That the King
could not impose taxes without the consent of Parliament is
admitted to have been, from time immemorial, a fundamental law of
England. It was among the articles which John was compelled by
the Barons to sign. Edward the First ventured to break through the
rule: but, able, powerful, and popular as he was, he
encountered an opposition to which he found it expedient to yield. He
covenanted accordingly in express terms, for himself and his heirs,
that they would never again levy any aid without the assent and
goodwill of the Estates of the realm. His powerful and victorious
grandson attempted to violate this solemn compact: but the attempt
was strenuously withstood. At length the Plantagenets gave
up the point in despair: but, though they ceased to infringe
the law openly, they occasionally contrived, by evading it, to
procure an extraordinary supply for a temporary purpose. They were
interdicted from taxing; but they claimed the right of begging
and borrowing. They therefore sometimes begged in a tone not
easily to be distinguished from that of command, and sometimes
borrowed with small thought of repaying. But the fact that they
thought it necessary to disguise their exactions under the names of
benevolences and loans sufficiently proves that the authority
of the great constitutional rule was universally
recognised.
The principle that
the King of England was bound to conduct the administration
according to law, and that, if he did anything against law, his
advisers and agents were answerable, was established at a
very early period, as the severe judgments pronounced and
executed on many royal favourites sufficiently prove. It is,
however, certain that the rights of individuals were often
violated by the Plantagenets, and that the injured parties were often
unable to obtain redress. According to law no Englishman could
be arrested or detained in confinement merely by the mandate of the
sovereign. In fact, persons obnoxious to the government were
frequently imprisoned without any other authority than a royal
order. According to law, torture, the disgrace of the Roman
jurisprudence, could not, in any circumstances, be inflicted on an
English subject. Nevertheless, during the troubles of the
fifteenth century, a rack was introduced into the Tower, and was
occasionally used under the plea of political necessity. But it
would be a great error to infer from such irregularities
that the English monarchs were, either in theory or in practice,
absolute. We live in a highly civilised society, through which
intelligence is so rapidly diffused by means of the press and of the
post office that any gross act of oppression committed in any
part of our island is, in a few hours, discussed by millions. If
the sovereign were now to immure a subject in defiance of the
writ of Habeas Corpus, or to put a conspirator to the torture, the
whole nation would be instantly electrified by the news. In the
middle ages the state of society was widely different. Rarely
and with great difficulty did the wrongs of individuals come
to the knowledge of the public. A man might be illegally confined
during many months in the castle of Carlisle or Norwich; and no
whisper of the transaction might reach London. It is highly
probable that the rack had been many years in use before the great
majority of the nation had the least suspicion that it was ever
employed. Nor were our ancestors by any means so much alive as we
are to the importance of maintaining great general rules. We
have been taught by long experience that we cannot without
danger suffer any breach of the constitution to pass unnoticed. It
is therefore now universally held that a government which
unnecessarily exceeds its powers ought to be visited with
severe parliamentary censure, and that a government which, under the
pressure of a great exigency, and with pure intentions, has
exceeded its powers, ought without delay to apply to Parliament for
an act of indemnity. But such were not the feelings of the
Englishmen of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They
were little disposed to contend for a principle merely as a
principle, or to cry out against an irregularity which was not also
felt to be a grievance. As long as the general spirit of the
administration was mild and popular, they were willing to allow
some latitude to their sovereign. If, for ends generally
acknowledged to be good, he exerted a vigour beyond the law, they not only
forgave, but applauded him, and while they enjoyed security
and prosperity under his rule, were but too ready to believe
that whoever had incurred his displeasure had deserved it. But
to this indulgence there was a limit; nor was that King wise who
presumed far on the forbearance of the English people. They might
sometimes allow him to overstep the constitutional
line: but they also claimed the privilege of overstepping that
line themselves, whenever his encroachments were so serious as
to excite alarm. If, not content with occasionally
oppressing individuals, he cared to oppress great masses, his
subjects promptly appealed to the laws, and, that appeal failing,
appealed as promptly to the God of battles.
