Charles Robert Leslie Fletcher

“ In fact he is very much at the mercy of the squire until the latter half of the twelfth century, when the King’s Law begins to protect him against the squire, to hang him if he commits crimes, and to enroll him as a soldier. But it will not pay the squire to oppress him too much if he is to get good work out of him. These clever Normans, all but a few of the greatest barons, soon made common cause with their tenants, soon became English at heart. Over them, too, the good land threw its dear familiar spell, and made them love it beyond all things. ”

“ And, while the barons’ quarrels round the King’s totterng throne became shriller and shriller, there were but too many men in England ready to fight somebody, they did not much care whom so long as there was plunder at the end. Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou, a fiery, cruel woman, ignored her gentle husband and governed in his name. She had already made herself the partisan of one of the two baronial factions, and had struck down the King’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester. ”

“ During the Great War a system of wooden signals from hill-top to hill-top, worked by hand, would carry a message from Dover to London in about an hour; now the electric telegraph flashes messages round the world in a few minutes. By another kind of wire, the telephone, a man in London can talk to a man in Paris, and they can hear each other’s voices and laughter. ”

“ He tried to reform the House of Commons, to abolish the cruel trade of carrying slaves from Africa to the West Indies; he tried to pacify Ireland and give it perfect free trade with Britain; and he would have liked to abolish the laws which still shut out the Catholics from Parliament. Every wise and moderate change which took place during the nineteenth century had already been conceived by this great and wise man. But many of his proposals were upset or spoiled either by the opposition of the Whigs, the stupidity of the Tories, or the prejudices of King George. ”

“ Schools were increasing, and even ‘Universities’, of which Oxford was the first in England, were beginning. The towns had been gaining in riches in spite of the civil war; London, to which Henry I had given a ‘Charter’, allowing it to govern itself and keep its own customs, was even more ahead of the other English towns than it is to-day. The difference of race between Norman and Englishman was being forgotten. We were growing into one ‘people’. The worst followers of the worst barons had killed each other off during the war, or gone away to the Crusades. ”

“ No war was ever fought with so much bloodshed in battle and so little cruelty after battle. Except where actual fighting or a siege was going on, civil life was not interrupted. Down to the end of 1643 the advantage was on the whole with the King. Then both men and money began to fail him, and an incomparable leader came to the front for the Parliament in the person of Oliver Cromwell, who was to finish the war and die, ten years later, something very like King of Great Britain.
With what feelings the men in either army must have looked upon each other before the first great battle! ”

“ More than one statesman, especially the famous Mr. Gladstone in 1885 and 1892, has thought of conciliating the Irish, by granting them, under the name of ‘Home Rule’, the separate Parliament which they demand. But most people fear that a separate Irish Parliament would be followed by a complete separation between Ireland and Great Britain, by the establishment of an Irish Republic, and by the oppression of the well-to-do and intelligent classes of Irishmen, who are certainly loyal to the British Crown. ”

“ The Industrial Revolution.At home great changes were beginning which were going to turn Britain from a corn-growing and wool-growing country into the workshop of the world. These changes have got the name of the ‘Industrial Revolution’. They took more than a century to work out, and the result of them has been that we now buy nearly all our food from distant lands, and buy it with the goods which we make in our great cities, principally iron, cotton and woollen goods. It is sometimes a little difficult to arrange for an uninterrupted supply of food for forty million people. ”

“ In a land of forest and swamp, where roads hardly exist for eight months of the year, it must always be difficult for armed men, judges or traders to pass from place to place, except on horseback; and the Saxons were no great horse-soldiers. I think we shall see that it was the knight and his horse, who, from the eleventh century onwards, first made the rule of one king possible over the whole island. Meanwhile, the ‘great men’ of the Saxons, ‘thegns’, ‘aldermen’, ‘earls’, or whatever they were called, took most of the power, and naturally began to oppress their poorer neighbours. ”

“ No sovereign ever so unweariedly set herself to win the love of her people, to be the servant of her people. And her people rewarded her with a love that she had more than deserved. Her reign of sixty-three years will always be remembered in history by her name ”

“ England had never yet been a united country. Ethelred, and Canute after him, had allowed great ‘aldermen’ or earls to govern it, one for Northumbria, one for Mercia, one for Wessex; Edward continued the same plan, and so these great earls were more powerful than the King himself. Northumbria and Mercia were largely Danish at heart and looked more to Denmark than to Wessex for a king. It was on Wessex, then, that the main resistance to Normandy would fall if the Normans attacked England. ”

“ The popes always tried to keep the Church independent of the King. They wanted the clergy to pay no taxes for their lands, to have separate courts of justice, to be governed by other laws than those of the laymen, and yet to be wholly defended by the kings and laymen. Now no good king approved of these demands, which were indeed monstrous if you consider that the clergy owned between one-quarter and one-third of the land of England, and were getting more and more, from gifts by pious laymen, every day. ”

“ In those days the House of Commons was chosen by a very small body of electors; now it is chosen by almost all the grown-up men in Great Britain. But the principle was the same then as now; a king who, perhaps, wanted to make a ‘Whig’ war or carry a ‘Whig’ law might suddenly find himself, after the election of a new Parliament, face to face with a ‘Tory’ House of Commons, and so he would have to dismiss his Whig ministers, take Tory ministers, and drop his ‘Whig’ war or his ‘Whig’ law. ”

“ But people are always glad to lend money to the Crown, because they know they will get the interest on it paid quite punctually. As long as we pay the interest on this National Debt we are still paying for some of King Willam’s wars and for those of all later sovereigns; but we need not grumble, because, if these great wars had not been fought, there would have been no British Colonies or Empire, and probably no independent Great Britain; our country would have been a province of France. ”

