WITH the Reformation the chief motive of my examination disappears and the main matter of it. For I set out to examine whether Mr Wells were competent as an historian to attack the Faith of Christian men, and the matter to my hand was his attitude towards the main doctrines of Faith and his acquaintance with the rise and character of the thing he hates so much.
The essential work is over when we come to the end of the great disruption which broke up the Unity of our Civilization and has bred the increasing ills from which we suffer.
I shall, therefore, do no more in this, the close of my book, than very briefly survey Mr. Wells’s competence to deal with the modern world since, say, 1600: testing that competence by one or two special points. I shall conclude with a Summary.
Since the Reformation Western Europe has stood divided into a Catholic and a Protestant culture. This does not to-day mean a division into two groups of opposing religious profession. It means two whole social developments proceeding from original Religious differences. Your Atheist of the Protestant culture is a different man altogether from your Atheist of the Catholic culture.
Mr. Wells writes in the midst of the Protestant culture. He knows nothing of the Catholic. He understands the motives and general character of that Protestant part of our civilization to which he himself belongs. He understands it more or less when it is Prussian, better when it is English, and best of all when it is of the neighbourhood of London. When he is dealing with such things he does his job reasonably well. With the other part of modern Europe and the Catholic part of all Europe he deals ill; for it thinks and talks in what is to him spiritually a foreign and unknown language, and he even deals ill with that part of his own region—e.g. the new English Aristocratic State produced by the Reformation — which requires a feeling for tradition.
I select three points.
First, an examination of what may be called the wind-up of the Reformation in England; to wit, the destruction of the English Monarchy in the seventeenth century and its replacing by an oligarchy of the well-to-do; for by the way in which a man treats that development, his general culture in the field of modern European history may very well be tested.
Secondly, the corresponding Continental modern movement, ending with the French Revolution.
Thirdly, what he has to say (and he says it very badly) about the effects upon the European mind, and particularly upon religion, of our physiological and biological discoveries, theories and blunders in the nineteenth century.
First, then, to the victory of the governing classes in England over the Crown, which was the final effect of the Reformation here.
Mr. Wells repeats upon the origins of Parliament what may be called the elementary-school-textbook legend. It is, of course, erroneous, and it is a type of those errors which, though apparently unconnected with error in religion, are really dependent upon such error. For it proceeds from a lack of comprehension of that united Catholic Europe of Middle Ages from which we all spring.
He tells us, to begin with, that monarchy in England was surrounded, after the breakdown of the Roman Empire, by Magnates who watched the common interests and modified the power of the monarch, but he adds that this was due to the presence of northern and Germanic blood. This is, of course, mere repetition of what is still written in a great many of our popular textbooks. It is, therefore, natural that Mr. Wells should repeat it. None the less it shows ignorance of essentials. It contains, like so many popular myths, a truth and a falsehood combined.
Local governments, after the breakdown of central rule from Rome, were invariably a combination of the local general and a group of Magnates round him. That is true. But the second statement — that one of the two which is important — is quite false. So little had this grouping of Magnates round the king to do with Germanic blood, that you find it everywhere the same throughout Europe, and actually weaker in the Germanies than anywhere else.
Moreover, the group of Magnates is hardly apparent at the beginning of the business when many of the local Roman generals, such as Theodoric, were of still unmixed Germanic blood. The Magnates only become strong much later in the centuries, and by that time the Germanic blood in the West had disappeared.
People of Northern Germanic blood have never shown any particular dislike to being governed absolutely by one man. Indeed they have been rather more docile under such a political condition than Southern people and Western people during and since the Dark Ages.
What made the gathering of Magnates round the Government a necessity during the Dark Ages (700 - 900) was the return to primitive conditions, the comparative difficulty of communications, and the continual armament of a free society, which was perpetually in conflict either domestic or through resistance to the Mohammedans and the heathens. You do not find absolutely centralized monarchy anywhere in the Dark Ages. You find it no more in Ireland or in Brittany or Galicia than you find it in the Rhine Valley or in Scandinavia; and the reason that you do not find it is that, under primitive conditions, such a thing cannot exist. Absolute monarchy, to be exercised over great numbers, needs high organization.