Our forefathers
might indeed safely tolerate a king in a few excesses; for they
had in reserve a check which soon brought the fiercest and
proudest king to reason, the check of physical force. It is
difficult for an Englishman of the nineteenth century to imagine
to himself the facility and rapidity with which, four
hundred years ago, this check was applied. The people have long
unlearned the use of arms. The art of war has been carried to a
perfection unknown to former ages; and the knowledge of that art is
confined to a particular class. A hundred thousand soldiers, well
disciplined and commanded, will keep down ten millions of
ploughmen and artisans. A few regiments of household troops are
sufficient to overawe all the discontented spirits of a large capital.
In the meantime the effect of the constant progress of wealth
has been to make insurrection far more terrible to
thinking men than maladministration. Immense sums have been expended
on works which, if a rebellion broke out, might perish in a
few hours. The mass of movable wealth collected in the shops and
warehouses of London alone exceeds five hundredfold that
which the whole island contained in the days of the Plantagenets;
and, if the government were subverted by physical force,
all this movable wealth would be exposed to imminent risk of
spoliation and destruction. Still greater would be the risk to
public credit, on which thousands of families directly depend
for subsistence, and with which the credit of the whole commercial
world is inseparably connected. It is no exaggeration to
say that a civil war of a week on English ground would now produce
disasters which would be felt from the Hoang-ho to the Missouri,
and of which the traces would be discernible at the distance of a
century. In such a state of society resistance must be regarded
as a cure more desperate than almost any malady which can afflict
the state. In the middle ages, on the contrary, resistance was an
ordinary remedy for political distempers, a remedy which was
always at hand, and which, though doubtless sharp at the
moment, produced no deep or lasting ill effects. If a popular chief
raised his standard in a popular cause, an irregular army
could be assembled in a day. Regular army there was none. Every
man had a slight tincture of soldiership, and scarcely any man
more than a slight tincture. The national wealth consisted chiefly
in flocks and herds, in the harvest of the year, and in the
simple buildings inhabited by the people. All the furniture, the
stock of shops, the machinery which could be 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 sat 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, and their spirits
high, but they understood the character of the nation that they
governed, and never once, like some of their predecessors, and
some of their successors, carried obstinacy to a fatal point. The
discretion of the Tudors was such, that their power, though it
was often resisted, was never subverted. The reign of every one
of them was disturbed by formidable discontents: but
the government was always able either to soothe the mutineers or
to conquer and punish them. Sometimes, by timely concessions, it
succeeded in averting civil hostilities; but in general it stood
firm, and called for help on the nation. The nation obeyed the
call, rallied round the sovereign, and enabled him to quell the
disaffected minority.
Thus, from the age
of Henry the Third to the age of Elizabeth, England grew and
flourished under a polity which contained the germ of our
present institutions, and which, though not very exactly defined,
or very exactly observed, was yet effectually prevented from
degenerating into despotism, by the awe in which the governors
stood of the spirit and strength of the governed.
But such a polity
is suited only to a particular stage in the progress of
society. The same causes which produce a division of labour in the
peaceful arts must at length make war a distinct science and a
distinct trade. A time arrives when the use of arms begins to occupy
the entire attention of a separate class. It soon appears that
peasants and burghers, however brave, are unable to stand
their ground against veteran soldiers, whose whole life is a
preparation for the day of battle, whose nerves have been braced
by long familiarity with danger, and whose movements have all
the precision of clockwork. It is found that the defence of
nations can no longer be safely entrusted to warriors taken
from the plough or the loom for a campaign of forty days. If any
state forms a great regular army, the bordering states
must imitate the example, or must submit to a foreign yoke. But,
where a great regular army exists, limited monarchy, such as
it was in the middle ages, can exist no longer. The sovereign is
at once emancipated from what had been the chief restraint on his
power; and he inevitably becomes absolute, unless he is
subjected to checks such as would be superfluous in a society where
all are soldiers occasionally, and none permanently.
With the danger
came also the means of escape. In the monarchies of the middle ages
the power of the sword belonged to the prince; but the power of
the purse belonged to the nation; and the progress of
civilisation, as it made the sword of the prince more and more
formidable to the nation, made the purse of the nation more and more
necessary to the prince. His hereditary revenues would no longer
suffice, even for the expenses of civil government. It was
utterly impossible that, without a regular and extensive system
of taxation, he could keep in constant efficiency a great
body of disciplined troops. The policy which the parliamentary
assemblies of Europe ought to have adopted was to take their
stand firmly on their constitutional right to give or withhold money,
and resolutely to refuse funds for the support of armies, till
ample securities had been provided against despotism.