“ Those of us who were not killed or made slaves at once, fled to the forests, fled ever northwards or westwards, or hid in our caves again. But many of us were made slaves, especially the women, some of whom afterwards married their conquerors. The Celts, for that was the name of the new people, seized all the best land, all the flocks and herds, and all the strong places on the hill-tops, and began to lead in Britain the life which they had been leading for several centuries in the country we now call France. From these Celts the Scottish, Irish and Welsh people are mainly descended. ”

“ Lord Nelson's famous signal, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ was spelled out in little flags from the mast of his great ship the Victory. And every man did. Almost the whole French and Spanish fleets were there destroyed or taken prisoners. No such victory had been won at sea since the Greeks beat the Persians at Salamis nearly five hundred years before Christ. Nelson was killed in the battle; but the plan of invasion was over and Napoleon never resumed it. The French Navy hardly recovered from this defeat before our own days. ”

“ It was called the war of the House of York against the House of Lancaster, of the ‘White Rose’ against the ‘Red Rose’; really, it was the war of some dozen savage barons on one side against another dozen on the other. Each of them had a little army of archers and spearmen; each had perhaps the grudges of a century to pay off upon some rival. The war hardly affected the towns at all, and stopped trade very little; and even the country districts, except in the actual presence of the armies, seem to have suffered little. ”

“ It was far more clearly a war for empire than any earlier one. ‘I will win America for us in Germany,’ was what Pitt said; and what he meant was that France, if thoroughly beaten in Germany, would be unable to spare troops to defend far-away Canada. But, being a thorough man, he also set about winning America in America itself. In America.He even persuaded the disloyal colonists to help us to fight their battles for them, and he paid them to do so. His huge and victorious fleet prevented the French from sending any help to Canada. ”

“ Results of the Norman Conquest.The battle of Hastings decided, though not even William knew it, that the great, slow, dogged, English race, was to be governed and disciplined (and at first severely bullied in the process) by a small number of the cleverest, strongest, most adventurous race then alive. Nothing more was wanted to make our island the greatest country in the world. The Saxons had been sinking down into a sleepy, fat, drunken, unenterprising folk. The Normans were temperate in food and drink, highly educated, as education went in those days, restless, and fiery. ”

“ The numbers of the barons were now very small, but each was proportionately more powerful; and a great man might perhaps hold four or five earldoms. The younger sons of the kings held many of these, and were often the worst rowdies at the fashionable game of ‘beggar-my-neighbour’ and ‘king of the castle’. In my schoolboy days, when we were asked what we knew of any particular baron in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, we usually thought it safe to answer, ‘He was the King’s uncle and was put to death.’ Most of the King’s uncles and cousins were put to death, and more of them deserved to be. ”

“ Unfortunately this reign of the Sword left on men’s minds an unreasonable hatred and fear, not only of this Puritan army, but of all armies; and that hatred and fear has too often paralysed the arm of England, and is not wholly dead to-day. It has prevented men from seeing that to serve King and country in the Army is the second best profession for Englishmen of all classes; to serve in the Navy, I suppose we all admit, is the best. Charles II prudently kept up a few of the regiments of Cromwells old army, and even increased it a little during his reign. ”

“ Progress towards Democracy.On the whole, the progress of Great Britain during the past ninety-six years has been towards what is called ‘Democracy’, a long word meaning ‘Government by the people’. This form of government may be said to be still ‘on its trial’. Let us hope that it will prove a great success. It will only do so if all classes of the people realize that they have duties as well as rights, and if each class realizes that every other class has rights as well as itself. ”

“ Who should succeed Henry?With the approval of his Parliament, he had settled that the crown should go after his death to his son Edward; if Edward had no children, to Mary; then, if Mary had no children, to Elizabeth; lastly, if all three of his children died without direct heirs, it was to go to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, not to those of his elder sister, Margaret, Queen of Scotland. He hated Scotland as bitterly as Edward I, and continued the Border wars as fiercely until his death in 1547. ”

“ No king and no lay court of justice was to dare to touch a priest, much less to hang him if he committed murder or theft, which too many priests still did. Henry wanted to hang such priests. He was told of a hundred murders committed by priests in the first ten years of his reign, which had gone unpunished, because the Church said all priests were ‘sacred’. So he chose his favourite minister, Thomas Becket, already Chancellor of England, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He believed that Thomas would help him to make one law for clergymen and laymen alike ”

“ Then began the great commercial prosperity of Modern Scotland. Within fifty years Glasgow had got an enormous share of the trade with the British colonies and India, and one of the most interesting tales of town history is the story how the grave merchants of Glasgow got together and set to work to deepen the river Clyde so as to make it carry the trade which they knew would come. The first Glasgow ship for tobacco sailed to America ten years after the union, and began what is still one of Glasgow's greatest industries. ”

“ When, in the eighth and ninth centuries, we begin to see a little into the darkness, we find that England has become a purely English country, with a purely English and rather absurd system of law, and a purely English language ”

“ Intentions of its leaders.No one had the least intention of upsetting the throne of King Charles. But in civil matters all were agreed in wishing to purify the Law Courts and to restore the ‘ancient constitution’, by which they meant the control of Parliament over the Crown, as it had existed before the Wars of the Roses. The ‘strong government’ of the Tudors, they said, had been necessary at the time; it was no longer necessary. The King of England ought to be a ‘limited monarch’, not an ‘absolute monarch’, and Charles must be made to realize the fact. ”