He
transacted
busi-
ness with his clerks in full dress.
ness with his clerks in full dress.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v12 - Gre to Hen
Richard and John both held with Glanvill
that the will of the prince was the law of the land; and to fetter
that will by the customs and franchises which were embodied in
the barons' claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of his
rights. But no imperialist theories had touched the minds of
## p. 6668 (#44) ############################################
6668
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
<<
his people. The country rose as one man at his refusal. At the
close of May, London threw open her gates to the forces of
the barons, now arrayed under Robert Fitz-Walter as Marshal
of the Army of God and Holy Church. " Exeter and Lincoln
followed the example of the capital; promises of aid came from
Scotland and Wales; the northern barons marched hastily under
Eustace de Vesci to join their comrades in London. Even the
nobles who had as yet clung to the King, but whose hopes of
conciliation were blasted by his obstinacy, yielded at last to the
summons of the "Army of God. " Pandulf indeed, and Arch-
bishop Langton, still remained with John; but they counseled, as
Earl Ranulf and William Marshal counseled, his acceptance of
the Charter. None in fact counseled its rejection save his new
Justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des Roches, and other foreigners
who knew the barons purposed driving them from the land. But
even the number of these was small: there was a moment when
John found himself with but seven knights at his back, and
before him a nation in arms. Quick as he was, he had been
taken utterly by surprise. It was in vain that in the short res-
pite he had gained from Christmas to Easter he had summoned
mercenaries to his aid, and appealed to his new suzerain the
Pope. Summons and appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath
in his heart, John bowed to necessity and called the barons to a
conference on an island in the Thames, between Windsor and
Staines, near a marshy meadow by the river-side, the meadow of
Runnymede. The King encamped on one bank of the river, the
barons covered the flat of Runnymede on the other. Their del-
egates met on the 15th of July on the island between them, but
the negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's purpose of
unconditional submission. The Great Charter was discussed and
agreed to in a single day.
Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the cathe-
drals and churches; and one copy may still be seen in the British
Museum, injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still
hanging from the brown shriveled parchment. It is impossible
to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English
freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our
own hands, the great Charter to which from age to age men
have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty. But in
itself the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish
any new constitutional principles. The Charter of Henry the
## p. 6669 (#45) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6669
First formed the basis of the whole, and the additions to it are
for the most part formal recognitions of the judicial and admin-
istrative changes introduced by Henry the Second. What was
new in it was its origin. In form, like the Charter on which it
was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In actual fact it
was a treaty between the whole English people and its King. In
it, England found itself for the first time since the Conquest a
nation bound together by common national interests, by a com-
mon national sympathy. In words which almost close the Char-
ter, the "community of the whole land" is recognized as the
great body from which the restraining power of the baronage
takes its validity. There is no distinction of blood or class, of
Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble.
All are recog-
nized as Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English
rights. Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnymede
the rights not of baron and churchman only, but those of free-
holder and merchant, of townsman and villein. The provisions
against wrong and extortion which the barons drew up as against
the King for themselves, they drew up as against themselves for
their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on Henry's Char-
ter, it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone before.
The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged
for precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten
custom which the older grant did little more than recognize had
proved too weak to hold the Angevins; and the baronage set
them aside for the restraints of written and defined law. It is in
this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the
age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation's memory and
officially declared by the Primate, to the age of written legisla-
tion, of parliaments and statutes, which was to come.
Its opening indeed is in general terms. The Church had
shown its power of self-defense in the struggle over the inter-
dict, and the clause which recognized its rights alone retained
the older and general form. But all vagueness ceases when the
Charter passes on to deal with the rights of Englishmen at
large, their right to justice, to security of person and property,
to good government "No freeman," ran a memorable article
that lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be
seized or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way.
brought to ruin; we will not go against any man
nor send
against him, save by legal judgment of his peers or by the law
## p. 6670 (#46) ############################################
6670
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
caru-
of the land. " "To no man will we sell," runs another, "or deny,
or delay, right or justice. " The great reforms of the past reigns
were now formally recognized; judges of assize were to hold
their circuits four times in the year, and the King's court was no
longer to follow the King in his wanderings over the realm, but
to sit in a fixed place. But the denial of justice under John was
a small danger compared with the lawless exactions both of him-
self and his predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of
the scutage which Henry the Second had introduced, and applied
it to raise funds for his ransom. He had restored the Danegeld,
or land-tax, so often abolished, under the new name of «<
cage"; had seized the wool of the Cistercians and the plate of the
churches, and rated movables as well as land. John had again
raised the rate of scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms
at his pleasure without counsel of the baronage. The Great
Charter met this abuse by a provision on which our constitutional
system rests. "No scutage or aid [other than the three cus-
tomary feudal aids] shall be imposed in our realm save by the
common council of the realm;" and to this Great Council it was
provided that prelates and the greater barons should be sum-
moned by special writ, and all tenants in chief through the sher-
iffs and bailiffs, at least forty days before. The provision defined
what had probably been the common usage of the realm; but the
definition turned it into a national right, a right so momentous
that on it rests our whole Parliamentary life. Even the baron-
age seem to have been startled when they realized the extent of
their claim; and the provision was dropped from the later issue
of the Charter at the outset of the next reign. But the clause
brought home to the nation at large their possession of a right
which became dearer as years went by. More and more clearly
the nation discovered that in these simple words lay the secret
of political power. It was the right of self-taxation that England
fought for under Earl Simon as she fought for it under Hamp-
den. It was the establishment of this right which established
English freedom.
## p. 6671 (#47) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6671
ENGLAND'S GROWTH IN COMMERCE AND COMFORT UNDER
ELIZABETH
From History of the English People'
A rising into importance.
MIDDLE class of wealthier land-owners and merchants was fast
"The wealth of the meaner sort,"
wrote one to Cecil, is the very fount of rebellion, the
occasion of their indolence, of the contempt of the nobility, and
of the hatred they have conceived against them. " But Cecil and
his mistress could watch the upgrowth of national wealth with
cooler eyes.
In the country its effect was to undo much of the
evil which the diminution of small holdings had done. Whatever
social embarrassment it might bring about, the revolution in agri-
culture which Latimer deplored undoubtedly favored production.
Not only was a larger capital brought to bear upon the land, but
the mere change in the system of cultivation introduced a taste
for new and better modes of farming; the breed of horses and of
cattle was improved, and a far greater use made of manure and
dressings. One acre under the new system produced, it was said,
as much as two under the old. As a more careful and constant
cultivation was introduced, a greater number of hands came to
be required on every farm; and much of the surplus labor which
had been flung off the land in the commencement of the new
system was thus recalled to it.
A yet more efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed was
found in the development of manufactures. The linen trade was
as yet of small value, and that of silk-weaving was only just
introduced. But the woolen manufacture was fast becoming an
important element in the national wealth. England no longer
sent her fleeces to be woven in Flanders and to be dyed at
Florence. The spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling, and dye-
ing of cloth, were spreading rapidly from the towns over the
country-side. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the cen-
tre, extended over the whole of the Eastern counties. Farmers'
wives began everywhere to spin their wool from their own
sheeps' backs into a coarse "homespun. " The South and the
West, however, still remained the great seats of industry and of
wealth, for they were the homes of mining and manufacturing
activity. The iron manufactures were limited to Kent and
Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was already
## p. 6672 (#48) ############################################
6672
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
threatened by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed their
furnaces, and by the exhaustion of the forests of the Weald.
Cornwall was then, as now, the sole exporter of tin; and the
exportation of its copper was just beginning. The broadcloths
of the West claimed the palm among the woolen stuffs of Eng-
land. The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of the com-
merce of the Channel. Every little harbor from the Foreland to
the Land's End sent out its fleets of fishing-boats, manned with
bold seamen who were to furnish crews for Drake and the Buc-
caneers. Northern England still lagged far behind the rest of
the realm in its industrial activity. But in the reign of Elizabeth
the poverty and inaction to which it had been doomed for so
many centuries began at last to be broken. We see the first
sign of the revolution which has transferred English manufact-
ures and English wealth to the north of the Mersey and of the
Humber, in the mention which now meets us of the friezes of
Manchester, the coverlets of York, the cutlery of Sheffield, and
the cloth trade of Halifax.
Elizabeth lent a ready patronage to the new commerce; she
shared in its speculations, she considered its extension and pro-
tection as a part of public policy, and she sanctioned the forma-
tion of the great merchant companies which could alone secure
the trader against wrong or injustice in distant countries. The
Merchant-Adventurers of London, a body which had existed long
before, and had received a charter of incorporation under Henry
the Seventh, furnished a model for the Russia Company and the
company which absorbed the new commerce to the Indies. But
it was not wholly with satisfaction that either the Queen or her
ministers watched the social change which wealth was producing
around them. They feared the increased expenditure and com-
fort which necessarily followed it, as likely to impoverish the
land and to eat out the hardihood of the people. "England
spendeth more on wines in one year," complained Cecil, “than it
did in ancient times in four years. >> In the upper classes the
lavishness of a new wealth combined with the lavishness of life,
a love of beauty, of color, of display, to revolutionize English
dress. Men «< wore a manor on their backs. " The Queen's three
thousand robes were rivaled in their bravery by the slashed
velvets, the ruffs, the jeweled purpoints of the courtiers around
her. But signs of the growing wealth were as evident in the
lower class as in the higher. The disuse of salt fish and the
## p. 6673 (#49) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6673
greater consumption of meat marked the improvement which had
taken place among the country folk. Their rough and wattled
farm-houses were being superseded by dwellings of brick and
stone. Pewter was replacing the wooden trenchers of the early
yeomanry, and there were yeomen who could boast of a fair
show of silver plate. It is from this period indeed that we can
first date the rise of a conception which seems to us now a
peculiarly English one,- the conception of domestic comfort. The
chimney-corner, so closely associated with family life, came into
existence with the general introduction of chimneys, a feature
rare in ordinary houses at the beginning of this reign. Pillows,
which had before been despised by the farmer and the trader as
fit only
for women in childbed," were now in general use.
Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier
houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and
costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their
carved staircases, their quaintly figured gables, not only con-
trasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English
towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to
play its part in later history.
A transformation of an even more striking kind marked the
extinction of the feudal character of the noblesse. Gloomy walls
and serried battlements disappeared from the dwellings of the
gentry. The strength of the mediæval fortress gave way to the
pomp and grace of the Elizabethan hall. Knole, Longleat, Bur-
leigh, and Hatfield, Hardwick, and Audley End, are familiar
instances of a social as well as an architectural change which
covered England with buildings where the thought of defense
was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and refinement. We
still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, their
fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their cas-
tellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble
looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces
and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint
mazes, its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque
shapes in hopeless rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South.
Nor was the change less within than without. The life of the
Middle Ages concentrated itself in the vast castle hall, where the
baron looked from his upper daïs on the retainers who gathered
at his board. But the great households were fast breaking up;
and the whole feudal economy disappeared when the lord of
XII-418
## p. 6674 (#50) ############################################
6674
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
the household withdrew with his family into his "parlor" or
"withdrawing-room" and left the hall to his dependants. The
Italian refinement of life which told on pleasance and garden
told on the remodeling of the house within, raised the principal
apartments to an upper floor,-a change to which we owe the
grand staircases of the time,—surrounded the quiet courts by long
galleries of the presence," crowned the rude hearth with huge
chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and Cupids, with quaintly in-
terlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on
the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly carved chairs
and costly cabinets. The prodigal use of glass became a marked
feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and one whose
influence on the general health of the people can hardly be over-
rated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the
new manor halls. Every merchant's house had its oriel. "You
shall have sometimes," Lord Bacon grumbled, "your houses so
full of glass that we cannot tell where to come to be out of the
sun or the cold. "
What Elizabeth contributed to this upgrowth of national pros-
perity was the peace and social order from which it sprang.
While autos-da-fé were blazing at Rome and Madrid, while the
Inquisition was driving the sober traders of the Netherlands to
madness, while Scotland was tossing with religious strife, while
the policy of Catharine secured for France but a brief respite
from the horrors of civil war, England remained untroubled and
at peace. Religious order was little disturbed. Recusants were
few. There was little cry as yet for freedom of worship. Free-
dom of conscience was the right of every man. Persecution
had ceased. It was only as the tale of a darker past that men
recalled how, ten years back, heretics had been sent to the fire.
Civil order was even more profound than religious order. The
failure of the northern revolt proved the political tranquillity of
the country. The social troubles from vagrancy and evictions
were slowly passing away. Taxation was light. The country
was firmly and steadily governed. The popular favor which had
met Elizabeth at her accession was growing into a passionate
devotion. Of her faults indeed, England beyond the circle of her
court knew little or nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy
were never seen outside the royal closet. The nation at large
could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its
temperance and good sense, and above all by its success. But
## p. 6675 (#51) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6675
every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at
home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness
and moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of concil-
iation and compromise among warring factions, which gave the
country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when almost every
other country in Europe was torn with civil war. Every sign of
the growing prosperity, the sight of London as it became the
mart of the world, of stately mansions as they rose on every
manor, told, and justly told, in the Queen's favor. Her statue in
the centre of the London Exchange was a tribute on he part of
the merchant class to the interest with which she watched and
shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a general
gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the martyrs threw
into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed which was conspic-
uous in her earlier reign, and never wholly wanting through its
fiercer close. Above all, there was a general confidence in her
instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her finger was
always on the public pulse. She knew exactly when she could
resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give way
before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy uncon-
sciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the
grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surren-
der won back at once the love that her resistance lost. Her
attitude at home, in fact, was that of a woman whose pride in
the well-being of her subjects and whose longing for their favor
was the one warm ou in the coldness of her natural temper.
Elizabeth could be said to love anything, she loved England.
"Nothing," she said to her first Parliament in words of unwonted
fire, "nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me
as the love and good-will of my subjects. " And the love and
good-will which were so dear to her she fully won.
WILLIAM PITT
From History of the English People'
UT of the union of these two strangely contrasted leaders, in
fact, rose the greatest, as it was last, of the purely
Whig administrations. But its real power lay from be-
ginning to end in Pitt himself. Poor as he was,- for his income
was little more than two hundred a year,— and springing as he
## p. 6676 (#52) ############################################
6676
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
did from a family of no political importance, it was by sheer
dint of genius that the young cornet of horse, at whose youth
and inexperience Walpole had sneered, seized a power which the
Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their grasp.
The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the
national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save
from his "popularity"; but this popularity showed that the polit-
ical torpor of the nation was passing away, and that a new in-
terest in public affairs and a resolve to have weight in them was
becoming felt in the nation at large. It was by the sure instinct
of a great people that this interest and resolve gathered them-
selves round William Pitt. If he was ambitious, his ambition
had no petty aim. "I want to call England," he said, as he
took office, "out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand
men from France can shake her. " His call was soon answered,
He at once breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he
served, as he communicated something of his own grandeur to
the men who served him. "No man," said a soldier of the time,
"ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet who did not feel himself braver
when he came out than when he went in. " Ill combined as
were his earlier expeditions, and many as were his failures, he
roused a temper in the nation at large which made ultimate
defeat impossible. "England has been a long time in labor,”
exclaimed Frederick of Prussia as he recognized a greatness like
his own, "but she has at last brought forth a man. "
It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most
as we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and
action stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In
the midst of a society critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to
the affectation of simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely
prosaic, cool of heart and of head, skeptical of virtue and enthu-
siasm, skeptical above all of itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone.
The depth of his conviction, his passionate love for all that he
deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginative-
ness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption,
his pompousness and extravagance, were not more puzzling to
his contemporaries than the confidence with which he appealed to
the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he
turned from a corruption which had till then been the great
engine of politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself,
in the grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out.
## p. 6677 (#53) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6677
"I know that I can save the country," he said to the Duke of
Devonshire on his entry into the ministry, "and I know no other
man can. " The groundwork of Pitt's character was an intense
and passionate pride; but it was a pride which kept him from
stooping to the level of the men who had so long held England
in their hands. He was the first statesman since the Restoration
who set the example of a purely public spirit. Keen as was his
love of power, no man ever refused office so often, or accepted
it with so strict a regard to the principles he professed.
not go to court," he replied to an offer which was made him,
"if I may not bring the Constitution with me. ”
For the corrup-
tion about him he had nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle
the buying of seats and the purchase of members. At the outset
of his career, Pelham appointed him to the most lucrative office
in his administration, that of Paymaster of the Forces; but its
profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was, Pitt refused
to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never ap-
peared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude towards
the people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than
"the great commoner," as Pitt was styled; but his air was always
that of a man who commands popularity, not that of one who
seeks it. He never bent to flatter popular prejudice. When mobs
were roaring themselves hoarse for "Wilkes and liberty," he de-
nounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and when all England
went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily declared his
esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to enlist
on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which
flashed from the small thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and
grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House
of Commons far greater than any other minister has possessed.
He could silence an opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the
whole House with a single word. But he never stooped to the
arts by which men form a political party, and at the height of
his power his personal following hardly numbered half a dozen
members.
His real strength indeed lay not in Parliament, but in the
people at large. His title of "the great commoner" marks a polit-
ical revolution. "It is the people who have sent me here,"
Pitt boasted with a haughty pride when the nobles of the Cab-
inet opposed his will. He was the first to see that the long
political inactivity of the public mind had ceased, and that the
## p. 6678 (#54) ############################################
6678
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
progress of commerce and industry had produced a great middle
class, which no longer found its representatives in the legislature.
"You have taught me," said George the Second when Pitt sought
to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, "to
look for the voice of my people in other places than within the
House of Commons. " It was this unrepresented class which
had forced him into power. During his struggle with Newcastle,
the greater towns backed him with the gift of their freedom
and addresses of confidence. "For weeks," laughs Horace Wal-
pole, "it rained gold boxes. " London stood by him through good
report and evil report; and the wealthiest of English merchants,
Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political lieutenant.
The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the
temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with
its energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its hon-
esty, its moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were
drawn by a natural attraction to the one statesman of their time
whose aims were unselfish, whose hands were clean, whose life
was pure and full of tender affection for wife and child.
But
there was a far deeper ground for their enthusiastic reverence,
and for the reverence which his country has borne Pitt ever
since. He loved England with an intense and personal love. He
believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England
learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs,
her defeats, his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all
thought of self or party spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the
factions who rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but
the public! I set you the example! " His glowing patriotism
was the real spell by which he held England. But even the
faults which checkered his character told for him with the mid-
dle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had been
men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and
absence of pretense. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in
the cabinet, in the House, in his very office.
He transacted busi-
ness with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, gen-
uine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural in tone.
It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his affectation, his
pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on great
debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his
side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing into the
House of Commons "the gestures and emotions of the stage. "
## p. 6679 (#55) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6679
But the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily
offended by faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the
statesman who was borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of
the gout, or carried into the House of Lords to breathe his last
in a protest against national dishonor.
Above all, Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence.
The power of political speech had been revealed in the stormy.
debates of the Long Parliament, but it was cramped in its utter-
ance by the legal and theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry
was flung off by the age of the Revolution; but in the eloquence
of Somers and his rivals we see ability rather than genius,
knowledge, clearness of expression, precision of thought, the
lucidity of the pleader or the man of business, rather than the
passion of the orator. Of this clearness of statement Pitt had
little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole, no speaker
of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always
his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect, his
trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the
front. That with defects like these he stood far above every
orator of his time was due above all to his profound conviction,
to the earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. "I must
sit still," he whispered once to a friend; "for when once I am
up everything that is in my mind comes out. " But the reality of
his eloquence was transfigured by a large and poetic imagination,
an imagination so strong that -as he said himself - "most things.
returned to him with stronger force the second time than the
first, and by a glow of passion which not only raised him high
above the men of his own day, but set him in the front rank
among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit,
the common-sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity,
a sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty
vehemence, a command over the whole range of human feeling.
