13 - 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 (00:04):
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 thirteen, The Age of the Puritans. We should be
very much bored if we had to read an account
of the most exciting argument or string of adventures in
which unmeaning words such as snark or boujum were systematically
substituted for the names of the chief characters or objects

(00:47):
in dispute. If we were told that a king was
given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering
the boujum, or that a mob was roused to fury
by the public exhibition of a boujum, which was inevitably
regarded as a gross reflection on the snark. Yet something
very like this situation is created by most modern attempts

(01:08):
to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while deferring to the fashionable distaste
for theology in this generation, or rather in the last generation. Thus,
the Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic for
what they thought was pure religion. Frequently they wanted to

(01:30):
impose it on others. Sometimes they only wanted to be
free to practice it themselves. But in no case can
justice be done to what was finest in their characters,
as well as first in their thoughts, if we never,
by any chance ask what it was they wanted to
impose or practice. Now, there was a great deal that

(01:53):
was very fine about many of the Puritans, which is
almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the Puritans.
They are praised for things which they either regarded with
indifference or more often detested with frenzy, such as religious liberty.
And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are even
undervalued in their logical case, for the things they really

(02:15):
did care about, such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans
picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate in novels
and plays. They would have publicly burnt. Were interested in
everything about them except the only thing in which they
were interested at all. We have seen that, in the

(02:37):
first instance, the new doctrines in England were simply an
excuse for plutocratic pillage, and that is the only truth
to be told about the matter. But it was far
otherwise with the individuals a generation or two after, to
whom the wreck of the Armada was already a legend
of national deliverance from popery, as miraculous and almost as

(02:58):
remote as deliverance of which they read so realistically in
the Hebrew books now lay open to them. The August
accident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only
too well with their concentration on the non Christian parts
of scripture. It may have satisfied a certain Old Testament
sentiment of the election of the English being announced in

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the stormy Oracles of Air and Sea, which was easily
turned into that heresy of a tribal pride that took
even heavier hold upon the Germans. It is by such
things that civilized state may fall from being a Christian
nation to being a chosen people. But even if their
nationalism was of a kind that has ultimately proved perilous

(03:43):
to the Committee of Nations, it still was nationalism from
first to last. The Puritans were patriots, a point in
which they had market superiority over the French Huguenots. Politically,
they were indeed, at first but one wing of the
new wealthy class, which had despoiled the church and were

(04:04):
proceeding to despoil the crown. But while they were all
merely the creatures of the great spoilation, many of them
were the unconscious creatures of it. They were strongly represented
in the aristocracy, but a great number were the middle classes,
though almost wholly the middle classes of the towns by

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the poor agricultural population, which was still by far the
largest part of the population. They were simply derided and detested.
It may be noted, for instance, that while they led
the nation in many of its higher departments, they could
produce nothing having the atmosphere of what is rather priggishly
called folklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts, rhymes,

(04:49):
or proverbs, is all royalist. About the Puritans, we can
find no great legend. We must put up as best
we can with great literature. All these things, however, are
simply things that other people might have noticed about them.
They are not the most important things, and certainly not

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the things they thought about themselves. The soul of the
movement was in two conceptions, or rather in two steps.
The first being the moral process by which they arrived
at their chief conclusion, and the second the chief conclusion
they arrived at. We will begin with the first, especially
as it was this which determined all the external social

(05:32):
attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honest Puritans,
growing up in youth in a world swept bare by
the great pillage, possessed himself of the first principle, which
is one of the three or four alternative first principles
which are possible to the mind of man. It was
the principle that the mind of man can alone directly

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deal with the mind of God. It may surely be
called the anti sacramental principle, but it really applies, and
he really applied it to many things beside the sacraments
of the Church. It equally applies, and he equally applied
it to art, to letters, to the love of locality,
to music, and even to good manners. The phrase about

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no priest coming between a man and his creator is
but an impoverished fragment of the full philosophical doctrine. The
true Puritan was equally clear that no singer or story
teller or fiddler must translate the voice of God to
him into the tongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable
that the one Puritan man of genius in modern times, Tolstoy,

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did accept this full conclusion, denounced all music as mere drug,
and forbade his own admirers to read his own admirable novels. Now,
the English Puritans were not only Puritans, but Englishman, and
therefore did not always shine in clearness of head. As
we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a Scotch than

