite capable of
assassinating a man, but not of sticking so dirty a

(13:24):
knife into the neighborhood of the cross of their redeemer,
in the place which is really occupied by the sword
of Saint Paul. It is remarked above that Parliament was
now an aristocracy, being an object of ambition. The truth
is perhaps more subtle than this. But if ever men
yearn to serve on jurys, we may probably guess that

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juries are no longer popular. Anyhow, this must be kept
in mind as against the opposite idea of the justiven
him or fixed authority. If we would appreciate the fall
of Richard, if the thing which dethroned him was a rebellion.
It was a rebellion of the parliament, of the thing
that had just proved more pitiless than he, toward a
rebellion of the people. But this is not the main point.

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The point is that by the removal of Richard, a
step above the parliament became possible for the first time.
The transition was tremendous. The crown became an object of ambition,
that which one could snatch, another could snatch from him,
That which the House of Lancaster held merely by force,
the House of York could take from it by force.

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The spell of an undethronable king seated out of reach
was broken, and for three unhappy generations, adventurers strove and
stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood above which was
something new in the medieval imagination, an empty throne. It
is obvious that the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurper, largely

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because he was a usurper, is the clue to many things,
some of which we should not I'll call good, some bad,
all of which we should probably call good or bad.
With the excessive facility with which we dismissed distant things.
It led the Lancastrian House to lean on Parliament, which
was the mixed matter we have already seen. It may

(15:16):
have been in some ways good for the monarchy to
be checked and challenged by an institution which at least
kept something of the old freshness and freedom of speech.
It was almost certainly bad for the Parliament, making it
yet more the ally of the mere ambitious noble, of
which we shall see much later. It also led the
Lancastrian House to lean on patriotism, which was perhaps more popular,

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to make English the tongue of the court for the
first time, and to reopen the French Wars with a
fine flag waving a bagging court. It led again to
lean on the Church, or rather perhaps on the higher clergy,
and that in the least worthy aspect of clericalism. A
certain morbidity, which more and more darkened the end of medievalism,

(16:03):
showed itself in new and more careful cruelties against the
last crop of heresies. A slight knowledge of the philosophy
of these heresies will lend little support to the notion
that they were in themselves prophetic of the Reformation. It's
hard to see how anybody can call Wycliffe a Protestant
unless he calls Pelagius or Areas a Protestant. And if

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john Ball was a reformer, Latimer was not a reformer.
But though the new heresies did not even hint at
the beginning of English Protestanism, they did perhaps hint at
the end of English Catholicism. Kabham did not light a
candle to be handed on to nonconformist chapels, but Arundel
did light a torch and put it into his own church.

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Such real unpopularity, as did the time attached to the
old religious system, and which afterwards became a true national
tradition against Mary, was doubtless started by the diseased energy
of these fifteenth century bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy,
and a defensible philosophy, but with some of these men,
persecution was rather a perversion across the channel. One of

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them was presiding at the trial of Joan of arc.
But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in
all the epic that follows the fall of Richard the Second,
and especially in those feuds that found so ironic an
imagery in English Roses and thorns. The foreshortening of such

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a backward glance as this book can alone claim to be,
forbids any entrance into the military mazes of the Wars
of York and Lancaster, or any attempt to follow the
thrilling recoveries and revenges which filled the lives of Warwick
the Kingmaker and the warlike widow of Henry the Fifth.
The rivals were not, indeed, as is sometimes exaggeratively implied,

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fighting for nothing, or even like a lion and the unicorn,
merely fighting for the crown. The shadow of a moral
difference can still be traced, even in that stormy twilight
of a heroic time. But when we have said that
Lancaster stood on the whole for the new notion of
a king proped by parliaments and powerful bishops, and York

(18:16):
on the whole for the remains of the older idea
of a king who permits nothing to come between him
and his people, we have set everything of permanent political
interest that could be traced by counting all the bows
of Barnet or all the lances of Tewksbury. But this
truth that there was something which can only vaguely be

(18:38):
called tory about the Yorkist has at least one interest
that it lends a justifiable romance to the last and
most remarkable figure of the fighting House of York, with
whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended. If we
desire it all to catch the strange colors of the
sunset of the Middle Ages, to see what had changed

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yet not wholly killed chivalry, there is no better study
than the riddle of Richard the Third. Of course, scarcely
a line of him was like the caricature with which
his much meaner successor like heart of the world. When
he was dead, he was not even a hunchback. He
had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probably the
effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender and

(19:24):
sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts
us somehow, as the crooked shadow of a straight night
of better days. He was not an ogre shedding rivers
of blood. Some of the man he executed deserved that
as much as any men of that wicked time, and
even the tale of his murdered nephews is not certain,
and is told by those who also tell us he

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was born with tusks and was originally covered with hair.
Yet a Crimson Cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory,
and so tainted is the very air of that time
with carnage, that we cannot say he was incapable, even
of the things of which he may have been innocent.
Whether or no, he was a good man. He was

(20:06):
apparently a good king, and even a popular one. Yet
we think of him vaguely and not i fancy untruly
as on sufferance. He anticipated the Renaissance in an abnormal
enthusiasm for art and music, and he seems to have
held to the old paths of religion and charity. He
did not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because

(20:27):
his only pleasure was in cutting throats. He probably did
it because he was nervous. It was the age of
our first portrait painting, and a fine contemporary portrait of
him throws a more plausible light on this particular detail,
for it shows him touching and probably twisting a ring
on his finger, the very act of a high strung

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personality who would also fidget with the dagger, and in
his face, as there painted, we can study all that
has made it worth while to pause so long upon
his name. An atmosphere very different from everything before and
after the face has a remarkable intellectual beauty. But there
is something else on the face that is hardly in

(21:08):
itself either good or evil. And that thing is death,
the death of an epic, the death of a great civilization,
the death of something which once sang to the sun
in the Canticle of Saint Francis, and sailed to the
ends of the earth in ships of the First Crusade,
but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards,

(21:31):
wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gamboled for
the crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, and
has this one grace among its dying virtues, that its
valor is the last to die. But whatever else may
have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester, there

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was a touch about him which makes him truly the
last of the medieval kings. It is expressed in the
one word which he cried aloud as he struck down
foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth. Treason,
for him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was
the same as treachery, And in this case at least,

(22:15):
it was the same as treachery. When his nobles deserted
him before the battle, he did not regard it as
a new political combination, but as the sin of false
friends and faithless servants. Using his own voice, like the
trumpet of a herald, he challenged his rival to a
fight as personal as that of two paladins of Charlemagne.

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His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply.
The modern world had begun. The call echoed unanswered down
the ages. For since that day no English king has
fought after that fashion. Having slain many, he was himself slain,
and his diminished force destroyed. So ended the War of

(22:59):
the Usurpers. And the last and most doubtful of all
the Usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight
from nowhere, found the crown of England under a bush
of thorn. End of Chapter ten