September 25, 2025 • 30 mins
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)
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This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
(00:25):
Chapter eleven, The Rebellion of the Rich. Sir Thomas Moore,
apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshes in
which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed
by all as a hero of the new learning, that
great dawn of a more rational daylight, which for so
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many made Medievalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever we think
of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no
dispute about his appreciation of the Renaissance. He was, above
all things, a humanist, and a very human one. He
was even in many ways very modern, which some rather
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erroneously supposed to be the same as being human. He
was also humane in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched
an ideal, or rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with
something of the ingenuity of mister H. G. Wells, but
essentially with much more than the flippancy attributed to mister
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Bernard Shaw. It is not fair discharged the utopian notions
upon his morality, but their subjects and suggestions mark what,
for want of a better word, we can only call
his modernism. Thus the immortality of animals is the sort
of transcendentalism which savors of evolution and the Gros suggests
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about the preliminaries of marriage might be taken quite seriously
by the students of eugenics. He suggested a sort of pacifism,
though the Utopians had a quaint way of achieving it.
In short while. He was, with his friend Erasmus, a
satirist of medieval abuses. Few would now deny that Protestantism
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was too narrow rather than too broad for him. If
he was obviously not a Protestant. There are few Protestants
who would deny him the name of a reformer. But
he was an innovator in things more alluring to modern
minds than theology. He was partly what we should call
a neo pagan. His friend call at summed up that
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escape from medievalism, which might be called passage from bad
Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern debates they
are lumped together, But Greek learning was the gross of
this time. There had always been a popular Latin, if
a dog Latin, he would be nearer the truth to
call the Medievils bilingual than to call their Latin a
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dead language. Greek never, of course, became so general a possession,
but for the man who got it, it is not
too much to say that he felt as if he
were in the open air for the first time. Much
of this Greek spirit was reflected in more its universality,
its urbanity, its balance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity.
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It is even probable that he shared some of the
excesses and errors of taste which inevitably infected the splendid
intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle Ages. We can
imagine him thinking Gargoyle's Gothic in the sense of barbaric,
or even failing to be stirred, as Sydney was by
the trumpet of chevy Chase. The wealth of the ancient
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Heathen world, in wit, loveliness and civic heroism, had so
recently been revealed to that generation, in its dazzling profusion
and perfection, that it might seem a trifle if they
did not here and there and in justice to the
relics of the Dark Ages, when Therefore we look at
the world with the eyes of more. We are looking
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from the whitest windows of that time, looking over an
English landscape, seen for the first time, very equally in
the level light of the sun at morning. For what
he saw was England of the Renaissance, England passing from
the medieval to the modern. Thus he looked forth and
saw many things, and said many things, and many witty
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But he noticed one thing, which is at once a
horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who
looked over that landscape said, sheep are eating men. This
singular summary of the great epoch of our emancipation and
enlightenment is not the fact usually put first in such
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very curt historical accounts of it. It has nothing to
do with the translation of the Bible, or the character
of Henry the Eighth, or the characters of Henry the
eights wives, or the triangular debates between Henry and Luther
and the Pope. It was not Popish sheep who were
eating Protestant men, or vice versa. Nor did Henry, at
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any period of his own brief and rather bewildering papacy,
have more martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had
them eaten by lions. What was meant, of course, by
this picturesque expression was that an intensive type of agriculture
was giving way to a very extensive type of pasture.
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Great spaces of England which had hitherto been cut up
into the Commonwealth, a number of farmers were being laid
under the sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point has
been put, by a touch of epigram rather in the
matter of more himself, by mister J. Stephen, in a
striking essay now I think only to be found in
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the back files of the New Witness. He unstated the
paradox that the very much admired individual who made two
blades of grass grow instead of one was a murderer.
In the same article, mister Stephen traced the true moral
origins of this movement which led to the growing of
so much grass and the murder, or at any rate,
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the destruction of so much humanity. He traced it, and
every true record of that transformation traces it to the
growth of a new refinement, in a sense, more rational
refinement in the governing class. The medieval lord had been,
by comparison a coarse fellow. He had merely lived in
the largest kind of farmhouse, after the fashion of the
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largest kind of farmer. He drank wine when he could,
but he was quite ready to drink ale, and science
had not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a
time later than this, one of the greatest ladies of
England writes to her husband that she cannot come to
him because her carriage horses are pulling the flow and
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the trueth. In Middle Ages, the greatest men were even
more rudely hampered, But in the time of Henry the
Eighth the transformation was beginning. In the next generation a
phrase was common, which is one of the keys of
the time, and is very much the key to these
more ambitious territorial schemes. This or that great lord was
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said to be Italianate. It meant subtler shapes of beauty,
delicate and ductile glass, gold and silver, not treated as
barbaric stones, but rather as stems and wreaths of molten metal, mirrors, cards,
and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty. It meant
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the perfection of trifles. It was not, as in popular
Gothic craftsmanship, the almost unconscious touch of art upon all
necessary things. Rather, it was the pouring of the whole
soul of passionately conscious art, especially into unnecessary things. Luxury
was made alive with a soul. We must remember this
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real first for beauty, for it is an explanation and
an excuse. The old barony had indeed been thin by
the civil wars that closed at Bosworth, and curtailed by
the economical and crafty policy of that unkingly King Henry
the seventh. He was himself a new man. But we
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shall see the barons largely give place to a whole
nobility of new men. But even the older families already
had their faces set in the newer direction. Some of them,
the Howards, for instance, may be said to have figured
both as old and new families. In any case, the
spirit of the whole upper class can be described as
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increasingly new. The English aristocracy, which is the chief creation
of the Reformation, is undeniably entitled to a certain praise
which is now almost universally regarded as very high praise.
