September 25, 2025 • 26 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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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 fourteen, The Triumph of the Whigs. Whether or no
(00:31):
we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there can be
little doubt that the Restoration did not really restore. Charles
the Second was never, in the old sense a king.
He was a leader of the opposition to his own ministers.
Because he was a clever politician, he kept his official post,
(00:53):
and because his brother and successor was an incredibly stupid politician,
he lost it. But the throne was already only one
of the official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles the
Second was fitted for the more modern world than beginning.
He was rather an eighteenth century than a seventeenth century man.
(01:16):
He was as witty as a character in a comedy,
and it was already the comedy of Sheridan, and not
of Shakespeare. He was more modern yet, when he enjoyed
the pure experimentalism of the royal society and bent eagerly
over the toys that were to grow into the terrible
engines of science. He and his brother, however, had two
(01:38):
links with what was in England, the losing side, and
by the strain on these, their dynastic cause was lost.
The first, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed,
was of course, the hatred felt for their religion. The second,
which grew as it neared the next century, was there
(02:00):
tie with the French monarchy. We will deal with the
religious quarrel before passing on to a much more irreligious age,
but the truth about it is tangled and far from
easy to trace. The tutors had begun to persecute the
old religion before they had ceased to belong to it.
(02:21):
That is one of the transitional complexities that can only
be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type
and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally and even fiercely
that priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody
caught talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which
(02:43):
may be very variously explained, covered the Church of England
and in a great degree the people of England, whether
it be called the Catholic continuity of Anglicanism, or merely
the slow extirpation of Catholicism. There can be no doubt
that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as late as
(03:03):
the Civil War, was stuffed with superstitions which were Catholic
in the extreme sense we should now call continental. Yet
many similar parsons had already a parallel and opposite passion
and thought of continental Catholicism, not even as the errant
Church of Christ, but as the consistent Church of Antichrist.
(03:26):
It is therefore very hard now to guess the proportion
of Protestantism, but there's no doubt about its presence, especially
its presence in centers of importance like London. By the
time of Charles the Second, after the purge of the
Puritan terror, it had begun something at least more inherent
and human than the mere exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or
(03:48):
the craft of tudor nobles. The Monmouth Rebellion showed that
it had a popular, though and insufficiently popular backing. The pope.
Reforce became the crowd, if it never became the people.
It was perhaps increasingly an urban crowd, and was subject
to those epidemics of detailed delusion with which sensational journalism
(04:13):
plays on the urban crowds of today. One of these
scares and scoops, not to add the less technical name
of lies, was the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily
by Charles the Second. Another was the tale of the
Warming Pan or the Bogus heir to the Throne, a
storm that finally swept away James the Second. The last blow, however,
(04:38):
could hardly have fallen but for one of those theological
but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone.
The debate about the Church of England then and now
differs from most debates in one vital point. It is
not a debate about what an institution ought to do,
or whether that institution ought to alter, but about what
(04:59):
the that institution actually is. One party, then as now
only cared forth because it was Catholic, and the other
only cared forth because it was Protestant. Now something had
certainly happened to the English, quite inconceivable to the Scotch
or the Irish. Masses of common people loved the Church
(05:20):
of England without having even decided what it was. It
had a whole different, indeed from that of the medieval church,
but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility
which clung to it in the succeeding century. A colleague,
with the widely different purpose in mind, devotes some pages
to proving that an Anglican clergyman was socially a mere
(05:43):
upper servant in the seventeenth century. He is probably right,
but he does not guess that this was but the
degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the Middle Ages.
A priest was not treated as a gentleman, but a
peasant was treated as a priest. And in England then,
(06:05):
as in Europe now, many entertained the fancy that priesthood
was a higher thing than gentility. In short, the national
Church was then at least really national, in a fashion
that was emotionally vivid, though intellectually vague. When therefore James
the second seemed to menace this practicing communion, he aroused
(06:27):
something at least more popular than the mere priggishness of
the Whig lords. To this must be added a fact
generally forgotten. I mean the fact that the influence then
cold Popish, was then in a real sense regarded as revolutionary.
The Jesuits seemed to the English not merely a conspirator,
but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling about
(06:50):
abstract speculations to many Englishmen, and the abstract speculations of
Jesuits like Waraz dealt with extreme democracy and things on
dreams to hear. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed
thus to many as vast and empty, as atheism. The
only seventeenth century Englishmen who had something of this transcendental
(07:12):
abstraction were the Quakers, and the cozy English Compromise shuddered
when the two things shook hands, for it was something
much more than a Stuart intrigue which made these philosophical
extremes meet, merely because they were philosophical, and which brought
the weary but humorous mind of Charles the Second into
(07:34):
alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn.
