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HALLAM

SEPTEMBER, 1828

NOTE ON THE ESSAY

N reviewing Hallam's Constitutional History Macaulay has stated his own conception of the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That he has done this with vehemence and exaggeration may be in some degree excused when we remember how young he still was. A more serious fault is the habit of regarding the events of the period which began with the Reformation and ended with the Restoration in the light of the distinction between Whig and Tory. It is true that in a sense the Puritans were the predecessors of the Whigs, and the Cavaliers the predecessors of the Tories. But it is equally true that whilst party distinctions prior to the Restoration were above all theological, party distinctions since the Restoration have been primarily political. Professor Gardiner has shown that ecclesiastical differences had most to do with the schism in the Long Parliament and the resulting civil war. Macaulay in this and other essays has dwelt too much upon the constitutional questions at issue, and even where he has touched upon religious controversies he has failed to apprehend their exact meaning because his mind was warped by the party considerations peculiar to his own time.

As the French Revolution had been in one aspect a revolt against a Church by law established and as it had achieved political equality between different confessions, that timid, narrow and obstructive Toryism which was generated in the long war with France cherished with peculiar affection every remnant of religious intolerance in our laws and made it a point of honour to keep Nonconformists and Roman Catholics in a condition of political inferiority. Writers who shared this bias endeavoured to show that the rulers of the Church of England had always been in the right and that those who resisted them had always been in the wrong. They were not content to view the failings of Elizabeth and Whitgift or of Charles and Laud with that indulgence which is due to imperfect human beings invested with great power and confronted with great difficulties. No indulgence could be needed where no failings were admitted. When Elizabeth and her Parliament inflicted the pains of treason upon the priest who reconciled an English

subject to the Church of Rome, they were only taking a justifiable political precaution. When the Star Chamber sentenced intemperate Puritan polemics to lose their ears it only showed its vigilance in maintaining public order and decency. This is the uncritical view of ecclesiastical history set forth in such a party pamphlet as Southey's Book of the Church. It called forth an almost equally uncritical version of history adapted to the needs of that party which thought religious inequality a bad thing. If the Tories regarded the Church of England as the unsullied vessel of primitive Christian truth the Whigs would regard her as the arbitrary creation of Tudor pride and worldliness. If the Tories asserted that the Church of England had never or scarcely ever persecuted, the Whigs would assert that the stigma of persecution attached peculiarly to the Church of England. If the Tories made out Cranmer to be saint and martyr, the Whigs had to brand him as knave and sycophant. If the Tories represented Laud as the noblest of Christian prelates, a man of commanding genius and apostolic zeal, the Whigs must represent him as the familiar imp of a spiteful witch and declare that only the imbecility of his intellect could make us forget the vices of his heart. We are not here concerned to arbitrate between these conflicting theories or to measure the elements of truth which either may contain. Everybody who takes an interest in such matters will perform the process somewhat differently. Questions of continuity and identity being always questions of degree are peculiarly apt to be decided by prejudice or sentiment. That the English Reformation was guided and controlled rather by statesmen than by men of deep religious feeling or precise religious conviction most well-informed persons would allow, although they might not be prepared to subscribe Macaulay's furious philippic. That the reproach of religious intolerance attaches, although in unequal degrees, to all the ecclesiastical parties of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody is now so ignorant as to deny. If here and there an extraordinary man had risen to the conception of tolerance he had no effect upon public opinion, and if he chanced to gain power too often wanted the courage to act what he believed. Nor were these exceptional men confined to one party. More and Erasmus were more tolerant in principle than Luther and Calvin. Against Roger Williams among the Puritans we may set Chillingworth among the Arminians. The common herd of all colours, Romanist and Reformer, clergy and laity, prince and peasant, were still in bondage to the medieval belief that religious uniformity is as essential to the safety of the commonwealth as it is to the salvation of the individual. This all but universal prejudice rendered it impossible to compose the disputes within the Church of England under Charles I.