This wise policy
was followed in our country alone. In the neighbouring
kingdoms great military establishments were formed; no new safeguards
for public liberty were devised; and the consequence was,
that the old parliamentary institutions everywhere ceased
to exist. In France, where they had always been feeble, they
languished, and at length died of mere weakness. In Spain, where they
had been as strong as in any part of Europe, they struggled
fiercely for life, but struggled too late. The mechanics of
Toledo and Valladolid vainly defended the privileges of the Castilian
Cortes against the veteran battalions of Charles the Fifth. As
vainly, in the next generation, did the citizens of Saragossa stand up
against Philip the Second, for the old constitution of
Aragon. One after another, the great national councils of the
continental monarchies, councils once scarcely less proud and
powerful than those which sate at Westminster, sank into utter
insignificance. If they met, they met merely as our Convocation
now meets, to go through some venerable forms. In England events
took a different course. This singular felicity she owed chiefly
to her insular situation. Before the end of the fifteenth century
great military establishments were indispensable to
the dignity, and even to the safety, of the French and
Castilian monarchies. If either of those two powers had disarmed, it
would soon have been compelled to submit to the dictation of the
other. But England, protected by the sea against invasion, and
rarely engaged in warlike operations on the Continent, was
not, as yet, under the necessity of employing regular troops.
The sixteenth century, the seventeenth century, found her still
without a standing army. At the commencement of the seventeenth
century political science had made considerable progress. The fate
of the Spanish Cortes and of the French States General had given
solemn warning to our Parliaments; and our Parliaments, fully
aware of the nature and magnitude of the danger, adopted,
in good time, a system of tactics which, after a contest protracted
through three generations, was at length successful
Almost every
writer who has treated of that contest has been desirous to show
that his own party was the party which was struggling to
preserve the old constitution unaltered. The truth however is that
the old constitution could not be preserved unaltered. A law,
beyond the control of human wisdom, had decreed that there should
no longer be governments of that peculiar class which, in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had been common throughout Europe.
The question, therefore, was not whether our polity should
undergo a change, but what the nature of the change should be. The
introduction of a new and mighty force had disturbed the old
equilibrium, and had turned one limited monarchy after
another into an absolute monarchy. What had happened elsewhere
would assuredly have happened here, unless the balance had been
redressed by a great transfer of power from the crown to the
parliament. Our princes were about to have at their command means of
coercion such as no Plantagenet or Tudor had ever possessed.
They must inevitably have become despots, unless they had been, at
the same time, placed under restraints to which no Plantagenet or
Tudor had ever been subject.
It seems certain,
therefore, that, had none but political causes been at work, the
seventeenth century would not have passed away without a fierce
conflict between our Kings and their Parliaments. But
other causes of perhaps greater potency contributed to
produce the same effect. While the government of the Tudors was in
its highest vigour an event took place which has coloured the
destinies of all Christian nations, and in an especial manner
the destinies of England. Twice during the middle ages the mind of
Europe had risen up against the domination of Rome. The first
insurrection broke out in the south of France. The energy of
Innocent the Third, the zeal of the young orders of Francis and
Dominic, and the ferocity of the Crusaders whom the priesthood let
loose on an unwarlike population, crushed the Albigensian
churches. The second reformation had its origin in England, and
spread to Bohemia. The Council of Constance, by removing some
ecclesiastical disorders which had given scandal to Christendom, and
the princes of Europe, by unsparingly using fire and sword against
the heretics, succeeded in arresting and turning back the
movement. Nor is this much to be lamented. The sympathies of a
Protestant, it is true, will naturally be on the side of the
Albigensians and of the Lollards. Yet an enlightened and temperate
Protestant will perhaps be disposed to doubt whether the
success, either of the Albigensians or of the Lollards, would,
on the whole, have promoted the happiness and virtue of mankind.
