A. F. Pollard

“ But when you know what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned, I will venture to swear that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a Prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy. ”

“ An English state could hardly exist before men had made roads, but it could no more exist until they had achieved that great victory of civilized government by which a minority agrees for the sake of peace to submit to the greater number. Steam and railways and telegraphs have placed further powers in the hands of men; they have conquered the land and the sea and the air; and medical science has built up their physique and paved the way for empire in tropical climes. But while he has conquered nature, man has also conquered himself. ”

“ The storm cleared the air and dissipated many a pestilent vapour, but it left a trail of wreck and ruin over the land. The nation purchased political salvation at the price of moral debasement; the individual was sacrificed on the altar of the State; and popular subservience proved the impossibility of saving a people from itself. Constitutional guarantees are worthless without the national will to maintain them; men lightly abandon what they lightly hold; and, in Henry's reign, the English spirit of independence burned low in its socket, and love of freedom grew cold. ”

“ For nearly two centuries after the Norman Conquest there is no history of the English people. There is history enough of England, but it is the history of a foreign government. We may now feel pride in the strength of our conqueror or pretend claims to descent from William's companions. We may boast of the empire of Henry II and the prowess of Richard I, and we may celebrate the organized law and justice, the scholarship and the architecture, of the early Plantagenet period; but these things were no more English than the government of India to-day is Hindu. ”

“ So spring passed into summer and the days began to wane, with the Germans reaping the fruits of their foresight and preparations in the East, while we pinned our faith to the silver lining of the clouds and looked day by day for that offensive which was to relieve our hard-pressed Allies but did not come. The truth was hidden from the public eye, and possibly with prudence; for there are times in which without illusions the weight of gloom would be intolerable. The difficulty is that illusion also dims the sense of danger and of duty ”

“ He was never betrayed by passion or enthusiasm into rash adventures, and he loved the substance, rather than the pomp and circumstance of power. Untrammelled by scruples, unimpeded by principles, he pursued with constant fidelity the task of his life, to secure the throne for himself and his children, to pacify his country, and to repair the waste of the civil wars. Folly easily glides into war, but to establish a permanent peace required all Henry's patience, clear sight and far sight, caution and tenacity. ”

“ Unwittingly Norman and Angevin despotism made an English nation out of Anglo-Saxon tribes, as English despotism has made a nation out of Irish septs, and will make another out of the hundred races and religions of our Indian empire. The more efficient a despotism, the sooner it makes itself impossible, and the greater the problems it stores up for the future, unless it can divest itself of its despotic attributes and make common cause with the nation it has created.
The provision of this even-handed tyranny was the great contribution of the Normans to the making of England. ”

“ The German surprise, so long and so carefully prepared, had failed, and the knockout blow had been parried. The Allied victory had not decided how the war would end, but it had decided that the war would be long--a test of endurance rather than of generalship, a struggle of peoples and a conflict of principles rather than duel between professional armies. There would be time for peaceful and even unarmed nations to gird themselves in defence; and the cause of democracy would not go down because military autocrats had thought to dispose of France before her allies could effectively intervene. ”

“ Its splendour and display were emblematic of the coming reign. Warham placed the crown on the King's head; the people cried, "Yea, yea!" in a loud voice when asked if they would have Henry as King; Sir Robert Dymock performed the office of champion; and a banquet, jousts and tourneys concluded the ceremonies.
Though he had wedded a wife and been crowned a king, Henry was as yet little more than a boy. A powerful mind ripens slowly in a vigorous frame, and Henry's childish precocity had given way before a youthful devotion to physical sports. He was no prodigy of early development. ”

“ But it is as absurd to think that John conceded modern liberty when he granted the charter of medieval liberties, as to think that he permitted some one to found a new religion when he licensed him to endow a new religious house (novam religionem) ; and to regard Magna Carta as a great popular achievement, when no vernacular version of it is known to have existed before the sixteenth century, and when it contains hardly a word or an idea of popular English origin, involves complete misunderstanding of its meaning and a serious antedating of English nationality. ”