We must also remember that the religious conflict of that time was not, as under Charles II., a conflict between a dominant Church and persecuted sects, but between two parties within the bounds of the Church, each wishing to reform the Church in its own way and resolved not merely to get freedom of conscience for itself, but also to suppress the freedom of its antagonist. Had the Presbyterians got the upper

hand they no less than the bishops would have enforced uniformity of doctrine, discipline and ceremonial. As for the Roman Catholics and the petty Protestant sects which were beginning to spring up outside the Church, neither Presbyterian nor prelatist would have spared them, although Laud might have borne hardest upon the sectaries and Pym upon the Catholics. Was Macaulay then quite unreasonable in regarding the Puritans as the champions of liberty? By no means. The Puritans did render an inestimable service to liberty and civilisation by manfully asserting for themselves those rights of conscience which they failed to recognise in others. Neither the force of tradition nor the attraction of example nor the fear of punishment could induce them to think by deputy or to accept without question the beliefs that bore the stamp of office. The most precious of all liberties, the liberty to form and to express our own opinions, was asserted for mankind by the victors of Marston and Naseby; but the Presbyterian hardly understood at all, and the Independent only half understood the value of their conquest. It was the rebellion, not the reign, of the Puritans which made England free. Later ages have gained from the conflict of Roundhead with Cavalier, the benefit which neither party intended to bestow.

When Macaulay turns from ecclesiastical to political history, he always becomes more instructive. Even here, however, he is too much preoccupied with the principles of the eighteenth to enter fully into the spirit of the seventeenth century. In his pages the constitution appears more mature and the restraints upon prerogative more definite than they actually were. His judgment of Charles I. is distorted by political passion, to the point of mistaking a weak and perverse man for a monster of wickedness. Charles, as Professor Gardiner has so well shown, was destitute of imagination and therefore of insight. Easily led by persons whom he liked, usually persons as unwise as himself, he was intractable either to a higher intelligence or to the overwhelming force of events. Criminally insincere he would, when tempted, make conflicting promises to all parties without seriously meaning to keep them to any, and yet probably was never conscious of having done anything base, save when he deserted Strafford. For nursed in the doctrine of absolute monarchy, and believing that he had received from God a plenary power which, for the good of his subjects themselves, he must not allow to be impaired, he honestly thought that all who opposed him must be either very foolish or very wicked, and deceived them with as little hesitation as the ordinary man feels in deceiving a lunatic or a criminal. Unfit for his high office, he ensured his own doom without losing his self-respect. Nor can the whole blame of the Civil War be justly imputed to him. To adapt the Tudor system to the wants of a new age was a task demanding such wisdom and self-denial as few men have possessed. But James had not merely imparted to Charles a false theory of the English constitution; he had forced upon the English people the question never distinctly stated before as to the power in the last resort supreme in England. Thenceforward a revolution, whether to the profit of the VOL. I.-8

Crown or of the Parliament, was assured. Macaulay comes nearest the truth when he says:

"Those who conceive that the Parliamentary leaders were desirous merely to maintain the old constitution, and those who represent them as conspiring to subvert it, are equally in error. The old constitution, as we have attempted to show, could not be maintained."

But then he should have allowed Charles and Wentworth as well as Pym and Hampden the benefit of this acute observation. On the other hand Macaulay was perhaps the first historian, not a Nonconformist, to appreciate the genius of Cromwell. This is all the more creditable since Cromwell squared almost as ill with Whig as with Tory maxims of policy. If he cut off the head of a king, he also expelled a House of Commons. In writing about the Restoration and the Revolution, Macaulay once more yields to his bias against the Stuarts and his love of high colouring. The real Lord Shaftesbury was not a nice or scrupulous man, but Macaulay loads him with crimes which he did not commit. The politicians who served William III. were indifferent patriots, but their intrigues with James were often no more than a feint designed to save their heads and estates in case a counterrevolution, which they neither desired nor furthered, should by ill chance take effect.

Since Macaulay's death, the history of the reigns of James I. and Charles I. has been rewritten by Professor Gardiner with such unwearied industry and in such a spirit of unswerving justice, as to enable us to enter into the thoughts and feelings of that age in a degree formerly impossible. Professor Gardiner has rendered previous histories more or less obsolete, and to him the reader must turn for many corrections in the essay which follows.

HALLAM

The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II. BY HENRY HALLAM. In 2 vols. 1827.

H

ISTORY, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind by a vivid representation of particular characters and incidents. But, in fact, the two hostile elements of which it consists have never been known to form a perfect amalgamation; and at length, in our own time, they have been completely and professedly separated. Good histories, in the proper sense of the word, we have not. But we have good historical romances, and good historical essays. The imagination and the reason, if we may use a legal metaphor, have made partition of a province of literature of which they were formerly seized per my et per tout; and now they hold their respective portions in severalty, instead of holding the whole in common.

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly belongs to the historian, have been appropriated by the historical novelist.2 On the other hand, to extract the philosophy of history, to direct our judgment of events and men, to trace the connection of causes and

1Joint tenants of an estate were in technical language said to have seisin or possession, per my et per tout, literally by the half and by the whole.

2 Macaulay's own History of England was a notable attempt to reconquer this province from the historical novelist.

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