Corrupt as the Church of Rome was, there is reason to believe
that, if that Church had been overthrown in the twelfth or even in
the fourteenth century, the vacant space would have been occupied
by some system more corrupt still. There was then, through the
greater part of Europe, very little knowledge; and that little
was confined to the clergy. Not one man in five hundred could have
spelled his way through a psalm. Books were few and costly.
The art of printing was unknown. Copies of the Bible, inferior in
beauty and clearness to those which every cottager may now
command, sold for prices which many priests could not afford
to give. It was obviously impossible that the laity should
search the Scriptures for themselves. It is probable therefore, that,
as soon as they had put off one spiritual yoke, they would have
put on another, and that the power lately exercised by the
clergy of the Church of Rome would have passed to a far worse
class of teachers. The sixteenth century was comparatively a
time of light. Yet even in the sixteenth century a considerable
number of those who quitted the old religion followed the first
confident and plausible guide who offered himself, and were
soon led into errors far more serious than those which they
had renounced. Thus Matthias and Kniperdoling, apostles of lust,
robbery, and murder, were able for a time to rule great cities.
In a darker age such false prophets might have founded empires;
and Christianity might have been distorted into a cruel and
licentious superstition, more noxious, not only than Popery, but even
than Islamism.
About a hundred
years after the rising of the Council of Constance, that
great change emphatically called the Reformation began. The fulness
of time was now come. The clergy were no longer the sole or
the chief depositories of knowledge The invention of
printing had furnished the assailants of the Church with a mighty
weapon which had been wanting to their predecessors. The
study of the ancient writers, the rapid development of the
powers of the modern languages, the unprecedented
activity which was displayed in every department of literature, the
political state of Europe, the vices of the Roman court, the
exactions of the Roman chancery, the jealousy with which the wealth
and privileges of the clergy were naturally regarded by
laymen, the jealousy with which the Italian ascendency was
naturally regarded by men born on our side of the Alps, all these
things gave to the teachers of the new theology an advantage which
they perfectly understood how to use.
Those who hold
that the influence of the Church of Rome in the dark ages was, on
the whole, beneficial to mankind, may yet with perfect
consistency regard the Reformation as an inestimable blessing. The
leading strings, which preserve and uphold the infant, would
impede the fullgrown man. And so the very means by which the human
mind is, in one stage of its progress, supported and propelled,
may, in another stage, be mere hindrances. There is a season in the
life both of an individual and of a society, at which
submission and faith, such as at a later period would be justly called
servility and credulity, are useful qualities. The child who
teachably and undoubtingly listens to the instructions of his elders is
likely to improve rapidly. But the man who should receive
with childlike docility every assertion and dogma uttered by another
man no wiser than himself would become contemptible. It
is the same with communities. The childhood of the European
nations was passed under the tutelage of the clergy. The ascendancy of
the sacerdotal order was long the ascendancy which naturally
and properly belongs to intellectual superiority. The priests, with
all their faults, were by far the wisest portion of
society. It was, therefore, on the whole, good that they should be
respected and obeyed. The encroachments of the ecclesiastical
power on the province of the civil power produced much more
happiness than misery, while the ecclesiastical power was in the hands
of the only class that had studied history, philosophy, and
public law, and while the civil power was in the hands of savage
chiefs, who could not read their own grants and edicts. But a
change took place. Knowledge gradually spread among laymen. At the
commencement of the sixteenth century many of them were in every
intellectual attainment fully equal to the most enlightened of
their spiritual pastors. Thenceforward that dominion, which,
during the dark ages, had been, in spite of many abuses, a
legitimate and salutary guardianship, became an unjust and noxious
tyranny.