He was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being proud
of their ancestors. He can be truly said that English
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aristocrats have rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants,
they plant huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth for
their descendants. They fought for a higher and higher place
in the government of the state for their descendants. Above all,
they nourished every new science or scheme of social philosophy.
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They seized the vast economic chances of pasturage, but they
also drained the fens. They swept away the priests, but
they condescended to the philosophers. As the new tutor House
passes through its generations, a new and more rationalist civilization
is being made. Scholars are criticizing authentic text Skeptics are
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discrediting not only Popish saints but pagan philosophers. Specialists are
analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are eating men. We
have seen that in the fourteenth century in England there
was real revolution of the people. It very nearly succeeded,
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And I need not conceal the conviction that would have
been the best possible thing for all of us if
it had entirely succeeded, if Richard I had really sprung
into the saddle of watt Tyler, or rather if his
parliament had not unhorsed him when he had got there.
If he had confirmed the fact of the new peasant
freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was
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already common to confirm the fact of the trade unions
by the form of royal charter, our country would probably
have had as happy a history as is possible to
human nature. The Renaissance, when it came, would have come
as a popular education, and not the culture of a
club of esthetics. The new learning might have been as
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democratic as the old learning. In the old days of
medieval Paris and Oxford, the exquisite artistry of the school
of Cellini might have been but the highest grade of
the craft of a guild. The Shakespeare and drama might
have been acted by workmen on wooden stages set up
in the street, like Punch and Duty. The finer fulfillment
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of the Miracle play as it was acted by a guild.
The players need not have been the king's servants, but
their own masters. The Great Renaissance might have been liberal
with its liberal education. If this be a fancy, it
is at least one that cannot be disproved. The medieval
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Revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for anyone to
show that it needed to have been unsuccessful. In the end,
the feudal parliament prevailed and pushed back the peasants at
least into their dubious and half developed status. More than this,
it would be exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation
of the really decisive events Afterward, Henry the Eighth came
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to the throne. The guilds were perhaps checked, but apparently unchanged,
and even the peasants had probably regained ground. Many were
still theoretically serfs, but largely under the easy landlordism of
the Abbots. The medieval system still stood. It might, for
all we know, have begun to grow again, But all
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says speculations are swamped in new and very strange things.
The failure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately
followed by a counter revolution, a successful revolution of the rich.
The apparent pivot of it was in certain events political
and even personal. They roughly resolved themselves into two, the
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marriages of Henry the Eighth and the Affair of the monasteries.
The marriages of Henry the Eighth have long been a
popular and even a stale joke, and there is the
truth or tradition in the joke, as there is in
almost any joke if it is sufficiently popular, and indeed,
if it is sufficiently stale, a jocular thing never lives
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to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry was
popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give
us quite a glorious picture of a young prince of
the Renaissance, radiant with all the new accomplishments. In his
last days he was something very like a maniac. He
no longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear,
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it was rather the fear of a mad dog than
of a watchdog. In this change, doubtless the inconsistency and
even ignominy of his Bluebeard weddings played a great part.
And it is but just to him to say that, perhaps,
with the exception of the first and the last, he
was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were
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in their husband. But it was undoubtedly the affair of
the first divorce that broke the back of his honor,
and incidentally broke a very large number of other more
valuable than universal things. To feel the meaning of his fury,
we must realize that he did not regard himself as
the enemy, but rather as the friend of the Pope.
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There was a shadow of the old story of Beckett.
He had defended the Pope in diplomacy and the church
in controversy, And when he wearied of his queen and
took a passionate fancy to one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn,
he vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession in that
age of cynical concessions, might very well be made to
him by a friend. But it is part of that
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high inconsistency which is the fate of the Christian faith
in human hands, that no man knows when the higher
side of it will really be uppermost, if only for
an instant, and that the worst ages of the Church
will not do or say something as if by accident
that is worthy of the best. Anyhow, for whatever reason,
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Henry sought to lean a upon the cushions of Leo,
and found he had struck his arm upon the rock
of Peter. The Pope denied the new marriage, and Henry,
in a storm and darkness of anger, dissolved all the
old relations with the papacy. It is probable that he
did not clearly know how much he was doing then,
and it is very genable that we do not know
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it now. He certainly did not think he was anti Catholic,
and in one rather ridiculous sense, we can hardly say
he thought he was anti papal, since he apparently thought
he was pope. On this day really dates something that
played a certain part in history. The more modern doctrine
of the divine right of kings widely different from medieval one.
