12 - 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
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
Chapter twelve, Spain and the Schism of Nations. The revolution

(00:31):
that arose out of what is called the Renaissance, and
ended up in some countries in what is called the Reformation,
did in the internal politics of England one drastic and
definite thing. That thing was destroying the institutions of the poor.
Was not the only thing it did, but it was
much the most practical. It was the basis of all

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the problems now connected with capital and labor. How much
the theological theories of the time had to do with
it is a perfectly fair matter for difference of opinion.
But neither party, if educated about the facts, will deny
that the same time and temper which produced the religious
schism also produced this new lawlessness in the rich. The

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most extreme Protestant will probably be content to say that
Protestantism was not the motive but the mask. The most
extreme Catholic will probably be content to admit that Protestantism
was not the sin, but rather, the punishment, the most
sweeping and shameless part of the process, was not complete, indeed,
until the end of the eighteenth century, when Protestantism was

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already passing into skepticism. Indeed, a very decent case could
be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first
and last of a near on paganism, that the thing
began in the inordinate thirst for new things in the
noblease of the Renaissance, and ended in the hell Fire Club. Anyhow,

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what was first founded that the Reformation was a new
and abnormally powerful aristocracy, and what was destroyed in an
ever increasing degree was everything that could be held directly
or indirectly by the people in spite of such an aristocracy.

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This fact has filled all the subsequent history of our country.
But the next particular point in that history concerns the
position of the crown. The king in reality had already
been elbowed aside by the courtiers who had crowded behind
him just before the bursting of the door. The king
is left behind in the rush for wealth, and already

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can do nothing alone. And of this fact, the next reign,
after the chaos of Edward the sixths, affords a very
arresting troop. Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced Queen Catherine,
as a bad name even in popular history and popular prejudice,

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is generally more worthy of study than scholarly sophistry. Her
enemies were indeed largely wrong about her character, but they
were not wrong about her effect. She was, in the
limited sense, a good woman, convinced, conscientious, rather morbid. But
it is true that she was a bad queen, bad

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for many things, but especially bad for her own most
beloved cause. It is true, when all is said, that
she set herself to burn out no popery, and managed
to burn it in the concentration of her fanaticism into cruelty,
especially its concentration in particular places, and in a short

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time did remain like something red hot in the public memory.
It was the first of the series of great historical
accidents that separated a real, if not universal, public opinion
from the old regime. It has been summarized in the
death by fire of the three famous martyrs at Oxford.

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For one of them, at least Latimer, was a reformer
of the more robust and human type, though another of them, Cranmer,
had been so smooth a snob and coward in the
Council of Henry the Eighth, as to make Thomas Cromwell
seem by comparison a man. But of what may be
called the Latimer tradition, the saner and more genuine Protestantism,

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I shall speak later. At the time, even the Oxford
Martyrs probably produced less pity and revulsion than the massacre
in the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts, whose very
ignorance and poverty made their cause seem more popular than
it really was. But this last ugly feature was brought

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into sharper relief and produced more conscious or unconscious bitterness
because of the other great fact of which I spoke above,
which is the determining test of this time of transition.
What made all the difference was this that even in
this Catholic reign, the property of the Catholic Church could

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not be restored. The very fact that Mary was a fanatic,
and yet this act of justice was beyond the wildest
dreams of fanaticism. That is the point. The very fact
that she was angry enough to commit wrongs for the church,
and yet not bold enough to ask for the rights
of the church. That is the test of the time.

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She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives,
she was not allowed to deprive great men of their property,
or rather, of other people's property. She could punish heresy,
she could not punish sacrilege. She was forced into the
false position of killing men who had not gone to
church and sparing men who had gone there to steal

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the church ornaments. What forced her into it not certainly
her own religious attitude, which was almost maniacally sincere, Not
public opinion, which had naturally much more sympathy for the
religious humanities which she did not restore, than for the
religious inhumanities which she did. The force came, of course,

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from the new nobility and the new wealth. They refused
to surrender, and the success of this earthly pressure proves
that the nobility was already stronger than the crown. The
scepter had only been used as a crowbar to break
open the door of a treasure house, and it was
itself broken or at least bent with the blow. There

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is a truth also when the popular insistence on the
story of Mary having Calais written on her heart. When
the last relic of the medieval conquests reverted to France.
Mary had the solitary and heroic half virtue of the tutors.
She was a patriot, but patriots are often pathetically behind