From the time when
the barbarians overran the Western Empire to the time of the
revival of letters, the influence of the Church of Rome had been
generally favourable to science to civilisation, and to good
government. But, during the last three centuries, to stunt the growth
of the human mind has been her chief object. Throughout
Christendom, whatever advance has been made in knowledge, in
freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has been made in spite
of her, and has everywhere been in inverse proportion to her
power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have,
under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political
servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant countries, once
proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned by skill
and industry into gardens, and can boast of a long list of
heroes and statesmen, philosophers and poets. Whoever, knowing
what Italy and Scotland naturally are, and what, four hundred years
ago, they actually were, shall now compare the country round Rome
with the country round Edinburgh, will be able to form some
judgment as to the tendency of Papal domination. The descent of Spain,
once the first among monarchies, to the lowest depths of
degradation, the elevation of Holland, in spite of many natural
disadvantages, to a position such as no commonwealth so small has ever
reached, teach the same lesson. Whoever passes in Germany from a
Roman Catholic to a Protestant principality, in Switzerland from a
Roman Catholic to a Protestant canton, in Ireland from a
Roman Catholic to a Protestant county, finds that he has passed from
a lower to a higher grade of civilisation. On the other side of
the Atlantic the same law prevails. The Protestants of the
United States have left far behind them the Roman Catholics of
Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. The Roman Catholics of Lower Canada
remain inert, while the whole continent round them is in a
ferment with Protestant activity and enterprise. The French have
doubtless shown an energy and an intelligence which, even when
misdirected, have justly entitled them to be called a great people. But
this apparent exception, when examined, will be found to confirm.
the rule; for in no country that is called Roman Catholic,
has the Roman Catholic Church, during several generations,
possessed so little authority as in France. The literature of
France is justly held in high esteem throughout the world. But if we
deduct from that literature all that belongs to four parties which
have been, on different grounds, in rebellion against the Papal
domination, all that belongs to the Protestants, all
that belongs to the assertors of the Gallican liberties, all
that belongs to the Jansenists, and all that belongs to the
philosophers, how much will be left?
It is difficult to
say whether England owes more to the Roman Catholic religion
or to the Reformation. For the amalgamation of races and for the
abolition of villenage, she is chiefly indebted to the influence
which the priesthood in the middle ages exercised over the
laity. For political and intellectual freedom, and for all the
blessings which political and intellectual freedom have
brought in their train, she is chiefly indebted to the great
rebellion of the laity against the priesthood.
The struggle
between the old and the new theology in our country was long, and the
event sometimes seemed doubtful. There were two extreme parties,
prepared to act with violence or to suffer with stubborn
resolution. Between them lay, during a considerable time, a middle
party, which blended, very illogically, but by no means unnaturally,
lessons learned in the nursery with the sermons of the
modern evangelists, and, while clinging with fondness to all
observances, yet detested abuses with which those observances were
closely connected. Men in such a frame of mind were willing to
obey, almost with thankfulness, the dictation of an able ruler who
spared them the trouble of judging for themselves, and,
raising a firm and commanding voice above the uproar of
controversy, told them how to worship and what to believe. It is not
strange, therefore, that the Tudors should have been able to
exercise a great influence on ecclesiastical affairs; nor is it
strange that their influence should, for the most part, have
been exercised with a view to their own interest.
Henry the Eighth
attempted to constitute an Anglican Church differing from the
Roman Catholic Church on the point of the supremacy, and on
that point alone. His success in this attempt was extraordinary.
The force of his character, the singularly favourable
situation in which he stood with respect to foreign powers, the
immense wealth which the spoliation of the abbeys placed at his
disposal, and the support of that class which still halted between two
Opinions, enabled him to bid defiance to both the extreme
parties, to burn as heretics those who avowed the tenets of the
Reformers, and to hang as traitors those who owned the authority of
the Pope. But Henry's system died with him. Had his life been
prolonged, he would have found it difficult to maintain a
position assailed with equal fury by all who were zealous either for
the new or for the old opinions. The ministers who held the royal
prerogatives in trust for his infant son could not venture to
persist in so hazardous a policy; nor could Elizabeth venture
to return to it. It was necessary to make a choice. The
government must either submit to Rome, or must obtain the aid of the
Protestants. The government and the Protestants had only one thing
in common, hatred of the Papal power. The English Reformers
were eager to go as far as their brethren on the Continent.