Much of England then was really alarmed at the Stuart's
scheme of toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical
and therefore fanciful, it was in advance of its age,
or to use a more intelligent language, too thin and
(07:55):
ethereal for its atmosphere. And to this affection for the
the actual in the English moderates must be added, in
what proportion we know, not a persecuting hatred of popery,
almost maniacal, but quite sincere. The state had, long as
we have seen, been turned to an engine of torture
(08:16):
against priests and the friends of priests. Men talk of
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but the English
persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But
at least by this time the English, like the French persecutors,
were repressing a minority. Unfortunately, there was another province of
(08:36):
government in which they were still more madly persecuting the majority.
For it was here that came to its climax and
took on its terrific character, that lingering crime that was
called government of Ireland. It would take too long to
detail the close network of unnatural laws by which that
country was covered till toward the end of the eighteenth century.
(09:00):
It is enough to say here that the whole attitude
to the Irish was tragically typified and tied up with
our expulsion of the Stewarts. In one of those acts
that are remembered forever, James the second fleeing from the
opinion of London, perhaps of England eventually found refuge in Ireland,
which took arms in his favor. The Prince of Orange,
(09:22):
whom their aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in
that country with an English and Dutch army, won the
Battle of the Boine, but saw his army successfully arrested
before Limerick by the military genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The
check was so complete that peace could only be restored
by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish in return
(09:44):
for the surrender of Limerick. The new English government occupied
the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not
a matter on which there is much more to be said.
It was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it,
but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it.
For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it
(10:05):
incessantly forever. But here again, the Stewart position was much
more vulnerable on the side of secular policy, and especially
a foreign policy. The aristocrats to whom power passed finally
at the Revolution, were already ceasing to have any supernatural
faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism, but they had a
(10:28):
very natural faith in England as against France, and even
in a certain sense in English institutions as against French institutions.
And just as these men, the most un medieval of mankind,
could yet boast about some medieval liberties magna carta, the
parliament and the jury, so they could appeal to a
(10:50):
true medieval legend in the matter of a war with France.
A typical eighteenth century oligarch like Horace Walpole could complain
that the ciss their rome in an old church troubled
him with traces of an irrelevant person named Saint Somebody
when he was looking for the remains of John of Gaunt.
(11:10):
He could say it with all the naivete of skepticism,
and never dream how far away from John Gaunt he
was really wandering and saying so. But though their notion
of medieval history was a mere masquerade ball, it was
one in which men fighting the French could still, in
an ornamental way, put on the armour of the Black
Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth in this matter.
(11:33):
In short, it is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular,
as patriots will always be popular. It is true that
the last Stuarts were themselves far from unpatriotic, and James
the second in particular may well be called the founder
of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France,
among other foreign countries. They took refuge in France, the
(11:56):
Elder before and the younger after his period of rule,
and France aid the later Jacobite efforts to restore their line,
and for the new England, especially the new English nobility,
France was the enemy. The transformation through which the external
relations of England passed at the end of the seventeenth
(12:17):
century is symbolized by two very separate and definite steps,
the first the accession of a Dutch king, and the
second the accession of a German king. In the first,
whore present all the features that can partially make an
unnatural thing natural. In the second we have the condition
in which even those affecting it can hardly call it natural,
(12:40):
but only call it necessary. William of Orange was like
a gun dragged into the breach of a wall, a
foreign gun, indeed, and one fired in a quarrel more
foreign than English, but still a quarrel in which the English,
and especially the English aristocrats could play a great part.
George of Hanover simply something stuffed into a hole in
(13:01):
a wall by English aristocrats who practically admitted that they
were simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways, William
cynical as he was carried on the legend of the
greater and grimmer Puritanism. He was, in private conviction a Calvinist.
And nobody knew or cared what George was, except that
(13:22):
he was not a Catholic. He was at home, the
partly republican magistrate of what had once been a purely
republican experiment, and among the cleaner, if colder ideals of
the seventeenth century. George was when he was at home
pretty much what the King of the Cannibal Islands was
(13:42):
when he was at home, a savage personal ruler, scarcely
logical enough to be called a despot. William was a
man of acute, of narrow intelligence. George was a man
of no intelligence, above all, touching the immediate effect produced.