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It is a matter which further embarrasses the open question
about the continuity of Catholic things and Anglicanism, for it
was a new note and yet one struck by the
older party. The supremacy of the king over the English
National Church was not, unfortunately, merely a fad of the king,
but became partly and for one period, a fat of
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the Church. But apart from all controverted questions, there is
at least a human and historic sense in which the
continuity of our past is broken perilously. At this point,
Henry not only cut off England from Europe, but what
was even more important, he cuts off England from England.
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The Great Divorce brought down Woolsey, the mighty minister who
had held the scales between the Empire and the French
monarchy and made the modern balance of power in Europe.
He is often described under the dictum of Ego at
rex meus, but he marks the stage in the English
story rather because he suffered for it than because he
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said it. At rex Meus might be the motto of
any modern prime minister, for we have forgotten the very
fact that the word minister merely means servant. Wolseley was
the last great servant who could and was simply dismissed
the mark of a monarchy still absolute. The English were
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amazed at it. In modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned
away like a butler, a more awful act proved the
new force was already in human It struck down the
noblest of the humanists, Thomas Moore, who seemed sometimes like
an Epicurean. Under Augustus died the death of a saint.
Under died Talitian. He died gloriously, jesting, and the death
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has naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred saviors
of his soul, his tenderness, his trust in the truth
of God. But for humanism it must have seemed a
monstrous sacrifice. It was, somehow as if Montaigne were a martyr,
and that is indeed the note something truly to be
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called unnatural had already entered the naturalism of the Renaissance,
and the soul of the great Christian rose against it.
He pointed to the Son, saying, I shall be above
that fellow with Franciscan familiarity, which can love nature, because
it will not worship her. So he left to his
king the Son, which, for so many weary days and years,
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was to go down only on his wrath. But the
more impersonal process which Moore himself had observed, as noted
at the beginning of this chapter, is the more clearly
defined and less clouded with controversies. In the second of
the two parts of Henry's policy, there is indeed a
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controversy about the monasteries, but it is one that is
clarifying and settling every day. Now. It is true that
the Church by the Renaissance period had reached a considerable corruption.
The real proofs of it are utterly different, both from
the contemporary despotic pretense and from the common Protestant story.
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It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters
of bishops and such authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life.
Violent as they often are, they cannot possibly be more
violent than the letters of Saint Paul. To the purest
and most primitive churches. The Apostle was their writing to
those early Christians whom all churches idealize, and he talks
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to them as to cutthroats and thieves. The explanation for
those concerned for such subtleties may possibly be found in
the fact that Christianity is not a creed for good men,
but for men. Such letters have been written in all centuries,
and even in the sixteenth century. They do not prove
so much that there were bad abbots as that there
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were good bishops. Moreover, even those who profess that the
monks were pluffligates dare not profess that they were oppressors.
There is a truth in Cobb's point that where monks
were landlords, they did not become rack renting landlords, and
could not become absent landlords. Nevertheless, there was a weakness
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in the good institutions as well as a mere strength
in the bad ones, and that weakness partakes of the
worst element of the time. In the fall of good things,
there is almost always a touch of betrayal from within,
and the Abbots were destroyed more easily because they did
not stand together. They did not stand together because the
spirit of the age, which is very often the worst
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enemy of the age, was the increasing division between rich
and poor, and it had partly divided even the rich
and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it nearly
always comes from that servant of Christ who holds the
bag to take a modern attack on liberty. On a
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much lower plane, we are familiar with the picture of
a politician going to the great brewers, or even the
great hotel proprietors, in pointing out the uselessness of a
litter of little public houses. That is what the Tudor
poeticians did first with the monasteries. They went to the
heads of the great houses and proposed the extinction of
the small ones. The great monastic lords did not resist,
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or at any rate did not resist enough, and the
sack of their religious houses began. But if the lord
abbots acted for a moment as lords, that could not
excuse them in the eyes of much greater lords, or
having frequently acted as abbots, a momentary rally to the
cause of the rich, did not wipe out the disgrace
of a thousand petty interferences, which had told only to
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the advantage of the poor. And they were soon to
learn that it was no epic for their easy rule
and their careless hospitality. The great houses, now isolated, with
themselves brought down one by one, and the beggar, whom
the monastery had served as the sort of sacred tavern,
came to it at evening and founded a ruin for
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a new and wide philosophy was in the world, which
still rules our society. By this creed, most of the
mystical virtues of the old monks have simply been turned
into great sins, and the greatest of these is charity.
But the populace, which had risen under Richard the Second,
was not yet disarmed. It was trained in the rude
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discipline of Beaux and Bill, and organized into local groups
of town and guild and manor. Over half the counties
of England. The people rose and fought one final battle
for the vision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool
of the new tyranny, a dirty fellow named Thomas Cromwell,
was especially singled out as the tyrant, and he was
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indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. The popular
movement was put down partly by force, and there is
the new node of modern militarism in the fact that
it was put down by cynical professional troops actually brought
in from foreign countries, who destroyed English religion for hire.