They unanimously condemned as Antichristian numerous dogmas
and practices to which Henry had stubbornly adhered, and which
Elizabeth reluctantly abandoned. Many felt a strong repugnance
even to things indifferent which had formed part of the polity
or ritual of the mystical Babylon. Thus Bishop Hooper, who died
manfully at Gloucester for his religion, long refused to wear
the episcopal vestments. Bishop Ridley, a martyr of still greater
renown, pulled down the ancient altars of his diocese, and
ordered the Eucharist to be administered in the middle of
churches, at tables which the Papists irreverently termed oyster
boards. Bishop Jewel pronounced the clerical garb to be a stage
dress, a fool's coat, a relique of the Amorites, and promised that
he would spare no labour to extirpate such degrading
absurdities. Archbishop Grindal long hesitated about accepting a mitre
from dislike of what he regarded as the mummery of consecration.
Bishop Parkhurst uttered a fervent prayer that the Church of
England would propose to herself the Church of Zurich as the
absolute pattern of a Christian community. Bishop Ponet was of
opinion that the word Bishop should be abandoned to the Papists, and
that the chief officers of the purified church should be called
Superintendents. When it is considered that none of these prelates
belonged to the extreme section of the Protestant party,
it cannot be doubted that, if the general sense of that party had
been followed. the work of reform would have been carried on as
unsparingly in England as in Scotland.
But, as the
government needed the support of the protestants, so the Protestants
needed the protection of the government. Much was therefore given up
on both sides: an union was effected; and the fruit of that
union was the Church of England.
To the
peculiarities of this great institution, and to the strong passions which it
has called forth in the minds both of friends and of enemies,
are to be attributed many of the most important events which have,
since the Reformation, taken place in our country; nor can
the secular history of England be at all understood by us,
unless we study it in constant connection with the history of her
ecclesiastical polity.
The man who took
the chief part in settling the condition, of the alliance which
produced the Anglican Church was Archbishop Cranmer. He was
the representative of both the parties which, at that time, needed
each other's assistance. He was at once a divine and a
courtier. In his character of divine he was perfectly ready to
go as far in the way of change as any Swiss or Scottish Reformer.
In his character of courtier he was desirous to preserve that
organisation which had, during many ages, admirably served
the purposes of the Bishops of Rome, and might be expected now to
serve equally well the purposes of the English Kings and of their
ministers. His temper and his understanding, eminently fitted
him to act as mediator. Saintly in his professions,
unscrupulous in his dealings, zealous for nothing, bold in
speculation, a coward and a timeserver in action, a placable enemy and
a lukewarm friend, he was in every way qualified to
arrange the terms of the coalition between the religious and the
worldly enemies of Popery.
To this day the
constitution, the doctrines, and the services of the Church, retain
the visible marks of the compromise from which she sprang. She
occupies a middle position between the Churches of Rome and
Geneva. Her doctrinal confessions and discourses, composed by
Protestants, set forth principles of theology in which Calvin or
Knox would have found scarcely a word to disapprove. Her
prayers and thanksgivings, derived from the ancient
Breviaries, are very generally such that Cardinal Fisher or Cardinal Pole
might have heartily joined in them. A controversialist
who puts an Arminian sense on her Articles and Homilies will be
pronounced by candid men to be as unreasonable as a
controversialist who denies that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration can
be discovered in her Liturgy.
The Church of Rome
held that episcopacy was of divine institution, and
that certain supernatural graces of a high order had been
transmitted by the imposition of hands through fifty generations, from
the Eleven who received their commission on the Galilean mount, to
the bishops who met at Trent. A large body of Protestants, on
the other hand, regarded prelacy as positively unlawful, and
persuaded themselves that they found a very different form of
ecclesiastical government prescribed in Scripture. The
founders of the Anglican Church took a middle course. They
retained episcopacy; but they did not declare it to be an institution
essential to the welfare of a Christian society, or to the
efficacy of the sacraments. Cranmer, indeed, on one important
occasion, plainly avowed his conviction that, in the primitive
times, there was no distinction between bishops and priests, and that
the laying on of hands was altogether superfluous.
Among the
Presbyterians the conduct of public worship is, to a great extent, left
to the minister. Their prayers, therefore, are not exactly the
same in any two assemblies on the same day, or on any two days in
the same assembly. In one parish they are fervent, eloquent,
and full of meaning. In the next parish they may be languid or
absurd. The priests of the Roman Catholic Church, on the
other hand, have, during many generations, daily chanted the same
ancient confessions, supplications, and thanksgivings, in
India and Lithuania, in Ireland and Peru. The service, being in
a dead language, is intelligible only to the learned; and the
great majority of the congregation may be said to assist as
spectators rather than as auditors. Here, again, the Church of England
took a middle course. She copied the Roman Catholic forms of
prayer, but translated them into the vulgar tongue, and
invited the illiterate multitude to join its voice to that of the
minister.