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the times, for the very fact the fact that they
dwell on old enemies often blinds them to new ones.
In a later generation, Cromwell exhibited the same error, reversed
and continued to keep a hostile eye on Spain when
he should have kept it on France. In our own time,
the jingles of Faschota kept it on France when they

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ought already to have had it on Germany. With no
particular anti national intention, Mary nevertheless got herself into an
anti national position toward the most tremendous international problem of
her people. It is the second of the coincidences that
confirmed the sixteenth century change, and the name of it

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was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen, she married
a Spanish prince and probably saw no more in such
an alliance than her father had done. But by the
time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who was
more cut off from the old religion, though very tenuously
attached to the new one, and by the time time

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the project of a similar Spanish marriage for Elizabeth herself
had fallen through something had matured which was wider and
mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman, standing on
his little island as on a lonely boat, had already
felt falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.

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Wooden cliches about the birth of the British Empire and
the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured,
but contradicted the crucial truth. From such phrases, one would
fancy that England, in some imperial fashion, now first realized
that she was great. It would be far truer to
say that she now first realized that she was small.

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The great poet of the spacious days does not praise
her as spacious, but only as small, like a jewel.
The vision of universal expansion was wholly veiled until the
eighteenth century, and even when it came, was far less
vivid and vital than what came in the sixteenth What
came then was not imperialism, it was anti imperialism. England

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achieved at the beginning of her modern history that one
thing human imagination will always find heroic, the story of
a small nationality, the business of the Armada was to
her what Bennockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to
the Boers, a victory that astonished even the victors. What

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was opposed to them was imperialism in is complete and
colossal sense, a thing unthinkable since Rome. It was, in
no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It was the greatness of
Spain that was the glory of England. It is only
when we realized that the English were, by comparison as dingy,

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as undeveloped, as petty and provincialist Boores, that we can
appreciate the height of their defiance or the splendor of
their escape. We can only grasp it by grasping that
for a great part of Europe, the cause of the
Armada had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade.

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The Pope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate. Logically, it is hard
to see what else he could say, having declared her
mother's marriage invalid. But the fact was another and perhaps
a final stroke, sundering England from the elder world. Meanwhile,
those picturesque English privateers who had plagued the Spanish Empire
of the New World were spoken of in the South

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simply as pirates, and technically the description was true. Only
technical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect rightly
judged with some generous weakness. Then, as if to stamp
the contrast in an imperishable image, Spain, or rather the
Empire with Spain for its center, put forth all its

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strength and seemed to cover the sea with the navy,
Like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on
the doomed island with the weight and solemnity of a
day of judgment. Sailors or pirates struck at it with
small ships staggering under large cannon, fought it with mere
masses of flaming rubbish, And in that last hour of grapple,

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a great storm arose out of the sea and swept
round the island, and the gigantic fleet was seen no more.
The uncanny completeness and abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy
touched the nerve that has never ceased to vibrate. The
hope of England dates from that hopeless hour, For there
is no real hope that has not once been a

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forlorn hope. The breaking of that vast naval net remained,
like a sign that the small thing which escaped would
survive the greatness. And yet there is truly a sense
in which we may never be so small or so
great again. For the splendor of the Elizabethan age, which

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is always spoken of as the sunrise, was in many
ways the sunset. Whether we regard it as the end
of the Renaissance or the end of the old medieval civilization,
no candid critic can deny that its chief glories ended
with it. Let the reader ask himself what strikes him
specially in Elizabethan magnificence, and he will generally find it

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in something of which there were at least traces in
medieval times, and far fewer traces in modern times. The
Elizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies. Its
tempestuous torch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans.
It is needless to say that the chief tragedy was
the cutting short of the comedy. For the comedy that

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came to England after the Restoration was, by comparison, both
foreign and frigid. At the best, it is comedy in
the sense of being humorous, but not in the sense
of being happy. It may be noted that the givers
of good news and good life luck in the Shakespearean
love stories nearly all belong to a world which was passing,
whether they are friars or fairies. It is the same

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with the chief Elizabethan ideals often embodied in the Elizabethan drama.
The national devotion to the Virgin Queen must not be
wholly discredited by its incongruities with the coarse and crafty
character of the historical elizabeth Her Critics might indeed reasonably
say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin Queen,

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the English reformers merely exchanged the true Virgin for a false.
But this truth does not dispose of a true, though limited,
contemporary cult. Whatever we think of that particular virgin queen.
The tragic heroines of the time offers a whole procession
of virgin queens, and it is certain that the Meydi
evils would have understood much better than the moderns the

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modyrdom of measure for measure, and as with the title
of virgin, so with the title of queen. The mystical
monarchy glorified in Richard the Second was soon to be
dethroned much more rouneously than in Richard the Second. The
same Puritans who tore off the pasteboard crowns of the
stage players were also to tear off the real crowns

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of the kings whose parts they played. All mummery was
to be forbidden, and all monarchy to be called mummery.
Shakespeare died upon Saint George's day, and much of what
Saint George had meant died with him. I do not
mean that the patriotism of Shakespeare or of England died.