William was married to a Stuart, and ascended the throne
hand in hand with a Stuart. He was a familiar
(14:04):
figure and already a part of our royal family. With
George there entered England, something that had scarcely been seen
there before, something hardly mentioned in medieval or Renaissance writing,
except as one mentions a Hottentot, a barbarian from beyond
the Rhine. The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the
(14:28):
period between these two foreign kings, is therefore the true
time of transition. It is the bridge between the time
when the aristocrats were at least weak enough to call
in a strong man to help them, and the time
when they were strong enough to deliberately call in a
weak man who would allow them to help themselves. To symbolize,
as always to simplify, and to simplify too much, But
(14:51):
the whole may well be symbolized as the struggle of
two great figures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both
courageous and clear about their own aims, and in everything
else a violent contrast at every point. One of them
was Henry Saint John, Lord Bolingbroke. The other was John Churchill,
(15:13):
the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story of
Churchill is primarily the story of the revolution and how
he succeeded. The story of Baalingbrooke is the story of
the counter revolution and how it had failed. Churchill is
a type of the extraordinary time in this that he
(15:34):
combines the presence of glory with the absence of honor.
When the new aristocracy had become normal to the nation,
in the next few generations, it produced personal types not
only of aristocracy but of chivalry. The Revolution reduced us
to a country wholly governed by gentlemen. The popular universities
and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds and abbeys,
(15:57):
had been seized and turned into what they are factories
of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories of snobs.
It is hard now to realize that what we call
the public schools were once undoubtedly public. By the Revolution,
they were already becoming as private as they are now.
But at least in the eighteenth century there were great
(16:19):
gentlemen in the generous, perhaps too generous, since now given
to the title. Types not merely honest, but rash and
romantic in their honesty, remain in the record with the
names of Nelson or of Fox. We have already seen
that the latter reformers defaced from fanaticism the churches which
the first reformers had defaced simply from avarice. Rather in
(16:42):
the same way the eighteenth century Whigs often praise in
a spirit of pure magnanimity what the seventeenth century Whigs
had done in a spirit of pure meanness. How mean
was that meanness can only be estimated by realizing that
a great military hero had not even the ordinary military
virtues of loyalty to his flag or obedience to his
(17:05):
superior officers, that he picked his way through campaigns that
have made him immortal with the watchful spirit of a
thieving camp follower. When William landed at Torbay on the
invitation of the other Whig nobles, Churchill, as if to
add something ideal to his imitation of ascariate, went to
James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth
(17:28):
in arms as if to defend the country from invasion,
and then calmly handed the army over to the invader.
To the finish of this work of art, but few
could aspire, but in their degree, all the politicians of
the Revolution were upon this ethical pattern. While they surrounded
the throne of James. There was scarcely one of them
who was not in correspondence with William. When they afterwards
(17:51):
surrounded the throne of William, there was not one of
them who was not still in correspondence with James. It
was such men who defeated Irish Jacobitism by the Treason
of Limerick. It was such men who defeated Scott's Jacobitism
by the Treason of Glencoe. Thus the strange yet splendid
(18:13):
story of eighteenth century England is one of greatness founded
on smallness, a pyramid standing on a point, or to
vary the metaphor, the new Mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized
even in the externals of its great sister, the mercantile
oligarchy of Venice. The solidity was all in the superstructure.
(18:35):
The fluctuation had been all in the foundations. The Great
Temple of Chatham and Warren Hastings was reared in its
origins on things as unstable as water and as fugitive
as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to
connect the unstable element with something restless and even shifty
in the Lords of the Sea. But there was certainly
(18:56):
in the genesis, if not the later generation of Armorial aristocracy,
a thing only too mercantile, something which had also been
urged against a yet older example of that polity, something
called punica fides. The great royalist Strafford, going disillusion to death,
(19:17):
had said, put not your trust in princes. The great
royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, and
least of all in merchant princes. Ballingbrooke stands for a
whole body of convictions which bolked very big in English history,
but which, with the recent windings of the course of history,
(19:39):
have gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it, we
cannot understand our past, nor I will add our future.
Curiously enough, the best English books of the eighteenth century
are crammed with it, yet modern culture cannot see it
when it is there. Doctor Johnson is full of it.
It is what he meant when he denounced minority rule
(19:59):
in Ireland, as well as when he said that the
devil was the first whig. Goldsmith is full of it.