In every part of
her system the same policy may be traced. Utterly rejecting
the doctrine of transubstantiation, and condemning as
idolatrous all adoration paid to the sacramental bread and wine,
she yet, to the disgust of the Puritan, required her children to
receive the memorials of divine love, meekly kneeling upon
their knees. Discarding many rich vestments which surrounded the
altars of the ancient faith, she yet retained, to the horror of weak
minds, a robe of white linen, typical of the purity which
belonged to her as the mystical spouse of Christ. Discarding a crowd
of pantomimic gestures which, in the Roman Catholic worship,
are substituted for intelligible words, she yet shocked many rigid
Protestants by marking the infant just sprinkled from the
font with the sign of the cross. The Roman Catholic addressed
his prayers to a multitude of Saints, among whom were numbered
many men of doubtful, and some of hateful, character. The
Puritan refused the addition of Saint even to the apostle of the
Gentiles, and to the disciple whom Jesus loved. The Church of
England, though she asked for the intercession of no created being,
still set apart days for the commemoration of some who had done
and suffered great things for the faith. She retained
confirmation and ordination as edifying rites; but she degraded them from
the rank of sacraments. Shrift was no part of her system. Yet
she gently invited the dying penitent to confess his sins to a
divine, and empowered her ministers to soothe the departing soul by
an absolution which breathes the very spirit of the old religion.
In general it may be said that she appeals more to the
understanding , and less to the senses and the imagination, than
the Church of Rome, and that she appeals less to the
understanding, and more to the senses and imagination, than the
Protestant Churches of Scotland, France, and Switzerland.
Nothing, however,
so strongly distinguished the Church of England from other
Churches as the relation in which she stood to the monarchy. The King
was her head. The limits of the authority which he
possessed, as such, were not traced, and indeed have never yet been
traced with precision. The laws which declared him supreme in
ecclesiastical matters were drawn rudely and in general terms. If,
for the purpose of ascertaining the sense of those laws, we
examine the books and lives of those who founded the English
Church, our perplexity will be increased. For the founders of the
English Church wrote and acted in an age of violent
intellectual fermentation, and of constant action and reaction. They
therefore often contradicted each other and sometimes
contradicted themselves. That the King was, under Christ, sole head
of the Church was a doctrine which they all with one voice
affirmed: but those words had very different significations in
different mouths, and in the same mouth at different
conjunctures. Sometimes an authority which would have satisfied
Hildebrand was ascribed to the sovereign: then it dwindled down to
an authority little more than that which had been claimed by
many ancient English princes who had been in constant communion
with the Church of Rome. What Henry and his favourite
counsellors meant, at one time, by the supremacy, was certainly nothing
less than the whole power of the keys. The King was to be the Pope
of his kingdom, the vicar of God, the expositor of
Catholic verity, the channel of sacramental graces. He arrogated to
himself the right of deciding dogmatically what was orthodox
doctrine and what was heresy, of drawing up and imposing
confessions of faith, and of giving religious instruction to his
people. He proclaimed that all jurisdiction, spiritual as well
as temporal, was derived from him alone, and that it was in his
power to confer episcopal authority, and to take it away. He
actually ordered his seal to be put to commissions by
which bishops were appointed, who were to exercise their functions as
his deputies, and during his pleasure. According to this
system, as expounded by Cranmer, the King was the spiritual as
well as the temporal chief of the nation. In both capacities
His Highness must have lieutenants. As he appointed civil
officers to keep his seal, to collect his revenues, and to
dispense justice in his name, so he appointed divines of various
ranks to preach the gospel, and to administer the sacraments. It
was unnecessary that there should be any imposition of
hands. The King,--such was the opinion of Cranmer given in the
plainest words,--might in virtue of authority derived from God,
make a priest; and the priest so made needed no ordination
whatever. These opinions the Archbishop, in spite of the opposition of
less courtly divines, followed out to every legitimate
consequence. He held that his own spiritual functions, like the secular
functions of the Chancellor and Treasurer, were at once determined
by a demise of the crown. When Henry died, therefore, the
Primate and his suffragans took out fresh commissions,
empowering them to ordain and to govern the Church till the new
sovereign should think fit to order otherwise. When it was objected
that a power to bind and to loose, altogether distinct from
temporal power, had been given by our Lord to his apostles, some
theologians of this school replied that the power to bind and to
loose had descended, not to the clergy, but to the whole body of
Christian men, and ought to be exercised by the chief magistrate
as the representative of the society. When it was objected that
Saint Paul had spoken of certain persons whom the Holy Ghost had
made overseers and shepherds of the faithful, it was answered
that King Henry was the very overseer, the very shepherd whom the
Holy Ghost had appointed, and to whom the expressions of
Saint Paul applied.