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That remained and even rose steadily to be the noblest
pride of the coming times. But much more than patriotism
had been involved in that image of Saint George, to
whom the Lion Heart had dedicated England long ago in
the deserts of Palestine. The conception of patron saint had
carried from the Middle Ages in one very unique and

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as yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation
without antagonism. The seven champions of Christendom were multiplied by
seventy times seven in the patrons of towns, trades, and
social types, but the very idea that they were all
saints excluded the possibility of ultimate rivalry in the fact

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that they were all patrons. The Guild of the Shoemakers
and the Guild of the Skinners, carrying the badges of
Saint Crispin and Saint Bartholomew might fight each other in
the streets, but they did not believe that Saint Crispin
and Saint Bartholomew were fighting each other in the skies. Similarly,
the English would cry and battle on Saint George, and

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the French hunt Saint Denis, but they did not seriously
believe that Saint George hated Saint Denis, or even those
who cried upon Saint Denis joan of arc who was
on the point of patriotism what many modern people would
call very fanatical, which yet upon this point what most
modern people would call very enlightened. Now, with the religious schism,

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it cannot be denied, a deeper and more in human
division appeared. It was no longer a scrap between the
followers of saints, who were themselves at peace, but a
war between the followers of gods who were themselves at war.
That the great Spanish ships were named after Saint Francis
or Saint Philip was already beginning to mean little to
the New England. Soon it was to mean something almost

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cosmically conflicting, as if they were named after Bael or Thor.
These are indeed mere symbols, but the process of which
they are symbols was very practical and must be seriously followed.
There entered with the religious wars, the idea which modern
science applies the racial wars, the idea of natural wars,

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not arising from a special quarrel, but from the nature
of the people quarreling. The shadow of racial fatalism first
fell across our path, and far away, in distance and darkness,
something moved that men had almost forgotten. On the frontiers
of the fading Empire. Lay that outer land as loose

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and drifting as the sea which had boiled over in
the Barbarian Wars. Most of it was now formerly Christian,
but barely civilized. A faint awe of the culture of
the South and the West lay on its wild forces
like a light frost. This semi civilized world had long
been asleep, but it had begun to dream in the

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generation before Elizabeth, the great Man, who, with all his violence,
was vitally a dreamer Martin Luther had cried out in
his sleep in a voice like thunder, hardly against the
place of bad customs, but largely also against the place
of good works in the Christian scheme. In the generation
after Elizabeth, the spread of the New wild doctrines in

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the Old wild Lands had sucked Central Europe into a
cyclic war of creeds. In this the house which stood
for the legend of the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, the
Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the old religion against
the league of other Germans fighting for the new. The
continental conditions were indeed complicated, and grew more and more

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complicated as the dream of restoring religious unity receded. They
were complicated by the firm determination of France to be
a nation in the full modern sense, to stand free
and for square from all combinations, a purpose which led her,
while hating her own Protestants at home, to give diplomatic
support to many Protestants abroad, simply because it preserved the

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balance of power against the gigantic confederation of Spaniards and Austrians.
It is complicated by the rise of calvinistic and commercial
power in the Netherlands logical, defiant, defending its own independence
valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we shall be
right if we see the first throes of the modern

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international problems from what is called the Thirty Years War,
whether we call it the revolt of the half Heathens
against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it
the coming of new sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics.
From the north. Sweden took a hand in the struggle
and sent a military hero to the help of the
newer Germany. But the sort of military heroism everywhere exhibited

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offered a strange combination of more and more complex strategic
science with the most naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forces
besides Sweden, found a career in the carnage. Far away
to the northeast, in a sterile land of Fens, a
small ambitious family of money lenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty,

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thoroughly selfish, rather thinly, adopted theories of Luther and began
to lend their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the
Protestant side. They were well paid for it by step
after step of promotion, but at this time their principality,
it was only the old mark of Brandenburg. Their name

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was hawan Zelern. End of Chapter twelve.