Chương Chương 41 · The English Revolution

HOW THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE “DIVINE RIGHT” OF KINGS AND THE LESS

DIVINE BUT MORE REASONABLE “RIGHT OF PARLIAMENT” ENDED DISASTROUSLY

FOR KING CHARLES I

Cæsar, the earliest explorer of north-western Europe, had crossed the

Channel in the year 55 B.C. and had conquered England. During four

centuries the country then remained a Roman province. But when the

Barbarians began to threaten Rome, the garrisons were called back from

the frontier that they might defend the home country and Britannia was

left without a government and without protection.

As soon as this became known among the hungry Saxon tribes of northern

Germany, they sailed across the North Sea and made themselves at

home in the prosperous island. They founded a number of independent

Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (so called after the original invaders, the

Angles or English and the Saxons) but these small states were for

ever quarrelling with each other and no King was strong enough to

establish himself as the head of a united country. For more than five

hundred years, Mercia and Northumbria and Wessex and Sussex and Kent

and East Anglia, or whatever their names, were exposed to attacks

from various Scandinavian pirates. Finally in the eleventh century,

England, together with Norway and northern Germany became part of the

large Danish Empire of Canute the Great and the last vestiges of

independence disappeared.

[Illustration: THE ENGLISH NATION]

The Danes, in the course of time, were driven away but no sooner was

England free, than it was conquered for the fourth time. The new

enemies were the descendants of another tribe of Norsemen who early

in the tenth century had invaded France and had founded the Duchy of

Normandy. William, Duke of Normandy, who for a long time had looked

across the water with an envious eye, crossed the Channel in October of

the year 1066. At the battle of Hastings, on October the fourteenth of

that year, he destroyed the weak forces of Harold of Wessex, the last

of the Anglo-Saxon Kings and established himself as King of England.

But neither William nor his successors of the House of Anjou and

Plantagenet regarded England as their true home. To them the island

was merely a part of their great inheritance on the continent—a sort

of colony inhabited by rather backward people upon whom they forced

their own language and civilisation. Gradually however the “colony”

of England gained upon the “Mother country” of Normandy. At the same

time the Kings of France were trying desperately to get rid of the

powerful Norman-English neighbours who were in truth no more than

disobedient servants of the French crown. After a century of warfare

the French people, under the leadership of a young girl by the name

of Joan of Arc, drove the “foreigners” from their soil. Joan herself,

taken a prisoner at the battle of Compiègne in the year 1430 and sold

by her Burgundian captors to the English soldiers, was burned as a

witch. But the English never gained foothold upon the continent and

their Kings were at last able to devote all their time to their British

possessions. As the feudal nobility of the island had been engaged in

one of those strange feuds which were as common in the middle ages

as measles and small-pox, and as the greater part of the old landed

proprietors had been killed during these so-called Wars of the Roses,

it was quite easy for the Kings to increase their royal power. And by

the end of the fifteenth century, England was a strongly centralised

country, ruled by Henry VII of the House of Tudor, whose famous Court

of Justice, the “Star Chamber” of terrible memory, suppressed all

attempts on the part of the surviving nobles to regain their old

influence upon the government of the country with the utmost severity.

[Illustration: THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR]

In the year 1509 Henry VII was succeeded by his son Henry VIII, and

from that moment on the history of England gained a new importance for

the country ceased to be a mediæval island and became a modern state.

Henry had no deep interest in religion. He gladly used a private

disagreement with the Pope about one of his many divorces to declare

himself independent of Rome and make the church of England the first of

those “nationalistic churches” in which the worldly ruler also acts as

the spiritual head of his subjects. This peaceful reformation of 1534

not only gave the house of Tudor the support of the English clergy,

who for a long time had been exposed to the violent attacks of many

Lutheran propagandists, but it also increased the Royal power through

the confiscation of the former possessions of the monasteries. At the

same time it made Henry popular with the merchants and tradespeople,

who as the proud and prosperous inhabitants of an island which was

separated from the rest of Europe by a wide and deep channel, had a

great dislike for everything “foreign” and did not want an Italian

bishop to rule their honest British souls.