These high
pretensions gave scandal to Protestants as well as to Catholics; and the
scandal was greatly increased when the supremacy, which
Mary had resigned back to the Pope, was again annexed to the
crown, on the accession of Elizabeth. It seemed monstrous that a
woman should be the chief bishop of a Church in which an apostle
had forbidden her even to let her voice be heard. The Queen,
therefore, found it necessary expressly to disclaim that
sacerdotal character which her father had assumed, and which,
according to Cranmer, had been inseparably joined, by divine ordinance,
to the regal function. When the Anglican confession of
faith was revised in her reign, the supremacy was explained in a
manner somewhat different from that which had been fashionable at the
court of Henry. Cranmer had declared, in emphatic terms,
that God had immediately committed to Christian princes the whole
cure of all their subjects, as well concerning the administration
of God's word for the cure of souls, as concerning the
administration of things political. The thirty-seventh
article of religion, framed under Elizabeth, declares, in terms
as emphatic, that the ministering of God's word does not
belong to princes. The Queen, however, still had over the Church a
visitatorial power of vast and undefined extent. She was
entrusted by Parliament with the office of restraining and
punishing heresy and every sort of ecclesiastical abuse, and was
permitted to delegate her authority to commissioners. The
Bishops were little more than her ministers. Rather than grant
to the civil magistrate the absolute power of nominating
spiritual pastors, the Church of Rome, in the eleventh century, set all
Europe on fire. Rather than grant to the civil magistrate the
absolute power of nominating spiritual pastors, the ministers of
the Church of Scotland, in our time, resigned their livings by
hundreds. The Church of England had no such scruples. By the
royal authority alone her prelates were appointed. By the
royal authority alone her Convocations were summoned,
regulated, prorogued, and dissolved. Without the royal sanction her
canons had no force. One of the articles of her faith was that
without the royal consent no ecclesiastical council could
lawfully assemble. From all her judicatures an appeal lay, in the
last resort, to the sovereign, even when the question was
whether an opinion ought to be accounted heretical, or whether the
administration of a sacrament had been valid. Nor did the Church
grudge this extensive power to our princes. By them she had been
called into existence, nursed through a feeble infancy, guarded
from Papists on one side and from Puritans on the other,
protected against Parliaments which bore her no good will, and avenged
on literary assailants whom she found it hard to answer. Thus
gratitude, hope, fear, common attachments, common enmities, bound
her to the throne. All her traditions, all her tastes, were
monarchical. Loyalty became a point of professional honour among her
clergy, the peculiar badge which distinguished them at once from
Calvinists and from Papists. Both the Calvinists and the
Papists, widely as they differed in other respects, regarded
with extreme jealousy all encroachments of the temporal power on
the domain of the spiritual power. Both Calvinists and
Papists maintained that subjects might justifiably draw the sword
against ungodly rulers. In France Calvinists resisted Charles
the Ninth: Papists resisted Henry the Fourth: both Papists and
Calvinists resisted Henry the Third. In Scotland Calvinists led
Mary captive. On the north of the Trent Papists took arms against
the English throne. The Church of England meantime condemned
both Calvinists and Papists, and loudly boasted that no
duty was more constantly or earnestly inculcated by her than that
of submission to princes.