Mr. Wells is right in saying that the presence of Knights of the Shire gave the British Parliament a special character; but he is quite at sea as to why they gave it a special character. The special character of the English Third Estate did not lie in the calling up to the King’s Council of men representing the smaller gentry. That happened all over France and Northern Spain, and it began abroad long before it began in England. The first parliaments of Europe were in the Pyrenees.
The special character of the English Commons House lay in the fact that the smaller gentry elsewhere sat in a house of their own, but here sat with the merchants of the towns; and this made at last an organized unit wherein the combined wealth of the country could act against the King, who was the common guardian of all, rich and poor. In other words, the special constitution of the English Third Estate was one tending towards aristocracy.
But England would never have become an aristocracy — as at last it did — nor would popular monarchy ever have been defeated and replaced by rule of the gentry had it not been for one economic factor of overwhelming importance of which Mr. Wells appears not to grasp the effect, I mean the dissolution of the monasteries. He does not even mention this prodigious economic revolution as having any connection with Parliament; yet it was the Dissolution which gave Parliament all its new power after the Reformation and enabled it to destroy the Crown.
The reason was this: the monastic land and a great deal of other Church endowment as well (the endowment of a great many schools and hospitals and confraternities of all kinds, and endowments for Masses, etc., and a great part of the Bishopric endowments) passed into the hands of the Squires and greater Burgesses — the gentry — and immensely increased their economic power, while the economic power of the English Crown was correspondingly depressed. That is the whole story.
The English Crown provided its own ruin by its ecclesiastical policy. It could no longer obtain the revenue necessary for running the country; the Squires and the great merchants had become much richer than it. Only by expedients could the King struggle on for a few years at a time by trying to put more land into the hands of the Government (resumption of the King’s rights over the forests), by selling monopolies, by reviving quaint old forgotten taxes, and (in one case and for several years) by accepting support from a foreign Government. The victory of the gentry over the Crown (which Mr. Wells seems to regard as a popular victory!) was the consequence of an economic revolution which had preceded it, and that economic revolution in its turn was a consequence of the Reformation.
Mr. Wells, whose tendency being materialism is all for exaggerating of the economic factor in history, should have spotted this; he has an acute and an original power of observation in such things. But he can well be excused through this fact that none of the ordinary official textbooks such as he would come across would put the truth before him.
In the same way, he evidently does not know who and what Oliver Cromwell was. To give us an idea of the man, he quotes one sentence about his "country cut clothes", giving the impression (which is certainly Mr. Wells’s own) that Cromwell was a bluff "man of the people". But the whole point of Cromwell was that he was a cadet of one of the very wealthiest of the new millionaire families. The "Cromwells" (an assumed name) had built up their enormous and ill-gotten fortune on the loot of religion. Cromwell’s real name was Williams.
The original Williams, his great-grandfather, was the favourite nephew of that Thomas Cromwell, the moneylender, who was the author of the policy of looting religion, and who heavily endowed that favourite nephew with monastic lands. No fewer than five great foundations — apart from lesser pickings — swelled the gigantic wealth of the family. It is symbolic and typical of the whole affair that Oliver Cromwell should come from those traditions of wealth acquired at the expense of the Catholic Church. It is true he was only the son of a cadet and therefore enjoyed but a small part of the family fortunes — a few thousand a year as we should say nowadays. But he came out of the very heart of the new millionaires. When he is represented as some rough fellow sprung from the core of the populace it is history of the very worst sort; not only baldly wrong in fact, but in tendency and motive.
