The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 - Thomas Babington Macaulay (novel books to read TXT) 📗

Many Normans

suddenly disappeared leaving no trace. The corpses of many were

found bearing the marks of violence. Death by torture was

denounced against the murderers, and strict search was made for

them, but generally in vain; for the whole nation was in a

conspiracy to screen them. It was at length thought necessary to

lay a heavy fine on every Hundred in which a person of French

extraction should be found slain; and this regulation was

followed up by another regulation, providing that every person

who was found slain should be supposed to be a Frenchman, unless

he was proved to be a Saxon.


During the century and a half which followed the Conquest, there

is, to speak strictly, no English history. The French Kings of

England rose, indeed, to an eminence which was the wonder and

dread of all neighbouring nations. They conquered Ireland. They

received the homage of Scotland. By their valour, by their

policy, by their fortunate matrimonial alliances, they became far

more popular on the Continent than their liege lords the Kings of

France. Asia, as well as Europe, was dazzled by the power and

glory of our tyrants. Arabian chroniclers recorded with unwilling

admiration the fall of Acre, the defence of Joppa, and the

victorious march to Ascalon; and Arabian mothers long awed their

infants to silence with the name of the lionhearted Plantagenet.

At one time it seemed that the line of Hugh Capet was about to

end as the Merovingian and Carlovingian lines had ended, and that

a single great monarchy would spread from the Orkneys to the

Pyrenees. So strong an association is established in most minds

between the greatness of a sovereign and the greatness of the

nation which he rules, that almost every historian of England has

expatiated with a sentiment of exultation on the power and

splendour of her foreign masters, and has lamented the decay of

that power and splendour as a calamity to our country. This is,

in truth, as absurd as it would be in a Haytian negro of our time

to dwell with national pride on the greatness of Lewis the

Fourteenth, and to speak of Blenheim and Ramilies with patriotic

regret and shame. The Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth

generation were not Englishmen: most of them were born in France:

they spent the greater part of their lives in France: their

ordinary speech was French: almost every high office in their

gift was filled by a Frenchman: every acquisition which they made

on the Continent estranged them more and more from the population

of our island. One of the ablest among them indeed attempted to

win the hearts of his English subjects by espousing an English

princess. But, by many of his barons, this marriage was regarded

as a marriage between a white planter and a quadroon girl would

now be regarded in Virginia. In history he is known by the

honourable surname of Beauclerc; but, in his own time, his own

countrymen called him by a Saxon nickname, in contemptuous

allusion to his Saxon connection.


Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in

uniting all France under their government, it is probable that

England would never have had an independent existence. Her

princes, her lords, her prelates, would have been men differing

in race and language from the artisans and the tillers of the

earth. The revenues of her great proprietors would have been

spent in festivities and diversions on the banks of the Seine.

The noble language of Milton and Burke would have remained a

rustic dialect, without a literature, a fixed grammar, or a fixed

orthography, and would have been contemptuously abandoned to the

use of boors. No man of English extraction would have risen to

eminence, except by becoming in speech and habits a Frenchman.


England owes her escape from such calamities to an event which

her historians have generally represented as disastrous. Her

interest was so directly opposed to the interests of her rulers

that she had no hope but in their errors and misfortunes. The

talents and even the virtues of her first six French Kings were a

curse to her. The follies and vices of the seventh were her

salvation. Had John inherited the great qualities of his father,

of Henry Beauclerc, or of the Conqueror, nay, had he even

possessed the martial courage of Stephen or of Richard, and had

the King of France at the same time been as incapable as all the

other successors of Hugh Capet had been, the House of Plantagenet

must have risen to unrivalled ascendancy in Europe. But, just at

this conjuncture, France, for the first time since the death of

Charlemagne, was governed by a prince of great firmness and

ability. On the other hand England, which, since the battle of

Hastings, had been ruled generally by wise statesmen, always by

brave soldiers, fell under the dominion of a trifler and a

coward. From that moment her prospects brightened. John was

driven from Normandy. The Norman nobles were compelled to make

their election between the island and the continent. Shut up by

the sea with the people whom they had hitherto oppressed and

despised, they gradually came to regard England as their country,

and the English as their countrymen. The two races, so long

hostile, soon found that they had common interests and common

enemies. Both were alike aggrieved by the tyranny of a bad king.