He passed without an effort from the most solemn appeal to the
gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos.
Every word was driven home by the grand self-consciousness of
the speaker. He spoke always as one having authority. He was
in fact the first English orator whose words were a power,—a
power not over Parliament only, but over the nation at large.
Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in
detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice
of Pitt reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was
»
## p. 6680 (#56) ############################################
6680
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
especially in these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief
passionate appeals, that the might of his eloquence lay. The few
broken words we have of him stir the same thrill in men of our
day which they stirred in the men of his own.
ATTEMPT ON THE FIVE MEMBERS: PREPARATIONS FOR WAR
From History of the English People'
THE
HE brawls of the two parties, who gave each other the nick-
names of "Roundheads" and "Cavaliers," created fresh
alarm in the Parliament; but Charles persisted in refusing
it a guard. "On the honor of a King," he engaged to defend
them from violence as completely as his own children; but the
answer had hardly been given when his Attorney appeared at
the bar of the Lords and accused Hampden, Pym, Hollis, Strode,
and Haselrig of high treason in their correspondence with the
Scots. A herald-at-arms appeared at the bar of the Commons,
and demanded the surrender of the five members. If Charles
believed himself to be within legal forms, the Commons saw a
mere act of arbitrary violence in a charge which proceeded per-
sonally from the King, which set aside the most cherished privi-
leges of Parliament, and summoned the accused before a tribunal
which had no pretense to a jurisdiction over them. The Com-
mons simply promised to take the demand into consideration, and
again requested a guard. "I will reply to-morrow," said the King.
On the morrow he summoned the gentlemen who clustered
round Whitehall to follow him, and embracing the Queen, prom-
ised her that in an hour he would return master of his kingdom.
A mob of Cavaliers joined him as he left the palace, and remained
in Westminster Hall as Charles, accompanied by his nephew the
Elector Palatine, entered the House of Commons. "Mr. Speaker,"
he said, "I must for a time borrow your chair! "
He paused
with a sudden confusion as his eye fell on the vacant spot where
Pym commonly sate; for at the news of his approach the House
had ordered the five members to withdraw. "Gentlemen," he
began in slow broken sentences, "I am sorry for this occasion of
coming unto you. Yesterday I sent a Sergeant-at-arms upon a
very important occasion, to apprehend some that by my com-
mand were accused of high treason, whereunto I did expect
obedience, and not a message. " Treason, he went on, had no
## p. 6681 (#57) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6681
privilege, "and therefore I am come to know if any of these
persons that were accused are here. " There was a dead silence,
only broken by his reiterated "I must have them, wheresoever I
find them. " He again paused, but the stillness was unbroken.
Then he called out, "Is Mr. Pym here? " There was no answer;
and Charles, turning to the Speaker, asked him whether the five
members were there. Lenthall fell on his knees: "I have neither
eyes to see," he replied, "nor tongue to speak, in this place, but
as this House is pleased to direct me. " "Well, well," Charles
angrily retorted, "'tis no matter. I think my eyes are as good
as another's! " There was another long pause, while he looked
carefully over the ranks of members. "I see," he said at last,
"all the birds are flown. I do expect you will send them to me
as soon as they return hither. " If they did not, he added, he
would seek them himself; and with a closing protest that he
never intended any force, "he went out of the House," says an
eye-witness, "in a more discontented and angry passion than he
came in. "
Nothing but the absence of the five members, and the calm
dignity of the Commons, had prevented the King's outrage from
ending in bloodshed.
Five hundred gentlemen of the best
blood in England would hardly have stood tamely by while the
bravoes of Whitehall laid hands on their leaders in the midst
of the Parliament. . . The five members had taken refuge
in the City, and it was there that on the next day the King him-
self demanded their surrender from the aldermen at Guildhall.
Cries of "Privilege" rang round him as he returned through the
streets; the writs issued for the arrest of the five were disre-
garded by the Sheriffs, and a proclamation issued four days
later, declaring them traitors, passed without notice. Terror
drove the Cavaliers from Whitehall, and Charles stood absolutely
alone; for the outrage had severed him for the moment from his
new friends in the Parliament and from the ministers, Falkland
and Colepepper, whom he had chosen among them. But lonely
as he was, Charles had resolved on war. The Earl of Newcastle
was dispatched to muster a royal force in the North; and on the
tenth of January, news that the five members were about to
return in triumph to Westminster drove Charles from Whitehall.
He retired to Hampton Court and to Windsor, while the Trained
Bands of London and Southwark on foot, and the London water-
men on the river, all sworn "to guard the Parliament, the King-
dom, and the King," escorted Pym and his fellow-members along
·
## p. 6682 (#58) ############################################
6682
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
the Thames to the House of Commons. Both sides prepared for
the coming struggle. The Queen sailed from Dover with the
Crown jewels to buy munitions of war. The Cavaliers again
gathered round the King, and the royalist press flooded the
country with State papers drawn up by Hyde. On the other
hand, the Commons resolved by vote to secure the great arse-
nals of the kingdom,- Hull, Portsmouth, and the Tower; while
mounted processions of freeholders from Buckinghamshire and
Kent traversed London on their way to St. Stephen's, vowing to
live and die with the Parliament.
The great point, however, was to secure armed support from
the nation at large; and here both sides were in a difficulty. Pre-
vious to the innovations introduced by the Tudors, and which had
been already questioned by the Commons in a debate on press-
ing soldiers, the King in himself had no power of calling on his
subjects generally to bear arms, save for purposes of restoring
order or meeting foreign invasion. On the other hand, no one
contended that such a power had ever been exercised by the two
Houses without the King; and Charles steadily refused to con-
sent to a Militia bill, in which the command of the national force
was given in every county to men devoted to the Parliamentary
cause. Both parties therefore broke through constitutional prece-
dent: the Parliament in appointing the Lord-Lieutenants who
commanded the Militia by ordinance of the two Houses, Charles
in levying forces by royal commissions of array. The King's
great difficulty lay in procuring arms; and on the twenty-third
of April he suddenly appeared before Hull, the magazine of the
North, and demanded admission. The new governor, Sir John
Hotham, fell on his knees, but refused to open the gates; and
the avowal of his act by the Parliament was followed by the
withdrawal of the royalist party among its members from their
seats at Westminster.
The two Houses gained in unity
and vigor by the withdrawal of the royalists. The militia was
rapidly enrolled, Lord Warwick named to the command of the
fleet, and a loan opened in the City, to which the women brought
even their wedding-rings. The tone of the two Houses had risen
with the threat of force: and their last proposals demanded the
powers of appointing and dismissing the royal ministers, naming
guardians for the royal children, and of virtually controlling mili-
tary, civil, and religious affairs. "If I granted your demands,"
replied Charles, "I should be no more than the mere phantom of
a king. "
## p. 6683 (#59) ############################################
6683
THOMAS HILL GREEN
(1836-1882)
NE of the most interesting phases of thought in the second
half of the nineteenth century is that known as the Neo-
Hegelian movement in England. Certain English students
of the deeper problems of life, dissatisfied with the prevailing phi-
losophies in their own country, turned to Germany for light and
believed that they found it in the philosophy of Kant, as modified
and supplemented by Hegel. Among the leaders of the movement
were J. W. Stirling, the brothers John and Edward Caird, and Will-
iam Wallace, all of whom have helped to make Hegel's doctrine
known to English and American students; but the most prominent
and influential of the group was the subject of this sketch, Thomas
Hill Green.
Green was born in Birkin, Yorkshire, on the 7th of April, 1836,
and was the youngest of four children. His mother died in his
infancy, and the children were left to be cared for and educated by
their father. In 1850, when he was fourteen, Thomas went to Rugby,
where he did not shine as a scholar, being uninterested in his studies
and lagging behind his class. In 1855 he entered Balliol College,
Oxford, and came fortunately under the teaching of Benjamin Jowett,
who succeeded in rousing his latent energies. He became interested
in history and philosophy, and in 1860 was elected a Fellow of Balliol,
beginning his career as a teacher by lecturing on ancient and modern
history. Two years later he gained the Chancellor's prize for an
essay on 'The Value and Influence of Works of Fiction. ' In 1864 he
lectured before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution on The Eng-
lish Commonwealth,' a favorite subject which he treated with much
ability.
The course of his philosophic studies is not known, nor at what
time he became acquainted with Hegel's works, which were destined
to have so great an influence on his opinions and life. But after
lecturing for a short time on history he began to teach philosophy,
which he had come to recognize as the true field of his life work.
For a time, indeed, he had hesitated in the choice of a profession.
Changes in his religious views prevented him from following his
father's example and entering the ministry; and notwithstanding his
interest in public affairs, he seems to have had no inclination toward
## p. 6684 (#60) ############################################
6684
THOMAS HILL GREEN
journalism. But in teaching philosophy he found a congenial occu-
pation which made him pecuniarily independent. For many years,
however, his position at Oxford was that of a tutor only, and it was
not until 1878 that his abilities received adequate recognition in his
appointment as Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy.
In 1871 he had married Charlotte Symonds, daughter of Dr.
Symonds of Clifton and sister of John Addington Symonds, one of
Green's oldest friends. Whether she was interested in his philosoph-
ical work or not, she shared his sympathy with the poor, and devoted
herself largely to their cause. Only seven years of married life,
however, were granted to Green, and only four years in his profess-
orship; for on March 26th, 1882, after a brief illness, he died.
His biographer, Mr. Nettleship, gives many interesting reminis
cences of this fine thinker. Ordinarily very undemonstrative, he was
capable of strong affection, and whenever he broke through his
reserve was a delightful companion. He had a true love for social
equality and a high sense of the dignity of simple human nature;
and he hoped, he said, for a condition of English society in which
all honest citizens would recognize themselves and be recognized by
each other as gentlemen. "We hold fast," he wrote, "to the faith
that the cultivation of the masses, which has for the present super-
seded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce
some higher type even of individual manhood than any which the
Old World has known. " With such sentiments he was naturally a
radical in politics; and so far as his professional duties permitted, he
took an active part in political discussion. He declared his political
aim to be "the removal of all obstructions which the law can remove
to the free development of English citizens. " He was a warm friend
of the American Union during the Civil War, and a sympathizer
with liberal movements throughout the world. He was pledged also
to the advancement of popular education, and labored especially, like
Matthew Arnold, for the better education of the middle classes. Tak-
ing him all in all, he stands for the most noble and thoughtful type
of modern citizen, devoted to the pursuit of truth and to the highest
interests of his fellow-man.
