Charles Oman

“ The people of Paris broke out into sedition, under a bold citizen named Etienne Marcel, and put the Dauphin himself in durance for a time. Last and worst of all, the peasantry of Central France, driven to despair by the general misery of the times, rose in rebellion against all constituted authority, slew every man of gentle blood that they could lay hands on, and roamed about in huge bands, burning castles and manors, and plundering towns and villages. ”

“ King George was as obstinate and courageous as he was narrow-minded. With a firm resolution that was admirable but unwise, he stood forth to face the whole world in arms, without yielding an inch. It was in vain that the aged William Pitt, whom the news of foreign war called out from his retirement, came down to the House of Lords to speak for reconciliation with America at all costs. He urged that we must not fight our own kith and kin, but seek peace with them, and turn all our forces against the foreign foe. ”

“ Orleans held out long and stubbornly, and while its siege still dragged on, a new factor was suddenly introduced into the struggle. The widespread misery and devastation caused by thirteen years of uninterrupted war had moved the hearts of the French to despair; the people lay inert and passive, hating the English, but caring little for the despicable Charles and his Armagnac court at Bourges. It was left for a simple peasant girl to turn this apathy into energy, and to send forth the whole people of France on a wild crusade against the invader. ”

“ Meanwhile there was a man who saw clearly the one way to restore a stable government and to content the nation. George Monk, a calm, self-reliant soldier who commanded the army in Scotland, had resolved to use his regiments, on whose obedience he could implicitly count, to restore legal and constitutional rule. His own private ambition lay in the direction of a quiet and assured competence, not of an unsteady grasp on supreme power. He put himself secretly in communication with the exiled Prince of Wales and the chiefs of the English Royalists. ”

“ A wise king would have dismissed Somerset after the disasters in Normandy and Guienne, and taken a more profitable helper in the hard task of governing England. York was the obvious man to choose; he was an able general, and the first prince of the blood. But Henry distrusted York, and Henry's young queen viewed him with keen and unconcealed dislike. The thought that, if any harm should come to her husband, Duke Richard must succeed him, filled Margaret of Anjou with wrath and bitterness. ”

“ William had brought over to England two principles of conflicting tendency—the one that of strong monarchical government, where everything depends on the king; the other that of feudal anarchy. He himself had been able to control the turbulent horde of military adventurers among whom he had distributed the lands of England, but would his sons be equally successful? We have now to see how two strong-handed kings kept down the monster of feudal rebellion; how one weak king's reign sufficed to put the monarchy in the gravest danger ”

“ When Henry of Anjou, now a young man of twenty-one years, succeeded to Stephen's crown, he found the country in a most deplorable condition. The regular administration of justice had ceased, many of the counties had no sheriffs or other royal officers, the revenue had fallen off by a half, and the barons were exercising all the prerogatives of the king, even to the extent of coining money in their own names. A weak man would have found the position hopeless; a strong man, like Henry, saw that it required instant and unflinching energy, but that it was not beyond repair. ”

“ In the long struggles that followed the declaration of war in 1803, Bonaparte at one time and another struck down every government in Europe that dared to stand against him, but England he could never subdue. From the moment when Sidney Smith turned him back from the walls of Acre, down to the moment when Wellington drove him a broken and defeated adventurer from the hillside of Waterloo, it was always England that stood between him and complete success. ”

“ King Edward now himself assumed the reins of government; he was still very young, but in the middle ages men ripened quick if they died early, and Edward at nineteen was thought both by others and himself old enough to take charge of the policy of the realm. He was in his youth a very well-served and well-loved sovereign, for he had all the qualities that attract popularity—a handsome person, pleasant and affable manners, a fluent tongue, and an energy that contrasted most happily with the listless indolence of his miserable father. ”

“ Nothing could have been more difficult than the problem which England had now to face. With all her disposable army over-sea in America, she found herself threatened by an invasion at home, and saw her possessions all over the world beset by France and Spain. Gibraltar and Minorca, the West Indies, and all our other outlying posts, were held by garrisons of wholly inadequate strength. The fleet, which, owing to the continental character of the American struggle, had been hitherto neglected, was suddenly called upon to act as our main line of defence, and proved too small for its task. ”

“ England had never loved the papal influence, and had still less reason to love it when it was employed for the benefit of her political enemies. The tale of the simony, corruption, and evil living of the papal court had gone forth all over Europe, and provoked even more wrath in England than elsewhere. The English Church itself was far from blameless: there were bishops who were mere statesmen and warriors, and neglected their diocesan work; there were secular clergy who never saw their parishes, and monasteries where religion and sound learning were less regarded than wealth and high living. ”

“ The peace of Paris was not received with enthusiasm in England. It was said, and truly, that Pitt would have asked and obtained much better terms, and that it was weak and futile to restore to France and Spain their lost colonies. Yet, looking at our enormous gains, it seems absurd to complain. The treaty made England supreme in America and in Hindostan, and ratified her permanent ascendency at sea. When so much was secured, it appeared greedy to ask for yet more, for never by any previous treaty had England won so much or brought a war so triumphantly to a close. ”

“ He proved a much better king than people expected, for, being a very young man and easily impressed, he grew to be more of an Englishman than a Dane in all his manners and habits of thought. He ruled in Denmark and Norway as well as in this island, but he made England his favourite abode, and regarded it as the centre and heart of his empire. The moment that he was firmly established on the throne, he took measures for restoring the prosperity of the land, which had been reduced to an evil plight by forty years of ill-governance and war. ”