The same lack of general comprehension appears in Mr. Wells’s quite honestly held idea of the Parliamentary army — particularly of the "new model". He thinks of it as a sort of democratic force. It was, as a fact, a very highly paid professional body, especially its cavalry, which was its decisive arm. Of course, there were many people of no origin in it, and a few, not many, people of low birth even held commands in it as officers. But it had a very large proportion of the wealthy classes in such positions. Nor is it true to say that this highly paid cavalry, well disciplined though it was, and containing excellent personnel, "swept the cavaliers before them from Marston Moor to Naseby". That is typical of the quite wrong old-fashioned textbook history from which such judgements are still drawn. Cavalry was the great strength of Charles; and if there had only been cavalry on either side, Charles would have won. It was the cavaliers who generally swept the mounted part of the "new model" before them, and particularly at Naseby, but the counter-charge was fatal to the increasingly weak infantry of the King.
Naseby was won by Oliver Cromwell, leading his cavalry in person against shaken infantry. The Parliamentary horse was badly mauled by Rupert’s horse on the left, but Cromwell on the right, checking the usual sweep of the counter-charge, gave up the following-up of the horse, wheeled to the left, and destroyed the badly trained, ill-disciplined and numerically weak Welsh footmen of the centre. The cavalry part of the few years’ fighting, when against cavalry, was in Charles’s favour, but Charles’s infantry got weaker and weaker; and the reason that Charles grew weaker and weaker in quality and numbers of infantry was lack of money. His cavalry was composed largely of noble-hearted and devoted volunteers, a good part of whom, popularly said to be half, were Catholic; but his infantry he had to hire as best he could.
I only pick out these points (small in themselves) because they are typical. They show the way in which the old conventional school-boy history of a lifetime ago is the only one our author possesses; and that explains also his quite erroneous view of what the Reformation was in England. He perpetuates what was once the official legend; naturally, no doubt, for he has never heard the modern destructive criticism levelled against it.
We have exactly the same thing in what he says of James II, that he "set himself to force the country into a reunion with Rome". That, again, is the regular conventional stuff of his boyhood and mine, but it is utterly unhistorical. James II set himself the task of procuring toleration for that still very large proportion of the English people who were Catholic, and incidentally for other dissenting bodies as well. He insisted that the remaining minority of Catholics, who still heroically practised their Religion after a century and half of persecution unparalleled in any other country should be allowed ordinary civic advantages. They were at least one-eighth of the population (and had the sympathy of at least another eighth, if not more), and James, himself a Catholic, proposed they should enjoy the benefits of the national universities, should be allowed to enter the public services, and should have as good chances as others in the legal profession.
If freedom for Catholics was likely to result in a great many conversions, and thus largely to undo the work of the Reformation, the fault was not with the policy of toleration, but with the spiritual power of the Catholic Church. To say that James II was attempting to force upon his Protestant subjects an unnatural revolution in their religion, is about as historical as it would be to say that the modern French Government is attempting to force Communism upon France because it offers (unlike most other Governments) the fullest liberty to Communist printing and to the exposing of Communist ideas through the Press. Or it is like saying that the Canadian Government, because it tolerates the use of French and English indifferently, is trying to force French (or English) upon the whole community.
The whole policy of James was a policy of toleration and the whole of the opposition he had to meet was a fanatical (and interested) refusal of toleration.
Where Mr. Wells deals with the Continental movement, which has weakened or destroyed Monarchy and broken up the religious unity of various nations, we have again the same confused attitude which we find in his dealing with the English one, only it is rather more remarkable that he should be so wrong about the foreign business. For, after all, it is natural enough for a man attempting to write a broad outline of History to go wrong upon the modern English record, seeing that the modern English record was not only everywhere taught officially, conventionally and wrongly in Mr. Wells’s boyhood, but is still in the main so taught.
