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

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found in the realm was of less value than the property which some

single parishes now contain. Manufactures were rude; credit was

almost unknown. Society, therefore, recovered from the shock as

soon as the actual conflict was over. The calamities of civil war

were confined to the slaughter on the field of battle, and to a

few subsequent executions and confiscations. In a week the

peasant was driving his team and the esquire flying his hawks

over the field of Towton or of Bosworth, as if no extraordinary

event had interrupted the regular course of human life.


More than a hundred and sixty years have now elapsed since the

English people have by force subverted a government. During the

hundred and sixty years which preceded the union of the Roses,

nine Kings reigned in England. Six of these nine Kings were

deposed. Five lost their lives as well as their crowns. It is

evident, therefore, that any comparison between our ancient and

our modern polity must lead to most erroneous conclusions, unless

large allowance be made for the effect of that restraint which

resistance and the fear of resistance constantly imposed on the

Plantagenets. As our ancestors had against tyranny a most

important security which we want, they might safely dispense with

some securities to which we justly attach the highest importance.

As we cannot, without the risk of evils from which the

imagination recoils, employ physical force as a check on

misgovernment, it is evidently our wisdom to keep all the

constitutional checks on misgovernment in the highest state of

efficiency, to watch with jealousy the first beginnings of

encroachment, and never to suffer irregularities, even when

harmless in themselves, to pass unchallenged, lest they acquire

the force of precedents. Four hundred years ago such minute

vigilance might well seem unnecessary. A nation of hardy archers

and spearmen might, with small risk to its liberties, connive at

some illegal acts on the part of a prince whose general

administration was good, and whose throne was not defended by a

single company of regular soldiers.


Under this system, rude as it may appear when compared with those

elaborate constitutions of which the last seventy years have been

fruitful, the English long enjoyed a large measure of freedom and

happiness. Though, during the feeble reign of Henry the Sixth,

the state was torn, first by factions, and at length by civil

war; though Edward the Fourth was a prince of dissolute and

imperious character; though Richard the Third has generally been

represented as a monster of depravity; though the exactions of

Henry the Seventh caused great repining; it is certain that our

ancestors, under those Kings, were far better governed than the

Belgians under Philip, surnamed the Good, or the French under

that Lewis who was styled the Father of his people. Even while

the wars of the Roses were actually raging, our country appears

to have been in a happier condition than the neighbouring realms

during years of profound peace. Comines was one of the most

enlightened statesmen of his time. He had seen all the richest

and most highly civilised parts of the Continent. He had lived in

the opulent towns of Flanders, the Manchesters and Liverpools of

the fifteenth century. He had visited Florence, recently adorned

by the magnificence of Lorenzo, and Venice, not yet bumbled by

the Confederates of Cambray. This eminent man deliberately

pronounced England to be the best governed country of which he

had any knowledge. Her constitution he emphatically designated as

a just and holy thing, which, while it protected the people,

really strengthened the hands of a prince who respected it. In no

other country were men so effectually secured from wrong. The

calamities produced by our intestine wars seemed to him to be

confined to the nobles and the fighting men, and to leave no

traces such as he had been accustomed to see elsewhere, no ruined

dwellings, no depopulated cities.


It was not only by the efficiency of the restraints imposed on

the royal prerogative that England was advantageously

distinguished from most of the neighbouring countries. A:

peculiarity equally important, though less noticed, was the

relation in which the nobility stood here to the commonalty.

There was a strong hereditary aristocracy: but it was of all

hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had

none of the invidious character of a caste. It was constantly

receiving members from the people, and constantly sending down

members to mingle with the people. Any gentleman might become a

peer. The younger son of a peer was but a gentleman. Grandsons of

peers yielded precedence to newly made knights. The dignity of

knighthood was not beyond the reach of any man who could by

diligence and thrift realise a good estate, or who could attract

notice by his valour in a battle or a siege. It was regarded as

no disparagement for the daughter of a Duke, nay of a royal Duke,

to espouse a distinguished commoner. Thus, Sir John Howard

married the daughter of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. Sir

Richard Pole married the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of

George, Duke of Clarence. Good blood was indeed held in high

respect: but between good blood and the privileges of peerage

there was, most fortunately for our country, no necessary

connection. Pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to be

found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who

bore the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to be

descended from knights who had broken the Saxon ranks at

Hastings, and scaled the walls of Jerusalem. There were Bohuns,

Mowbrays, DeVeres, nay, kinsmen of the House of Plantagenet, with

no higher addition than that of Esquire, and with no civil

privileges beyond those enjoyed by every farmer and shopkeeper.

