Furneaux Jordan

“ In our time a body of men who hate England more than they love Ireland have, of set purpose, tumbled parliament into the dust: now, if a capable and firm authority were entrusted for twelve months with exceptional yet absolute control over parliamentary procedure, does any sane person suppose that the English passion for free parliaments would be lulled to sleep? Rule has often to be cruel in order to be kind. ”

“ If a brother is attached to his brother and does not quarrel with him, is he therefore poor-spirited? If by rare chance a servant sees, possibly on good grounds, a hero in his master, is he therefore a poltroon? If a parliament and a king see eye to eye, is it just to label the parliament throughout history as an abject parliament?
Henry’s epoch, moreover, was not one of marked political excitement, and therefore the hasty observer jumps to the conclusion that it was not one of political independence. In each individual, in each community, in each people there is a sum-total of nerve force. ”

“ But in our history the foible of a King avails but little when it clashes with the conscience, the ideal, the will of a people. Henry’s greed, moreover, whatever its strength, was less strong than his conservatism, less strong than his piety. Stronger, too, than all these combined was his boundless love of popularity—a love which alone would have preserved the monasteries could the monasteries have been preserved by any single man. ”

“ Could the long buried bones of their founders have come to life again and have put on the newer flesh, thought, with newer brain, the newer thought, they would have found quite other outlets for their energy, leisure and wealth. It is so with all founders and all institutions. It is so at this moment with the institutions which were born of the Reformation itself. Naturalists tell us that the jelly-like mass, the amæba, embraces everything, both the useful and the useless, that comes in its way, but that in time it relaxes its embrace on the useless. ”

“ Henry and his father presided over the introduction of a new order of things, which new order, however, was a step only, not a cataclysm. They themselves scarcely knew the significance of the step or how worthily they presided over it. The world, indeed, knows little—history says little—of great and sudden acts of constructive genius. These gradually emerge from the growth of peoples; they do not spring from the brains of individuals royal or otherwise. If the vision of a ruler is clear and his aims good, he, more than others, may help on organic and beneficent growth. ”

“ It mattered not whether this thing had been done or that; whether this particular leader led or that; whether this or that concession had been made at Rome. If Erasmus could not fight Luther could. If Rome could concede nothing, much could be torn from her. There is, indeed, much fighting and tearing in history: complacent persons, loftily indifferent to organisation, and race, and long antecedent, are astonished that men should fight, or should fight with their bodies, or that, when fighting they should actually kill each other. ”

“ In other words Henry had more of intellect and less of passion than his grandfather. Edward’s early and secret marriage was no proof of passion. Early marriages are not the monopoly of any temperament; sometimes they are the product of the mere caprice, or the self-will and the feeble restraint of the passionless, and sometimes the product of the raw and immature judgment of the passionate. Edward deserves our pity, for he had everything against him; he had no models, no ideals, no education, no training. ”

“ It is a singular misreading of history to say that Henry did much directly or indirectly to help on the Reformation of the Church in this country, although the part he played was not a small one. Neither was the Reformation itself, grave and critical as it was, so sudden and volcanic an upheaval as is generally believed.
Luther himself did not put forward a single new idea. No man is thinker and fighter at once; at any rate, no man thinks and fights at the same moment. Luther struck his blows for already accomplished thought. ”

“ No century contains three royal figures so striking in themselves and so clearly revealed to us as are the figures of Henry and Elizabeth and Mary in the sixteenth. Their capability, their vitality and their attainments would have made them striking persons in any position of life. Each, indeed, possessed the three qualities which make a really interesting personality—and such personalities are but a small proportion of the neutral-tinted multitude who are good and kind and industrious—and nothing more. They, the three personalities, could all see facts for themselves ”

“ But let us not forget this one lesson from history and physiology: it is not given—or but rarely given—to any one man to do all these things, to innovate, to illuminate, to formulate, to fight, to rouse; it is certainly not given to any one man to do all with equal power, and certainly not all at once. For there is a sum-total of brain-force, not in the individual only, but in the community and in the epoch. In one stream it is powerful ”

“ One passion, if unequivocally present, denotes the existence of other passions, palpable or latent—denotes the existence, in fact, of the impassioned temperament. Henry VIII., startling as the statement may seem, had no single, deep, unequivocal passion—no deep love, no profound pity, no overwhelming grief, no implacable hate, no furious anger. The noisy petulance of a busy, censorious, irritable man and the fretfulness of an invalid are frequently misunderstood. ”

“ One figure of Henry’s times which never fails to interest us is that of Sir Thomas More. More was clearly one of the unimpassioned class; but his commanding intellect, his quick response to high influences, his capability of forming noble friendships, and his lofty ideals seemed to dispense with the need of deep emotions. More and Henry, indeed, were much alike in many ways. ”

“ The cruelty of the impassioned man is perhaps the darkest of human passions. It is the cruelty born of hate—cruelty contrived with deliberation and watched with glee. Happily it is a kind which lessens with the growth of civilisation. ”