It is the whole point of that fine poem The
Deserted Village, and it is set out theoretically with great
lucidity and spirit in the vicar of Wakefield. Swift is
full of it and found in it an intellectual brotherhood
in arms with Ballingbroke himself. In the time of Queen Anne.
(20:22):
It was probably the opinion of the majority of people
in England, but it was not only in Ireland that
the minority had begun to rule. This conviction has brilliantly
expounded by Bolingbrook had many aspects. Perhaps the most practical
was the point that one of the virtues of a
despot is distance. It is the little tyrant of the
(20:44):
fields that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism
that a good king is not only a good thing,
but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the
paradox that even a bad king is a good king,
for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure
on the populace. If he is a tyrant, he chiefly
(21:05):
tortures the torturers, and though Nero's murder of his own
mother was hardly perhaps again to his soul, it was
no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a
wholly rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects
a fine and typical eighteenth century intellect, a free thinking deist,
(21:28):
a clear and classic writer of English. But he was
also a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political courage,
and he made one last throw for the Stewarts. It
was defeated by the great Whig nobles, who formed the
committee of the new Regime of the Gentry. And considering
who it was who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary
(21:49):
to say that it was defeated by a trick. The
small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted
into it like a dummy, and a great English royalist
went into exile. Twenty years afterward, he reappears and reasserts
his living and logical faith in a popular monarchy. But
(22:10):
it is typical of the whole detachment and distinction of
his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing
to strengthen the heir of the king, whom he had
tried to exclude. He was always a royalist, but never
a Jacobite. What he cared for was not a royal family,
but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book,
(22:31):
The Patriot King, written in exile. And when he thought
that George's great grandson was enough of a patriot, he
only wished he might be more of a king. He made,
in his old age yet another attempt, with such unpromising
instruments as George the Third and Lord Bute, And when
these broke in his hand, he died with all the
(22:53):
dignity of the said Victor. Catonny. The great commercial aristocracy
grew on to its full stature. But if we wished
to realize the good and ill of its growth, there
is no better summary than this section, from the first
to the last of the Foil Coudeta of Balingbrooke. In
the first his policy made peace with France and broke
(23:14):
the connection with Austria. In the second his policy again
made peace with France and broke the connection with Prussia.
For in that interval the seed of the money lending
squires of Brandenburg had waxed mighty, and had already become
that prodigy which has become so enormous a problem in Europe.
By the end of this epoch, Chatham, who incarnated and
(23:37):
even created, at least in a representative sense, all that
we call the British Empire, was at the height of
his own and his country's glory. He summarized the new
England of the revolution in everything, especially in everything in
which that movement seemed too many to be intrinsically contradictory,
and yet was most corporately consistent. Thus he was a
(24:01):
Whig and even in some ways what we should call
a Jingo, and the Whig Party was consistently the Jingo Party.
He was an aristocrat in the sense that all our
public men were then aristocrats. But he was very emphatically
what may be called the commercialist. One might almost say Carthaginian.
(24:23):
In this connection. It has the characteristic which perhaps humanized,
but was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan. I
mean that he could use the middle classes. It was
a young soldier of middle rank, James Wolfe, who fell
gloriously driving the French out of Quebec. It was a
young clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who
(24:44):
threw open to the English the golden gates of India.
But it was precisely one of the strong points of
this eighteenth century aristocracy that it wielded without friction the
wealthier bourgeoisie. It was not there that social cleavage was
to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator, and though
(25:06):
parliament was as narrow as the Senate. It was one
of the great senators. The very word recalls the role
of those noble Roman phrases they often used, which we
are right in calling classic, but wrong in calling cold.
In some ways, nothing could be further from all this fine,
(25:26):
if florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all
this air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than
the little inland state of the stingy drill sergeants of Potsdam,
hammering mere savages into mere soldiers. And yet the great
chief of these was, in some ways like a shadow
of Chatham flung across the world, the sort of shadow
(25:49):
that is at once an enlargement and a caricature. The
English lords, whose paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here
something drawn out long and then out of their own theories.
What was paganism in Chatham was atheism in Frederick the Great,
And what was in the first patriotism was in the
(26:11):
second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibal theory
of a commonwealth that it can, of its nature eat
other commonwealths had entered Christendom, its autocracy, and our own
aristocracy drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed for a time
to be wedded, but not before the Great Bolingbroke had
(26:34):
made a dying gesture as if to forbid the bands
end of chapter fourteen.