There was therefore here no line like that which in some other

countries divided the patrician from the plebeian. The yeoman was

not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children

might rise. The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into

which his own children must descend.


After the wars of York and Lancaster, the links which connected

the nobility and commonalty became closer and more numerous than

ever. The extent of destruction which had fallen on the old

aristocracy may be inferred from a single circumstance. In the

year 1451 Henry the Sixth summoned fifty-three temporal Lords to

parliament. The temporal Lords summoned by Henry the Seventh to

the parliament of 1485 were only twenty-nine, and of these

several had recently been elevated to the peerage. During the

following century the ranks of the nobility were largely

recruited from among the gentry. The constitution of the House of

Commons tended greatly to promote the salutary intermixture of

classes. The knight of the shire was the connecting link between

the baron and the shopkeeper. On the same benches on which sate

the goldsmiths, drapers, and grocers, who had been returned to

parliament by the commercial towns, sate also members who, in any

other country, would have been called noblemen, hereditary lords

of manors, entitled to hold courts and to bear coat armour, and

able to trace back an honourable descent through many

generations. Some of them were younger sons and brothers of

lords. Others could boast of even royal blood. At length the

eldest son of an Earl of Bedford, called in courtesy by the

second title of his father, offered himself as candidate for a

seat in the House of Commons, and his example was followed by

others. Seated in that house, the heirs of the great peers

naturally became as zealous for its privileges as any of the

humble burgesses with whom they were mingled. Thus our democracy

was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our

aristocracy the most democratic in the world; a peculiarity which

has lasted down to the present day, and which has produced many

important moral and political effects.


The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his

grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the

Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the

difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the

men and women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power

during a period of a hundred and twenty years, always with

vigour, often with violence, sometimes with cruelty. They, in

imitation of the dynasty which had preceded them, occasionally

invaded the rights of the subject, occasionally exacted taxes

under the name of loans and gifts, and occasionally dispensed

with penal statutes: nay, though they never presumed to enact any

permanent law by their own authority, they occasionally took upon

themselves, when Parliament was not sitting, to meet temporary

exigencies by temporary edicts. It was, however, impossible for

the Tudors to carry oppression beyond a certain point: for they

had no armed force, and they were surrounded by an armed people.

Their palace was guarded by a few domestics, whom the array of a

single shire, or of a single ward of London, could with ease have

overpowered. These haughty princes were therefore under a

restraint stronger than any that mere law can impose, under a

restraint which did not, indeed, prevent them from sometimes

treating an individual in an arbitrary and even in a barbarous

manner, but which effectually secured the nation against general

and long continued oppression. They might safely be tyrants,

within the precinct of the court: but it was necessary for them

to watch with constant anxiety the temper of the country. Henry

the Eighth, for example, encountered no opposition when he wished

to send Buckingham and Surrey, Anne Boleyn and Lady Salisbury, to

the scaffold. But when, without the consent of Parliament, he

demanded of his subjects a contribution amounting to one sixth of

their goods, he soon found it necessary to retract. The cry of

hundreds of thousands was that they were English and not French,

freemen and not slaves. In Kent the royal commissioners fled for

their lives. In Suffolk four thousand men appeared in arms. The

King's lieutenants in that county vainly exerted themselves to

raise an army. Those who did not join in the insurrection

declared that they would not fight against their brethren in such

a quarrel. Henry, proud and selfwilled as he was, shrank, not

without reason from a conflict with the roused spirit of the

nation. He had before his eyes the fate of his predecessors who

had perished at Berkeley and Pomfret. He not only cancelled his

illegal commissions; he not only granted a general pardon to all

the malecontents; but he publicly and solemnly apologised for his

infraction of the laws.


His conduct, on this occasion, well illustrates the whole policy

of his house. The temper of the princes of that line was hot,