On English matters from the Reformation onward all our official History is propaganda: The Stuarts always wrong, Magna Charta a Whig document, Cromwell a noble-hearted hero (and poor), etc. etc. etc. Only a good deal of original reading among modern writers and hard thinking of one’s own as well, can set one right upon it. But the Continental record has been dealt with by the greatest scholars from all points of view and with the fullest freedom for two generations. There is no excuse for going wrong upon its main lines.
For instance, the tremendous struggle between the more civilized traditional part of Germany, led by the Emperor, and the less civilized northern part, led by the Protestant Princes, was decided adversely to the Catholic Church at the Peace of Westphalia. Mr. Wells prints a good little map of the results of that Peace. But what he certainly does not understand, and probably has never heard of is that those results were due to French policy. It was French deliberate support of the anti-Catholic side in the Empire towards the end of the struggle which prevented the evil of the Reformation in Germany from being undone, and which left the Catholic civilization and tradition of the German Empire in ruins.
He is also lacking in what should be part of the mental furniture of every educated man, and that is the history and quality of what is called religious toleration in the struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whether religious toleration be necessarily a good thing may be left to debate; whether Mr. Wells regards it as a good thing no man can tell, because he is all for it where a Catholic culture is tolerating anti-Catholicism in its midst, and yet quite indifferent to an anti-Catholic culture oppressing Catholicism in its midst. That is a very frequent phenomenon in men who feel strongly and think weakly. I have heard men propounding with violence the duty of the State to forbid tobacco, wine, large families, free marriage of the poor, socialistic literature, Sunday trading, and Heaven knows how many other things — and everyone of them would have told you that he loved toleration!
Here we have Mr. Wells’s pronouncement that the "more tolerating countries" became Protestant with happy little Catholic lumps inside them, while the "less tolerating countries — France, Italy and Spain", produced societies in which men are either definitely Catholic or Atheist, or, at any rate, strongly anti-Catholic.
A man who writes sentences of
that sort about the processes which have produced modern Europe, singling
out France, Spain and Italy(!) as specially intolerant, does not know what
he is talking about. The Protestant countries persecuted religion with
a ferocity unknown elsewhere. You find that persecution rampant in the
exclusion of Catholicism in the early laws of the Protestant culture in
North America as in England. The whole story of the Cecils is a story of
drastic and murderous persecution, the determination of the new Reformation
millionaires under Elizabeth and James I to stamp out the last vestiges,
and the first beginnings, of Catholic truth. Persecution of the most extreme
kind, relentless and overwhelming, is the one striking characteristic of
later sixteenth and seventeenth century England.
Does Mr. Wells imagine that
he could find in any province under the Princes of France, Italy or Spain
the wholesale confiscation that went on in Ireland: a whole people dispossessed
of their land in the effort to crush out the Church? Did the Valois or
Louis XIII string up and disembowel Protestant pastors for no other crime
than the reciting of their service?
Again, Mr. Wells does not understand what it is that makes men in the Catholic culture either definitely Catholic or definitely and wholly sceptical. It is that men in the Catholic culture think; they use the human reason. If they have the Faith they argue that a Divine authority will be infallible; they therefore accept all its doctrine. If they have lost the Faith, if they think the Church to be of human institution, their reason bids them as a consequence combat an organization which makes such enormous pretensions to authority without (as they believe) any right to it.
The reason, for instance, that you do not have mawkish religious sentiment hanging about such minds as, in Catholic countries, have lost the Faith, is that those minds are founded upon Intelligence and despise muddle-headed emotionalism. They admit their loss of doctrine, and they are not afraid to face the consequence of whatever they conceive to be the truth.
But in nations not of Catholic culture it is the other way about. Men like Mr. Wells, who have ceased to believe that Our Blessed Lord was God, or even that He had Divine authority, cling desperately to the emotions which the old belief aroused — because they find those emotions pleasant. That is a piece of intellectual weakness for which corresponding men, atheists of the Catholic culture, very properly feel a hearty contempt.