Of Green's writings only a small portion were published during
his lifetime; the most important being perhaps the two introductory
essays prepared for the complete edition of Hume edited by him-
self and T. H. Grose in 1874. His principal ethical work, the 'Prole-
gomena to Ethics,' appeared in 1883 under the editorship of his
friend A. C. Bradley; and all his writings except the 'Prolegomena '
were issued a few years later in three volumes, edited with a mem-
oir by R. L. Nettleship. In literary form, his essays display his
most finished work, his philosophical papers being often obscure from
## p. 6685 (#61) ############################################
THOMAS HILL GREEN
6685
overcrowding of the thought. The main outlines of his ideas and
the leading principles of his philosophy are, however, unmistakable.
"Philosophy was to him," says Mr. Nettleship, "the medium in which
the theoretic impulse, the impulse to see and feel things more clearly
and intensely than every-day life allows, found its most congenial sat-
isfaction. The strength, the repose, the mental purgation which come
to some men through artistic imagination or religious emotion, came
to him through thinking. " From Kant, Green took his theory of
knowledge, according to which substance and cause, and all the re-
lations that subsist between things, are mental creations; while the
material world, which to most men appears so substantial, has no
real existence. From Hegel he took the doctrine of pantheism, which
formed the metaphysical basis of his ethics and his religion. Accord-
ing to this view our minds are only manifestations of God; or as
he otherwise expresses it, the Divine spirit reproduces itself in the
human spirit, while the material world exists only for thought. In
ethics also he was indebted to Hegel, holding with him that the ulti-
mate end of moral action is the self-realization or self-perfection of
the individual a theory not easily reconcilable with Green's political
views nor with his ardent interest in social reforms.
―
The best expression of his doctrines is found in the Prolegomena
to Ethics, his ablest constructive work; which, though mainly de-
voted to the discussion of ethical subjects, contains several chapters
on the metaphysical questions with which ethics is so closely con-
nected. His ethical instructions are the most valuable, not only in
the 'Prolegomena,' but in certain of the essays and in the 'Lectures
on the Principles of Political Obligation. ' If he impresses the impar-
tial critic as an able and earnest inquirer, whose system of philoso-
phy is incomplete, yet the world has reason to be grateful to so
honest and brave a thinker; for Green's writings must long remain
suggestive and stimulating in a high degree.
THE SCOPE OF THE NOVELIST
From the Essay on the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction'
HE novelist not only works on more various elements, he ap-
peals to more ordinary minds than the poet. This indeed
is the strongest practical proof of his essential inferiority as
an artist. All who are capable of an interest in incidents of life.
which do not affect themselves, may feel the same interest more
keenly in a novel; but to those only who can lift the curtain
does a poem speak intelligibly. It is the twofold characteristic,
## p. 6686 (#62) ############################################
6686
THOMAS HILL GREEN
of universal intelligibility and indiscriminate adoption of mate-
rials, that gives the novel its place as the great reformer and
leveler of our time. Reforming and leveling are indeed more
closely allied than we are commonly disposed to admit. Social
abuses are nearly always the result of defective organization.
The demarcations of family, of territory, or of class, prevent the
proper fusion of parts into the whole. The work of the reformer
progresses as the social force is brought to bear more and more
fully on classes and individuals, merging distinctions of privilege
and position in the one social organism. The novel is one of
the main agencies through which this force acts. It gathers up
manifold experiences, corresponding to manifold situations of life;
and subordinating each to the whole, gives to every particular
situation a new character as qualified by all the rest. Every
good novel, therefore, does something to check what may be
called the despotism of situations; to prevent that ossification
into prejudices arising from situation, to which all feel a tend-
ency. The general novel-literature of any age may be regarded
as an assertion by mankind at large in its then development, of
its claims as against the influence of class and position; whether
that influence appear in the form of positive social injustice, of
oppressive custom, or simply of deficient sympathy.
To be what he is, the novelist must be a man with large
powers of sympathetic observation. He must have an eye for
the "humanities" which underlie the estranging barriers of social
demarcation, and in relation to which the influence of those bar-
riers can alone be rightly appreciated. We have already spoken
of that acquiescence in the dominion of circumstance to which we
are all too ready to give way, and which exclusive novel-reading
tends to foster. The circumstances, however, whose rule we rec-
ognize, are apt to be merely our own or those of our class. We
are blind to other "idola" than those of our own cave; we do
not understand that the feelings which betray us into "indiscre-
tions" may, when differently modified by a different situation,
lead others to game-stealing or trade outrages. From this nar-
rowness of view the novelist may do much to deliver us. The
variations of feeling and action with those of circumstance, and
the essential human identity which these variations cannot touch,
are his special province. He shows us that crime does not always
imply sin, that a social heresy may be the assertion of a native
right, that an offense which leads to conventional outlawry may
## p. 6687 (#63) ############################################
THOMAS HILL GREEN
6687
be merely the rebellion of a generous nature against conventional
tyranny.
Thus, if he does not do everything, he does much. Though
he cannot reveal to us the inner side of life, he at least gives a
more adequate conception of its surface. Though he cannot raise.
us to a point of view from which circumstances appear subordi-
nate to spiritual laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not
from being influenced, by the circumstances of our own position.
Though we cannot show the prisoners the way of escape from
their earthly confinement, yet by breaking down the partitions
between the cells he enables them to combine their strength for
a better arrangement of the prison-house. The most wounding
social wrongs more often arise from ignorance than from malice,
from acquiescence in the opinion of a class rather than from
deliberate selfishness. The master cannot enter into the feelings
of a servant, nor the servant into those of his master. The mas-
ter cannot understand how any good quality can lead one to
"forget his station "; to the servant the spirit of management in
the master seems mere "driving. " This is only a sample of what
is going on, all society over. The relation between the higher
and lower classes becomes irritating and therefore injurious, not
from any conscious unfairness on either side, but simply from the
want of a common understanding; while at the same time every
class suffers within its own limits from the prevalence of habits
and ideas, under the authority of class convention, which could
not long maintain themselves if once placed in the light of gen-
eral opinion
Against this twofold oppression the novel, from its first estab-
lishment as a substantive branch of literature, has made vigorous
war. From Defoe to Kingsley, its history boasts of a noble army
of social reformers; yet the work which these writers have
achieved has had little to do with the morals-commonly value-
less, if not false and sentimental - which they have severally
believed themselves to convey. Defoe's notion of a moral seems
to have been the vulgar one that vice must be palpably punished
and virtue rewarded; he recommends his 'Moll Flanders' to the
reader on the ground that "there is not a wicked action in any
part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy or unfortunate. "
The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can be called, is sim-
ply the importance of that prudence which his heroes might have.
dispensed with but for the wildness of their animal license.
## p. 6688 (#64) ############################################
6688
THOMAS HILL GREEN
both Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind.
The thieves and harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punish-
ing, but whose adventures he describes with the minuteness of
affection, are what we ourselves might have been; and in their
histories we hear, if not the "music," yet the "harsh and grat-
ing" cry of suffering humanity. Fielding's merit is of the same
kind; but the sympathies which he excites are more general, as
his scenes are more varied, than those of Defoe. His coarseness
is everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contume-
lious buffets to which weakness is exposed. He has the practical
insight of Dickens and Thackeray, without their infusion of sen-
timent. He does not moralize over the contrast between the rich
man's law and the poor man's, over the "indifference" of rural
justice, over the lying and adultery of fashionable life. He sim-
ply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere under our
eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society
where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased
class itself to that public intelligence which, in spite of the
cynic's sneer on the task of "producing an honesty from the
combined action of knaves," has really power to override private
selfishness.
The same sermon has found many preachers since, the uncon-
scious missionaries being perhaps the greatest. Scott was a Tory
of the purest water. His mind was busy with the revival of a
pseudo-feudalism; no thought of reforming abuses probably ever
entered it. Yet his genial human insight made him a reformer
against his will. He who makes man better known to man takes
the first steps towards healing the wounds which man inflicts on
man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures
of the Scotch peasantry. He popularized the work which the
Lake poets had begun, of reopening the primary springs of
human passion. "Love he had found in huts where poor men
lie," and he announced the discovery; teaching the "world" of
English gentry what for a century and a half they had seemed
to forget, that the human soul, in its strength no less than in its
weakness, is independent of the accessories of fortune. He left
no equals, but the combined force of his successors has been
constantly growing in practical effect. They have probably done
more than the journalists to produce that improvement in the
organization of modern life which leads to the notion that because
social grievances are less obvious, they have ceased to exist. The
## p. 6689 (#65) ############################################
THOMAS HILL GREEN
6689
novelist catches the cry of suffering before it has obtained the
strength or general recognition which are presupposed when
the newspaper becomes its mouthpiece. The miseries of the
marriage market had been told by Thackeray with almost weari-
some iteration, many years before they found utterance in the
columns of the Times.
It may indeed be truly said that after all, human selfishness
is much the same as it ever was; that luxury still drowns sym-
pathy; that riches and poverty have still their old estranging
influence. The novel, as has been shown, cannot give a new
birth to the spirit, or initiate the effort to transcend the separa-
tions of place and circumstance; but it is no small thing that it
should remove the barriers of ignorance and antipathy which
would otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at least brings
man nearer to his neighbor, and enables each class to see itself
as others see it. And from the fusion of opinions and sympa-
thies thus produced, a general sentiment is elicited, to which op-
pression of any kind, whether of one class by another, or of
individuals by the tyranny of sectarian custom, seldom appeals in
vain.