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 fourteen, The Triumph of the Whigs. Whether or no
(00:31):
we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there can be
little doubt that the Restoration did not really restore. Charles
the Second was never, in the old sense a king.
He was a leader of the opposition to his own ministers.
Because he was a clever politician, he kept his official post,
(00:53):
and because his brother and successor was an incredibly stupid politician,
he lost it. But the throne was already only one
of the official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles the
Second was fitted for the more modern world than beginning.
He was rather an eighteenth century than a seventeenth century man.
(01:16):
He was as witty as a character in a comedy,
and it was already the comedy of Sheridan, and not
of Shakespeare. He was more modern yet, when he enjoyed
the pure experimentalism of the royal society and bent eagerly
over the toys that were to grow into the terrible
engines of science. He and his brother, however, had two
(01:38):
links with what was in England, the losing side, and
by the strain on these, their dynastic cause was lost.
The first, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed,
was of course, the hatred felt for their religion. The second,
which grew as it neared the next century, was there
(02:00):
tie with the French monarchy. We will deal with the
religious quarrel before passing on to a much more irreligious age,
but the truth about it is tangled and far from
easy to trace. The tutors had begun to persecute the
old religion before they had ceased to belong to it.
(02:21):
That is one of the transitional complexities that can only
be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type
and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally and even fiercely
that priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody
caught talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which
(02:43):
may be very variously explained, covered the Church of England
and in a great degree the people of England, whether
it be called the Catholic continuity of Anglicanism, or merely
the slow extirpation of Catholicism. There can be no doubt
that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as late as
(03:03):
the Civil War, was stuffed with superstitions which were Catholic
in the extreme sense we should now call continental. Yet
many similar parsons had already a parallel and opposite passion
and thought of continental Catholicism, not even as the errant
Church of Christ, but as the consistent Church of Antichrist.
(03:26):
It is therefore very hard now to guess the proportion
of Protestantism, but there's no doubt about its presence, especially
its presence in centers of importance like London. By the
time of Charles the Second, after the purge of the
Puritan terror, it had begun something at least more inherent
and human than the mere exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or
(03:48):
the craft of tudor nobles. The Monmouth Rebellion showed that
it had a popular, though and insufficiently popular backing. The pope.
Reforce became the crowd, if it never became the people.
It was perhaps increasingly an urban crowd, and was subject
to those epidemics of detailed delusion with which sensational journalism
(04:13):
plays on the urban crowds of today. One of these
scares and scoops, not to add the less technical name
of lies, was the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily
by Charles the Second. Another was the tale of the
Warming Pan or the Bogus heir to the Throne, a
storm that finally swept away James the Second. The last blow, however,
(04:38):
could hardly have fallen but for one of those theological
but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone.
The debate about the Church of England then and now
differs from most debates in one vital point. It is
not a debate about what an institution ought to do,
or whether that institution ought to alter, but about what
(04:59):
the that institution actually is. One party, then as now
only cared forth because it was Catholic, and the other
only cared forth because it was Protestant. Now something had
certainly happened to the English, quite inconceivable to the Scotch
or the Irish. Masses of common people loved the Church
(05:20):
of England without having even decided what it was. It
had a whole different, indeed from that of the medieval church,
but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility
which clung to it in the succeeding century. A colleague,
with the widely different purpose in mind, devotes some pages
to proving that an Anglican clergyman was socially a mere
(05:43):
upper servant in the seventeenth century. He is probably right,
but he does not guess that this was but the
degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the Middle Ages.
A priest was not treated as a gentleman, but a
peasant was treated as a priest. And in England then,
(06:05):
as in Europe now, many entertained the fancy that priesthood
was a higher thing than gentility. In short, the national
Church was then at least really national, in a fashion
that was emotionally vivid, though intellectually vague. When therefore James
the second seemed to menace this practicing communion, he aroused
(06:27):
something at least more popular than the mere priggishness of
the Whig lords. To this must be added a fact
generally forgotten. I mean the fact that the influence then
cold Popish, was then in a real sense regarded as revolutionary.
The Jesuits seemed to the English not merely a conspirator,
but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling about
(06:50):
abstract speculations to many Englishmen, and the abstract speculations of
Jesuits like Waraz dealt with extreme democracy and things on
dreams to hear. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed
thus to many as vast and empty, as atheism. The
only seventeenth century Englishmen who had something of this transcendental
(07:12):
abstraction were the Quakers, and the cozy English Compromise shuddered
when the two things shook hands, for it was something
much more than a Stuart intrigue which made these philosophical
extremes meet, merely because they were philosophical, and which brought
the weary but humorous mind of Charles the Second into
(07:34):
alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn.