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an English thing. But this was the driving power and
the direction, and the doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle,
insane intellectual truth was the only tribute fit for the
highest truth of the universe. And the next step in
such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought
was the truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut

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loose from instinct, as well as tradition, taught him a
concept of the omnipotence of God, which meant simply the
impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier and milder form
of the Protestant process, only went so far as to
say that nothing a man did could help him accept
his confession of Christ. With Calvin it took the last

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logical step and said that even this could not help him,
since omnipotence must have disposed of all his destiny beforehand,
that men must be created to be lost and saved.
In the purer types of whom I speak, this logic
was white hot, and we must read the formula into
all their parliamentary and legal formula. When we read the

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Puritan Party demanded reforms in the church, we must understand
the Puritan Party demanded fuller and clearer affirmation that men
are created to be lost and saved. When we read
the Army selected persons for their godliness, we must understand
the army selected those persons who seemed most convinced that

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men are created to be lost and saved. It should
be added that this terrible trend was not confined even
to Protestant countries. Some great Romanists doubtfully followed it until
stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age
and should be a permanent warning against mistaking the spirit

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of the Age for the immortal spirit of man. For
there are now few Christians or non Christians who can
look back at the Calvinism which nearly captured Canterbury and
even Rome by the genius and heroism of escal Or Milton,
without crying out like the lady in mister Bernard Shaw's play,
How splendid, how glorious, and oh what an escape. The

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next thing to note is that their conception of church
government was in a true sense self government, and yet
for a particular reason, turned out to be rather selfish government.
It was equal, and yet it was exclusive. Internally, the
syned Or Conventicle tended to be a small republic, but
fortunately to be a very small republic in relation to

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the street outside. The conventicle was not a republic but
an aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies,
that of the elect, for it was not a right
of birth, but a right before birth, and alone of
all nobilities, it was not laid level in the dust.
Hence we have, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans,

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a ring of real republican virtue, a defiance of tyrants,
an assertion of human dignity, but above all, an appeal
to that first of all republican virtues, publicity. One of
the regicides, on trial for his life, struck the note
which all the unnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility.

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This thing was not done in a corner. But their
most drastic idealism did nothing to recover a ray of
the light that at once lightened every man that came
into the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all
baptized people. They were indeed very like that dreadful scaffold
at which the regicide was not afraid to point. They

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were certainly public, they may have been public spirited. They
were never popular, and it seems never to have crossed
their minds that there was any need to be popular.
England was never so little of democracy as during the
short time when she was a republic. The struggle with

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the Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history,
arose from an alliance which some may think an accidental alliance,
between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinism,
which affected the cultural world, as did our recent intellectual
fashion of collectivism. The second was the older thing, which

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had made that creed and perhaps that cultured world possible.
The aristocratic revolt under the last tutors. It was, we
might say, the story of a father and a son
breaking down the same golden image. But the younger really
from hatred of idolatry, and the older solely from love
of gold. It is at once the tragedy and the

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paradox of England, that it was the eternal passion that
passed and the trenchient or terrestrial passion that remained. This
was true of England, it was far less true of Scotland,
and that is the meaning of the Scotch and English
War that ended at Worceshire. The First Change had indeed
been much the same materialist manner in both countries, a

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mere brigandage of barons, and even John Knox, though he
has become a national hero, was an extremely anti national politician.
The Patriot Party in Scotland was that of Cardinal Beaton
and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the New Creed did become popular
in the Lowlands in a positive sense not even yet

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known in our own land. Hence, since Scotland, Puritanism was
the main thing and was mixed with parliamentary and other oligarchies,
in England, parliamentary oligarchy was the main thing and was
mixed with Puritanism. When the storm began to rise against
Charles the First after the more or less transitional time

(13:08):
of his father, the Scotch successor of Elizabeth. The instances
commonly cited mark all the difference between democratic religion and
aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny Getty's,
the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest.
The English legend is that of John Hampden, the great

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squire who raised the country against the king. The parliamentary
movement in England was indeed almost wholly a thing of squires,
with their new allies, the Merchants. They were squires who
may well have regarded themselves as the real and natural
leaders of the English. But they were leaders who allowed
no mutiny among their followers. There was certainly no village Hemden.