In 1547 Henry died. He left the throne to his small son, aged ten. The

guardians of the child, favoring the modern Lutheran doctrines, did

their best to help the cause of Protestantism. But the boy died before

he was sixteen, and was succeeded by his sister Mary, the wife of

Philip II of Spain, who burned the bishops of the new “national church”

and in other ways followed the example of her royal Spanish husband.

Fortunately she died, in the year 1558, and was succeeded by Elizabeth,

the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the second of his six

wives, whom he had decapitated when she no longer pleased him.

Elizabeth, who had spent some time in prison, and who had been released

only at the request of the Holy Roman Emperor, was a most cordial

enemy of everything Catholic and Spanish. She shared her father’s

indifference in the matter of religion but she inherited his ability as

a very shrewd judge of character, and spent the forty-five years of her

reign in strengthening the power of the dynasty and in increasing the

revenue and possessions of her merry islands. In this she was most ably

assisted by a number of men who gathered around her throne and made the

Elizabethan age a period of such importance that you ought to study it

in detail in one of the special books of which I shall tell you in the

bibliography at the end of this volume.

Elizabeth, however, did not feel entirely safe upon her throne. She

had a rival and a very dangerous one. Mary, of the house of Stuart,

daughter of a French duchess and a Scottish father, widow of king

Francis II of France and daughter-in-law of Catherine of Medici (who

had organised the murders of Saint Bartholomew’s night), was the mother

of a little boy who was afterwards to become the first Stuart king

of England. She was an ardent Catholic and a willing friend to those

who were the enemies of Elizabeth. Her own lack of political ability

and the violent methods which she employed to punish her Calvinistic

subjects, caused a revolution in Scotland and forced Mary to take

refuge on English territory. For eighteen years she remained in

England, plotting forever and a day against the woman who had given her

shelter and who was at last obliged to follow the advice of her trusted

councilors “to cutte off the Scottish Queen’s heade.”

The head was duly “cutte off” in the year 1587 and caused a war with

Spain. But the combined navies of England and Holland defeated Philip’s

Invincible Armada, as we have already seen, and the blow which had been

meant to destroy the power of the two great anti-Catholic leaders was

turned into a profitable business adventure.

[Illustration: JOHN AND SEBASTIAN CABOT SEE THE COAST OF NEWFOUNDLAND]

For now at last, after many years of hesitation, the English as well as

the Dutch thought it their good right to invade the Indies and America

and avenge the ills which their Protestant brethren had suffered at

the hands of the Spaniards. The English had been among the earliest

successors of Columbus. British ships, commanded by the Venetian pilot

Giovanni Caboto (or Cabot), had been the first to discover and explore

the northern American continent in 1496. Labrador and Newfoundland

were of little importance as a possible colony. But the banks of

Newfoundland offered a rich reward to the English fishing fleet. A year

later, in 1497, the same Cabot had explored the coast of Florida.

[Illustration: THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE]

Then had come the busy years of Henry VII and Henry VIII when there

had been no money for foreign explorations. But under Elizabeth,

with the country at peace and Mary Stuart in prison, the sailors

could leave their harbour without fear for the fate of those whom

they left behind. While Elizabeth was still a child, Willoughby had

ventured to sail past the North Cape and one of his captains, Richard

Chancellor, pushing further eastward in his quest of a possible road

to the Indies, had reached Archangel, Russia, where he had established

diplomatic and commercial relations with the mysterious rulers of

this distant Muscovite Empire. During the first years of Elizabeth’s

rule this voyage had been followed up by many others. Merchant

adventurers, working for the benefit of a “joint stock Company” had

laid the foundations of trading companies which in later centuries

were to become colonies. Half pirate, half diplomat, willing to stake

everything on a single lucky voyage, smugglers of everything that could

be loaded into the hold of a vessel, dealers in men and merchandise

with equal indifference to everything except their profit, the sailors

of Elizabeth had carried the English flag and the fame of their

Virgin Queen to the four corners of the Seven Seas. Meanwhile William

Shakespeare kept her Majesty amused at home, and the best brains and

the best wit of England co-operated with the queen in her attempt to

change the feudal inheritance of Henry VIII into a modern national

state.