Much of England then was really alarmed at the Stuart's
scheme of toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical
and therefore fanciful, it was in advance of its age,
or to use a more intelligent language, too thin and
(07:55):
ethereal for its atmosphere. And to this affection for the
the actual in the English moderates must be added, in
what proportion we know, not a persecuting hatred of popery,
almost maniacal, but quite sincere. The state had, long as
we have seen, been turned to an engine of torture
(08:16):
against priests and the friends of priests. Men talk of
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but the English
persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But
at least by this time the English, like the French persecutors,
were repressing a minority. Unfortunately, there was another province of
(08:36):
government in which they were still more madly persecuting the majority.
For it was here that came to its climax and
took on its terrific character, that lingering crime that was
called government of Ireland. It would take too long to
detail the close network of unnatural laws by which that
country was covered till toward the end of the eighteenth century.
(09:00):
It is enough to say here that the whole attitude
to the Irish was tragically typified and tied up with
our expulsion of the Stewarts. In one of those acts
that are remembered forever, James the second fleeing from the
opinion of London, perhaps of England eventually found refuge in Ireland,
which took arms in his favor. The Prince of Orange,
(09:22):
whom their aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in
that country with an English and Dutch army, won the
Battle of the Boine, but saw his army successfully arrested
before Limerick by the military genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The
check was so complete that peace could only be restored
by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish in return
(09:44):
for the surrender of Limerick. The new English government occupied
the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not
a matter on which there is much more to be said.
It was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it,
but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it.
For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it
(10:05):
incessantly forever. But here again, the Stewart position was much
more vulnerable on the side of secular policy, and especially
a foreign policy. The aristocrats to whom power passed finally
at the Revolution, were already ceasing to have any supernatural
faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism, but they had a
(10:28):
very natural faith in England as against France, and even
in a certain sense in English institutions as against French institutions.
And just as these men, the most un medieval of mankind,
could yet boast about some medieval liberties magna carta, the
parliament and the jury, so they could appeal to a
(10:50):
true medieval legend in the matter of a war with France.
A typical eighteenth century oligarch like Horace Walpole could complain
that the ciss their rome in an old church troubled
him with traces of an irrelevant person named Saint Somebody
when he was looking for the remains of John of Gaunt.
(11:10):
He could say it with all the naivete of skepticism,
and never dream how far away from John Gaunt he
was really wandering and saying so. But though their notion
of medieval history was a mere masquerade ball, it was
one in which men fighting the French could still, in
an ornamental way, put on the armour of the Black
Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth in this matter.
(11:33):
In short, it is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular,
as patriots will always be popular. It is true that
the last Stuarts were themselves far from unpatriotic, and James
the second in particular may well be called the founder
of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France,
among other foreign countries. They took refuge in France, the
(11:56):
Elder before and the younger after his period of rule,
and France aid the later Jacobite efforts to restore their line,
and for the new England, especially the new English nobility,
France was the enemy. The transformation through which the external
relations of England passed at the end of the seventeenth
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century is symbolized by two very separate and definite steps,
the first the accession of a Dutch king, and the
second the accession of a German king. In the first,
whore present all the features that can partially make an
unnatural thing natural. In the second we have the condition
in which even those affecting it can hardly call it natural,
(12:40):
but only call it necessary. William of Orange was like
a gun dragged into the breach of a wall, a
foreign gun, indeed, and one fired in a quarrel more
foreign than English, but still a quarrel in which the English,
and especially the English aristocrats could play a great part.
George of Hanover simply something stuffed into a hole in
(13:01):
a wall by English aristocrats who practically admitted that they
were simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways, William
cynical as he was carried on the legend of the
greater and grimmer Puritanism. He was, in private conviction a Calvinist.
And nobody knew or cared what George was, except that
(13:22):
he was not a Catholic. He was at home, the
partly republican magistrate of what had once been a purely
republican experiment, and among the cleaner, if colder ideals of
the seventeenth century. George was when he was at home
pretty much what the King of the Cannibal Islands was
(13:42):
when he was at home, a savage personal ruler, scarcely
logical enough to be called a despot. William was a
man of acute, of narrow intelligence. George was a man
of no intelligence, above all, touching the immediate effect produced.