Both were alike indignant at the favour shown by the court to the

natives of Poitou and Aquitaine. The great grandsons of those who

had fought under William and the great grandsons of those who had

fought under Harold began to draw near to each other in

friendship; and the first pledge of their reconciliation was the

Great Charter, won by their united exertions, and framed for

their common benefit.


Here commences the history of the English nation. The history of

the preceding events is the history of wrongs inflicted and

sustained by various tribes, which indeed all dwelt on English

ground, but which regarded each other with aversion such as has

scarcely ever existed between communities separated by physical

barriers. For even the mutual animosity of countries at war with

each other is languid when compared with the animosity of nations

which, morally separated, are yet locally intermingled. In no

country has the enmity of race been carried farther than in

England. In no country has that enmity been more completely

effaced. The stages of the process by which the hostile elements

were melted down into one homogeneous mass are not accurately

known to us. But it is certain that, when John became King, the

distinction between Saxons and Normans was strongly marked, and

that before the end of the reign of his grandson it had almost

disappeared. In the time of Richard the First, the ordinary

imprecation of a Norman gentleman was "May I become an

Englishman!" His ordinary form of indignant denial was "Do you

take me for an Englishman?" The descendant of such a gentleman a

hundred years later was proud of the English name.


The sources of the noblest rivers which spread fertility over

continents, and bear richly laden fleets to the sea, are to be

sought in wild and barren mountain tracts, incorrectly laid down

in maps, and rarely explored by travellers. To such a tract the

history of our country during the thirteenth century may not

unaptly be compared. Sterile and obscure as is that portion of

our annals, it is there that we must seek for the origin of our

freedom, our prosperity, and our glory. Then it was that the

great English people was formed, that the national character

began to exhibit those peculiarities which it has ever since

retained, and that our fathers became emphatically islanders,

islanders not merely in geographical position, but in their

politics, their feelings, and their manners. Then first appeared

with distinctness that constitution which has ever since, through

all changes, preserved its identity; that constitution of which

all the other free constitutions in the world are copies, and

which, in spite of some defects, deserves to be regarded as the

best under which any great society has ever yet existed during

many ages. Then it was that the House of Commons, the archetype

of all the representative assemblies which now meet, either in

the old or in the new world, held its first sittings. Then it was

that the common law rose to the dignity of a science, and rapidly

became a not unworthy rival of the imperial jurisprudence. Then

it was that the courage of those sailors who manned the rude

barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of England terrible

on the seas. Then it was that the most ancient colleges which

still exist at both the great national seats of learning were

founded. Then was formed that language, less musical indeed than

the languages of the south, but in force, in richness, in

aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the

philosopher, and the orator, inferior to the tongue of Greece

alone. Then too appeared the first faint dawn of that noble

literature, the most splendid and the most durable of the many

glories of England.


Early in the fourteenth century the amalgamation of the races was

all but complete; and it was soon made manifest, by signs not to

be mistaken, that a people inferior to none existing in the world

had been formed by the mixture of three branches of the great

Teutonic family with each other, and with the aboriginal Britons.

There was, indeed, scarcely anything in common between the

England to which John had been chased by Philip Augustus, and the

England from which the armies of Edward the Third went forth to

conquer France.


A period of more than a hundred years followed, during which the

chief object of the English was to establish, by force of arms, a

great empire on the Continent. The claim of Edward to the

inheritance occupied by the House of Valois was a claim in which

it might seem that his subjects were little interested. But the

passion for conquest spread fast from the prince to the people.

The war differed widely from the wars which the Plantagenets of

the twelfth century had waged against the descendants of Hugh

Capet. For the success of Henry the Second, or of Richard the

First, would have made England a province of France. The effect

of the successes of Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth was to

make France, for a time, a province of England. The disdain with

which, in the twelfth century, the conquerors from the Continent

had regarded the islanders, was now retorted by the islanders on

the people of the Continent. Every yeoman from Kent to

Northumberland valued himself as one of a race