“ He knew that nothing serves so well to quiet down internal troubles as a successful and glorious foreign war. He believed himself, and rightly, to be capable of leading the national forces to victory, and he knew that England's old neighbour and enemy across the Channel was weak and divided. Accordingly, from the moment of his accession Henry began to prepare for an assault on France. He was determined to claim not merely the restoration of the lost provinces of Guienne, but the crown of France itself, as Edward III. had done in the days before the treaty of Bretigny. ”

“ Where generals of an older school would run headlong into a fight and win with heavy loss, he would outflank or outmarch his enemy, and hustle him out of his positions with little or no bloodshed. On one occasion—as we shall see—he drove an army of 60,000 French before him and seized half the duchy of Brabant, without losing more than 80 men. Yet when hard blows were necessary he never shrank from the most formidable problems, and would lead his troops into the hottest fire with a cool-headed courage that won every man's admiration. ”

“ If he had been born a peer instead of a prince, he would have been one of the best men of his day. But, unfortunately for England and for himself, he inherited a crown and not a coronet. He came to the helm of State fully persuaded of the truth of the two maxims that his father had taught him—that the royal prerogative overrode all the ancient national rights, and that the king ought to judge for himself in all things, and follow his own ideas, not the advice of his Parliament. ”

“ The idea of federation is in the air both in Great Britain and in her daughter-states. The day has long gone by when a not inconsiderable number of English statesmen looked forward to the time when the colonies should, as it was phrased, "cut the painter" and steer their own course. The consciousness of common origin and interests grows stronger; the interdependence of the mother country and her colonies is more realized; the development of rapid communication by sea and land makes the distance between the various British communities in different hemispheres less felt as every year rolls by. ”

“ With the triumph of Pitt English politics are lifted to a higher level, and lose the mean and petty aspect which they had displayed ever since the days of Walpole. For the first time since the century began, England was in the hands of a minister of a spotless personal integrity, who possessed broad views and a definite political programme. His power was enormous, for, in return for having delivered the king from his hated enemies the Whigs, Pitt was granted the royal support even for measures which his narrow-minded sovereign hardly understood and could not love. ”

“ Smarting under the narrow and stupid rule of the Ancien Régime, many Frenchmen took these Utopian ideas seriously, and talked of setting up the reign of reason and humanity. Hence it came that all the claims and aspirations of the French Revolution were inspired by vague and visionary ideas of the rights of man, and demanded the destruction of old institutions, unlike our English agitations for reform, which from Magna Carta downwards have always claimed a restoration of ancient liberties, not the setting up of a new constitution. ”

“ Unless Elizabeth should marry and have issue, Mary stood next her in the line of succession. The Queen of Scots, however, was a most undesirable heiress. She had been brought up in France, had married the eldest son of Henry II. and hated England. She was a zealous Romanist, and ready to work hard for her faith. Moreover, she was greatly desirous of being recognized as Elizabeth's next of kin, and openly laid claim to the position. Though very young, she was clever and active, and possessed charms of person and manner which bent many men to her will. ”

“ The chief misfortunes of the unhappy time that was now to set in, had their source in the swollen importance of the great noble houses, and the bitterness of their feuds with each other. For the last hundred years the landed wealth of England had been concentrating into fewer and fewer hands. The House of Lords contained less than a third of the numbers that it had shown in the days of Edward I. The greater peers had piled up such vast masses of estates that they were growing to be each a little king in his own district. ”

“ England, whose troops were not destined to fire another shot in Europe for forty years, had full leisure to look around her and count up the cost of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The table of profit and loss was not at first sight a very cheerful one. The weight of debt and taxation was obvious to every man, while the compensating advantages, resulting from the firm establishment of our naval and commercial supremacy in all the seas of the world, were only just beginning to make themselves felt. ”

“ And since he possessed in his army a weapon able to dissolve any number of parliaments, he was tempted to bring every quarrel to an end by abruptly dismissing the recalcitrant House. A less self-confident man, or one who did not think that he possessed a mandate from above to reform England, might have learnt to co-operate with a Parliament. But Cromwell was so sure of his own good intentions, and so convinced that those who questioned them must be wrong-headed and factious, that he drove away three parliaments in succession with words of rebuke and of righteous anger. ”

“ Nevertheless, Aelfthryth's boy Aethelred got the profit of his mother's wicked deed, for the Witan crowned him as the sole heir to King Eadgar. His long reign was worthy of its evil commencement, for it proved one unbroken series of disasters, and brought England at last to the feet of a foreign conqueror. He ruled for thirty-eight years of misery and trouble, for which he was himself largely responsible, for he was a selfish, idle, dilatory, hard-hearted man, and let himself be guided by unworthy flatterers and favourites, who sought nothing but their own private advantage. ”

“ Swegen became Aethelred's bitterest foe, and repeatedly warred against him, not with mere Viking bands, but with the whole force of Denmark at his back, a great national army bent on serious invasion of the land, not on transient raiding. The English were driven to despair by Swegen's ravages, and the king did nothing to save them. He had now fallen entirely into the hands of an unscrupulous favourite, named Eadric Streona, or the Grasper, and was guided in all things by this low-born adventurer. ”

“ The earlier years of Henry's reign were much disturbed by petty rebellions, the last ground-swell of discontent and lawlessness which lingered on after the great tempest of the Wars of the Roses had abated. Richard III. had left behind him a few devoted partisans who had resolved never to submit; the chief were John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, who had been declared heir to the throne by the late king, and Lord Lovel, the sole survivor of the three favourites who had "ruled all England under the Hog." They were bold reckless men, ready to risk all for ambition and revenge. ”