William was married to a Stuart, and ascended the throne
hand in hand with a Stuart. He was a familiar
(14:04):
figure and already a part of our royal family. With
George there entered England, something that had scarcely been seen
there before, something hardly mentioned in medieval or Renaissance writing,
except as one mentions a Hottentot, a barbarian from beyond
the Rhine. The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the
(14:28):
period between these two foreign kings, is therefore the true
time of transition. It is the bridge between the time
when the aristocrats were at least weak enough to call
in a strong man to help them, and the time
when they were strong enough to deliberately call in a
weak man who would allow them to help themselves. To symbolize,
as always to simplify, and to simplify too much, But
(14:51):
the whole may well be symbolized as the struggle of
two great figures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both
courageous and clear about their own aims, and in everything
else a violent contrast at every point. One of them
was Henry Saint John, Lord Bolingbroke. The other was John Churchill,
(15:13):
the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story of
Churchill is primarily the story of the revolution and how
he succeeded. The story of Baalingbrooke is the story of
the counter revolution and how it had failed. Churchill is
a type of the extraordinary time in this that he
(15:34):
combines the presence of glory with the absence of honor.
When the new aristocracy had become normal to the nation,
in the next few generations, it produced personal types not
only of aristocracy but of chivalry. The Revolution reduced us
to a country wholly governed by gentlemen. The popular universities
and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds and abbeys,
(15:57):
had been seized and turned into what they are factories
of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories of snobs.
It is hard now to realize that what we call
the public schools were once undoubtedly public. By the Revolution,
they were already becoming as private as they are now.
But at least in the eighteenth century there were great
(16:19):
gentlemen in the generous, perhaps too generous, since now given
to the title. Types not merely honest, but rash and
romantic in their honesty, remain in the record with the
names of Nelson or of Fox. We have already seen
that the latter reformers defaced from fanaticism the churches which
the first reformers had defaced simply from avarice. Rather in
(16:42):
the same way the eighteenth century Whigs often praise in
a spirit of pure magnanimity what the seventeenth century Whigs
had done in a spirit of pure meanness. How mean
was that meanness can only be estimated by realizing that
a great military hero had not even the ordinary military
virtues of loyalty to his flag or obedience to his
(17:05):
superior officers, that he picked his way through campaigns that
have made him immortal with the watchful spirit of a
thieving camp follower. When William landed at Torbay on the
invitation of the other Whig nobles, Churchill, as if to
add something ideal to his imitation of ascariate, went to
James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth
(17:28):
in arms as if to defend the country from invasion,
and then calmly handed the army over to the invader.
To the finish of this work of art, but few
could aspire, but in their degree, all the politicians of
the Revolution were upon this ethical pattern. While they surrounded
the throne of James. There was scarcely one of them
who was not in correspondence with William. When they afterwards
(17:51):
surrounded the throne of William, there was not one of
them who was not still in correspondence with James. It
was such men who defeated Irish Jacobitism by the Treason
of Limerick. It was such men who defeated Scott's Jacobitism
by the Treason of Glencoe. Thus the strange yet splendid
(18:13):
story of eighteenth century England is one of greatness founded
on smallness, a pyramid standing on a point, or to
vary the metaphor, the new Mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized
even in the externals of its great sister, the mercantile
oligarchy of Venice. The solidity was all in the superstructure.
(18:35):
The fluctuation had been all in the foundations. The Great
Temple of Chatham and Warren Hastings was reared in its
origins on things as unstable as water and as fugitive
as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to
connect the unstable element with something restless and even shifty
in the Lords of the Sea. But there was certainly
(18:56):
in the genesis, if not the later generation of Armorial aristocracy,
a thing only too mercantile, something which had also been
urged against a yet older example of that polity, something
called punica fides. The great royalist Strafford, going disillusion to death,
(19:17):
had said, put not your trust in princes. The great
royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, and
least of all in merchant princes. Ballingbrooke stands for a
whole body of convictions which bolked very big in English history,
but which, with the recent windings of the course of history,
(19:39):
have gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it, we
cannot understand our past, nor I will add our future.
Curiously enough, the best English books of the eighteenth century
are crammed with it, yet modern culture cannot see it
when it is there. Doctor Johnson is full of it.
It is what he meant when he denounced minority rule
(19:59):
in Ireland, as well as when he said that the
devil was the first whig. Goldsmith is full of it.