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In Hemden Village. The Stuarts, it may be suspected, brought
from Scotland a more medieval and therefore more logical view
of their own function, For the note of their nation
was logic. It is a proverb that James the First
was a Scot and pedant. It is hardly sufficiently noted
that Charles the First also was not a little of

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a pedant, being very much of a Scot. He had
also the virtues of a Scott courage and quiet, natural dignity,
and an appetite for the things of the mind. Being
somewhat Scottish, he was very un English and could not
manage a compromise. He tried instead to split hairs, and
seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have

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been far more inconsistent if he had been a little
hardy and hazy. But he was of the sort that
sees everything in black and white, and it is therefore remembered,
especially the black. From the first he fenced with his
parliament as with a mere foe. Perhaps he almost felt
it as a foreigner. The issue is familiar, and we

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need not these so careful as the gentleman who wished
to finish the chapter in order to find out what
happened to Charles the First. His minister, the Great Strafford,
was foiled in an attempt to make him strong in
the fashion of a French king, and perished on the
scaffold of frustrated Richelieu. The parliament, claiming the power of

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the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword,
and at first carried all before him, but success passed
to the wealth of the parliamentary class. The discipline of
the new army, and the patience and genius of Cromwell,
and Charles died the same death as his great servant. Historically,

(15:39):
the quarrel resolved itself through ramifications generally followed, perhaps in
more detail than they deserve, into the great modern query
of whether a king can raise taxes without the consent
of his parliament. The test case was that of Hamden,
the great Buckinghamshire magnate, who challenged the legality of a
tax which Charles imposed professedly for a national navy. As

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even innovators always of necessity seek for sanctity in the past,
the Puritan squires made a legend of the medieval magna carta,
and they were so far in a true tradition that
the concession of John had really been, as we have
already noted, anti despotic without being democratic. These two truths

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cover two parts of the problem of the Stewart Fall,
which are very different, certainly, and should be considered separately.
For the first point about democracy, no candid person, in
the face of the facts can really consider it at all.
It is quite possible to hold that the seventeenth century
Parliament was fighting for the truth it is not possible

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to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After
the Autumn of the Middle Ages. Parliament was always actively
aristocratic and actively answered popular. Institution which, forbade Charles the
first to raise ship money was the same institution which
previously forbade Richard the second to free the serfs. The

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group which claimed coal and minerals from Charles the First
was the same which afterward claimed the common lands from
the village community. It was the same institution which only
two generations before had eagerly helped to destroy not merely
things of popular sentiment, like the monasteries, but all the
things of popular utility, like the guilds and the parishes,

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the local governments of towns, and trades. The work of
the great lords may have had, indeed it certainly had
another more patriotic and creative side, but it was exclusively
the work of the great lords that was done by Parliament.
The House of Commons has itself been a house of lords.

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But when we turn to the other or anti despotic
aspect of the campaign against the Stewarts, we come to
something much more difficult to dismiss and much more easy
to justify. While the stupidest things are set against the Stewards.
The real contemporary case for their enemies is little realized,
for it is connected with what our insular history most neglects,

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the condition of the continent. It should be remembered that
though the Stewards failed in England, they fought for things
that succeeded in Europe. These were, roughly first the effects
of the counter Reformation, which made the sincere Protestancy Stuart
Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an
old flame, but as the spread of a conflagation. Charles

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the Second, for instance, was a man of strong, skeptical
and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was quite certainly
and even reluctantly convinced of Catholicism as a philosophy. The
other and more important matter here was the almost awful
autocracy that was being built up in France like a
bast deal. It was more logical and in many ways

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more equal and even equitable than the English oligarchy, but
it really became a tyranny in case of rebellion or
even resistance. There were none of the rough English safeguards
of juries and good customs of the old common law.
There was letter de cachet as unanswerable as magic. The

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English who defied the law were better off than the French.
A French satirist would probably have retorted that it was
the English who obeyed the law who were worse off
than the French. The ordering of men's normal lives was
with the squire, but he was, if anything more limited
when he was a magistrate. He was stronger as master

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of the village, but actually weaker as agent of the
king in defending this state of things. In short, the
Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they were, in
a real sense defending liberty. They were even defending some
remains of medieval liberty, though not the best. The jury,

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not the guild. Even feudalism had involved a localism not
without liberal elements, which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those
who loved such things might well be alarmed at the
leviathan of the state, which, for Hobbes was a single
monster and for France a single man. As to the

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mere facts, it must be said again that in so
far as Puritanism was pure, it was unfortunately passing, and
the very type of the transition by which it passed
can be found in that extraordinary man who is popularly
credited with making it predominant. Oliver Cromwell is in history
much less the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism.