When Mr. Wells goes on to the climax of the affair abroad, which is the French Revolution, his work becomes a mixture of good and bad. The précis side of it is good in so far as it proceeds from his own pen. It is, in my judgement, an error to print great wads of Carlyle, column after column. Mr. Wells’s own less picturesque way of writing is much better suited for an outline — but that is a small point. The sequence of events and their proportion is well kept, and there is a very good little sketch map of the Campaign of Valmy which shows that the author — or whoever else it was that drew the map — has got a good clear comprehension of that rather complicated and very important episode.
But in his attempts to judge the characters of the Revolution he goes all wrong, because he is dealing with a whole side of Europe which is unfamiliar to him. For instance, he does not know what the trouble was with Marie Antoinette. It was not that she was grossly extravagant; that is a mere legend. She was a lady; and certainly Mr. Wells would not give one to understand that; moreover, during all the later part of her life she had become a very sincerely religious woman, practising, frequenting the Sacraments. The tragedy of the queen lay in the intimate relations of her early married life. Now, everybody ought to know that who pretends to deal with the period at all. The details have been fully printed (by myself among others) and are available to popular writers.
In the same way he has got Robespierre all wrong. He has evidently read nothing modern on Robespierre, and he commits the old error of recording the last and worst of the Terror as being in particular Robespierre’s work.
The point is of no very great importance, but it is worth quoting because it is very characteristic. Ask one of Mr. Wells’s myriad-headed popular public, who Robespierre was, and they would answer a fanatical Republican who attempted to force his views upon France by guillotine, and was at last put down because people sickened of the increasing slaughter. Now when a popular author writes what his very large and un-instructed public already believe they know, he naturally goes down; if he wrote historical truth instead, his work would be less pleasant to them and far less saleable. Yet, after all, truth is the test of good history; not momentary selling value.
Now the truth about Robespierre is today fairly well known. Hamel’s great monograph, though far too favourable to his subject, is crammed with document and reference. It was not Robespierre, it was the Committee of Public Safety, and Carnot in particular, who created the Terror as an instrument of martial law. They created it in order to win the desperate battle in which they were engaged on every frontier and upon the sea, and the first sign of Robespierre’s downfall was his desertion of the Committee of Public Safety. Carnot in particular saw that Robespierre was interfering with the Committee’s rigour. The Committee had no idea that when they had got rid of Robespierre the false popular conception upon his character and position would release the very heavy strain which the Terror had created and make the continuation of it impossible: but though they did not see what was coming, it was they that deposed Robespierre, and they deposed him not because he represented the Terror, but, on the contrary, because he would have modified and restricted their power, of which the Terror was the instrument.
If Mr. Wells would be at the pains to read the actual indictments on which people were put to death in Paris, he would find that the great majority of them were humble people, and most of them, humble or prominent, were put to death for some form of weakening the military effort; for sending money abroad, for attempting desertion to the enemy, or helping him, or uttering "defeatist" sentiments, and so on.
On Mr. Wells’s very long and violent diatribe against Napoleon I shall not delay. It is merely silly. Mr. Wells seems to have a personal grudge against anyone in history who shows remarkable military talent, or, indeed, remarkable powers of any kind, and these in the case of Napoleon were combined with all the qualities which are to Mr. Wells like red rags to a bull. He was of the Catholic culture, he had an immense genius in nearly every department of human activity, he was a gentleman by birth, he was a soldier by profession. It is, therefore, natural that our author should be opposed to him strongly. But surely one can be strongly, opposed to an historical character without making a fool of one’s self! I, for instance, am strongly opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s character, I have no indulgence for his particular kind of vices, cruelty and avarice and pride, while I have a natural indulgence for the sensual frailties to which Cromwell was not inclined. But what would any competent critic think of me as an historian if I denied Cromwell’s energy, belittled his capacity as a cavalry leader, or doubted the reality of his fanatical religion? If I made him out an insignificant fellow?