The novelist is a leveler also in another sense than that of
which we have already spoken. He helps to level intellects as
well as situations. He supplies a kind of literary food which the
weakest natures can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by
the consumption of which the former sort lose much of their
weakness and the latter much of their strength.
that the will of the prince was the law of the land; and to fetter
that will by the customs and franchises which were embodied in
the barons' claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of his
rights. But no imperialist theories had touched the minds of
## p. 6668 (#44) ############################################
6668
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
<<
his people. The country rose as one man at his refusal. At the
close of May, London threw open her gates to the forces of
the barons, now arrayed under Robert Fitz-Walter as Marshal
of the Army of God and Holy Church. " Exeter and Lincoln
followed the example of the capital; promises of aid came from
Scotland and Wales; the northern barons marched hastily under
Eustace de Vesci to join their comrades in London. Even the
nobles who had as yet clung to the King, but whose hopes of
conciliation were blasted by his obstinacy, yielded at last to the
summons of the "Army of God. " Pandulf indeed, and Arch-
bishop Langton, still remained with John; but they counseled, as
Earl Ranulf and William Marshal counseled, his acceptance of
the Charter. None in fact counseled its rejection save his new
Justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des Roches, and other foreigners
who knew the barons purposed driving them from the land. But
even the number of these was small: there was a moment when
John found himself with but seven knights at his back, and
before him a nation in arms. Quick as he was, he had been
taken utterly by surprise. It was in vain that in the short res-
pite he had gained from Christmas to Easter he had summoned
mercenaries to his aid, and appealed to his new suzerain the
Pope. Summons and appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath
in his heart, John bowed to necessity and called the barons to a
conference on an island in the Thames, between Windsor and
Staines, near a marshy meadow by the river-side, the meadow of
Runnymede. The King encamped on one bank of the river, the
barons covered the flat of Runnymede on the other. Their del-
egates met on the 15th of July on the island between them, but
the negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's purpose of
unconditional submission. The Great Charter was discussed and
agreed to in a single day.
Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the cathe-
drals and churches; and one copy may still be seen in the British
Museum, injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still
hanging from the brown shriveled parchment. It is impossible
to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English
freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our
own hands, the great Charter to which from age to age men
have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty. But in
itself the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish
any new constitutional principles. The Charter of Henry the
## p. 6669 (#45) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6669
First formed the basis of the whole, and the additions to it are
for the most part formal recognitions of the judicial and admin-
istrative changes introduced by Henry the Second. What was
new in it was its origin. In form, like the Charter on which it
was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In actual fact it
was a treaty between the whole English people and its King. In
it, England found itself for the first time since the Conquest a
nation bound together by common national interests, by a com-
mon national sympathy. In words which almost close the Char-
ter, the "community of the whole land" is recognized as the
great body from which the restraining power of the baronage
takes its validity. There is no distinction of blood or class, of
Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble.
All are recog-
nized as Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English
rights. Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnymede
the rights not of baron and churchman only, but those of free-
holder and merchant, of townsman and villein. The provisions
against wrong and extortion which the barons drew up as against
the King for themselves, they drew up as against themselves for
their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on Henry's Char-
ter, it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone before.
The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged
for precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten
custom which the older grant did little more than recognize had
proved too weak to hold the Angevins; and the baronage set
them aside for the restraints of written and defined law. It is in
this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the
age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation's memory and
officially declared by the Primate, to the age of written legisla-
tion, of parliaments and statutes, which was to come.
Its opening indeed is in general terms. The Church had
shown its power of self-defense in the struggle over the inter-
dict, and the clause which recognized its rights alone retained
the older and general form. But all vagueness ceases when the
Charter passes on to deal with the rights of Englishmen at
large, their right to justice, to security of person and property,
to good government "No freeman," ran a memorable article
that lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be
seized or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way.
brought to ruin; we will not go against any man
nor send
against him, save by legal judgment of his peers or by the law
## p. 6670 (#46) ############################################
6670
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
caru-
of the land. " "To no man will we sell," runs another, "or deny,
or delay, right or justice. " The great reforms of the past reigns
were now formally recognized; judges of assize were to hold
their circuits four times in the year, and the King's court was no
longer to follow the King in his wanderings over the realm, but
to sit in a fixed place. But the denial of justice under John was
a small danger compared with the lawless exactions both of him-
self and his predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of
the scutage which Henry the Second had introduced, and applied
it to raise funds for his ransom. He had restored the Danegeld,
or land-tax, so often abolished, under the new name of «<
cage"; had seized the wool of the Cistercians and the plate of the
churches, and rated movables as well as land. John had again
raised the rate of scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms
at his pleasure without counsel of the baronage. The Great
Charter met this abuse by a provision on which our constitutional
system rests. "No scutage or aid [other than the three cus-
tomary feudal aids] shall be imposed in our realm save by the
common council of the realm;" and to this Great Council it was
provided that prelates and the greater barons should be sum-
moned by special writ, and all tenants in chief through the sher-
iffs and bailiffs, at least forty days before. The provision defined
what had probably been the common usage of the realm; but the
definition turned it into a national right, a right so momentous
that on it rests our whole Parliamentary life. Even the baron-
age seem to have been startled when they realized the extent of
their claim; and the provision was dropped from the later issue
of the Charter at the outset of the next reign. But the clause
brought home to the nation at large their possession of a right
which became dearer as years went by. More and more clearly
the nation discovered that in these simple words lay the secret
of political power. It was the right of self-taxation that England
fought for under Earl Simon as she fought for it under Hamp-
den. It was the establishment of this right which established
English freedom.
## p. 6671 (#47) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6671
ENGLAND'S GROWTH IN COMMERCE AND COMFORT UNDER
ELIZABETH
From History of the English People'
A rising into importance.
MIDDLE class of wealthier land-owners and merchants was fast
"The wealth of the meaner sort,"
wrote one to Cecil, is the very fount of rebellion, the
occasion of their indolence, of the contempt of the nobility, and
of the hatred they have conceived against them. " But Cecil and
his mistress could watch the upgrowth of national wealth with
cooler eyes.
In the country its effect was to undo much of the
evil which the diminution of small holdings had done. Whatever
social embarrassment it might bring about, the revolution in agri-
culture which Latimer deplored undoubtedly favored production.
Not only was a larger capital brought to bear upon the land, but
the mere change in the system of cultivation introduced a taste
for new and better modes of farming; the breed of horses and of
cattle was improved, and a far greater use made of manure and
dressings. One acre under the new system produced, it was said,
as much as two under the old. As a more careful and constant
cultivation was introduced, a greater number of hands came to
be required on every farm; and much of the surplus labor which
had been flung off the land in the commencement of the new
system was thus recalled to it.
A yet more efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed was
found in the development of manufactures. The linen trade was
as yet of small value, and that of silk-weaving was only just
introduced. But the woolen manufacture was fast becoming an
important element in the national wealth. England no longer
sent her fleeces to be woven in Flanders and to be dyed at
Florence. The spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling, and dye-
ing of cloth, were spreading rapidly from the towns over the
country-side. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the cen-
tre, extended over the whole of the Eastern counties. Farmers'
wives began everywhere to spin their wool from their own
sheeps' backs into a coarse "homespun. " The South and the
West, however, still remained the great seats of industry and of
wealth, for they were the homes of mining and manufacturing
activity. The iron manufactures were limited to Kent and
Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was already
## p. 6672 (#48) ############################################
6672
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
threatened by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed their
furnaces, and by the exhaustion of the forests of the Weald.
Cornwall was then, as now, the sole exporter of tin; and the
exportation of its copper was just beginning. The broadcloths
of the West claimed the palm among the woolen stuffs of Eng-
land. The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of the com-
merce of the Channel. Every little harbor from the Foreland to
the Land's End sent out its fleets of fishing-boats, manned with
bold seamen who were to furnish crews for Drake and the Buc-
caneers. Northern England still lagged far behind the rest of
the realm in its industrial activity. But in the reign of Elizabeth
the poverty and inaction to which it had been doomed for so
many centuries began at last to be broken. We see the first
sign of the revolution which has transferred English manufact-
ures and English wealth to the north of the Mersey and of the
Humber, in the mention which now meets us of the friezes of
Manchester, the coverlets of York, the cutlery of Sheffield, and
the cloth trade of Halifax.
Elizabeth lent a ready patronage to the new commerce; she
shared in its speculations, she considered its extension and pro-
tection as a part of public policy, and she sanctioned the forma-
tion of the great merchant companies which could alone secure
the trader against wrong or injustice in distant countries. The
Merchant-Adventurers of London, a body which had existed long
before, and had received a charter of incorporation under Henry
the Seventh, furnished a model for the Russia Company and the
company which absorbed the new commerce to the Indies. But
it was not wholly with satisfaction that either the Queen or her
ministers watched the social change which wealth was producing
around them. They feared the increased expenditure and com-
fort which necessarily followed it, as likely to impoverish the
land and to eat out the hardihood of the people. "England
spendeth more on wines in one year," complained Cecil, “than it
did in ancient times in four years. >> In the upper classes the
lavishness of a new wealth combined with the lavishness of life,
a love of beauty, of color, of display, to revolutionize English
dress. Men «< wore a manor on their backs. " The Queen's three
thousand robes were rivaled in their bravery by the slashed
velvets, the ruffs, the jeweled purpoints of the courtiers around
her. But signs of the growing wealth were as evident in the
lower class as in the higher. The disuse of salt fish and the
## p. 6673 (#49) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6673
greater consumption of meat marked the improvement which had
taken place among the country folk. Their rough and wattled
farm-houses were being superseded by dwellings of brick and
stone. Pewter was replacing the wooden trenchers of the early
yeomanry, and there were yeomen who could boast of a fair
show of silver plate. It is from this period indeed that we can
first date the rise of a conception which seems to us now a
peculiarly English one,- the conception of domestic comfort. The
chimney-corner, so closely associated with family life, came into
existence with the general introduction of chimneys, a feature
rare in ordinary houses at the beginning of this reign. Pillows,
which had before been despised by the farmer and the trader as
fit only
for women in childbed," were now in general use.
Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier
houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and
costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their
carved staircases, their quaintly figured gables, not only con-
trasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English
towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to
play its part in later history.
A transformation of an even more striking kind marked the
extinction of the feudal character of the noblesse. Gloomy walls
and serried battlements disappeared from the dwellings of the
gentry. The strength of the mediæval fortress gave way to the
pomp and grace of the Elizabethan hall. Knole, Longleat, Bur-
leigh, and Hatfield, Hardwick, and Audley End, are familiar
instances of a social as well as an architectural change which
covered England with buildings where the thought of defense
was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and refinement. We
still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, their
fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their cas-
tellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble
looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces
and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint
mazes, its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque
shapes in hopeless rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South.
Nor was the change less within than without. The life of the
Middle Ages concentrated itself in the vast castle hall, where the
baron looked from his upper daïs on the retainers who gathered
at his board. But the great households were fast breaking up;
and the whole feudal economy disappeared when the lord of
XII-418
## p. 6674 (#50) ############################################
6674
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
the household withdrew with his family into his "parlor" or
"withdrawing-room" and left the hall to his dependants. The
Italian refinement of life which told on pleasance and garden
told on the remodeling of the house within, raised the principal
apartments to an upper floor,-a change to which we owe the
grand staircases of the time,—surrounded the quiet courts by long
galleries of the presence," crowned the rude hearth with huge
chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and Cupids, with quaintly in-
terlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on
the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly carved chairs
and costly cabinets. The prodigal use of glass became a marked
feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and one whose
influence on the general health of the people can hardly be over-
rated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the
new manor halls. Every merchant's house had its oriel. "You
shall have sometimes," Lord Bacon grumbled, "your houses so
full of glass that we cannot tell where to come to be out of the
sun or the cold. "
What Elizabeth contributed to this upgrowth of national pros-
perity was the peace and social order from which it sprang.
While autos-da-fé were blazing at Rome and Madrid, while the
Inquisition was driving the sober traders of the Netherlands to
madness, while Scotland was tossing with religious strife, while
the policy of Catharine secured for France but a brief respite
from the horrors of civil war, England remained untroubled and
at peace. Religious order was little disturbed. Recusants were
few. There was little cry as yet for freedom of worship. Free-
dom of conscience was the right of every man. Persecution
had ceased. It was only as the tale of a darker past that men
recalled how, ten years back, heretics had been sent to the fire.
Civil order was even more profound than religious order. The
failure of the northern revolt proved the political tranquillity of
the country. The social troubles from vagrancy and evictions
were slowly passing away. Taxation was light. The country
was firmly and steadily governed. The popular favor which had
met Elizabeth at her accession was growing into a passionate
devotion. Of her faults indeed, England beyond the circle of her
court knew little or nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy
were never seen outside the royal closet. The nation at large
could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its
temperance and good sense, and above all by its success. But
## p. 6675 (#51) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6675
every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at
home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness
and moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of concil-
iation and compromise among warring factions, which gave the
country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when almost every
other country in Europe was torn with civil war. Every sign of
the growing prosperity, the sight of London as it became the
mart of the world, of stately mansions as they rose on every
manor, told, and justly told, in the Queen's favor. Her statue in
the centre of the London Exchange was a tribute on he part of
the merchant class to the interest with which she watched and
shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a general
gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the martyrs threw
into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed which was conspic-
uous in her earlier reign, and never wholly wanting through its
fiercer close. Above all, there was a general confidence in her
instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her finger was
always on the public pulse. She knew exactly when she could
resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give way
before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy uncon-
sciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the
grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surren-
der won back at once the love that her resistance lost. Her
attitude at home, in fact, was that of a woman whose pride in
the well-being of her subjects and whose longing for their favor
was the one warm ou in the coldness of her natural temper.
Elizabeth could be said to love anything, she loved England.
"Nothing," she said to her first Parliament in words of unwonted
fire, "nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me
as the love and good-will of my subjects. " And the love and
good-will which were so dear to her she fully won.
WILLIAM PITT
From History of the English People'
UT of the union of these two strangely contrasted leaders, in
fact, rose the greatest, as it was last, of the purely
Whig administrations. But its real power lay from be-
ginning to end in Pitt himself. Poor as he was,- for his income
was little more than two hundred a year,— and springing as he
## p. 6676 (#52) ############################################
6676
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
did from a family of no political importance, it was by sheer
dint of genius that the young cornet of horse, at whose youth
and inexperience Walpole had sneered, seized a power which the
Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their grasp.
The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the
national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save
from his "popularity"; but this popularity showed that the polit-
ical torpor of the nation was passing away, and that a new in-
terest in public affairs and a resolve to have weight in them was
becoming felt in the nation at large. It was by the sure instinct
of a great people that this interest and resolve gathered them-
selves round William Pitt. If he was ambitious, his ambition
had no petty aim. "I want to call England," he said, as he
took office, "out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand
men from France can shake her. " His call was soon answered,
He at once breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he
served, as he communicated something of his own grandeur to
the men who served him. "No man," said a soldier of the time,
"ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet who did not feel himself braver
when he came out than when he went in. " Ill combined as
were his earlier expeditions, and many as were his failures, he
roused a temper in the nation at large which made ultimate
defeat impossible. "England has been a long time in labor,”
exclaimed Frederick of Prussia as he recognized a greatness like
his own, "but she has at last brought forth a man. "
It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most
as we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and
action stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In
the midst of a society critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to
the affectation of simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely
prosaic, cool of heart and of head, skeptical of virtue and enthu-
siasm, skeptical above all of itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone.
The depth of his conviction, his passionate love for all that he
deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginative-
ness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption,
his pompousness and extravagance, were not more puzzling to
his contemporaries than the confidence with which he appealed to
the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he
turned from a corruption which had till then been the great
engine of politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself,
in the grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out.
## p. 6677 (#53) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6677
"I know that I can save the country," he said to the Duke of
Devonshire on his entry into the ministry, "and I know no other
man can. " The groundwork of Pitt's character was an intense
and passionate pride; but it was a pride which kept him from
stooping to the level of the men who had so long held England
in their hands. He was the first statesman since the Restoration
who set the example of a purely public spirit. Keen as was his
love of power, no man ever refused office so often, or accepted
it with so strict a regard to the principles he professed.
not go to court," he replied to an offer which was made him,
"if I may not bring the Constitution with me. ”
For the corrup-
tion about him he had nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle
the buying of seats and the purchase of members. At the outset
of his career, Pelham appointed him to the most lucrative office
in his administration, that of Paymaster of the Forces; but its
profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was, Pitt refused
to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never ap-
peared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude towards
the people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than
"the great commoner," as Pitt was styled; but his air was always
that of a man who commands popularity, not that of one who
seeks it. He never bent to flatter popular prejudice. When mobs
were roaring themselves hoarse for "Wilkes and liberty," he de-
nounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and when all England
went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily declared his
esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to enlist
on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which
flashed from the small thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and
grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House
of Commons far greater than any other minister has possessed.
He could silence an opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the
whole House with a single word. But he never stooped to the
arts by which men form a political party, and at the height of
his power his personal following hardly numbered half a dozen
members.
His real strength indeed lay not in Parliament, but in the
people at large. His title of "the great commoner" marks a polit-
ical revolution. "It is the people who have sent me here,"
Pitt boasted with a haughty pride when the nobles of the Cab-
inet opposed his will. He was the first to see that the long
political inactivity of the public mind had ceased, and that the
## p. 6678 (#54) ############################################
6678
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
progress of commerce and industry had produced a great middle
class, which no longer found its representatives in the legislature.
"You have taught me," said George the Second when Pitt sought
to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, "to
look for the voice of my people in other places than within the
House of Commons. " It was this unrepresented class which
had forced him into power. During his struggle with Newcastle,
the greater towns backed him with the gift of their freedom
and addresses of confidence. "For weeks," laughs Horace Wal-
pole, "it rained gold boxes. " London stood by him through good
report and evil report; and the wealthiest of English merchants,
Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political lieutenant.
The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the
temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with
its energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its hon-
esty, its moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were
drawn by a natural attraction to the one statesman of their time
whose aims were unselfish, whose hands were clean, whose life
was pure and full of tender affection for wife and child.
But
there was a far deeper ground for their enthusiastic reverence,
and for the reverence which his country has borne Pitt ever
since. He loved England with an intense and personal love. He
believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England
learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs,
her defeats, his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all
thought of self or party spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the
factions who rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but
the public! I set you the example! " His glowing patriotism
was the real spell by which he held England. But even the
faults which checkered his character told for him with the mid-
dle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had been
men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and
absence of pretense. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in
the cabinet, in the House, in his very office.
He transacted busi-
ness with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, gen-
uine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural in tone.
It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his affectation, his
pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on great
debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his
side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing into the
House of Commons "the gestures and emotions of the stage. "
## p. 6679 (#55) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6679
But the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily
offended by faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the
statesman who was borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of
the gout, or carried into the House of Lords to breathe his last
in a protest against national dishonor.
Above all, Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence.
The power of political speech had been revealed in the stormy.
debates of the Long Parliament, but it was cramped in its utter-
ance by the legal and theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry
was flung off by the age of the Revolution; but in the eloquence
of Somers and his rivals we see ability rather than genius,
knowledge, clearness of expression, precision of thought, the
lucidity of the pleader or the man of business, rather than the
passion of the orator. Of this clearness of statement Pitt had
little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole, no speaker
of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always
his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect, his
trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the
front. That with defects like these he stood far above every
orator of his time was due above all to his profound conviction,
to the earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. "I must
sit still," he whispered once to a friend; "for when once I am
up everything that is in my mind comes out. " But the reality of
his eloquence was transfigured by a large and poetic imagination,
an imagination so strong that -as he said himself - "most things.
returned to him with stronger force the second time than the
first, and by a glow of passion which not only raised him high
above the men of his own day, but set him in the front rank
among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit,
the common-sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity,
a sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty
vehemence, a command over the whole range of human feeling.