In the year 1603 the old lady died at the age of seventy. Her cousin,

the great-grandson of her own grandfather Henry VII and son of Mary

Stuart, her rival and enemy, succeeded her as James I. By the Grace

of God, he found himself the ruler of a country which had escaped the

fate of its continental rivals. While the European Protestants and

Catholics were killing each other in a hopeless attempt to break the

power of their adversaries and establish the exclusive rule of their

own particular creed, England was at peace and “reformed” at leisure

without going to the extremes of either Luther or Loyola. It gave

the island kingdom an enormous advantage in the coming struggle for

colonial possessions. It assured England a leadership in international

affairs which that country has maintained until the present day. Not

even the disastrous adventure with the Stuarts was able to stop this

normal development.

The Stuarts, who succeeded the Tudors, were “foreigners” in England.

They do not seem to have appreciated or understood this fact. The

native house of Tudor could steal a horse, but the “foreign” Stuarts

were not allowed to look at the bridle without causing great popular

disapproval. Old Queen Bess had ruled her domains very much as she

pleased. In general however, she had always followed a policy which

meant money in the pocket of the honest (and otherwise) British

merchants. Hence the Queen had been always assured of the wholehearted

support of her grateful people. And small liberties taken with some of

the rights and prerogatives of Parliament were gladly overlooked for

the ulterior benefits which were derived from her Majesty’s strong and

successful foreign policies.

Outwardly King James continued the same policy. But he lacked that

personal enthusiasm which had been so very typical of his great

predecessor. Foreign commerce continued to be encouraged. The Catholics

were not granted any liberties. But when Spain smiled pleasantly upon

England in an effort to establish peaceful relations, James was seen to

smile back. The majority of the English people did not like this, but

James was their King and they kept quiet.

Soon there were other causes of friction. King James and his son,

Charles I, who succeeded him in the year 1625 both firmly believed in

the principle of their “divine right” to administer their realm as

they thought fit without consulting the wishes of their subjects. The

idea was not new. The Popes, who in more than one way had been the

successors of the Roman Emperors (or rather of the Roman Imperial ideal

of a single and undivided state covering the entire known world), had

always regarded themselves and had been publicly recognised as the

“Vice-Regents of Christ upon Earth.” No one questioned the right of

God to rule the world as He saw fit. As a natural result, few ventured

to doubt the right of the divine “Vice-Regent” to do the same thing

and to demand the obedience of the masses because he was the direct

representative of the Absolute Ruler of the Universe and responsible

only to Almighty God.

When the Lutheran Reformation proved successful, those rights which

formerly had been vested in the Papacy were taken over by the many

European sovereigns who became Protestants. As head of their own

national or dynastic churches they insisted upon being “Christ’s

Vice-Regents” within the limit of their own territory. The people

did not question the right of their rulers to take such a step.

They accepted it, just as we in our own day accept the idea of a

representative system which to us seems the only reasonable and just

form of government. It is unfair therefore to state that either

Lutheranism or Calvinism caused the particular feeling of irritation

which greeted King James’s oft and loudly repeated assertion of his

“Divine Right.” There must have been other grounds for the genuine

English disbelief in the Divine Right of Kings.