“ But when, at a later time (and for purposes other than the special study of character) , I came to review the Reformation with its ideas, its men, its incidents, I saw at once, to my surprise, that Henry’s life was a busy, active, conspicuous, passionless life. He might have sat for the portrait I had previously drawn. Markedly unimpassioned men tend to be fitful, petulant, censorious, self-important, self-willed, and eager for popularity—so tended Henry. The unimpassioned are frequently sincere, conscientious, pious, and conservative—Henry was all these. ”

“ In the reformations of a growing people, whatever the age in which they happen, whatever the religion or policy or conduct of the age, leading spirits rebel against what is most oppressive and resent what is most arrogant in that age; they reject what is most false and laugh out of court what is most ridiculous. In the sixteenth century men felt no special or inherent resentment to arrogance because it lifted its head in Rome ”

“ The Papacy itself had made Papal rule impossible to vigorous peoples. With curiously narrow ambition Popes have always preferred even limited temporal importance to unlimited spiritual sway. Two Popes, nay at one time three, had struggled not for the supremacy of religion but for merely personal pre-eminence. Popes had fought Popes, councils had fought councils, and each had called in the friendly infidel to fight the catholic enemy. The catholic sack of catholic Rome had been accompanied by greater lust and more copious bloodshed than the sack of Rome in olden time by northern Infidels. ”

“ The Tudor time, more than any other in our history, lends itself to the study of character; a study which, although difficult, is the less difficult in that whatever of change may take place, old elements of character do not altogether disappear and entirely new elements do not make their appearance. ”

“ Unhappily unbounded lust is now and then a feature of the impassioned temperament. It is never seen however in the less impassioned, and Henry was one of the less impassioned. The want of dignity is itself a striking feature in the character of passionless and active men, and want of dignity was the one conspicuous defect in Henry’s conduct in his marriage affairs. Perhaps too, dignity—personal or national—is, like quietness and like kindliness, among the later growths of civilisation. ”

“ Mary’s fate was destined to be one of the saddest of recorded time. Inward force and outer circumstance are so commingled that mortal reason fails to disentangle them. To-day men seem to put a curb on circumstance, and to-morrow circumstance seems to run away with men. ”

“ History broadly hints that great delusions, like great revolutions, may overcome—especially if the overcoming be not too sudden—both peoples and persons without their special wonder. In such delusions and such revolutions the actors and the victims are alike often unconscious actors and unconscious victims. Neither Henry nor his people dreamt that the great marriage question of the sixteenth century would excite the ridicule of all succeeding centuries. Luther did not imagine that his efforts would help to divide religious Europe into two permanently hostile camps. ”

“ Self-importance, as a rule, is built on a foundation of solid self-confidence, and Henry’s confidence in himself was broad enough and deep enough to sustain any conceivable edifice. The Romish church was then, and had been for a thousand years, the strongest influence in Europe. It touched every event in men’s bodily lives and decided also the fate of their immortal souls. Henry nevertheless had no misgiving as to his fitness to be the spiritual head of the Church in this country, or the spiritual head of the great globe itself, if the great globe had had one Church only. ”

“ Henry and Elizabeth were examples of one type and Mary of another. The Tudor father and daughter were, as we have already seen, not examples merely but extreme examples of the unimpassioned, ever active, ever visible class. Mary was as extreme an example of the impassioned, meditative, persistent and tenacious class. It was a remarkable coincidence that pitted two such mental and bodily extremes against each other. All sane human beings have much more of that which is [Pg 75] common to the character of the race than they have of that which is peculiar to the individual. ”

“ Carlyle, in his own rousing way and on a subject which deeply interests him—Luther and the Reformation—mingles fine literary vigour with an indifference to physiological teaching which is by no means habitual with him. The heaven-born hero tells us what has become false and unreal, and shows us—it is his special business—how we may go back to truth and reality. The humbler student believes that we are constantly journeying towards truth and reality—these lie not behind but in front of us. The school of prophets tells us that the hero alights in front of us and stands apart. ”

“ In all the parts he played, save the part of husband, his unimpassioned temperament stood him in good stead. A man’s attitudes to his fellow-men and to the movements of his time are, on the whole, determined more by his intellect than by his feeling. The emotions indeed are very disturbing elements. They have, it is true, made or helped to make a few careers; but they have destroyed many more. Very curiously, Henry’s compeers were, most of them, like himself—unimpassioned men. ”

“ Not a syllable is said of Henry’s grief at Jane Seymour’s death; and three weeks after he was intriguing for a Continental, state, and purely diplomatic marriage. It is true that he paraded a sort of fussy affection for the young prince Edward—carried him indeed through the state apartments in his own royal arms; but the less impassioned temperament is often more openly demonstrative than the impassioned, especially when the public ear listens and the public eye watches. Those who caress in public attach as a rule but little meaning to caresses. ”

“ At the close of the eighteenth century in France the oppression was heavy, the opportunity was large, and the uprising was ferocious. No other people have ever [Pg 59] shown such a spectacle, and it is therefore idle to compare other great national movements with it. French history stands alone: no oppressor can oppress like the French oppressor; no retaliator can retaliate like the French retaliator. It is a question much less of politics than of organisation and race. ”