He passed without an effort from the most solemn appeal to the
gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos.
Every word was driven home by the grand self-consciousness of
the speaker. He spoke always as one having authority. He was
in fact the first English orator whose words were a power,—a
power not over Parliament only, but over the nation at large.
Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in
detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice
of Pitt reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was
»
## p. 6680 (#56) ############################################
6680
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
especially in these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief
passionate appeals, that the might of his eloquence lay. The few
broken words we have of him stir the same thrill in men of our
day which they stirred in the men of his own.
ATTEMPT ON THE FIVE MEMBERS: PREPARATIONS FOR WAR
From History of the English People'
THE
HE brawls of the two parties, who gave each other the nick-
names of "Roundheads" and "Cavaliers," created fresh
alarm in the Parliament; but Charles persisted in refusing
it a guard. "On the honor of a King," he engaged to defend
them from violence as completely as his own children; but the
answer had hardly been given when his Attorney appeared at
the bar of the Lords and accused Hampden, Pym, Hollis, Strode,
and Haselrig of high treason in their correspondence with the
Scots. A herald-at-arms appeared at the bar of the Commons,
and demanded the surrender of the five members. If Charles
believed himself to be within legal forms, the Commons saw a
mere act of arbitrary violence in a charge which proceeded per-
sonally from the King, which set aside the most cherished privi-
leges of Parliament, and summoned the accused before a tribunal
which had no pretense to a jurisdiction over them. The Com-
mons simply promised to take the demand into consideration, and
again requested a guard. "I will reply to-morrow," said the King.
On the morrow he summoned the gentlemen who clustered
round Whitehall to follow him, and embracing the Queen, prom-
ised her that in an hour he would return master of his kingdom.
A mob of Cavaliers joined him as he left the palace, and remained
in Westminster Hall as Charles, accompanied by his nephew the
Elector Palatine, entered the House of Commons. "Mr. Speaker,"
he said, "I must for a time borrow your chair! "
He paused
with a sudden confusion as his eye fell on the vacant spot where
Pym commonly sate; for at the news of his approach the House
had ordered the five members to withdraw. "Gentlemen," he
began in slow broken sentences, "I am sorry for this occasion of
coming unto you. Yesterday I sent a Sergeant-at-arms upon a
very important occasion, to apprehend some that by my com-
mand were accused of high treason, whereunto I did expect
obedience, and not a message. " Treason, he went on, had no
## p. 6681 (#57) ############################################
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6681
privilege, "and therefore I am come to know if any of these
persons that were accused are here. " There was a dead silence,
only broken by his reiterated "I must have them, wheresoever I
find them. " He again paused, but the stillness was unbroken.
Then he called out, "Is Mr. Pym here? " There was no answer;
and Charles, turning to the Speaker, asked him whether the five
members were there. Lenthall fell on his knees: "I have neither
eyes to see," he replied, "nor tongue to speak, in this place, but
as this House is pleased to direct me. " "Well, well," Charles
angrily retorted, "'tis no matter. I think my eyes are as good
as another's! " There was another long pause, while he looked
carefully over the ranks of members. "I see," he said at last,
"all the birds are flown. I do expect you will send them to me
as soon as they return hither. " If they did not, he added, he
would seek them himself; and with a closing protest that he
never intended any force, "he went out of the House," says an
eye-witness, "in a more discontented and angry passion than he
came in. "
Nothing but the absence of the five members, and the calm
dignity of the Commons, had prevented the King's outrage from
ending in bloodshed.
Five hundred gentlemen of the best
blood in England would hardly have stood tamely by while the
bravoes of Whitehall laid hands on their leaders in the midst
of the Parliament. . . The five members had taken refuge
in the City, and it was there that on the next day the King him-
self demanded their surrender from the aldermen at Guildhall.
Cries of "Privilege" rang round him as he returned through the
streets; the writs issued for the arrest of the five were disre-
garded by the Sheriffs, and a proclamation issued four days
later, declaring them traitors, passed without notice. Terror
drove the Cavaliers from Whitehall, and Charles stood absolutely
alone; for the outrage had severed him for the moment from his
new friends in the Parliament and from the ministers, Falkland
and Colepepper, whom he had chosen among them. But lonely
as he was, Charles had resolved on war. The Earl of Newcastle
was dispatched to muster a royal force in the North; and on the
tenth of January, news that the five members were about to
return in triumph to Westminster drove Charles from Whitehall.
He retired to Hampton Court and to Windsor, while the Trained
Bands of London and Southwark on foot, and the London water-
men on the river, all sworn "to guard the Parliament, the King-
dom, and the King," escorted Pym and his fellow-members along
·
## p. 6682 (#58) ############################################
6682
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
the Thames to the House of Commons. Both sides prepared for
the coming struggle. The Queen sailed from Dover with the
Crown jewels to buy munitions of war. The Cavaliers again
gathered round the King, and the royalist press flooded the
country with State papers drawn up by Hyde. On the other
hand, the Commons resolved by vote to secure the great arse-
nals of the kingdom,- Hull, Portsmouth, and the Tower; while
mounted processions of freeholders from Buckinghamshire and
Kent traversed London on their way to St. Stephen's, vowing to
live and die with the Parliament.
The great point, however, was to secure armed support from
the nation at large; and here both sides were in a difficulty. Pre-
vious to the innovations introduced by the Tudors, and which had
been already questioned by the Commons in a debate on press-
ing soldiers, the King in himself had no power of calling on his
subjects generally to bear arms, save for purposes of restoring
order or meeting foreign invasion. On the other hand, no one
contended that such a power had ever been exercised by the two
Houses without the King; and Charles steadily refused to con-
sent to a Militia bill, in which the command of the national force
was given in every county to men devoted to the Parliamentary
cause. Both parties therefore broke through constitutional prece-
dent: the Parliament in appointing the Lord-Lieutenants who
commanded the Militia by ordinance of the two Houses, Charles
in levying forces by royal commissions of array. The King's
great difficulty lay in procuring arms; and on the twenty-third
of April he suddenly appeared before Hull, the magazine of the
North, and demanded admission. The new governor, Sir John
Hotham, fell on his knees, but refused to open the gates; and
the avowal of his act by the Parliament was followed by the
withdrawal of the royalist party among its members from their
seats at Westminster.
The two Houses gained in unity
and vigor by the withdrawal of the royalists. The militia was
rapidly enrolled, Lord Warwick named to the command of the
fleet, and a loan opened in the City, to which the women brought
even their wedding-rings. The tone of the two Houses had risen
with the threat of force: and their last proposals demanded the
powers of appointing and dismissing the royal ministers, naming
guardians for the royal children, and of virtually controlling mili-
tary, civil, and religious affairs. "If I granted your demands,"
replied Charles, "I should be no more than the mere phantom of
a king. "
## p. 6683 (#59) ############################################
6683
THOMAS HILL GREEN
(1836-1882)
NE of the most interesting phases of thought in the second
half of the nineteenth century is that known as the Neo-
Hegelian movement in England. Certain English students
of the deeper problems of life, dissatisfied with the prevailing phi-
losophies in their own country, turned to Germany for light and
believed that they found it in the philosophy of Kant, as modified
and supplemented by Hegel. Among the leaders of the movement
were J. W. Stirling, the brothers John and Edward Caird, and Will-
iam Wallace, all of whom have helped to make Hegel's doctrine
known to English and American students; but the most prominent
and influential of the group was the subject of this sketch, Thomas
Hill Green.
Green was born in Birkin, Yorkshire, on the 7th of April, 1836,
and was the youngest of four children. His mother died in his
infancy, and the children were left to be cared for and educated by
their father. In 1850, when he was fourteen, Thomas went to Rugby,
where he did not shine as a scholar, being uninterested in his studies
and lagging behind his class. In 1855 he entered Balliol College,
Oxford, and came fortunately under the teaching of Benjamin Jowett,
who succeeded in rousing his latent energies. He became interested
in history and philosophy, and in 1860 was elected a Fellow of Balliol,
beginning his career as a teacher by lecturing on ancient and modern
history. Two years later he gained the Chancellor's prize for an
essay on 'The Value and Influence of Works of Fiction. ' In 1864 he
lectured before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution on The Eng-
lish Commonwealth,' a favorite subject which he treated with much
ability.
The course of his philosophic studies is not known, nor at what
time he became acquainted with Hegel's works, which were destined
to have so great an influence on his opinions and life. But after
lecturing for a short time on history he began to teach philosophy,
which he had come to recognize as the true field of his life work.
For a time, indeed, he had hesitated in the choice of a profession.
Changes in his religious views prevented him from following his
father's example and entering the ministry; and notwithstanding his
interest in public affairs, he seems to have had no inclination toward
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THOMAS HILL GREEN
journalism. But in teaching philosophy he found a congenial occu-
pation which made him pecuniarily independent. For many years,
however, his position at Oxford was that of a tutor only, and it was
not until 1878 that his abilities received adequate recognition in his
appointment as Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy.
In 1871 he had married Charlotte Symonds, daughter of Dr.
Symonds of Clifton and sister of John Addington Symonds, one of
Green's oldest friends. Whether she was interested in his philosoph-
ical work or not, she shared his sympathy with the poor, and devoted
herself largely to their cause. Only seven years of married life,
however, were granted to Green, and only four years in his profess-
orship; for on March 26th, 1882, after a brief illness, he died.
His biographer, Mr. Nettleship, gives many interesting reminis
cences of this fine thinker. Ordinarily very undemonstrative, he was
capable of strong affection, and whenever he broke through his
reserve was a delightful companion. He had a true love for social
equality and a high sense of the dignity of simple human nature;
and he hoped, he said, for a condition of English society in which
all honest citizens would recognize themselves and be recognized by
each other as gentlemen. "We hold fast," he wrote, "to the faith
that the cultivation of the masses, which has for the present super-
seded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce
some higher type even of individual manhood than any which the
Old World has known. " With such sentiments he was naturally a
radical in politics; and so far as his professional duties permitted, he
took an active part in political discussion. He declared his political
aim to be "the removal of all obstructions which the law can remove
to the free development of English citizens. " He was a warm friend
of the American Union during the Civil War, and a sympathizer
with liberal movements throughout the world. He was pledged also
to the advancement of popular education, and labored especially, like
Matthew Arnold, for the better education of the middle classes. Tak-
ing him all in all, he stands for the most noble and thoughtful type
of modern citizen, devoted to the pursuit of truth and to the highest
interests of his fellow-man.