But like the old Popela the Rising, it was even
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more put down by fraud. Like the old Rising, it
was sufficiently triumphant to force the government to a parley,
and the government had to resort to the simple expedient
of calming the people with promises and then proceeding to
break first the promises and then the people after the
fashion made familiar to us by the modern politicians in
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their attitudes toward the Great Strikes. The revolt bore the
name of Pilgrimage of Grace, and its program was practically
the restoration of the old religion in connection with the
fancy about the fate of England. If Tyler a triumph,
it proves I think one thing, that his triumph, while
it might or might not have led to something that
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could be called a reform, would have rendered quite impossible
everything that we now know as the Reformation. The reign
of terror established by Thomas Cromwell became an inquisition of
the blackest and most unbearable sort. Historians who have no
shadow of sympathy with the old religion or agreed that
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it was uprooted by means more horrible than have ever
perhaps been employed in England before or since. It was
a government by torturers, rendered ubiquitous by spies. The spoilation
of the monasteries especially was carried out not only with
a violence which recalled barbarism, but with a minuteness for
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which there is no other word but meanness. It was
as if the Dane had returned in the character of
a detective. The inconsistency of the king's personal attitude to
Catholicism did indeed complicate the conspiracy with new brutalities toward Protestants,
but such reaction as there was in this was wholly theological.
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Cromwell lost that fitful favor and was executed, but the
terrorism went on the more terribly for being simplified to
the single vision of the wrath of the king. It
culminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the
story told on an earlier page, where the despot revenged
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himself on a rebel whose defiance seemed to him to
ring down three centuries. He laid waste to the most
popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer
had once ridden singing, because it was also the shrine
where King Henry had knelt to repent. For three centuries
the church and the people had called Beckett a saint.
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When Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor. This
might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy, and
yet it was not really so, or then rose to
its supreme height of self revelation that still stranger, something
of which we have perhaps fensively found hints before in
this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurably
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weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages. And
whether or no his failure had been foreshadowed, he failed.
The breach he had made in the dike of the
ancient doctrines, let in a flood that may almost be
said to have washed him away. In a sense, he
disappeared before he died, for the drama that filled his
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last days is no longer the drama of his own character.
When put the matter most practically by saying that it
is unpractical to discuss whether Froud finds any justification for
Henry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy.
For whether or no it was desired, it was not created.
Least of all our princes did the tutors leave behind
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them a secure central government. And the time when monarchy
was at its worst comes only one or two generations
before the time when it was weakest, but a few
years afterwards, his history goes, the relations of the crown
and the new servants were to be reversed on a
high stage so as to horrify the world. And the
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acts which had been sanctified with the blood of More
and soiled with the blood of Cromwell, was that the
signal of one of that slave's own descendants to fall
and kill an English king. The tide which thus burst
through the breach and overwhelmed the king as well as
the church, was the revolt of the rich, and especially
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of the new rich. They used the King's name, and
could not have prevailed without his power. But the ultimate
effect was rather as if they had plundered the king
after he had plundered the monasteries amazing little of the wealth,
considering the name and theory of the thing actually remained
in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt by
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the fact that Edward the sixth succeeded to the throne
as a mere boy. But the deeper truth can be
seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line between
the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family and
thus providing himself with the sun, Henry had also provided
the country with a very type of powerful things family
which was to rule merely by pillage. An enormous and
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unnatural tragedy. The execution of one of the Seymours by
his own brother was enacted during the impotence of the
childish king, and the successful Seymour figured as Lord protector,
even though he would have found it hard to say
what he was protecting, since it was not even his
own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say
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that every human thing was left unprotected from the greed
of such cannibal protector. We talk of the dissolution of
the monasteries, but what occurred was the dissolution of the
whole of the old civilization. Lawyers and lackeys and money lenders.
The meanest of lucky men looted the art and economics
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of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church. Their names,
when they did not change them, became the names of
the great dukes and marquis of our own day. But
if we look back and forth in our history, perhaps
the most fundamental act of destruction occurred when the armed
men of the Seymours and their sort passed from the
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sacking of the monasteries to the sacking of the guilds.
The medieval trade unions were struck down, their buildings were
broken into by the soldiery, and their fund seized by
the new nobility. And this simple incident takes all its
common meeting out of the assertion in itself plausible enough
that the guilds, like everything else at the time, were
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probably not at their best proportion is the only practical thing.
And it may be true that Caesar was not feeling
well on the morning of the IDEs of March, But
simply to say that the guilds declined is about as
true as saying that Caesar quietly decayed from purely natural causes.