It is the whole point of that fine poem The
Deserted Village, and it is set out theoretically with great
lucidity and spirit in the vicar of Wakefield. Swift is
full of it and found in it an intellectual brotherhood
in arms with Ballingbroke himself. In the time of Queen Anne.
(20:22):
It was probably the opinion of the majority of people
in England, but it was not only in Ireland that
the minority had begun to rule. This conviction has brilliantly
expounded by Bolingbrook had many aspects. Perhaps the most practical
was the point that one of the virtues of a
despot is distance. It is the little tyrant of the
(20:44):
fields that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism
that a good king is not only a good thing,
but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the
paradox that even a bad king is a good king,
for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure
on the populace. If he is a tyrant, he chiefly
(21:05):
tortures the torturers, and though Nero's murder of his own
mother was hardly perhaps again to his soul, it was
no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a
wholly rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects
a fine and typical eighteenth century intellect, a free thinking deist,
(21:28):
a clear and classic writer of English. But he was
also a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political courage,
and he made one last throw for the Stewarts. It
was defeated by the great Whig nobles, who formed the
committee of the new Regime of the Gentry. And considering
who it was who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary
(21:49):
to say that it was defeated by a trick. The
small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted
into it like a dummy, and a great English royalist
went into exile. Twenty years afterward, he reappears and reasserts
his living and logical faith in a popular monarchy. But
(22:10):
it is typical of the whole detachment and distinction of
his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing
to strengthen the heir of the king, whom he had
tried to exclude. He was always a royalist, but never
a Jacobite. What he cared for was not a royal family,
but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book,
(22:31):
The Patriot King, written in exile. And when he thought
that George's great grandson was enough of a patriot, he
only wished he might be more of a king. He made,
in his old age yet another attempt, with such unpromising
instruments as George the Third and Lord Bute, And when
these broke in his hand, he died with all the
(22:53):
dignity of the said Victor. Catonny. The great commercial aristocracy
grew on to its full stature. But if we wished
to realize the good and ill of its growth, there
is no better summary than this section, from the first
to the last of the Foil Coudeta of Balingbrooke. In
the first his policy made peace with France and broke
(23:14):
the connection with Austria. In the second his policy again
made peace with France and broke the connection with Prussia.
For in that interval the seed of the money lending
squires of Brandenburg had waxed mighty, and had already become
that prodigy which has become so enormous a problem in Europe.
By the end of this epoch, Chatham, who incarnated and
(23:37):
even created, at least in a representative sense, all that
we call the British Empire, was at the height of
his own and his country's glory. He summarized the new
England of the revolution in everything, especially in everything in
which that movement seemed too many to be intrinsically contradictory,
and yet was most corporately consistent. Thus he was a
(24:01):
Whig and even in some ways what we should call
a Jingo, and the Whig Party was consistently the Jingo Party.
He was an aristocrat in the sense that all our
public men were then aristocrats. But he was very emphatically
what may be called the commercialist. One might almost say Carthaginian.
(24:23):
In this connection. It has the characteristic which perhaps humanized,
but was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan. I
mean that he could use the middle classes. It was
a young soldier of middle rank, James Wolfe, who fell
gloriously driving the French out of Quebec. It was a
young clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who
(24:44):
threw open to the English the golden gates of India.
But it was precisely one of the strong points of
this eighteenth century aristocracy that it wielded without friction the
wealthier bourgeoisie. It was not there that social cleavage was
to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator, and though
(25:06):
parliament was as narrow as the Senate. It was one
of the great senators. The very word recalls the role
of those noble Roman phrases they often used, which we
are right in calling classic, but wrong in calling cold.
In some ways, nothing could be further from all this fine,
(25:26):
if florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all
this air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than
the little inland state of the stingy drill sergeants of Potsdam,
hammering mere savages into mere soldiers. And yet the great
chief of these was, in some ways like a shadow
of Chatham flung across the world, the sort of shadow
(25:49):
that is at once an enlargement and a caricature. The
English lords, whose paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here
something drawn out long and then out of their own theories.
What was paganism in Chatham was atheism in Frederick the Great,
And what was in the first patriotism was in the
(26:11):
second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibal theory
of a commonwealth that it can, of its nature eat
other commonwealths had entered Christendom, its autocracy, and our own
aristocracy drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed for a time
to be wedded, but not before the Great Bolingbroke had
(26:34):
made a dying gesture as if to forbid the bands
end of chapter fourteen.
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