“ Lloyd George had been appointed Minister of Munitions in May 1915 to revolutionize the situation which had inspired him with such confidence in April. We had more to learn in the art of war than the manufacture of munitions, and the dream that a better supply would have enabled us to beat the Germans in the spring of 1915--without any American troops at all and with a British Army about a tenth of the effective strength that was in the end required--was as idle as the German fancy that their similar superiority should have brought us to our knees in the autumn of 1914. ”

“ The trend of hostile opinion is to regard parliament as an unnecessary middleman, and to advocate in its stead a sort of plebiscitary bureaucracy, a constitution under which legislation drafted by officials would be demanded, sanctioned, or rejected by direct popular vote, and would be discussed, like the Insurance Bill, in informal conferences outside, rather than inside, parliament; while administration by a vast army of experts would be partially controlled by popularly elected ministers; for socialists waver between their faith in human equality and their trust in the superman. ”

“ They thought that the tide of invasion would recede as fast as it had advanced, and it was only as the days of German resistance lengthened into weeks, and the weeks into months of the longest battle in history, that staffs and armies and peoples began to grasp the awful potentialities of scientific progress in the art of modern war. The battle without a morrow had long been the ideal consummation for victorious strategy, but no one had yet foreseen the battle without an end and armies without flanks. ”

“ Politics, the action of men in the mass, are akin to the operation of natural forces; and, as such, they are neither moral nor immoral; they are simply non-moral. Political movements are often as resistless as the tides of the ocean; they carry to fortune, and they bear to ruin, the just and the unjust with heedless impartiality. ”

“ A race that sticks like a limpet to the soil may be happy but cannot be great; and the ejection of English peasants from their homesteads saved them from the reproach of home- keeping youths that they have ever homely wits.
Mary's reign, however, checked the national impulse towards expansion, and thrust England for the moment back into the Middle Ages. First she put herself and her kingdom under the aegis of Spain, to which in heart and mind she belonged, by marrying Philip II. Then with his assistance she restored the papal jurisdiction, and England surrendered its national independence. ”

“ Now, when Henry was left without an ally, when the Scots were victorious in the North, when France was ready to launch an Armada against the southern coasts of England, now, surely, was the time for a national uprising to depose the bloodthirsty tyrant, the enemy of the Church, the persecutor of his people. Strangely enough his people did, and even desired, nothing of the sort. Popular discontent existed only in the imagination of his enemies; Henry retained to the last his hold over the mind of his people. Never had they been called to pay such a series of loans, subsidies and benevolences ”

“ Armies are the weapons of autocracy, navies those of freedom; for peoples do not live upon water, and only armies command their homes. Command of the sea is a sufficient protection for an island-empire; to conquer others it needs a superior army, and the absence of such an army proved the defensive aims of the British Empire before the war. World domination could only be secured by the combination of a dominant army with a dominant navy, and hence the significance of the German naval programme designed at least to prevent the counteraction of one by the other. ”

“ William had only conquered the people by the help of his barons; Henry II only crushed the barons with the help of lower orders and of ministers raised from the ranks. It was left for his sons to alienate the support which he had enlisted, and to show that, if the first condition of progress was the restraint of the barons, the second was the curbing of the crown. Their reigns illustrate the ineradicable defect of arbitrary rule: a monarch of genius creates an efficient despotism, and is allowed to create it, to deal with evils that yield to no milder treatment. ”

“ To one historian an inhuman embodiment of cruelty and vice, to another a superhuman incarnation of courage, wisdom and strength of will, Henry VIII. has, by an almost universal consent, been placed above or below the grade of humanity. So unique was his personality, so singular his achievements, that he appears in the light of a special dispensation sent like another Attila to be the scourge of mankind, or like a second Hercules to cleanse, or at least to demolish, Augean stables. ”