(29:50):
At the foot of the Statue of Pompeii, the end
of chapter eleven,
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
(00:25):
Chapter eleven, The Rebellion of the Rich. Sir Thomas Moore,
apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshes in
which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed
by all as a hero of the new learning, that
great dawn of a more rational daylight, which for so
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many made Medievalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever we think
of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no
dispute about his appreciation of the Renaissance. He was, above
all things, a humanist, and a very human one. He
was even in many ways very modern, which some rather
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erroneously supposed to be the same as being human. He
was also humane in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched
an ideal, or rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with
something of the ingenuity of mister H. G. Wells, but
essentially with much more than the flippancy attributed to mister
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Bernard Shaw. It is not fair discharged the utopian notions
upon his morality, but their subjects and suggestions mark what,
for want of a better word, we can only call
his modernism. Thus the immortality of animals is the sort
of transcendentalism which savors of evolution and the Gros suggests
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about the preliminaries of marriage might be taken quite seriously
by the students of eugenics. He suggested a sort of pacifism,
though the Utopians had a quaint way of achieving it.
In short while. He was, with his friend Erasmus, a
satirist of medieval abuses. Few would now deny that Protestantism
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was too narrow rather than too broad for him. If
he was obviously not a Protestant. There are few Protestants
who would deny him the name of a reformer. But
he was an innovator in things more alluring to modern
minds than theology. He was partly what we should call
a neo pagan. His friend call at summed up that
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escape from medievalism, which might be called passage from bad
Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern debates they
are lumped together, But Greek learning was the gross of
this time. There had always been a popular Latin, if
a dog Latin, he would be nearer the truth to
call the Medievils bilingual than to call their Latin a
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dead language. Greek never, of course, became so general a possession,
but for the man who got it, it is not
too much to say that he felt as if he
were in the open air for the first time. Much
of this Greek spirit was reflected in more its universality,
its urbanity, its balance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity.
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It is even probable that he shared some of the
excesses and errors of taste which inevitably infected the splendid
intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle Ages. We can
imagine him thinking Gargoyle's Gothic in the sense of barbaric,
or even failing to be stirred, as Sydney was by
the trumpet of chevy Chase. The wealth of the ancient
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Heathen world, in wit, loveliness and civic heroism, had so
recently been revealed to that generation, in its dazzling profusion
and perfection, that it might seem a trifle if they
did not here and there and in justice to the
relics of the Dark Ages, when Therefore we look at
the world with the eyes of more. We are looking
(04:08):
from the whitest windows of that time, looking over an
English landscape, seen for the first time, very equally in
the level light of the sun at morning. For what
he saw was England of the Renaissance, England passing from
the medieval to the modern. Thus he looked forth and
saw many things, and said many things, and many witty
(04:30):
But he noticed one thing, which is at once a
horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who
looked over that landscape said, sheep are eating men. This
singular summary of the great epoch of our emancipation and
enlightenment is not the fact usually put first in such
(04:52):
very curt historical accounts of it. It has nothing to
do with the translation of the Bible, or the character
of Henry the Eighth, or the characters of Henry the
eights wives, or the triangular debates between Henry and Luther
and the Pope. It was not Popish sheep who were
eating Protestant men, or vice versa. Nor did Henry, at
(05:13):
any period of his own brief and rather bewildering papacy,
have more martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had
them eaten by lions. What was meant, of course, by
this picturesque expression was that an intensive type of agriculture
was giving way to a very extensive type of pasture.
(05:34):
Great spaces of England which had hitherto been cut up
into the Commonwealth, a number of farmers were being laid
under the sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point has
been put, by a touch of epigram rather in the
matter of more himself, by mister J. Stephen, in a
striking essay now I think only to be found in
(05:54):
the back files of the New Witness. He unstated the
paradox that the very much admired individual who made two
blades of grass grow instead of one was a murderer.
In the same article, mister Stephen traced the true moral
origins of this movement which led to the growing of
so much grass and the murder, or at any rate,
(06:16):
the destruction of so much humanity. He traced it, and
every true record of that transformation traces it to the
growth of a new refinement, in a sense, more rational
refinement in the governing class. The medieval lord had been,
by comparison a coarse fellow. He had merely lived in
the largest kind of farmhouse, after the fashion of the
(06:38):
largest kind of farmer. He drank wine when he could,
but he was quite ready to drink ale, and science
had not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a
time later than this, one of the greatest ladies of
England writes to her husband that she cannot come to
him because her carriage horses are pulling the flow and
(06:59):
the trueth. In Middle Ages, the greatest men were even
more rudely hampered, But in the time of Henry the
Eighth the transformation was beginning. In the next generation a
phrase was common, which is one of the keys of
the time, and is very much the key to these
more ambitious territorial schemes. This or that great lord was
(07:20):
said to be Italianate. It meant subtler shapes of beauty,
delicate and ductile glass, gold and silver, not treated as
barbaric stones, but rather as stems and wreaths of molten metal, mirrors, cards,
and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty. It meant
(07:41):
the perfection of trifles. It was not, as in popular
Gothic craftsmanship, the almost unconscious touch of art upon all
necessary things. Rather, it was the pouring of the whole
soul of passionately conscious art, especially into unnecessary things. Luxury
was made alive with a soul. We must remember this
(08:03):
real first for beauty, for it is an explanation and
an excuse. The old barony had indeed been thin by
the civil wars that closed at Bosworth, and curtailed by
the economical and crafty policy of that unkingly King Henry
the seventh. He was himself a new man. But we
(08:24):
shall see the barons largely give place to a whole
nobility of new men. But even the older families already
had their faces set in the newer direction. Some of them,
the Howards, for instance, may be said to have figured
both as old and new families. In any case, the
spirit of the whole upper class can be described as
(08:45):
increasingly new. The English aristocracy, which is the chief creation
of the Reformation, is undeniably entitled to a certain praise
which is now almost universally regarded as very high praise.
He was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being proud
of their ancestors. He can be truly said that English
(09:08):
aristocrats have rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants,
they plant huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth for
their descendants. They fought for a higher and higher place
in the government of the state for their descendants. Above all,
they nourished every new science or scheme of social philosophy.
(09:30):
They seized the vast economic chances of pasturage, but they
also drained the fens. They swept away the priests, but
they condescended to the philosophers. As the new tutor House
passes through its generations, a new and more rationalist civilization
is being made. Scholars are criticizing authentic text Skeptics are
(09:52):
discrediting not only Popish saints but pagan philosophers. Specialists are
analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are eating men. We
have seen that in the fourteenth century in England there
was real revolution of the people. It very nearly succeeded,
(10:14):
And I need not conceal the conviction that would have
been the best possible thing for all of us if
it had entirely succeeded, if Richard I had really sprung
into the saddle of watt Tyler, or rather if his
parliament had not unhorsed him when he had got there.
If he had confirmed the fact of the new peasant
freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was
(10:35):
already common to confirm the fact of the trade unions
by the form of royal charter, our country would probably
have had as happy a history as is possible to
human nature. The Renaissance, when it came, would have come
as a popular education, and not the culture of a
club of esthetics. The new learning might have been as
(10:55):
democratic as the old learning. In the old days of
medieval Paris and Oxford, the exquisite artistry of the school
of Cellini might have been but the highest grade of
the craft of a guild. The Shakespeare and drama might
have been acted by workmen on wooden stages set up
in the street, like Punch and Duty. The finer fulfillment
(11:17):
of the Miracle play as it was acted by a guild.
The players need not have been the king's servants, but
their own masters. The Great Renaissance might have been liberal
with its liberal education. If this be a fancy, it
is at least one that cannot be disproved. The medieval
(11:37):
Revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for anyone to
show that it needed to have been unsuccessful. In the end,
the feudal parliament prevailed and pushed back the peasants at
least into their dubious and half developed status. More than this,
it would be exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation
of the really decisive events Afterward, Henry the Eighth came
(12:01):
to the throne. The guilds were perhaps checked, but apparently unchanged,
and even the peasants had probably regained ground. Many were
still theoretically serfs, but largely under the easy landlordism of
the Abbots. The medieval system still stood. It might, for
all we know, have begun to grow again, But all
(12:22):
says speculations are swamped in new and very strange things.
The failure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately
followed by a counter revolution, a successful revolution of the rich.
The apparent pivot of it was in certain events political
and even personal. They roughly resolved themselves into two, the
(12:46):
marriages of Henry the Eighth and the Affair of the monasteries.
The marriages of Henry the Eighth have long been a
popular and even a stale joke, and there is the
truth or tradition in the joke, as there is in
almost any joke if it is sufficiently popular, and indeed,
if it is sufficiently stale, a jocular thing never lives
(13:08):
to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry was
popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give
us quite a glorious picture of a young prince of
the Renaissance, radiant with all the new accomplishments. In his
last days he was something very like a maniac. He
no longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear,
(13:30):
it was rather the fear of a mad dog than
of a watchdog. In this change, doubtless the inconsistency and
even ignominy of his Bluebeard weddings played a great part.
And it is but just to him to say that, perhaps,
with the exception of the first and the last, he
was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were
(13:52):
in their husband. But it was undoubtedly the affair of
the first divorce that broke the back of his honor,
and incidentally broke a very large number of other more
valuable than universal things. To feel the meaning of his fury,
we must realize that he did not regard himself as
the enemy, but rather as the friend of the Pope.
(14:12):
There was a shadow of the old story of Beckett.
He had defended the Pope in diplomacy and the church
in controversy, And when he wearied of his queen and
took a passionate fancy to one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn,
he vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession in that
age of cynical concessions, might very well be made to
him by a friend. But it is part of that
(14:35):
high inconsistency which is the fate of the Christian faith
in human hands, that no man knows when the higher
side of it will really be uppermost, if only for
an instant, and that the worst ages of the Church
will not do or say something as if by accident
that is worthy of the best. Anyhow, for whatever reason,
(14:58):
Henry sought to lean a upon the cushions of Leo,
and found he had struck his arm upon the rock
of Peter. The Pope denied the new marriage, and Henry,
in a storm and darkness of anger, dissolved all the
old relations with the papacy. It is probable that he
did not clearly know how much he was doing then,
and it is very genable that we do not know
(15:19):
it now. He certainly did not think he was anti Catholic,
and in one rather ridiculous sense, we can hardly say
he thought he was anti papal, since he apparently thought
he was pope. On this day really dates something that
played a certain part in history. The more modern doctrine
of the divine right of kings widely different from medieval one.