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He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all
his life, by the rather somber religious passions of his period.
But as he emerges into importance, he stands more and
more for the positivism of the English as compared with
the Puritanism of the Scotch. He is one of the

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Puritan squires, but he is steadily more of the squire
and less of the Puritan, and he points to the
process by which the squirearchy became at last merely pagan.
This is the key to most of what is praised
and most of what is blamed in him, the key
to the comparative sanity, toleration, and modern efficiency of many

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of his departures, the key to the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism,
and lack of sympathy in many others. He was the
reverse of an idealist, and he cannot be, without absurdity,
be held up as an ideal. But he was, like
most of the squires, a type genuinely English, not without

(21:54):
public spirit, certainly not without patriotism. His seizure of personal power,
which destroyoud an impersonal and ideal government, had something English
in its very unreason. The act of killing the King
I Fancy was not primarily his, and certainly not characteristically his.
It was a concession to the high inhuman ideals of

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the tiny group of true Puritans with whom he had
to compromise, but with whom he afterward collided. It was
logic rather than cruelty in the act that was not Cromwellian,
for he treated with bestial cruelty the native Irish, whom
the new spiritual exclusiveness regarded as beasts, or as the

(22:38):
modern euphemism would put it, as aborigines. But his practical
temper was more akin to set human slaughter on what
seemed to him the edges of civilization, than to a
sort of human sacrifice in the very center and forum
of it. He is not a representative regicide in a sense.
That piece of headsmanship was rather above his head. The

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real regicides did it in a sort of trance servision,
and he was not troubled with visions. But the true
collision between the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth
century movement came symbolically on that day of driving Storm
at Dunbar, when the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and
forced him down into the valley to be the victim

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of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell said that God had
delivered them into his hand, but it was their own
God who delivered them the dark, unnatural god of the
Calvinist dreams, as overpowering, as a nightmare, and as passing.
It was the Whig rather than the Puritan the triumph

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on that day. It was the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise,
And even what followed Cromwell's death, the restoration was an
Aristocratic compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might
cheer as for medieval king, but the protectorate and the
restoration were more of a peace than the mob understood.

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Even in the superficial things where there seemed to be
a rescue, it was ultimately a respite. Thus the Puritan
regime had risen chiefly by one thing unknown to medievalism. Militarism.
Picked professional troops, harshly drilled but highly paid, were a
new and alien instrument by which the Puritans became masters.

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These were disbanded and their return resisted by Tories and Whigs,
but their return seemed always imminent, because it was in
the spirit of the new stern world of the Thirty
Years War. A discovery is an incurable disease, and it
had been discovered that a crowd could be turned into
an iron centipede, crushing larger and looser crowds. Similarly, the

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remains of Christmas were rescued from the Puritans, but they
had eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from the utilitarians,
and may yet have to be rescued by someone from
the vegetarians and teetotalers. The Strange army passed and vanished,
almost like a Moslem invasion. But it had made the

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difference that armed valor and victory always make, if it
was but a negative difference. It was the final break
in our history. It was a breaker of many things,
and perhaps a popular rebellion in our land. It is
something of a verbal symbol that these men founded New
England in America, for indeed, they tried to found it

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here by a paradox, there was something prehistoric in the
very nakedness of their novelty. Even the old and savage
things they invoked became more savage in becoming more new.
In observing what is called their Jewish stabat, they would
have had to stone the strictest jew And they, and

(26:04):
indeed their age, generally turned witch hunting from an episode
to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed disappeared together,
but they remain as something nobler than the nibbling legalism
of some of the Whig cynics who continue their work.
They were, above all things anti historic, like the futurists

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in Italy, and there was this unconscious greatness about them,
that their very sacrilege was public and solemn, like a sacrament,
and they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was properly
considered but a very secondary example of their strange and
violent simplicity, that one of them, before a mighty mob

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at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sacramental
man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in
the Western Shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from
which had grown the whole story of Britain end of
Chapter thirteen,