Of Green's writings only a small portion were published during
his lifetime; the most important being perhaps the two introductory
essays prepared for the complete edition of Hume edited by him-
self and T. H. Grose in 1874. His principal ethical work, the 'Prole-
gomena to Ethics,' appeared in 1883 under the editorship of his
friend A. C. Bradley; and all his writings except the 'Prolegomena '
were issued a few years later in three volumes, edited with a mem-
oir by R. L. Nettleship. In literary form, his essays display his
most finished work, his philosophical papers being often obscure from
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THOMAS HILL GREEN
6685
overcrowding of the thought. The main outlines of his ideas and
the leading principles of his philosophy are, however, unmistakable.
"Philosophy was to him," says Mr. Nettleship, "the medium in which
the theoretic impulse, the impulse to see and feel things more clearly
and intensely than every-day life allows, found its most congenial sat-
isfaction. The strength, the repose, the mental purgation which come
to some men through artistic imagination or religious emotion, came
to him through thinking. " From Kant, Green took his theory of
knowledge, according to which substance and cause, and all the re-
lations that subsist between things, are mental creations; while the
material world, which to most men appears so substantial, has no
real existence. From Hegel he took the doctrine of pantheism, which
formed the metaphysical basis of his ethics and his religion. Accord-
ing to this view our minds are only manifestations of God; or as
he otherwise expresses it, the Divine spirit reproduces itself in the
human spirit, while the material world exists only for thought. In
ethics also he was indebted to Hegel, holding with him that the ulti-
mate end of moral action is the self-realization or self-perfection of
the individual a theory not easily reconcilable with Green's political
views nor with his ardent interest in social reforms.
―
The best expression of his doctrines is found in the Prolegomena
to Ethics, his ablest constructive work; which, though mainly de-
voted to the discussion of ethical subjects, contains several chapters
on the metaphysical questions with which ethics is so closely con-
nected. His ethical instructions are the most valuable, not only in
the 'Prolegomena,' but in certain of the essays and in the 'Lectures
on the Principles of Political Obligation. ' If he impresses the impar-
tial critic as an able and earnest inquirer, whose system of philoso-
phy is incomplete, yet the world has reason to be grateful to so
honest and brave a thinker; for Green's writings must long remain
suggestive and stimulating in a high degree.
THE SCOPE OF THE NOVELIST
From the Essay on the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction'
HE novelist not only works on more various elements, he ap-
peals to more ordinary minds than the poet. This indeed
is the strongest practical proof of his essential inferiority as
an artist. All who are capable of an interest in incidents of life.
which do not affect themselves, may feel the same interest more
keenly in a novel; but to those only who can lift the curtain
does a poem speak intelligibly. It is the twofold characteristic,
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THOMAS HILL GREEN
of universal intelligibility and indiscriminate adoption of mate-
rials, that gives the novel its place as the great reformer and
leveler of our time. Reforming and leveling are indeed more
closely allied than we are commonly disposed to admit. Social
abuses are nearly always the result of defective organization.
The demarcations of family, of territory, or of class, prevent the
proper fusion of parts into the whole. The work of the reformer
progresses as the social force is brought to bear more and more
fully on classes and individuals, merging distinctions of privilege
and position in the one social organism. The novel is one of
the main agencies through which this force acts. It gathers up
manifold experiences, corresponding to manifold situations of life;
and subordinating each to the whole, gives to every particular
situation a new character as qualified by all the rest. Every
good novel, therefore, does something to check what may be
called the despotism of situations; to prevent that ossification
into prejudices arising from situation, to which all feel a tend-
ency. The general novel-literature of any age may be regarded
as an assertion by mankind at large in its then development, of
its claims as against the influence of class and position; whether
that influence appear in the form of positive social injustice, of
oppressive custom, or simply of deficient sympathy.
To be what he is, the novelist must be a man with large
powers of sympathetic observation. He must have an eye for
the "humanities" which underlie the estranging barriers of social
demarcation, and in relation to which the influence of those bar-
riers can alone be rightly appreciated. We have already spoken
of that acquiescence in the dominion of circumstance to which we
are all too ready to give way, and which exclusive novel-reading
tends to foster. The circumstances, however, whose rule we rec-
ognize, are apt to be merely our own or those of our class. We
are blind to other "idola" than those of our own cave; we do
not understand that the feelings which betray us into "indiscre-
tions" may, when differently modified by a different situation,
lead others to game-stealing or trade outrages. From this nar-
rowness of view the novelist may do much to deliver us. The
variations of feeling and action with those of circumstance, and
the essential human identity which these variations cannot touch,
are his special province. He shows us that crime does not always
imply sin, that a social heresy may be the assertion of a native
right, that an offense which leads to conventional outlawry may
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THOMAS HILL GREEN
6687
be merely the rebellion of a generous nature against conventional
tyranny.
Thus, if he does not do everything, he does much. Though
he cannot reveal to us the inner side of life, he at least gives a
more adequate conception of its surface. Though he cannot raise.
us to a point of view from which circumstances appear subordi-
nate to spiritual laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not
from being influenced, by the circumstances of our own position.
Though we cannot show the prisoners the way of escape from
their earthly confinement, yet by breaking down the partitions
between the cells he enables them to combine their strength for
a better arrangement of the prison-house. The most wounding
social wrongs more often arise from ignorance than from malice,
from acquiescence in the opinion of a class rather than from
deliberate selfishness. The master cannot enter into the feelings
of a servant, nor the servant into those of his master. The mas-
ter cannot understand how any good quality can lead one to
"forget his station "; to the servant the spirit of management in
the master seems mere "driving. " This is only a sample of what
is going on, all society over. The relation between the higher
and lower classes becomes irritating and therefore injurious, not
from any conscious unfairness on either side, but simply from the
want of a common understanding; while at the same time every
class suffers within its own limits from the prevalence of habits
and ideas, under the authority of class convention, which could
not long maintain themselves if once placed in the light of gen-
eral opinion
Against this twofold oppression the novel, from its first estab-
lishment as a substantive branch of literature, has made vigorous
war. From Defoe to Kingsley, its history boasts of a noble army
of social reformers; yet the work which these writers have
achieved has had little to do with the morals-commonly value-
less, if not false and sentimental - which they have severally
believed themselves to convey. Defoe's notion of a moral seems
to have been the vulgar one that vice must be palpably punished
and virtue rewarded; he recommends his 'Moll Flanders' to the
reader on the ground that "there is not a wicked action in any
part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy or unfortunate. "
The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can be called, is sim-
ply the importance of that prudence which his heroes might have.
dispensed with but for the wildness of their animal license.
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6688
THOMAS HILL GREEN
both Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind.
The thieves and harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punish-
ing, but whose adventures he describes with the minuteness of
affection, are what we ourselves might have been; and in their
histories we hear, if not the "music," yet the "harsh and grat-
ing" cry of suffering humanity. Fielding's merit is of the same
kind; but the sympathies which he excites are more general, as
his scenes are more varied, than those of Defoe. His coarseness
is everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contume-
lious buffets to which weakness is exposed. He has the practical
insight of Dickens and Thackeray, without their infusion of sen-
timent. He does not moralize over the contrast between the rich
man's law and the poor man's, over the "indifference" of rural
justice, over the lying and adultery of fashionable life. He sim-
ply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere under our
eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society
where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased
class itself to that public intelligence which, in spite of the
cynic's sneer on the task of "producing an honesty from the
combined action of knaves," has really power to override private
selfishness.
The same sermon has found many preachers since, the uncon-
scious missionaries being perhaps the greatest. Scott was a Tory
of the purest water. His mind was busy with the revival of a
pseudo-feudalism; no thought of reforming abuses probably ever
entered it. Yet his genial human insight made him a reformer
against his will. He who makes man better known to man takes
the first steps towards healing the wounds which man inflicts on
man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures
of the Scotch peasantry. He popularized the work which the
Lake poets had begun, of reopening the primary springs of
human passion. "Love he had found in huts where poor men
lie," and he announced the discovery; teaching the "world" of
English gentry what for a century and a half they had seemed
to forget, that the human soul, in its strength no less than in its
weakness, is independent of the accessories of fortune. He left
no equals, but the combined force of his successors has been
constantly growing in practical effect. They have probably done
more than the journalists to produce that improvement in the
organization of modern life which leads to the notion that because
social grievances are less obvious, they have ceased to exist. The
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THOMAS HILL GREEN
6689
novelist catches the cry of suffering before it has obtained the
strength or general recognition which are presupposed when
the newspaper becomes its mouthpiece. The miseries of the
marriage market had been told by Thackeray with almost weari-
some iteration, many years before they found utterance in the
columns of the Times.
It may indeed be truly said that after all, human selfishness
is much the same as it ever was; that luxury still drowns sym-
pathy; that riches and poverty have still their old estranging
influence. The novel, as has been shown, cannot give a new
birth to the spirit, or initiate the effort to transcend the separa-
tions of place and circumstance; but it is no small thing that it
should remove the barriers of ignorance and antipathy which
would otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at least brings
man nearer to his neighbor, and enables each class to see itself
as others see it. And from the fusion of opinions and sympa-
thies thus produced, a general sentiment is elicited, to which op-
pression of any kind, whether of one class by another, or of
individuals by the tyranny of sectarian custom, seldom appeals in
vain.
The novelist is a leveler also in another sense than that of
which we have already spoken. He helps to level intellects as
well as situations. He supplies a kind of literary food which the
weakest natures can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by
the consumption of which the former sort lose much of their
weakness and the latter much of their strength.