(15:43):
It is a matter which further embarrasses the open question
about the continuity of Catholic things and Anglicanism, for it
was a new note and yet one struck by the
older party. The supremacy of the king over the English
National Church was not, unfortunately, merely a fad of the king,
but became partly and for one period, a fat of
(16:04):
the Church. But apart from all controverted questions, there is
at least a human and historic sense in which the
continuity of our past is broken perilously. At this point,
Henry not only cut off England from Europe, but what
was even more important, he cuts off England from England.
(16:25):
The Great Divorce brought down Woolsey, the mighty minister who
had held the scales between the Empire and the French
monarchy and made the modern balance of power in Europe.
He is often described under the dictum of Ego at
rex meus, but he marks the stage in the English
story rather because he suffered for it than because he
(16:46):
said it. At rex Meus might be the motto of
any modern prime minister, for we have forgotten the very
fact that the word minister merely means servant. Wolseley was
the last great servant who could and was simply dismissed
the mark of a monarchy still absolute. The English were
(17:07):
amazed at it. In modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned
away like a butler, a more awful act proved the
new force was already in human It struck down the
noblest of the humanists, Thomas Moore, who seemed sometimes like
an Epicurean. Under Augustus died the death of a saint.
Under died Talitian. He died gloriously, jesting, and the death
(17:31):
has naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred saviors
of his soul, his tenderness, his trust in the truth
of God. But for humanism it must have seemed a
monstrous sacrifice. It was, somehow as if Montaigne were a martyr,
and that is indeed the note something truly to be
(17:52):
called unnatural had already entered the naturalism of the Renaissance,
and the soul of the great Christian rose against it.
He pointed to the Son, saying, I shall be above
that fellow with Franciscan familiarity, which can love nature, because
it will not worship her. So he left to his
king the Son, which, for so many weary days and years,
(18:15):
was to go down only on his wrath. But the
more impersonal process which Moore himself had observed, as noted
at the beginning of this chapter, is the more clearly
defined and less clouded with controversies. In the second of
the two parts of Henry's policy, there is indeed a
(18:37):
controversy about the monasteries, but it is one that is
clarifying and settling every day. Now. It is true that
the Church by the Renaissance period had reached a considerable corruption.
The real proofs of it are utterly different, both from
the contemporary despotic pretense and from the common Protestant story.
(18:57):
It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters
of bishops and such authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life.
Violent as they often are, they cannot possibly be more
violent than the letters of Saint Paul. To the purest
and most primitive churches. The Apostle was their writing to
those early Christians whom all churches idealize, and he talks
(19:20):
to them as to cutthroats and thieves. The explanation for
those concerned for such subtleties may possibly be found in
the fact that Christianity is not a creed for good men,
but for men. Such letters have been written in all centuries,
and even in the sixteenth century. They do not prove
so much that there were bad abbots as that there
(19:42):
were good bishops. Moreover, even those who profess that the
monks were pluffligates dare not profess that they were oppressors.
There is a truth in Cobb's point that where monks
were landlords, they did not become rack renting landlords, and
could not become absent landlords. Nevertheless, there was a weakness
(20:03):
in the good institutions as well as a mere strength
in the bad ones, and that weakness partakes of the
worst element of the time. In the fall of good things,
there is almost always a touch of betrayal from within,
and the Abbots were destroyed more easily because they did
not stand together. They did not stand together because the
spirit of the age, which is very often the worst
(20:26):
enemy of the age, was the increasing division between rich
and poor, and it had partly divided even the rich
and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it nearly
always comes from that servant of Christ who holds the
bag to take a modern attack on liberty. On a
(20:46):
much lower plane, we are familiar with the picture of
a politician going to the great brewers, or even the
great hotel proprietors, in pointing out the uselessness of a
litter of little public houses. That is what the Tudor
poeticians did first with the monasteries. They went to the
heads of the great houses and proposed the extinction of
the small ones. The great monastic lords did not resist,
(21:10):
or at any rate did not resist enough, and the
sack of their religious houses began. But if the lord
abbots acted for a moment as lords, that could not
excuse them in the eyes of much greater lords, or
having frequently acted as abbots, a momentary rally to the
cause of the rich, did not wipe out the disgrace
of a thousand petty interferences, which had told only to
(21:33):
the advantage of the poor. And they were soon to
learn that it was no epic for their easy rule
and their careless hospitality. The great houses, now isolated, with
themselves brought down one by one, and the beggar, whom
the monastery had served as the sort of sacred tavern,
came to it at evening and founded a ruin for
(21:55):
a new and wide philosophy was in the world, which
still rules our society. By this creed, most of the
mystical virtues of the old monks have simply been turned
into great sins, and the greatest of these is charity.
But the populace, which had risen under Richard the Second,
was not yet disarmed. It was trained in the rude
(22:18):
discipline of Beaux and Bill, and organized into local groups
of town and guild and manor. Over half the counties
of England. The people rose and fought one final battle
for the vision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool
of the new tyranny, a dirty fellow named Thomas Cromwell,
was especially singled out as the tyrant, and he was
(22:38):
indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. The popular
movement was put down partly by force, and there is
the new node of modern militarism in the fact that
it was put down by cynical professional troops actually brought
in from foreign countries, who destroyed English religion for hire.
But like the old Popela the Rising, it was even
(23:01):
more put down by fraud. Like the old Rising, it
was sufficiently triumphant to force the government to a parley,
and the government had to resort to the simple expedient
of calming the people with promises and then proceeding to
break first the promises and then the people after the
fashion made familiar to us by the modern politicians in
(23:22):
their attitudes toward the Great Strikes. The revolt bore the
name of Pilgrimage of Grace, and its program was practically
the restoration of the old religion in connection with the
fancy about the fate of England. If Tyler a triumph,
it proves I think one thing, that his triumph, while
it might or might not have led to something that
(23:43):
could be called a reform, would have rendered quite impossible
everything that we now know as the Reformation. The reign
of terror established by Thomas Cromwell became an inquisition of
the blackest and most unbearable sort. Historians who have no
shadow of sympathy with the old religion or agreed that
(24:03):
it was uprooted by means more horrible than have ever
perhaps been employed in England before or since. It was
a government by torturers, rendered ubiquitous by spies. The spoilation
of the monasteries especially was carried out not only with
a violence which recalled barbarism, but with a minuteness for
(24:23):
which there is no other word but meanness. It was
as if the Dane had returned in the character of
a detective. The inconsistency of the king's personal attitude to
Catholicism did indeed complicate the conspiracy with new brutalities toward Protestants,
but such reaction as there was in this was wholly theological.
(24:45):
Cromwell lost that fitful favor and was executed, but the
terrorism went on the more terribly for being simplified to
the single vision of the wrath of the king. It
culminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the
story told on an earlier page, where the despot revenged
(25:06):
himself on a rebel whose defiance seemed to him to
ring down three centuries. He laid waste to the most
popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer
had once ridden singing, because it was also the shrine
where King Henry had knelt to repent. For three centuries
the church and the people had called Beckett a saint.
(25:28):
When Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor. This
might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy, and
yet it was not really so, or then rose to
its supreme height of self revelation that still stranger, something
of which we have perhaps fensively found hints before in
this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurably
(25:53):
weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages. And
whether or no his failure had been foreshadowed, he failed.
The breach he had made in the dike of the
ancient doctrines, let in a flood that may almost be
said to have washed him away. In a sense, he
disappeared before he died, for the drama that filled his
(26:14):
last days is no longer the drama of his own character.
When put the matter most practically by saying that it
is unpractical to discuss whether Froud finds any justification for
Henry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy.
For whether or no it was desired, it was not created.
Least of all our princes did the tutors leave behind
(26:36):
them a secure central government. And the time when monarchy
was at its worst comes only one or two generations
before the time when it was weakest, but a few
years afterwards, his history goes, the relations of the crown
and the new servants were to be reversed on a
high stage so as to horrify the world. And the
(26:57):
acts which had been sanctified with the blood of More
and soiled with the blood of Cromwell, was that the
signal of one of that slave's own descendants to fall
and kill an English king. The tide which thus burst
through the breach and overwhelmed the king as well as
the church, was the revolt of the rich, and especially
(27:19):
of the new rich. They used the King's name, and
could not have prevailed without his power. But the ultimate
effect was rather as if they had plundered the king
after he had plundered the monasteries amazing little of the wealth,
considering the name and theory of the thing actually remained
in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt by
(27:40):
the fact that Edward the sixth succeeded to the throne
as a mere boy. But the deeper truth can be
seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line between
the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family and
thus providing himself with the sun, Henry had also provided
the country with a very type of powerful things family
which was to rule merely by pillage. An enormous and
(28:04):
unnatural tragedy. The execution of one of the Seymours by
his own brother was enacted during the impotence of the
childish king, and the successful Seymour figured as Lord protector,
even though he would have found it hard to say
what he was protecting, since it was not even his
own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say
(28:26):
that every human thing was left unprotected from the greed
of such cannibal protector. We talk of the dissolution of
the monasteries, but what occurred was the dissolution of the
whole of the old civilization. Lawyers and lackeys and money lenders.
The meanest of lucky men looted the art and economics
(28:47):
of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church. Their names,
when they did not change them, became the names of
the great dukes and marquis of our own day. But
if we look back and forth in our history, perhaps
the most fundamental act of destruction occurred when the armed
men of the Seymours and their sort passed from the
(29:07):
sacking of the monasteries to the sacking of the guilds.
The medieval trade unions were struck down, their buildings were
broken into by the soldiery, and their fund seized by
the new nobility. And this simple incident takes all its
common meeting out of the assertion in itself plausible enough
that the guilds, like everything else at the time, were
(29:30):
probably not at their best proportion is the only practical thing.
And it may be true that Caesar was not feeling
well on the morning of the IDEs of March, But
simply to say that the guilds declined is about as
true as saying that Caesar quietly decayed from purely natural causes.
(29:50):
At the foot of the Statue of Pompeii, the end
of chapter eleven,
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