The first positive denial of the “Divine Right” of sovereigns had been

heard in the Netherlands when the Estates General abjured their lawful

sovereign King Philip II of Spain, in the year 1581. “The King,” so

they said, “has broken his contract and the King therefore is dismissed

like any other unfaithful servant.” Since then, this particular idea

of a king’s responsibilities towards his subjects had spread among

many of the nations who inhabited the shores of the North Sea. They

were in a very favourable position. They were rich. The poor people in

the heart of central Europe, at the mercy of their Ruler’s body-guard,

could not afford to discuss a problem which would at once land them in

the deepest dungeon of the nearest castle. But the merchants of Holland

and England who possessed the capital necessary for the maintenance

of great armies and navies, who knew how to handle the almighty

weapon called “credit,” had no such fear. They were willing to pit

the “Divine Right” of their own good money against the “Divine Right”

of any Habsburg or Bourbon or Stuart. They knew that their guilders

and shillings could beat the clumsy feudal armies which were the only

weapons of the King. They dared to act, where others were condemned to

suffer in silence or run the risk of the scaffold.

When the Stuarts began to annoy the people of England with their claim

that they had a right to do what they pleased and never mind the

responsibility, the English middle classes used the House of Commons

as their first line of defence against this abuse of the Royal Power.

The Crown refused to give in and the King sent Parliament about its

own business. Eleven long years, Charles I ruled alone. He levied

taxes which most people regarded as illegal and he managed his British

kingdom as if it had been his own country estate. He had capable

assistants and we must say that he had the courage of his convictions.

Unfortunately, instead of assuring himself of the support of his

faithful Scottish subjects, Charles became involved in a quarrel with

the Scotch Presbyterians. Much against his will, but forced by his

need for ready cash, Charles was at last obliged to call Parliament

together once more. It met in April of 1640 and showed an ugly temper.

It was dissolved a few weeks later. A new Parliament convened in

November. This one was even less pliable than the first one. The

members understood that the question of “Government by Divine Right”

or “Government by Parliament” must be fought out for good and all.

They attacked the King in his chief councillors and executed half a

dozen of them. They announced that they would not allow themselves to

be dissolved without their own approval. Finally on December 1, 1641,

they presented to the King a “Grand Remonstrance” which gave a detailed

account of the many grievances of the people against their Ruler.

Charles, hoping to derive some support for his own policy in the

country districts, left London in January of 1642. Each side organised

an army and prepared for open warfare between the absolute power of the

crown and the absolute power of Parliament. During this struggle, the

most powerful religious element of England, called the Puritans, (they

were Anglicans who had tried to purify their doctrines to the most

absolute limits), came quickly to the front. The regiments of “Godly

men,” commanded by Oliver Cromwell, with their iron discipline and

their profound confidence in the holiness of their aims, soon became

the model for the entire army of the opposition. Twice Charles was

defeated. After the battle of Naseby, in 1645, he fled to Scotland. The

Scotch sold him to the English.

There followed a period of intrigue and an uprising of the Scotch

Presbyterians against the English Puritan. In August of the year 1648

after the three-days’ battle of Preston Pans, Cromwell made an end to

this second civil war, and took Edinburgh. Meanwhile his soldiers,

tired of further talk and wasted hours of religious debate, had decided

to act on their own initiative. They removed from Parliament all those

who did not agree with their own Puritan views. Thereupon the “Rump,”

which was what was left of the old Parliament, accused the King of high

treason. The House of Lords refused to sit as a tribunal. A special

tribunal was appointed and it condemned the King to death. On the

30th of January of the year 1649, King Charles walked quietly out of

a window of White Hall onto the scaffold. That day, the Sovereign

People, acting through their chosen representatives, for the first time

executed a ruler who had failed to understand his own position in the

modern state.

The period which followed the death of Charles is usually called after

Oliver Cromwell. At first the unofficial Dictator of England, he was

officially made Lord Protector in the year 1653. He ruled five years.

He used this period to continue the policies of Elizabeth. Spain once

more became the arch enemy of England and war upon the Spaniard was

made a national and sacred issue.

The commerce of England and the interests of the traders were placed

before everything else, and the Protestant creed of the strictest

nature was rigourously maintained. In maintaining England’s position

abroad, Cromwell was successful. As a social reformer, however, he

failed very badly. The world is made up of a number of people and they

rarely think alike. In the long run, this seems a very wise provision.

