English Civil War

“ The shame of defeat abroad was being added to the misery and discomfort at home. The French war ran its disastrous course. One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a second sunk by a storm; and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like its predecessors, in disappointment and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between employers and employed was kindling into civil war. The Parliament, drawn as it was wholly from the proprietary classes, struggled as fiercely for the mastery of the labourers as it struggled for the mastery of the Crown. ”

“ Although, in a narrow political sense, a disruption may be useful to England, in another point of view it is a misfortune, inasmuch as the maintenance of one confederation during seventy-two years, over such a vast extent of territory, with no civil war, and only two foreign wars, is the greatest thing which the English race has done out of England, and its dissolution is sure to be viewed with pleasure by all who in their hearts hate free institutions and the English race. ”

“ CHAPTER XX. The civil war closed with ill-feeling amounting to resentment towards England on the part of the loyal citizens of the United States. They believed that the Government of Great Britain, and especially the aristocratic and wealthy classes (whose influence in the kingdom is predominant) , had desired the destruction of the Union and had connived at it so far as connivance was safe; they believed that great harm had been inflicted on the American marine by rebel cruisers built in English ship-yards and manned with English sailors ”

“ For two years longer, he wanders through Germany still watching the course of the war and then returns to England, soon to take part in another war at home, namely the Civil War, in which the English people were divided into two great parties according as they supported King Charles I or the members of the Long Parliament who opposed him. ”

“ Did Great Britain in spite of her long years of championship of personal freedom and of leadership in the cause of anti-slavery seize upon the opportunity offered in the disruption of the American Union, and forgetting humanitarian idealisms, react only to selfish motives of commercial advantage and national power? In brief, how is the American Civil War to be depicted by historians of Great Britain, recording her attitude and action in both foreign and domestic policy, and revealing the principles of her statesmen, or the inspirations of her people? ”

“ The bad effect of sudden and violent changes may best be observed in our own history. The great changes of the Civil War left England without any checks on the violence of parties. The King and Lords had been abolished, and the Commons ruled alone. ”

“ A new nation came into being. The friends of the North had triumphed.
Thus in addition to the play of diplomatic incidents, the incidental frictions, the effect on trade relations, the applications of British neutrality, and the general policy of the Government, there existed for Great Britain a great issue in the outcome of the Civil War--the issue of the adoption of democratic institutions. It affected at every turn British public attitude, creating an intensity and bitterness of tone, on both sides, unexampled in the expressions of a neutral people. ”

“ The facts would embarrass those who determine to assert that England was our undivided enemy during our Civil War, if facts ever embarrassed a complex. Those afflicted with the complex can keep their eyes upon the Alabama and the London Times, and avert them from Bright, and Cobden, and the cotton-spinners, and the Union and Emancipation Society, and Queen Victoria. ”

“ The real origin of your nation is the key to the present relations between you and the different parties in England. This is the old battle waged again on a new field. We will not talk too much of Puritans and Cavaliers. The soldiers of the Union are not Puritans, neither are the planters Cavaliers, But the present civil war is a vast episode in the same irrepressible conflict between Aristocracy and Democracy; and the heirs of the Cavalier in England sympathize with your enemies, the heirs of the Puritan with you.
The feeling of our aristocracy, as of all aristocracies, is against you. ”

“ I have acted with the same temper; anxious to prevent, if it had been possible, the effusion of the blood of my subjects; and the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war; still hoping that my people in America would have discerned the traitorous views of their leaders, and have been convinced, that to be a subject of Great Britain, with all its consequences, is to be the freest member of any civil society in the known world. ”

“ Papa has made it very clear to me that the Revolutionary War was fought to win freedom from Great Britain’s galling yoke, and make ourselves a nation; the War of 1812 to convince the British that we were free and independent, and not to be maltreated with impunity. Those two wars did that for us;—made the dear old Union; and the Civil War saved it from being destroyed by those who ought to have been ready to defend and preserve it at the risk of their lives. ”

“ They who go to war must abide the issue of war; they who take the sword must be prepared to perish by the sword. Thus far, in the history of the world, very few rights have been gained by civil war which could not have been gained in the end without it. The great rights which the people have secured in England for two hundred years are the result of an appeal to reason and justice. The second revolution was bloodless. The Parliament which first arrayed itself against the government of Charles was no mean foe, even if it had not resorted to arms. ”

“ HOW THE GREAT CIVIL WAR BEGAN AT HULL. In four different centuries has England suffered the pangs of that deplorable kind of war which we are accustomed to describe by the adjective ‘Civil.’ And in each case has the cause of the war been the same—a disagreement as to who should be the ruler of the country’s destinies. In the twelfth century it was a struggle between the King and a would-be Queen, in the thirteenth a struggle between the King and his barons, in the fifteenth a struggle between two royal families, and in the seventeenth a struggle between King and Parliament. ”

“ England sprang out of the mass of English states which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe it to the gradual submission of the smaller peoples to the supremacy of a common political head. The difference in power between state and state which inevitably led to this process of union was due to the character which the conquest of Britain was now assuming. Up to this time all the kingdoms which had been established by the invaders had stood in the main on a footing of equality. ”