A government of and by and for one single part of the entire community

cannot possibly survive. The Puritans had been a great force for

good when they tried to correct the abuse of the royal power. As the

absolute Rulers of England they became intolerable.

When Cromwell died in 1658, it was an easy matter for the Stuarts to

return to their old kingdom. Indeed, they were welcomed as “deliverers”

by the people who had found the yoke of the meek Puritans quite as hard

to bear as that of autocratic King Charles. Provided the Stuarts were

willing to forget about the Divine Right of their late and lamented

father and were willing to recognise the superiority of Parliament, the

people promised that they would be loyal and faithful subjects.

Two generations tried to make a success of this new arrangement. But

the Stuarts apparently had not learned their lesson and were unable to

drop their bad habits. Charles II, who came back in the year 1660, was

an amiable but worthless person. His indolence and his constitutional

insistence upon following the easiest course, together with his

conspicuous success as a liar, prevented an open outbreak between

himself and his people. By the act of Uniformity in 1662 he broke the

power of the Puritan clergy by banishing all dissenting clergymen from

their parishes. By the so-called Conventicle Act of 1664 he tried to

prevent the Dissenters from attending religious meetings by a threat

of deportation to the West Indies. This looked too much like the good

old days of Divine Right. People began to show the old and well-known

signs of impatience, and Parliament suddenly experienced difficulty in

providing the King with funds.

Since he could not get money from an unwilling Parliament, Charles

borrowed it secretly from his neighbour and cousin, King Louis of

France. He betrayed his Protestant allies in return for 200,000 pounds

per year, and laughed at the poor simpletons of Parliament.

Economic independence suddenly gave the King great faith in his own

strength. He had spent many years of exile among his Catholic relations

and he had a secret liking for their religion. Perhaps he could bring

England back to Rome! He passed a Declaration of Indulgence which

suspended the old laws against the Catholics and Dissenters. This

happened just when Charles’ younger brother James was said to have

become a Catholic. All this looked suspicious to the man in the street.

People began to fear some terrible Popish plot. A new spirit of unrest

entered the land. Most of the people wanted to prevent another outbreak

of civil war. To them Royal Oppression and a Catholic King—yea, even

Divine Right,—were preferable to a new struggle between members of the

same race. Others however were less lenient. They were the much-feared

Dissenters, who invariably had the courage of their convictions. They

were led by several great noblemen who did not want to see a return of

the old days of absolute royal power.

For almost ten years, these two great parties, the Whigs (the middle

class element, called by this derisive name because in the year 1640 a

lot of Scottish Whiggamores or horse-drovers headed by the Presbyterian

clergy, had marched to Edinburgh to oppose the King) and the Tories

(an epithet originally used against the Royalist Irish adherents but

now applied to the supporters of the King) opposed each other, but

neither wished to bring about a crisis. They allowed Charles to die

peacefully in his bed and permitted the Catholic James II to succeed

his brother in 1685. But when James, after threatening the country

with the terrible foreign invention of a “standing army” (which was to

be commanded by Catholic Frenchmen), issued a second Declaration of

Indulgence in 1688, and ordered it to be read in all Anglican churches,

he went just a trifle beyond that line of sensible demarcation which

can only be transgressed by the most popular of rulers under very

exceptional circumstances. Seven bishops refused to comply with the

Royal Command. They were accused of “seditious libel.” They were

brought before a court. The jury which pronounced the verdict of “not

guilty” reaped a rich harvest of popular approval.