“ From 1150 to 1400, resistance was an ordinary remedy for political disagreements. If a popular leader raised his standard in a popular cause, an irregular army could be assembled in a day. (There was no regular army, since England was protected by the sea from invasion.) So misgovernment by a king would be quickly restrained. Society recovered quickly from conflict and civil war because the national wealth consisted chiefly in flocks and herds and in the simple buildings inhabited by the people. ”

“ The American Civil War, as regards continuity, numbers of men steadily engaged, resources employed, and persistence of the combatants, was the "Great War," to date, of all modern conflicts. Not only British, but nearly all foreign observers were of the opinion by midsummer of 1864, after an apparent check to Grant in his campaign toward Richmond, that all America had become engaged in a struggle from which there was scant hope of emergence by a decisive military victory. ”

“ The fact was that the English people were a power not only apart from but in opposition to the King, and that this power was at that very moment arising in one of its periodic struggles for the destruction of royal prerogative and arbitrary rule. And that the Englishmen leading this battle realized that our War of Independence was the very backbone of their movement—that the American cause was their cause and the cause of freedom of peoples of the whole world. ”

“ On July 6, 1861, the Economist, reviewing the progress of the war preparations to date, asserted that it was universally agreed no restoration of the Union was possible and answered British fears by declaring it was impossible to believe that even the American madness could contemplate a servile insurrection. ”

“ I have already explained how far Americans are from understanding the British Empire. It is a pity; they would understand Englishmen better and like them better. And what the building of the Empire and the keeping of it have done for Englishmen, the Civil War did in large measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's memory ”

“ Theirs was an age of reorganization in religion, in political life, and in philosophy and science. The Thirty Years' War and the Civil War in England were conflicts in which the basis of modern religious toleration was laid in suffering and desolation. In America the Colonies were begun. In England the continued struggle with the House of Stuart resulted in the assurance of political liberty, to be secured at length by an evolution without the price of blood which the Continent, and especially France, had later on to pay. ”

“ The very suggestion of a concert of Powers was itself one to be avoided. "A conference of the five great Powers is an imposing force, but it is a dangerous body to set in motion. A single intervening Power may possibly contrive to satisfy both the adverse parties; but five intervening Powers have first to satisfy one another." Who could tell what divergence might arise on the question [V2:pg 63] of slavery, or on boundaries, or how far England might find her ideals or her vital interests compromised [815] ? ”

“ Our only influence is that of our example. If our system was a failure, the institutions of England were not endangered, but strengthened by such a result. It was their success only that made them dangerous, not to the people of England, but to dynastic ambition, to aristocratic rule, and to selfish interests. To insure our permanent division, was to destroy us. Hence, she encouraged the South, acknowledged her as a belligerent, welcomed the rebel flag and war vessels into her ports, protected them there, enabled them to elude our cruisers, and prepared to aid and sustain slavery. ”

“ Hence during the nineteenth century Great Britain's policy was to maintain a fleet stronger than that of any possible combination against her.
England's colonial system had been developed into a great empire. Principles of English liberty and representative government were carried by Britishers to many parts of the world. The American Revolution showed the mother country that Englishmen would not brook oppression even by their own king and parliament. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries England adopted the policy of erecting her colonies into self-governing communities. ”

“ I have hoped this country would settle her internal disputes advantageously and without bloodshed. As yet none has been spilt, though the British newspapers give the idea of a general civil war. Hitherto, I had supposed both the King and parliament would lose authority, and the nation gain it, through the medium of its States General and provincial Assemblies, but the arrest of the deputies of Bretagne two days ago, may kindle a civil war. Its issue will depend on two questions. 1. Will other provinces rise? 2. How will the army conduct itself? A stranger cannot predetermine these questions. ”

“ The history of the English “people,” considered in their political capacity, cannot be held to be of ancient date. The civil wars of England, and the intestine discords of the bloody Roses, seem to have nearly reduced the nation to a semi-barbarous condition; disputed successions, cruel factions, and family feuds, had long convulsed the land, and the political disorganization had been as eventful as were, not long after, the religious dissensions. ”

“ I cannot see how a civil war was a service, unless it were a service to destroy the aristocratic constitution and substitute imperialism, which some think was needed with the vast extension of the Empire, and for the good administration of the provinces,--robbed and oppressed by the governors whom the Senate had sent out to enrich the aristocracy. ”

“ For England to give her moral support to the revolted Southern States, founding their Confederacy upon the baneful principle of human slavery, was a matter of grave lamentation with patriots at the North, to say nothing of the apparent English indifference to the superior civilization of the free States and the great cause to which they were devoted in a struggle of life and death. ”

“ France, it is true, had suffered severely from her civil war of thirty-six years. Trade and industry had been ruined, and her finances heavily strained.Condition of France. The venality of her administrative system had been increased. The Estates-General and the ‘Parlements,’ the representatives of constitutional life, had been discredited; the former by the extreme views it had at times adopted, both by their subservience to the League. The power and self-importance of the nobles had been increased during the civil wars, and by the system adopted by Henry IV. of buying off their opposition. ”