At this unfortunate moment, James (who in a second marriage had taken

to wife Maria of the Catholic house of Modena-Este) became the father

of a son. This meant that the throne was to go to a Catholic boy rather

than to his older sisters, Mary and Anne, who were Protestants. The

man in the street again grew suspicious. Maria of Modena was too old

to have children! It was all part of a plot! A strange baby had been

brought into the palace by some Jesuit priest that England might have

a Catholic monarch. And so on. It looked as if another civil war would

break out. Then seven well-known men, Whigs and Tories, wrote a letter

asking the husband of James’s oldest daughter Mary, William III the

Stadtholder or head of the Dutch Republic, to come to England and

deliver the country from its lawful but entirely undesirable sovereign.

On the fifth of November of the year 1688, William landed at Torbay.

As he did not wish to make a martyr out of his father-in-law, he

helped him to escape safely to France. On the 22nd of January of 1689

he summoned Parliament. On the 13th of February of the same year he

and his wife Mary were proclaimed joint sovereigns of England and the

country was saved for the Protestant cause.

Parliament, having undertaken to be something more than a mere advisory

body to the King, made the best of its opportunities. The old Petition

of Rights of the year 1628 was fished out of a forgotten nook of the

archives. A second and more drastic Bill of Rights demanded that the

sovereign of England should belong to the Anglican church. Furthermore

it stated that the king had no right to suspend the laws or permit

certain privileged citizens to disobey certain laws. It stipulated that

“without consent of Parliament no taxes could be levied and no army

could be maintained.” Thus in the year 1689 did England acquire an

amount of liberty unknown in any other country of Europe.

But it is not only on account of this great liberal measure that the

rule of William in England is still remembered. During his lifetime,

government by a “responsible” ministry first developed. No king of

course can rule alone. He needs a few trusted advisors. The Tudors had

their Great Council which was composed of Nobles and Clergy. This body

grew too large. It was restricted to the small “Privy Council.” In the

course of time it became the custom of these councillors to meet the

king in a cabinet in the palace. Hence they were called the “Cabinet

Council.” After a short while they were known as the “Cabinet.”

William, like most English sovereigns before him, had chosen his

advisors from among all parties. But with the increased strength of

Parliament, he had found it impossible to direct the politics of the

country with the help of the Tories while the Whigs had a majority

in the house of Commons. Therefore the Tories had been dismissed and

the Cabinet Council had been composed entirely of Whigs. A few years

later when the Whigs lost their power in the House of Commons, the

king, for the sake of convenience, was obliged to look for his support

among the leading Tories. Until his death in 1702, William was too

busy fighting Louis of France to bother much about the government

of England. Practically all important affairs had been left to his

Cabinet Council. When William’s sister-in-law, Anne, succeeded him in

1702 this condition of affairs continued. When she died in 1714 (and

unfortunately not a single one of her seventeen children survived her)

the throne went to George I of the House of Hanover, the son of Sophie,

grand-daughter of James I.

This somewhat rustic monarch, who never learned a word of English,

was entirely lost in the complicated mazes of England’s political

arrangements. He left everything to his Cabinet Council and kept away

from their meetings, which bored him as he did not understand a single

sentence. In this way the Cabinet got into the habit of ruling England

and Scotland (whose Parliament had been joined to that of England in

1707) without bothering the King, who was apt to spend a great deal of

his time on the continent.

During the reign of George I and George II, a succession of great

Whigs (of whom one, Sir Robert Walpole, held office for twenty-one

years) formed the Cabinet Council of the King. Their leader was finally

recognised as the official leader not only of the actual Cabinet

but also of the majority party in power in Parliament. The attempts

of George III to take matters into his own hands and not to leave

the actual business of government to his Cabinet were so disastrous

that they were never repeated. And from the earliest years of the

eighteenth century on, England enjoyed representative government, with

a responsible ministry which conducted the affairs of the land.

To be quite true, this government did not represent all classes of

society. Less than one man in a dozen had the right to vote. But it

was the foundation for the modern representative form of government.

In a quiet and orderly fashion it took the power away from the King

and placed it in the hands of an ever increasing number of popular

representatives. It did not bring the millennium to England, but it

saved that country from most of the revolutionary outbreaks which

proved so disastrous to the European continent in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries.