MEDIEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY STUBBS J. PETER MAYER LIBRARY . bonbon HENRY FROWDE Oxford University Press Warehouse Amen Corner, E.C. SEVENTEEN LECTURES ON THE STUDY OF ) , V * \y' f Medieval and Modern History AND KINDRED SUBJECTS DELIVERED AT OXFORD, UNDER STATUTORY OBLIGATION IN THE YEARS 1867—1884 BY WILLIAM STUBBS, D.D. Bishop of Chester and Honorary Student of Christ Church Late Regius Professor of Modern History LL.D. of Cambridge and Edinburgh Doctor in utroque jure, Heidelberg A Member of the Court of the Victoria University, and An Honorary Member of the Imperial University ofS. Vladimir of Kieff And of the Royal Bavarian, Prussian, Irish and Danish Academies Correspondent oj the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institute of France AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1887 [All rights reserved] LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA PREFACE. If I were asked what is my reason for printing these lectures, I might be at a loss for an answer. They are not printed by request, or because they seem to me worthy to be preserved, or because they are likely to be useful reading, or because they supply a want. It may be that they owe their present form to the fact that the love of correcting proof- sheets has become a leading passion with the author. Some part of the volume may be readable, some part useful : it may be that the useful part is hard reading, and the readable part trifling, but I will give myself, unphilosophic as it may be, the benefit of a doubt. The lectures were written under the pressure of statutory compulsion, and against the grain. I know, by sad experience, how often the best lecture, the best sermon on which I have most prided myself — eloquent, lucid, learned, logical, — has gone the way of all fireworks. There is a chance that something may be said for work elicited by forcible pressure, under weariness and vexation, against stress of time, under statutory obligation and a conscientious sense of duty. The statute under which these lectures were delivered was a burdensome statute to me ; it would not be so to every professor, but the discomforts of working under it could only be explained by experience : and the statute itself is now a thing of the past. The feeling of compulsion, the compulsion to produce something twice a year which might attract an idle audience, without seeming to trifle with a deeply loved vi PREFACE. and honoured study, was so irksome that never once, in the course of my seventeen years of office, did I think that there would come a time when I could look back on this part of my work with pleasure or grateful regret. And I fear that this will be only too obvious to any one who tries to read this book. But I have said more than enough about it ; and I will content myself with adding that the following are only a selection from a larger number of exercises delivered under the same conditions. Most of the omitted lectures have seen the light in other places. The second lecture of 1867 was made part of the Introduction to the second volume of Roger Hoveden, in the Rolls Series. The lectures of 1868 and 1874, on Anglo-Saxon literature and monastic history, formed part of a plan which I finally discarded after the restoration of Professor Earle to the Anglo-Saxon Chair, and, by themselves, do not seem to justify publication. Those for 1869 on Comparative Constitutional History, and for 1 87 1 on Scottish Constitutional History, would have required a larger apparatus of notes, and more labour of revision, than I could at present afford, to qualify them for a permanent form, and are as a matter of necessity excluded. The lectures for 1870 form the Introduction to my Select Charters; those for 1873 were utilized as the seventh chapter of the Constitaticmal History; those for 1875 as the fourteenth chapter; and those for 1872 in the preface to the second volume of the Memoriale of Walter of Coventry. W. CESTR. Dee Side, Chester : May 17, 1886. P.S. — The last line on page 131 seems obscure. The reference is to the division taken in the House of Commons, during the debate on the Universities Bill, April 30, 1877, on the amendment ' to omit the word and* CONTENTS. PAGE I. Inaugural. (February 7, 1867.) 1 II. On the Present State and Prospects of Historical Study. (May 17, 1876.) 29 III. On the Present State and Prospects of Historical Study. (May 20, 1876.) 55 IV. On the Purposes and Methods of Historical Study. (May 15, 1877.) 81 V. Methods of Historical Study. (May 18, 1877.) . 107 VI. Learning and Literature at the Court of Henry II. (June 11, 1878.) 132 VII. Learning and Literature at the Court of Henry II. (June 13, 1878.) 156 VIII. The Medieval Kingdoms of Cyprus and Armenia. (October 26 and 29, 1878.) 179 IX. On the Characteristic Differences between Medieval and Modern History. (April 15, 1880.) 238 X. On the Characteristic Differences between Medieval and Modern History. (April 17, 18S0.) 257 XL The Reign of Henry VIII. (June 7, 1881.) . . 277 XII. Parliament under Henry VIII. (June 9, 1881.) . 305 XIII. The History of the Canon Law in England. (April 19, 1882.) 335 XIV. The History of the Canon Law in England. (April 20, 1882.) 359 XV. The' Reign of Henry VII. (April 24, 1883.) . . 382 XVI. The Reign of Henry VII. (April 25, 1883.) . . 403 XVII. A Last Statutory Public Lecture. (May 8, 1884.) 425 Index 443 INAUGURAL. (Feb. 7, 1867.) THE giving of an Inaugural Lecture is an occasion which compels and may well excuse a little trepidation. The speaker, although he is wisely restrained by academic de- corum from courting or fearing the thunder, propitious or otherwise, of right or left, cannot divest himself of the feeling that he is really about to take the omens of his future success, and cannot but be anxious to make, if he possibly can, a promising beginning. This is especially the case when he is called upon, as I am now, for the first time in his life, to address an academic, I may even say an educated, audience. He has not learned the tone of authority which befits the professorial character : it is no mere matter of form for him to deprecate adverse criticism ; he feels that he must intro- duce himself, in a way that is of necessity painful both to his self-respect and to his modesty, to an audience from whom he has at least as much to learn as he can ever hope to teach them. I can indeed hardly use the word teach without re- servation. I am so sensible of the greatness of the field, the variety of the instruments, the infinite multitude of the workers employed on the subject to which my labours in this place are to be devoted, that I am afraid even to advertise myself as a teacher, and would rather be looked on as a helper and trainer in a school in which every man has to learn his own lessons. V,- 2 INAUGURAL LECTURE. [I. For I am thoroughly convinced that the purpose which is answered by the study of Modern and Medieval History is twofold ; it is at once the process of acquisition of a stock of facts, an ignorance of which unfits a man from playing the very humblest part as a citizen, or even watching the politics of his own age with an intelligent apprehension ; and it is an educational discipline directed to the cultivation of powers for whose development, as it seems to me, no other training is equally efficacious. It is but natural that I should speak thus of a study which has been to me the pleasure, rest, and comfort of a somewhat busy and anxious life, to whose teachings I feel myself* indebted for whatever power of judg- ment, critical experience, or speculative equity, if I may be allowed to use such a form of words, I am conscious of possessing. I wish to undervalue no other system of training, no other field of inquiry, but I speak of this as I love it, and as, if a sound purpose of doing with my might what my hand has found to do can be any pledge of honest and effectual work, I trust those who will apply themselves to it with my assistance will come to love it and profit by it as well. But as I shall have, no doubt, to say more than enough about myself before I finish this lecture, I will proceed now, in that desultory way which the nature of an inaugural lecture necessitates, to say something about my founder and my predecessors ; and, having done that, to enlarge somewhat on the place which our study has among the pursuits of this University, the method of training, and the end which I pro- pose to myself in the work that lies before me. I have pleaded guilty to a natural trepidation, I have acknowledged that what I have to say will be desultory. I think that the circumstances account for both, and trust to you for an equitable consideration. The Professorship of Modern History was founded in the year 1724 by King George I; a prince of whom those who I.] THE FOUNDER. would say the worst must allow that he was an honest and harmless sovereign, whilst a professed panegyrist would most wisely content himself with saying that his reign is the com- mencement of an era during which the happiness of the kingdoms he ruled, their progress in knowledge, political in- telligence, wealth, domestic and social comfort, have increased in a ratio unprecedented and unparalleled : during which the exertion of English influence in the councils and contests of the world has been effective beyond precedent and parallel, and has been used, if not always in the most enlightened way, always for the end and for the cause that seemed to be just and right. The process of events, and the action of various systems of politics, have in a great measure served to alter the views which at the time were taken of the wars of the last century and of the early years of the present. We have learned some of us to approve, and more perhaps to acquiesce in, proceedings which our fathers looked on as in the last degree unrighteous and intolerable. The days in which men go to war for an idea, and accept subjugation because they cannot afford to be sentimental, can safely smile at the errors of statesmen and the short-sightedness of kings, to whom justice and honesty were still justice and honesty, although disguised in the mock solemnities of dynastic- shadows. But we will not deny either to kings or to peoples the credit of zeal for what they believed to be right, and the glory they had, so far as it was real, of counting no cost too great to be incurred for what they saw to be the cause of order and of society. They fought, as they believed, for their own existence and ours. George I, whatever may have been his personal faults, and however little adapted he may have seemed in his own days, or may seem now, to fulfil the ideal character of kingship in a free and enlightened people, comes on the stage of English History as the representative of a principle which has been B 2 4 INAUGURAL LECTURE. [I. found to answer, and as the inaugurator of a period of national prosperity. So far at least we have no cause to blush for our founder. But as our founder, I think we may look at him more closely. The house of Brunswick has always had the reputation for the good sense to patronise literature, and especially historical literature. Not to seek for precedents so far back as Henry the Lion, who superintended the writing of the annals of his country in the twelfth century ; it will perhaps suffice to give a general reference to the enormous number of historical books which, during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, issued under ducal patronage from the presses of Helmstadt, Hanover, and Gottingen. George himself had been the patron of Leibnitz, of Jo. George Eccard, Burckhard Gotthilf Struve, and Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, whom I name rather as familiar to English ears than as standing alone in their peculiar studies. One of his first measures, when his accession to the crown of Great Britain had increased his influence in Europe, was to interest himself in behalf of Leibnitz and Muratori in their attempts to draw, from the archives of the jealous republic of Venice, materials for their gigantic undertakings in the same line. At Cambridge, again, he appears as purchasing and bestowing on the University the invaluable MS. Collections of Bishop More, which have helped to make the Public Library there one of the most useful and famous historical libraries in Europe. Whatever may have been the king's purpose in these several measures, we may safely, I think, affirm that it was not a mere political or official object which determined him when, in 1724, he wished to confer a mark of favour on Cambridge and to hold out an olive-branch to Oxford, to give to his sister foundations the same character of professorships of Modern History. Leibnitz was the most learned man he had ever seen, and perhaps Leibnitz's learn- ing was most intelligible to George I in the shape of the 1.] PURPOSE OF THE FOUNDATION. 5 Annates rerum Brunsvicensium. Nor should I omit to mention what, in the opinion of their most adverse critics, ought to be a redeeming point in the later Hanoverian princes. George II refounded and reformed the Chair which I have the honour to fill ; under George III began those long and at last successful investigations into the archives of the kingdom and the treasures of our great public libraries, which are now but beginning to bear a promise of abundant interest : under George IV, as king of Great Britain and Hanover, was begun the great series of Monuments of German History, the editor of which was once wont to call himself Historiographer of the Most Serene Guelfic house, and of which the king of Hanover was a patron to an extent double of that of Prussia, and nearly equal to the patronage of all the rest of the German Courts ; a great work which has made Hanover its home, and for the possession of which our Library here is indebted to the munificence of king George V. It is hardly, I think, necessary to look further than the king himself for the influence under which the foundation was first projected ; the exact time and the declared purpose of the completion of the design may have been determined by others. It is possible that Walpole or Stanhope may have been the adviser ; it is by no means improbable that bishop Robinson, who has been looked upon as the founder of the eighteenth century school of English diplomacy, may have been consulted as to those details of the plan which were intended to afford to the students of the Universities the means of a diplomatic education. I am sorry to say that I have been unable to find any satisfactory evidence on the subject. I have indeed heard it positively affirmed that bishop Robinson drew up the scheme which took effect the year after his death ; and I should have been glad to believe it was so, for bishop Robinson was a benefactor of the Church to which I owe my own education, and the College 6 INAUGURAL LECTURE. [I. which has munificently contributed a large portion of the endowment of the professorship. But until more evidence is attainable, I cannot speak with confidence. The influence of either Stanhope or Robinson would account for the parti- cular intention with which the foundation was completed ; whilst that of Walpole, if it were used, would hardly have taken any other than a utilitarian direction. It is to the prominence with which this particular intention is put for- ward that, in conjunction I think with a general distaste to accept a benefaction from the duke of Brunswick, the un- gracious reception which the new foundation met with at Oxford is to be ascribed. For the University not only acknowledged the receipt of the king's letter in a most con- temptuous way, forwarding their letter of thanks by a bedell, but when, by due pressure and by the example of Cambridge, compelled to send a formal answer by a deputation to the king, clothed it in such words as showed that the introduc- tion of the new study was looked on as an unwarranted interference with the educational government of the place ; clearly it was no part of the intention of Oxford in 1724 to educate able servants for the house of Hanover. For the study of History Oxford had hitherto been no unkindly school. The period of literary activity which had succeeded the Restoration had been greatly indebted to Oxford scholars. The names of Bishops Nicholson, Tanner, and Kennett, of Atterbury, Wake, and Gibson, although in these days they are chiefly known, if known at all, as anti- quaries or controversialists, mark a period of historical exer- tion second to none either in the importance of its researches or in the value of their results. Cambridge began the modern study of English History with Parker, Oxford followed up briskly with Savile and Camden, Selden, Gale, Fulman, and Fell ; men, who, if they did not pretend to shine as Historians, are entitled to the eternal gratitude of all I.] THE PROFESSORS. 7 students, and appreciated at least that true and fundamental canon of composition that the materials for History must be provided before History can be written. From Oxford, or from the studies of Oxford men, proceeded nearly all the great collections of English Historians; and the old school of students was now well represented by Thomas Hearne. But at the time when this professorship was founded this class of men were either withdrawn, like Tanner and Kennett, to other work, or relegated by their own political sympathies and Whig liberality, like Hearne and Baker, to the compara- tive uselessness of literary retirement. Nor, I think, were the ministers of the crown very careful as to the hands in which they placed the engine of education, from which so much might have been hoped. To speak with the utmost respect of my early predecessors, I do not find that they were men to whom the study of History, either English or foreign, is in any way indebted, until we come down to Dr. Nares at the beginning of the present century. They probably owed their position to their political connexions or to literary eminence of other kinds. It is no wonder that under the circumstances the place of History among the studies of the University became worse rather than better, or, like that of Moral Philosophy, was lost altogether. Passing on from Dr. Nares, of whom 1 speak with all gratitude, remembering well, as many of the elders amongst my hearers can doubtless remember likewise, the days when his weighty volumes were almost the only available sources of information for later history : we come to the great name, never to be pronounced without reverence even by his oppo- nents, of the man whose sincerity, energy, and power of training, made him the prime mover of this generation. What Arnold might have done for the study of History in this place, had his time been given to it or been prolonged sufficiently to produce any appreciable effect on it, may be 8 INAUGURAL LECTURE. [i. estimated by the effect of his work on other branches and in other places of education. I say it with diffidence, rather because I fear your criticism than because I have any doubt of the truth of the assertion, I believe that the one thing which Arnold wanted to perfect the balance of his admirable judgment, and to direct the current of his overflowing sympa- thies, was that experience of critical difficulties and moral incompatibilities which becomes practically, to the devoted student of History, a training in itself. Of Dr. Cramer I can say little. He was well furnished as a scholar and a most accomplished man : his contributions to literary history are exceedingly valuable : but his time here was short ; he was not a young man when he undertook the office : he had other cares which took him away from Oxford. Most of all perhaps during the time of his holding this office all the thinking men of the University were engrossed in contro- versies on matters interesting, most interesting to all, in which, however much a historical training might have profited them, it was too late to forge their weapons when they were in the midst of battle. Of the two professors who preceded me, I must not, need not, say much : you are far better able than I am to appreciate their work here : but I may say that none of you can more sincerely than I do admire the learning, acuteness, earnestness, and eloquence of Professor Goldwin Smith : learning, acuteness, earnestness, and eloquence never more signally admirable than when employed, as we have so often rejoiced to see them em- ployed, on the behalf of Christian Truth against philosophic sciolism. The circumstances under which I return to Oxford and begin my work here are, for many reasons, most encourag- ing ; so encouraging as to afford, I think, some grounds of apprehension that the responsibility is heavier than I ought to have undertaken. In no respect does the Oxford I find I.] THE NEW SCHOOL. 9 on my return contrast more favourably with the Oxford I left sixteen years ago. At that time the professorship of Church History had been founded, and was filled by one [Robert Hussey] who was undoubtedly the founder of the modern study of that subject in Oxford. I mean the study of the history of the Church as a whole, not from points of controversy to supply weapons for the discomfiture of oppos- ing theologians, but as the life of the Christian Church itself, the whole history of the body of which the modern nations claim in their spiritual character to be members. But the theological exigencies of the time had so far narrowed the field of inquiry that it was practically restricted to the first three centuries, or at the outside to the period embraced under the topics of the general councils. The attempt which he made to extend the range by introducing the study of the Venerable Bede as a text-book was, as you are aware, foiled by the impossibility of getting together a lecture on a matter that was neither connected with the controversies of the day, nor required to be known by candidates for holy orders. The College libraries then as now afforded abundant re- sources for any student who would take up the subject for himself, but my grateful recollection of the first acquaintance made with Hearne, Dugdale, and Prynn, in Christ Church Library, is inseparably connected with the reminiscence of the amused, and I am glad to remember approving, surprise, with which Dean Gaisford took me unawares at my note- book. It is possible that the rooms of the Architectural Society in Holywell were the school in which a taste for medieval history, at least, was insensibly acquired. The introduction of new studies into the course of University training was viewed with apprehension by many : some perhaps of us who are now here were inclined to waver between a mistrust of innovations which seemed likely to break down the traditionary character of our education and IO INAUGURAL LECTURE. Li- the desire of welcoming a study of all others the most germane to the true and perpetual genius of Oxford. I may now, I suppose, say it without offence : I think that the dis- trust of the new studies, at all events of the study of Modern History, was owing quite as much to the management of their advocates as to the conservative habits of the opponents. I am not sure that either party would have admitted, or indeed would now admit, what, to adopt a proper professorial tone, I may say is certain, that whilst of all studies in the whole range of knowledge, the study of law affords the most con- servative training, so the study of Modern History is, next to Theology itself, and only next in so far as Theology rests on a divine revelation, the most thoroughly religious training that the mind can receive. It is no paradox to say that Modern History, including Medieval History in the term, is co-extensive in its field of view, in its habits of criticism, in the persons of its most famous students, with Ecclesiastical History. We may call them sister studies, but, if they are not really one and the same, they are twin sisters, so much alike that there is no distinguishing between them. Men who are bent on seeing only differences and ignoring points of agreement refused to see that in 1850, and I dare say refuse to see it still. So much, however, has changed and changed rapidly in sixteen years ; so many old friends have sought new fields of work, so great changes have passed over the moral and intellectual atmosphere of Oxford, that one is prone to forget that in truth the precedent era from 1830 to 1850 was itself only a transient phase, and not to be looked on as stamping for ever the character of the University. I for one can re- joice in looking back on those days, and I can look forward with hope and sympathy to what is before us in these respects. If I regret the absence of some things that were pleasant in the old life, at least I can appreciate much of I.] THE NEW SCHOOL. II that which promises to be the charm of the new. Happily removed for all these years from Oxford controversies, and I am glad to say that in the humblest way I have not had a finger in them, I can still clothe the old life with that glad- ness which for most men gilds the recollection of under- graduate days. But the world did not stop with me when I left Oxford, and I trust, if God shall spare me, to work with a good heart as long as it is called to-day. I rejoice then to find on my return the School of Law and Modern History occupying a well-defined and still im- proving position, and bestowing honours which the men most honoured in the other contests of the academic arena are glad not only to win but to work for. The Modern History School has thriven with very little nursing ; and it needs but a glance at the class lists to show that there has been and continues to be, I will not say abundant promise, but actual work done in the cause of historical study by those who have distinguished themselves in our examinations. It is not invidious to mention the names of some who have challenged public criticism by their books, and have not merely shown in them the usefulness of historical training, but conferred lasting benefits on the students that follow them. The Law and Modern History School helped at least to train my excellent colleague, the Chichele Professor, for his labours; and it has helped to give us from Mr. Kington an English life of Frederick II, from Mr. Eryce a monograph on the Western Empire, which have already taken their place as standard books on our shelves. But far more than this has been done by the direction into the same channel of a con- siderable part of the more industrious teaching power of the Colleges, so that there is now a strong and, I hope, an increasing, staff of College tutors, whose time and mind are devoted primarily to the cultivation of this study. With these my occasional visits here as examiner have put me into 12 INAUGURAL LECTURE. [I. communication, and the association with them in their work is to my mind one of the happiest incidents of my present position. I would, indeed, that this thought had been with- out the drawback that, at the very moment of my return, I in common with the whole of the rest of the University should have to lament the loss of one [Dr. Shirley], noble, good, and wise far beyond his years, who had watched and worked for the development of this study from the day of its introduction to Oxford, whose labours and influence were ever used for good and for everything that was good, whose early promotion and effective character had marked him out as the man who was to do great things for the University and the Church of God in this a°:e. Seldom has so much promise, seldom have so great earnests of great work been so sadly or so fatally blighted : we cannot look that his place can ever in all respects be so filled that there will not still be much, very much, to desiderate ; for it is not Oxford alone that laments him, nor the cause of Historical study only with which he had identified himself both here and through- out the literary world. But I will not touch on questions beyond the scope of my present consideration. Besides the very advantageous position which, without nursing, I repeat, our study has attained here, in men, books, and honours, the immense treasures of historical lore which are now being poured liberally from the great storehouses of record throughout Europe, but most especially in England, form a feature of the present time that promises to renew the youth of the Historic Muse. The great Continental col- lections of Historians are growing slowly but substantially ; the German collection, begun in 1826, nearly rivals the Erench one a century its senior ; the Sardinian Government had one of its own, which we may hope will not be smothered for the sake of more ambitious plans ; the Vatican itself, under the kindly influence of a German Oratorian, has I.] NEW MATERIALS FOR HISTORY. 1 3 begun to thaw from its old reserve. Last and greatest, our own national work under the direction of Lord Romilly has in eight years proved itself more than a worthy rival both in bulk and workmanship of the older repositories. And not to speak of the collection of Historians, of which from my own connexion with it I am obliged to speak with modesty and reserve, the extracts and abstracts of public and private documents found in our Record offices and in those of Spain and Venice are rapidly filling our libraries with cases of stout green volumes from which the history of the most eventful of our years is being rewritten, and which will soon involve the necessity of a new Macaulay as they have already brought into being a new Burnet and a new Robertson. From this sudden breaking up of the fountains of historical refreshment I dare not augur what results may follow, or what new worlds may be opening for other generations to exercise their logical acuteness and their historical per- spicacity upon. We have our work set, in a literary point of view, in arranging, and bringing into bearing on one another, the masses of information that are threatening to overwhelm us. Happily, there is no lack of helpers ; the great German hive of historical workers is busy as we are on our archives ; such and so close are the ties which now, owing to the facilities of travelling and communication, the abundance of libraries and the accessibility of records, the extension of literary and investigative sympathies, and, I am happy to think, the extinction of literary jealousies, are now binding the historical scholars of Europe, that I think and hope that the day is coming when, although wc may not cease to quarrel with and criticise one another, there will be a great republic of workers able and willing to assist one another ; not working for party purposes, unfettered by political preju- dices, and although as strong partizans and politicians as ever, anxious above all to find the truth, and to purify the 14 INAUGURAL LECTURE. [!. cause that each loves best from every taint of falsehood, every inclination to calumny or concealment. I confess that it is towards this consummation that my dearest wishes as a student of History are directed ; and that I anticipate with the greatest pleasure the prospect of being instrumental and able to assist in the founding of an historical school in Eng- land, which shall join with the other workers of Europe in a common task ; which shall build, not upon Hallam and Palgrave and Kemble and Froude and Macaulay, but on the abundant collected and arranged materials on which those writers tried to build whilst they were scanty and scattered and in disorder. The time cannot be far off when all the records of the medieval world which are in existence will be in print either in full or in such abundant abstracts as will be thoroughly trustworthy representations of their contents ; when every great Library will contain copies of them all, and when every town will contain a great Library. The seed sown by the old Record Commission, by presenting copies of their publications to the municipal corporations and prin- cipal provincial libraries, marks an era, as antiquaries well know, in the development of antiquarian study and the preservation of archaeological treasures. We may hope to see the same principle extended now, and although the chief labours of the historian must continue to find their place in his own study, as no library can supersede the need of books at home, still no man may be obliged to keep all his ideas in chronic effervescence and all his hopeful discoveries in a state of tantalising suspension, in the hope that once a year he can visit the Bodleian or the British Museum. For that day of many students, many books, many libraries, and many readers, I look with confidence ; in the meantime I do hope and trust that my work here, although this may not be its primary aim or its most successful use, may help in a humble way to educate workers for the good time coming. I.] OUR PURPOSES AND HOPES. 15 For I desire to introduce myself to you, not as a philo- sopher nor as a politician, but as a worker at history. Not that I have not strong views on politics, nor short and con- cise opinions on philosophy, but because this is my work, and I have taken it up in all sincerity and desire of truth, and wish to keep to my work and to the sort of truth that I can help on in the inquiry ; because you have plenty of politicians and plenty of scholars to whom, if they wish to have it, I certainly will not begrudge the name of philosophers. I sup- pose that it is truth we are all seeking, and that though the sorts of truth are distinct and the ways that we work in are very different, when we have found what we seek for we shall find all our discoveries combine in harmony ; and I trust and believe that the more sincerely, the more single-heartedly we work each of us, the nearer we consciously come to the state where we shall see the oneness and glory and beauty of the truth itself. So that the theologian, the naturalist, the historian, the philosopher, if he work honestly, is gaining each for his brother, and being worked for each by his brother, in the pursuit of the great end, the great consummation of all. We may all speak humbly, the theologian because of the ex- cellence of his subject, the rest because of the vastness of our field of work, the length of our art and the shortness of our life ; but we cannot afford to speak contemptuously of any sort of knowledge, and God forbid that we should speak contemptuously or hypercritically of any honest worker. The subject-matter of Modern Historical inquiry has peculiar advantages for the training of the powers most constantly in exercise in a practical generation. Compared with the study of Ancient History it is like the study of life compared with that of death, the view of the living body compared with that of the skeleton. The student of Ancient History has his advantages ; he can speculate on his skeleton, he can penetrate more deeply into the framework of ancient 1 6 INAUGURAL LECTURE. [I. society, so far as his materials allow him ; he can handle the different parts and form his political hypotheses as it pleases him, according to the various ways in which his skeleton can be put together ; he is little troubled by the fear of new facts, or new developments making their appearance suddenly to put to flight his calculations ; he has all the existing materials for his investigation before him, or within easy reach ; he has for the geographical area of his work a portion of the earth and its peoples that has had, since the roll of its own his- torians was closed, little to do with the active work of the world. He can work out principles at his will; he can educate his taste and analyse and experiment to the very ne plus ultra of critical subtilty. But the principles he works out and the results of his criticism are alike things that give the world no new knowledge, or exercise no direct influence on the interests of real life. And in this is one of the great incidental uses of classical training as an engine of education. You have in its languages and histories and philosophies, the most elegant, the most compact, the most ingenious systems on which the mind of man can be exercised ; and you have them in such isolation, so set apart altogether from personal or party or national or scholastic propensions, that the lessons to be drawn from them are for the most part as safe, as un- exciting, as far removed from the heart and interests of life, as any proposition in mathematics. In Modern History, on the contrary, you are dealing with the living subject: your field of examination is the living, working, thinking, growing world of to-day ; as distin- guished from the dead world of Greece and Rome, by the life that is in it, as it is in geographical area and in the em- barrassing abundance of the data from which only in their full integrity it is safe, or ever will be safe, to attempt to philosophise. England, France, Germany, the East, regions that have but a shadowy existence in the background of the I.] MODERN HISTORY. 1 7 pictures in which living Egypt, Rome, and Asia stand before us, after thousands of years of death, in the bright colouring and life-like grouping of yesterday; these are the area in which the modern historian seeks and finds the interests of his pursuit. Italy, the common ground of the sister studies, the strange borderland between light and darkness, in which alone the past seems to live and the present for the most part to be a living death, has a double existence that fits and unfits her for the free handling of either. And in this new and modern and living world there has been since the era began, such a continuity of life and de- velopment that hardly one point in its earliest life can be touched without the awakening some chord in the present. Scarcely a single movement now visible in the current of modern affairs but can be traced back with some distinctness to its origin in the early middle ages ; scarcely a movement that has disturbed the world since the invasion of our bar- barian ancestors but has its representative in the chart of law or thoughts or territory to this day. Not a dynasty that is trembling out its little span of days now, but represents in its shattered tottering throne some great hero, some great heroic movement, that has won the gratitude of the medieval world. Not a country revolutionised and levelled until it hardly knew itself, until it scarcely remembered the names of its rivers and mountains, has been able utterly to obliterate the boundaries, or the customs, or the affinities of its old divisions. The dynastic traditions of Europe are rooted and grounded in the distant past : the principle of nationalities, new in its fashion of announcement and most unlucky in its prophet, is rooted and grounded in a past more distant still; the principle of freedom, in their effect on which only the dynastic and national ideas have their true political value, rests on a yet more ancient foundation, but on one that is peculiar to the modern field of study, for it was brought c 1 deliver two solemn lectures annually on some subject of modern history or political biography, I took occasion of the fact that I was just completing my tenth year of service as Professor to discuss some of the more obvious phenomena which had, during the preceding ten years, marked the progress of Historical Study in Oxford first and in Europe generally. As is invariably the case when one has written a book or made a speech, subsequent reflexion, after no long time, brings home to one the conviction that, besides saying much that were better unsaid, one has left out very much that ought to have been said if the intention were to be realised with which the discussion was attempted. In this particular instance, I confess, one whole region of my subject was left out of sight : my object, indeed, was principally to view the extension and advance of the study, and it was only incidentally that I felt called upon to say a word here and there on the method and purposes of it. But, judging from the utter- ances which have recently, both before and after the delivery of those two lectures, fallen from the mouths of some of the most clever and cultivated men of this generation, it would appear that the method and purpose of historical G 82 POPULAR VIEWS OF HISTORY. [IV. reading were points by no means second in interest to the external development of the study of history. These utterances are in themselves valuable as the mature judgments of men who have at all events known how to draw from history precious lessons on the subjects on which they desired to be taught ; but they have an additional value in setting plainly before us, teachers of history, the views which popular opinion and the men who lead popular opinion upon educational matters formulate regarding the pursuit to which we have devoted ourselves. To us a great many of the statements, as well as of the theories, that find enthusiastic echoes in mixed audiences, are apt to appear either truisms, or fallacies, or both. In many of them there is an apologetic tone which reminds us to some extent of what we used to hear in common rooms when our History school was first started, as if the study was one that needed some vindication as a bona fide study, valuable in itself and in its results, before it could be allowed to compete with other older and more organised departments of learning. And, as usual, when that is defended which needs no defence, the theories of the advocate produce an effect diametrically opposite to that which he intended; he seems to hazard on the strength of some occasional or adventitious argument the claim which on its own merits is indisputable. Now far be it from me to attempt even to gather up or analyse, much less to review, the deliberate and elaborate utterances to which I have referred. I am not going to answer or to refute them where they need refuta- tion, or to use them to strengthen my own theories where I agree with them : it may be enough to say that many of them contain good and sound suggestions which recommend themselves as soon as they are heard ; that others are familiar as lecture-room words to all who have any ex- perience in teaching ; and that the worst that can be justly IV.] OBJECTS OF STUDY. 83 said of any of them is that they prescribe, for the general pursuit of the whole study of History, directions which are valuable in their way in relation to particular portions of it, or for particular purposes for which it may have been undertaken. Instead of reviewing them, then, I shall simply accept them as furnishing suggestions for a brief discussion on points on which it is my privilege to speak, and yours to judge whether what I have to say is worth saying. For I also will claim it as a professorial right to be allowed to utter truisms, and will claim, moreover, as one advantage accruing from our common heritage of error, that, if I utter fallacies, I may have the sympathy of men who know how easy it is, in matters where head and heart are alike engaged, to disparage truth by exaggeration. Although I am not going to venture on any philosophical arrangement of my topics, or to lay down anything pretend- ing to be a complete theory of the method of historical study, I will begin by saying that there are, as it seems to me, and as I doubt not it seems to you, three different sorts of object or aim in reading History : it may be read for its own sake, it may be learned as a mental discipline, and it may be acquired as a piece of the furniture or apparatus of culti- vated life. I have used the words advisedly, for they imply, with diversity of object, diversity of method also. In the first aspect History assumes the dignity of a science, in the second it is a great engine of education, in the third it is in its higher forms a graceful and useful accomplishment, in its lower an indispensable requisite for every-day existence in a civilised country. The three aims are not by any means incompatible, and the results are of course coincident so far as they go. He who reads History for its own sake gains the educational result in the process, and possesses in the fullest way the stock of knowledge which enables him to read his newspaper, G 2 84 VARIETY OF METHODS. [IV. to give his vote, or to pass his opinion on any new book. The man who has gone through the educational training will likewise be able to do these things, besides benefiting by that disciplinary and formative process that qualifies him to give a sound historical judgment on passing events. And it is no small advantage to be able to give an honest, really intelligent vote and to take an interest in a really interest- ing book. Only, the man who has only read History for the purpose of education has not entered into the fulness of the blessing of the man who reads it for its own sake, and the man who has learned it as he learns French or German from a travelling conversation book, does not gain either the for- mative effect on the judgment, or the great inheritance of scientific study. These points need no insisting upon; I merely state them to set us clear at starting, and to point out that the method which may be with advantage adopted for one of these purposes will not be applicable for the other two ; popular lectures may serve admirably to the third object, but be absolutely useless as regards the second ; careful study of isolated periods may suffice for the second, but will not satisfy the instincts that are aroused in the pursuit of the first. But I will not anticipate what ought to come later on. In the distinction that I have drawn you will no doubt recognise your old friends, the professorial, the tutorial, and the popular view of history. I will so far admit the charge as to arrogate to myself the professorial right to make the first the largest half of my discussion, and devote this lecture to the first point, leaving the other two for the second. But there is a prior question, prior even to the assumption that History should be studied for its own sake : Is it worth studying at all ? As I have said, the apologetic tone of many of its advocates renders it necessary that I should at once stale why it needs no vindication. If man IV.] VARIETY OF METHODS. 85 is not, as we believe, the greatest and most wonderful of God's works, he is at least the most wonderful that comes within our contemplation ; if the human will, which is the motive cause of all historical events, is not the freest agent in the universe, it is at least the freest agency of which we have any knowledge ; if its variations are not absolutely innumerable and irreducible to classification, on the gene- ralisations of which we may formulate laws and rules, and maxims and prophecies, they are far more diversified and less reducible than any other phenomena in those regions of the universe that we have power to penetrate. For one great insoluble problem of astronomy or geology there are a thousand insoluble problems in the life, in the character, in the face of every man that meets you in the street. Thus, whether we look at the dignity of the subject-matter, or at the nature of the mental exercise which it requires, or at the inexhaustible field over which the pursuit ranges, History, the knowledge of the adventures, the development, the changeful career, the varied growths, the ambitions, aspirations, and, if you like, the approximating destinies of mankind, claims a place second to none in the roll of sciences. Arising from one of the first and most anciently cultivated instincts, the desire to know how we come to be what we are, and how the world comes to be what it is, the love of history is certainly second in origin to no other sort of love of knowledge. As a search for truth it tries to investigate matters in which the truth may be more dif- ficult to find than it is in mere matters of observation or deduction, but surely its difficulty is not an argument for its disparagement; as a hoarding up of knowledge, it collects facts and records, the results of which are less exact than those of strict science, but are not less precious even in the eyes of the man who would regard them as mere engines of power. It is not true that written history is a mere tradition 86 THE DIGNITY OF THE STUDY. [IV. of falsehoods, assumptions and illogical deductions, of what the writers believed, rather than of what they knew, and of what they wished to have believed rather than what was true ; even if it were, it would be no reason why we should not do our best to unmask the falsehood and detect the fallacies. But we have all heard enough of that sort of thing before; there is, in the most exact science that has subject-matter at all, a mixture of the phenomenal and the real : even the falsehoods and misrepresentations of the record serve as a guide to the discovery of the truth of fact, and certainly serve to train the mind to distinguish historical truth. Agreeing, then, that both for the great extent of its field of view, the grandeur of its subject-matter, the difficulty of its problems, and the value of its results, the study of history is worth pursuing ; and that, for its own sake, not merely for its effects as an educational agent, or its usefulness in the business of life, — we may allow that, even for its own sake, it may be studied with some variety of aspect or approach. We may work simply for the love of discovery, that is the exercise of the investigative instinct and the pleasure of over- coming difficulties; or we may work with the beneficent idea of increasing the sum of human knowledge, or of unravel- ling the string which forms the clue to the history of human progress, or of making such generalisations as may constitute the laws of a new historic science. All these, and perhaps some other purposes may be arranged under our first head, because, although some of them may seem subsidiary to larger and wider general designs, they all have in common the belief in the real value of history itself. Of these purposes, the mere gratification of curiosity, even in its highest and most dignified form, ranks first and lowest; and yet without some infusion of it the genuine love of history is out of the question; and the usefulness of it, IV.] ORIGINAL RESEARCH. 87 . -^ — - -■■.-■■■■■ ■ . ■ ■ 1 , , a even in the humble office of providing materials for men who work with a higher purpose and idea, cannot be gainsayed. The mere archaeologist, the mere genealogist, the mere antiquary, are not the parasites of historical study, as they are too often regarded by men who find it easier to borrow than to estimate the results of their researches ; they are working bees in the hive of historic knowledge. And the curious fact that the contemptuous toleration of archaeological research is very often found in the speeches and writings of men who profess to set a high value on the study of original sources, a fact so curious as to lead to the conclusion that the critic is dealing on both hands with unknown quantities, may serve to lead on to the question, what are, and what is the value of the study of, original sources? We hear a great deal about them at the present day ; not only are our bookshelves actually broken down with the weight of them, but the exact study of them is becoming a subordinate science with method and rules of its own, and with a great apparatus of material appliances in the shape of palceographical tests; a science of historical palmistry, if that is the word, that attempts to refer, by distinctions of penmanship, parchment, paper, ink, illumi- nation and abbreviation, every manuscript to its own country, district, age, school, and even individual writer. Truly we may say the study of Geschichtsquellen is not to be approached without clean hands and an open mind. And after the initial investigation comes the criticism; first we have to identify, then we have to value our historical in- ventory. Both these processes are involved in the study of original sources; it means not merely the reading, or the restriction of reading to, the primary authorities, but the weighing and critical analysis of the primary authorities themselves. 88 THE STUDY OF SOURCES. [IV. Perhaps you think that I am misusing terms when I speak of analysing primary authorities, but I will explain directly what I mean; only a word first on the interest and value of the processes I refer to. If I were drawing a comparison between ancient and medieval and modern history as re- munerative studies, this is probably the first point in which I should claim superior interest for the latter. In ancient history we have wonderful models of thoughtful writing, and ingenious record of primitive tradition, tradition at least that is so far primitive that to us no further analysis is possible. There are exceptional departments even here ; recent discoveries in Assyriology and Egyptology are opening up regions of interest which appear to me to be absolutely beyond parallel or comparison; new records of most ancient life which not only lie out of the scope within which cri- ticism, up to the last twenty or thirty years, confined itself, but which must, if they be approached with due reverence and delicacv of touch, reveal a strange and hitherto unread age of the world's History, and in it the springs of an older cultivation than we have been used to dwell upon, and the links that bind the great civilisations of the Western world with the earliest, but not perhaps less magnificent, civilisations of the East. In these we may hope one day to read a new and clear page of the fair record of human history, of which we have bright but unconnected glimpses in the incidental notices of Holy Scripture. But outside of these, and the study of them is to most of us only in its beginning, the study of ancient History is mainly the study of classical History ; and in classical History, splendid as our materials are, they have been in our hands for ages. Every bone of the great skeleton has long been put into its place : criticism upon it is becoming more and more every year the rearrange- ment of the critical material collected long ago, or the recon- struction of the History with all the charm which novel IV.] ECCLESIASTICAL SOURCES. 89 treatment, without novel material, can supply. Unluckily we can only, in a very fragmentary way, trace back, in com- menting on Herodotus or Livy, the actual line of tradition by which they received what they report to us ; as to Thucy- dides and Tacitus the chain is less fragmentary, and, of course, in the narrative of contemporary writers we look less for traces of earlier authority than for traces of sympathy and antipathy, personal knowledge and direct authenticity. But, as a rule, we may say the study of ancient classical History lies within a confined area, every manuscript, every inscription, every coin, and every map of which has long been known, into which rash speculation never ventures without having cause for bitter repentance, and in which anything like a new discovery, such as the recent finds at Troy and Mycenae, is so very new, that when it does come to pass no one knows what to make of it. The very definiteness of all connected with this study makes it, for educational purposes, an incomparable discipline. As a study of knowledge for its own sake, as a field of discovery and profitable speculation, as a department in which the sum of human knowledge is likely to be largely increased, I confess I think that it promises perhaps less than the study of later History. As a ground for fresh and re- munerative exploration, I am sure it is still less promising. To return, however, to the original sources. We all know how large a debt modern and medieval History owes to the ecclesiastical writers. From the very beginning of the middle ages, Annals, Chronicles, and Histories poured in comparative abundance from the religious houses of England and the Continent, records which serve to check and correct one another at almost every turn, and which, for some of the more dramatic incidents of History, enable us to reconstruct a picture of the event, viewed by different minds from different points and in different lights, in a 90 ECCLESIASTICAL SOURCES. [IV. perfection which has no parallel at all in ancient history. Such, for instance, is the picture of the life and death of Becket; some great scenes in the life of Simon de Montfort; some portions of the history of the Norman Conquest. I mention these, not only because they are well known, but because they lie within the region for our knowledge of which we are altogether indebted to ecclesiastical writers. Now these ecclesiastical writers have for the most part two great points of interest in the direction of research. All, or almost all, are members of religious houses, and all are members of a great fraternity in close and direct cor- respondence. The annalist is the annalist of his monastery or his cathedral ; his monastery or his cathedral has had a history, has records, charters, a library, a scriptorium for multiplying copies of records, perhaps a school of annalists of which the representative man appropriates and assimilates the labours. He is a member of a great fraternity of news- mongers ; every visitor to the monastery, every pilgrim, every journey of the abbot or bishop up to parliament, every letter from abroad, contributes something to the multifarious store. Such a chronicle as that of Matthew Paris contains every one of those elements and perhaps more ; he was an antiquary, zealous of the history and fame of his own monastery, skilled in charters and in everything bearing on its origin and growth, the position of its estates, and the character of its inmates : he was a compiler who appropriated and digested the work of a whole school of earlier annalists; he was an eye-witness of much that he records of contemporary history, acquainted with the great men of the day ; he had travelled and learned much, he had stayed at home and learned more, asking questions of every one who came down that way. Matthew Paris is an original authority ; but what a fine subject for analysis; what an admirable corpus for the Kritik der Quellen 1 Further back you have IV.] MONASTIC WRITERS. 9 1 what is called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; one of the first set of books that was subjected to the process of speculative analysis, now fifty years ago, by a gentleman who dissected it out of his own consciousness. Our Professor of Anglo- Saxon has shown us what may be done in a part of the field of criticism on the Chronicle, by study of a small number of MSS. and dialectic differences. But there is still probably, in the region of Cartularies and Acta Sanc- torum, and in the more minute study of other MSS., something to be done even for this. I may perhaps be allowed to point to my own edition of the Dunstan Memorials as showing, not any completeness of treatment, for I do not pretend to have effected that, but the singular variety and peculiar interest of the fields of investigation in which new discoveries may be expected. This sort of study has two great charms, besides the value of the results ; in common, to compare small things with great, with the discoveries of natural science — botany, for instance. In one way we take a historical series of events and work out the known items of the series, and range the persons and places of our action, until we know where to look for the missing links, and go to look for them and find them. Such a success, and every student of original sources working with zeal and modesty may hope for such, is in a small way like that of the astronomer who, when from calculating the perturbations and so on of the heavenly bodies he has inferred the existence of a hitherto unknown planet, some bright evening and with a new improved glass discovers the real planet of which he has been thinking, and sees in it, not only a great new fact of science, but a proof of the correctness of his computations, a substantial reward for his efforts. And the other is that in every such search, be it successful or not, the inquirer, who is wide awake, is sure to come upon material that is even more valuable than what he 2 PLEASURES OF RESEARCH. [IV. looks for ; makes discoveries that are not less delightful because they are accidental. Of course it may be said that a great deal of useless know- ledge is accumulated in this way ; what good can be done, it may be said, by analysing Matthew Paris, and determining how much of his narrative is drawn from ancient charters, or foreign letters, lives of saints, or such stribiligines : it is his historic power and authority that gives them value, not they that give authority to him. Not quite so, I think, and even if it were so, there might be a lesson in the mere proof of the fact ; the analysis is necessary for the due estimate of his value as a historian ; the writer who can pass such an ordeal where it is possible to apply it, may be trusted where it is not possible to apply it. But I take the higher ground and say, how far can any knowledge be said to be useless ? there may be much useless learning, I allow ; accumulations of other men's thoughts, and crude heaps of second-hand memories that are alike useless to their owner and to the world. But not real knowledge, not a substantiated fact, however remote it may seem from the interests and uses of the day, or the object of the day. It may serve to complete a chain of demonstration, the necessity of which is not as yet apparent ; it may furnish, as an undesigned coincidence, an important element in a discussion yet in its elementary stages. How great is the debt that History owes to the ant-like instincts of collectors of memoranda, the recorders of births, deaths, and marriages, the savers of old letters and old newspapers, of the very things that seemed most useless. If there is any useless knowledge in History, we may say, — as Dr. Maitland said, when people talked of the Dark Ages, they meant the ages that were dark to them, — the uselessness of the knowledge is generally the fault of those who do not know how to use it. It would be doing great injustice, however, to my subject if I were to lead you to suppose that I regard the great IV.] NO USELESS KNOWLEDGE. 93 benefit arising from the study of original materials to lie in the gratification of our natural instinctive desire to get to the bottom of a thing. I suppose that such an instinct is given us for some good end, and that that which lies at the bottom of the historical well is historical truth : Truth that defies the all-dissolving processes of criticism, or at least such an approach to truth as may be credited to a record in- capable of further analysis. The results of such minute study are the little pebbles of the concrete in which the foundations of the historic superstructure are laid. Every great historian has been his own Dry-as-dust, however much he may, as Carlyle does, point the moral of the lesson of labour with small type and inverted commas ; for, I take it, the prophet does not adopt this plan as a means of disguise, but rather to show that to a great extent historical genius consists in an unlimited capacity for taking pains. The man who has, out of independent study, produced such results, has made a con- tribution, small or great as the case may be, to the great stock of sound material which constitutes real knowledge. This consciousness may be its own reward ; but, as I said before, if the love of history for its own sake goes no further, such ambition ranks among the lowest forms of the historical spirit. We take a real pleasure not only in cutting out our sound and perfect stone, but in fitting it into its place in the building : we wish to increase the sum of human knowledge not only by the accumulation of facts but by following them up and making them a part of history. The botanist is charmed when he finds a new plant, and the astronomer when he discovers a new star, but we scarcely should call the one a botanist or the other an astronomer if he did not straightway go and fit in his discovery into the general system of his science, reunite the missing plant to its kinsfolk in genus, and species and variety, or find out the relation of his star to the rest, and assign it to its group and class in the 94 WASTE AND MISAPPREHENSION. [I"V '. map of the heavens. And I think that the somewhat com- passionate condescension with which archaeological inquiry is now and then spoken of, and the study of original sources also, is owing to the fact that so many inquirers do stop at some such point : hence it is that people are constantly dis- covering things which have often been discovered before, and trumpeting as new results of research points of fact that have long been ticketed and set in their places in books where they could easily have found them. The study of original sources is thus taken to mean the study of nothing else ; a pursuit accordingly which has no other result than the gratification, by a laborious process, of a curiosity that might have been gratified by reference to a cyclopaedia, or the amount of training, not itself to be despised if it be regarded merely as training, which makes the fact that one has worked out for himself infinitely more precious than one that he has simply looked out in the dictionary. But I am not speaking now of the educational aspect of the subject. Let it suffice to say, that original sources to be studied remuneratively must be approached with all the apparatus and all the appliances that previous inquirers have accumulated for the illustration of them. If that be not done, we shall share the fate of the astronomer who searches for a new planet with the naked eye, and the mathematician who discovers perpetual motion. And so we may go on to another point. The student of History, for its own sake, may approach his subject with the desire of adding to the mass of human knowledge by the ascertaining of truths hiiherto imperfectly apprehended ; the completing of series of developments, or delineations of character, or the explanations of out-of-the-way regions, or the rehabilitation and analysis of traditions. In these points he has a wide field of interest, and a most remunerative sphere of study in exercise and result. IV.] WHAT HISTORY IS BEST WORTH READING? 95 But here we come upon another primary question, Is all History equally valuable ? You may say to me, we have accepted your assertion that no knowledge is useless, except by the fault of the person who possesses it ; but it does not follow that all is equally useful or equally valuable in itself. What history is the best worth studying for its own sake? Now to answer that question fully would take a long time, and involve a discussion, not only on the nature of History, but on its co-ordination with other branches of human knowledge, such as moral philosophy and theology, carrying us into regions into which I cannot offer to guide you, and must refer you to the philosophers. But if you will be satis- fied with a simple answer, I will say that the true field of Historic study is the history of those nations and institutions in which the real growth of humanity is to be traced : in which we can follow the developments, the retardations and perturbations, the ebb and flow of human progress, the education of the world, the leading on by the divine light from the simplicity of early forms and ideas where good and evil are distinctly marked, to the complications of modern life, in which light and darkness are mingled so intimately, and truth and falsehood are so hard to distinguish, but in which we believe and trust that the victory of light and truth is drawing nearer every day. The most precious Histories are those in which we read the successive stages of God's dispensations with man, the growth of the highest natures, under the most favourable circumstances, in the most fully developed institutions, in the successive contributions which those natures, regions and institutions have furnished to the general welfare of the whole. But I can hear at least one critic say, Is not this assuming the truth of a doctrine that you are always practically deny- ing, that the very designation of your professorship, your very raison d'etre, forces you to deny — the Unity of History, C)6 THE UNITY OF HISTORY. [iV. the Continuity of Historic growth, the Education of the world ? Well, if the Unity of History means what I have said, I certainly believe in it : but that is not the meaning which is commonly attached to the term, and it is not the meaning in which I have so often had to do battle with the idea. The false idea, or that which to me seems practically misleading in the term the Unity of History, is the acceptance as a practical rule or maxim that there are no new points of departure in human history; that modern life is a continua- tion of medieval, of ancient and medieval, history, by a continuity and unity that is at all points equally important, of the same consistency in fact. Now this idea has a truth only in the very highest regions of speculation. Every human soul has an equal value in the eyes of the Christian missionary and religious philosopher, but every human life does not convey lessons of the same practical value to the social investigator ; every national history does not contribute equally valuable results towards the general progress of man- kind, and so neither does every chronological epoch. That perhaps we all allow. Why then should not cycles of history, two, three, or more cycles of history, be allowed to exist, within which all the really important factors have their origin and development, and, it may be, work out their full destiny ; successive great dramas of ages, the interest of which is self-contained, although there is enough of common ground between them and those which precede and follow to give them a simple continuity, and although there is doubtless in the divine mind one great plan of cosmical action in which each drama of the human ages serves as a single act or even a single incident ? Let scripture history, classical and ecclesiastical history, medieval history and modern history, be read successively and connectedly, so much the better; but why deny that classical history and medieval and modern can be advantageously studied apart ? IV.] UNITY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE. 97 why confine the thoughts to the points on which they are conterminous, continuous and agreed, to the exclusion of those in which they differ, when it is on the points in which they differ that the great contributions to the real history of man are to be traced ? In any other sense than that in which I have attempted to limit it and have accepted it, the Unity of History is either the crotchet of a sciolist, or the dream of a universal philosopher. For just think how the field of view expands ; we can never know one thing perfectly unless we know everything ; true, but we can try to learn here and there a thing as perfectly as it can be learned, without knowing everything. In the same sense in which the careful study of ancient history is absolutely necessary to the careful study of modern history, the careful study of the latter is absolutely necessary to that of the former. If you read the second alone, where do you find your causes ? If you read the first alone, where do you find your consequences ? Just in the same way, it may be said, the external history of man cannot be read without an internal reading of his history ; no man can approach History without being a consummate moral phi- losopher ; yet is it so ? Then most of the great historians of the world have been great moral philosophers without know- ing it. But how can a man pretend to understand the moral conformation of his fellows without knowing their physical conformation ? Then the moral philosopher must be an anatomist, and the anatomist a chemist, a botanist and geologist, and the geologist an astronomer; i.e. instead of borrowing, and being content to borrow from the kindred and allied sciences what is necessary for the consistent pursuit of our own study, we must know the principles of all, like the sophists of old, and we all know what that ends in, nana)? f]nl(TTaTo wt'ivTa. But my friend says, exaggeration is no argument, an answer which, by-the-by, may tell either H 98 NATURE OF CONTINUITY. [IV. way : ancient, and modern and medieval history, as you call them, have the same subject-matter, they are connected by certain visible and tangible lines of recorded fact, and they are, as yourself admit, acts of one great drama. Granted : first then, ancient history has much that is common with modern in the region of political thought; second then, the ancient Roman civilisation and literature constitute by them- selves, and they are but one of many, a sufficient line of continuity to prove essential identity ; third, but it is enough for you to admit the continuity of the world's progress. Now, if I were arguing against the reading of ancient history in connexion with modern, such an answer would be complete ; but, as I am merely protesting against the idea that it is impossible to read modern history from its own starting-point, I will observe, and content myself with observ- ing, first that there are no doubt political thoughts common to ancient and modern life ; nay more, that, as has been said, there is very much that is modern in ancient history and much that is ancient in modern history ; and yet that that very element of continuity on which the whole discussion hangs is wanting. There may be, I will not say there is, a certain similarity of thought in a leading article of The Times and a chapter in Thucydides : the similarity of the circum- stances of two political crises may bring out parallels and coincidences ; Constantinople may be the Athens, Alexander II the Xerxes of the day, and anyhow the Bosphorus must be pretty nearly where it was. But the connexion of the political ideas is one of coincidence and not of continuity ; there is not even the life that germinates in the grains of wheat found in Egyptian mummy-pits. Every factor is new, even the area, the nationality of the actors, the whole idea in its origin and every stage of growth is new. Or let the area be the same ; what has modern Greece in continuity with ancient Greece, but the soil and sky and the, to it, un- IV.] CHURCH HISTORY. 99 intelligible wreck of ancient magnificence, from which it fails apparently to draw even the ordinary lessons of civilisation ? what period and region of the whole history of the world conveys a less important lesson than Greece during the Middle Ages of European History? It is scarcely less so with Italy, except for the fact that during a great part of those ages Italy was the centre and stage of Ecclesiastical History, in which, as I shall point out directly, and in which alone, on any large or broad scale, the unity and continuity are to be found. The vital interest of Medieval and Modern History lies in England, France and Germany, as certainly as that of the ancient lies in the East, in Greece and Italy ; no small part of that of the future lies in the further Western world. The actors in the medieval and modern drama are the new nations, nations that were unheard of before the decline of the Roman empire began, and which inherited from the civilisation of that empire only the ecclesiastical culture, not the political system, or even the political map, which that system had laid out. The ideas of medieval and modern life are of medieval and modern growth, or if connected with antiquity, connected by a new birth of culture, a re-discovery, a re-creation, not a continuous impulse of vitality. Save in the one region, that of the History of Religion, Ecclesiastical History; yet in that also the one great fact of the Christian dispensation, which connects the ancient Hebrew isolation with the great Catholic Church life, is itself as much a break as a link of continuity; so immensely does the new transcend the old, that, in the apostle's words, old things are passed away and behold all things are become new. The Unity and Continuity of Ancient and Modern History is an idea which is realised on a great and intelligible scale in Eccle- siastical History only ; and even there the unity is to some extent a unity of ideas, a coincidence of religious and moral h 2 100 CHURCH HISTORY. [IV. motive influences, and not merely of historic continuity. It is in it that the continuity of the Latin civilisation, of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Latin language, Roman Law and Latin literature, is traceable, and to it that we owe them. To it, or to influences which it nourished or provoked, we owe the renaissance, that revival of ancient culture the very title of which is a denial of the continuity which its influences seem to claim for it. But I am not going to usurp the functions of a Professor of Church History, and I am very sure that Church History is not the ground on which the doctrine of the Unity of History is supposed by its advocates to take its stand. One word more; I do not deny this Unity in the high region of religious History or in the scarcely less compre- hensive grasp which the political philosopher may take of Universal Human Life ; nor do I deny it in the minute archaeological investigations in which all particulars great and small have much the same value ; nor do I deny that the student of modern history may gain lessons of immense value from the old. But I do maintain that it is wrong to say that the one cannot be studied without the other; for the things, persons, ideas, plot and scenery are different in the two ; and more than that, save in the region of Church History, the precious lessons of the two are not those in which the approximate continuity may be traced : the con- tinuity lies in the less important, the great contributions of either to the world's growth lie in the less continuous in- fluences ; in the ancient world in a perished civilisation, in the modern world in one in which all the fresh springs are, by God's grace, in the new races. You will, I hope, acquit me now of any desire to under- value any kind of culture ; but, put upon our defence, we must maintain the strong point, as it seems to us, of our position ; and it is our duty, as well as our right, to say what IV.] UNITY AND CONTINUITY. 101 we think. Most successful teachers of Modern History- have passed through the gate of the ancient lore ; but if they would look the truth in the face, they would see that the help which that ancient lore gave to the study of the modern, was first in the discipline of the mind, for which it furnishes an incomparable exercise, and secondly in the wealth of illustration with which it provides them ; but the illustrations are not links in a historic chain, and the fact that the discipline of the mind has been beneficial by no means implies that the powers cultivated in the two studies are the same, or the method of the one applicable without much modification to the exploration of the other. And this is a point which is scarcely less important than the more ostensible and obvious one on which I have dwelt so long. The method of historic investigation is different in the two or three regions which we have been comparing. Of that I have said something in reference to original sources, and I may have to say something more in reference to the educational view of Historic study. I will not therefore dwell upon it now; but rest content to base my argument on what I have said ; that is, the Unity and Continuity are only traceable in the high regions which belong to other sciences and other studies, or in the lower departments of minute archaeology; it is well to abstract, and well to make our own generalisations in the realms that are common to the two, but it is a poor result if, after fixing our thoughts on the things in which they agree and excluding those in which they differ, we find that we have come to generalisa- tions that might be discovered by intuition and cast away differences in which all that is new and true and precious was inherent. But thus I come to the region of abstractions and general- isations, and to the old question, How about the science of 102 A SCIENCE OF HISTORY. [IV. History ? As I hope I made clear before, I do not intend this lecture to be a systematic exposition of my own views or any one else's ; and I certainly do not intend to attempt an analysis of History as the subject-matter of a science or philosophy. I am only trying, if possible, to adjust my own impressions to the maxims of our theoretical instructors, and to say a word or two on subjects which recent dis- cussions suggest. It certainly seems curious that, although the advocates of the Unity and Continuity of History, and the believers in the science and philosophy of History, imagine themselves to be diametrically opposed to one another, the weakness of their respective positions seems to be the same. Both prefer to work out generalisations and collect coincidences, rather than to study the drama in its plot and personnel ; both decline to look at the subject, as we might say, all round. It is true that this is a fault of theory rather than of practice : a really good historian may, as we all know, combine an earnest faith in the Unity of History with a power of creating most exact and minute reproductions of periods, scenes and characters; and such an advocate might almost convince us of the truth of his doctrine, because his practice is so completely free from the faults which that doctrine seems to the outside critic to involve. I am perhaps in error too on the other side, in speaking of the Science of History and the Philosophy of History in one breath ; for certainly there is a Philosophy of History which is not content with abstractions, but busies itself with following up causes and following out conse- quences, goes behind the scenes of the drama as well as directs a miscroscopic vigilance on the stage ; and there is a sense in which the Unity of History is itself a Philosophy of History. I will then leave out the Philosophy of History, and finish the lecture with a few words on the theory of a science of History. IV.] SCHOLASTIC SCIENCE. 103 Shall I be saying too much if I say at once that one great objection to the very idea of reducing History to the lines and rules of exact science lies in the fact I have already stated, that generalisations become obscurer arid more use- less as they grow wider, and, as they grow narrower and more special, cease to have any value as generalisations at all ? Is not a historical science liable, if it can be elaborated at all, to become on the one hand a mere table of political formulae and on the other a case-book of political casuistry ? And, in either case, is it not as a mere political weapon that it is sought for, not as an increase of knowledge, not as an investigation of truth, nor as a study of History for its own sake ? And is not the fact that the idea of a science of History finds acceptation, not among practical historians, but among high-paced theorists, a proof that such a possi- bility belongs to theory and not to practice ; that it is aimed at as a new grace for the all-accomplished doctrinaire, rather than as an object to be sought by those who seek after wisdom ? There were days, centuries ago, when the schoolmen fancied that they could bring into class and line all human knowledge, and encroach to some extent upon the divine, by syllogisms and conversions and oppositions. Much precious knowledge those men handed down to us, with much verbiage and false logic ; but even they for the most part left History alone. They ticketed every portion of man's moral anatomy, found a rule for every possible case of choice, a reason and a reward for every virtue, and a punishment for every conceivable crime ; they turned generalisations into laws, and deduced from them as laws the very facts from which they had generalised. They benefited mankind by exercising and training subtle wits, and they reduced dialectics, almost, we might say, logic itself, to absurdity. I do not undervalue them, because the 104 SCHOLASTIC SCIENCE. [IV. great men among them were so great that even such a method did not destroy them : in reading Thomas Aquinas, for instance, one is constantly provoked to say, What could not such a mind have done if it had not been fettered by such a method ? Such, I imagine, must be the result of every attempt to substitute abstract reasonings for minute examination of facts in the study of History. History repeats itself we know, parallels and cycles recur, the speculative mind can evaluate the curve in which political progress moves, trace the contortions of the unruly spiral, and eschew a cusp as a historic anomaly. But the dealings of human wills, in countless combinations, and circumstances which no theory can ever exhaustively calculate, are not the field for dog- matic assumption or for speculative classification. Perhaps you may think that I am talking at random, that no people ever were so foolish as to suppose that even an exhaustive knowledge of past history could enable a man to prophesy ; for such should be the result of a scientific treatment, even if the subject-matter be akin rather to the subject-matter of meteorology than to that of astronomy. It may be so ; but the idea is not strange. Experience of life, it is argued, qualifies us for dealing with men ; knowledge of human history must qualify us for calculating on the results of even historical contingencies ; the practical politician can arrange the factors of his problem so as to work out the solution beforehand ; the theoretic explorer of History may so manipulate his factors as to provide for every conceivable combination. Again, I say, it may be so ; but not in the regions of life that are worthy of real study ; vague general- isations may form the stock-in-trade of the political empiric, but he is an empiric notwithstanding; readiness of observa- tion and fertility of expedient, political genius, the power that interprets events and realises character and motive, IV.] GENIUS AND KNOWLEDGE. 105 are not the result of abstraction even from universal reading. I grant that genius may do great things with poor in- struments and out of small materials. But the scientific triumphs of genius all imply minute knowledge as well as the power of grasping the idea. Owen, from a single bone, could reproduce an entire archaic animal, the real existence of which later discovery vindicated : in that great exploit of scientific genius, there was not only consummate grasp of the idea but enormous knowledge of mechanical anatomy: he did not elaborate the beast out of his own consciousness, nor make a lucky guess ; but he looked at his bone all round, and saw its mechanical capabilities, and realised the idea which only could explain the possession of such capa- bilities. So, to some extent, the historical genius can re- construct character. From a very incomplete study of History Scott could create a Richard, the truth of whose portraiture careful historical scrutiny seems to assure. Out of an enormous amount of material, Carlyle reconstructs for us Frederick William I of Prussia, a living, moving, tan- talising reality. In both there is the eye and the hand of genius, different as is the workmanship, distinct as is the result. But although genius can reconstruct character, it cannot reconstruct events : it flashes its lightning into the dark, and for the moment we see battles and alliances, life and death, growth and decline of heroes, cities and nations ; but it would require many such flashes to produce one per- manent impression ; and for even an approach to an under- standing of the vision we must go down and map out the land, photograph the heroes, and classify the populations of the cities. Patient study may not have much to do with genius; it has less to do with generalisations: but without patient study genius will flash with no productive efficacy, and generalisations will become mere formulae, useful neither 3 06 GENIUS AND STUDY. to teachers nor to learners, neither to statesmen nor to scholars ; and even with patient study, what results ? Surely that scientific generalisations are but by-play, diversions and amusements, not real lessons : formulae that are convenient for a moment now and then, but quite unsafe as implements of investigation or even as helps for memory: truisms, or fallacies, or both : or if containing truth, or aiming at uni- versality, diluting the truth until it is useless ; assuming a universality of rule which, when it comes to be applied, is met with a universality of exception. There is a ' One in History' as a One in Nature, but it is not shown to the man whose idea of science is confined to making his inventory or ticketing compartments of his cabinet, even if the mechanism of his museum be ever so complete, unless he has studied and learned well the con- formation and individual histories of the specimens which he attempts to classify. Sometimes men classify the speci- mens which other men have collected, and claim the character of philosophers without any direct acquaintance with ma- terials at all. V. METHODS OF HISTOBICAL STUDY. (May 18, 1877.) IN my Lecture delivered the other day, in the discharge of a duty which, in the case of a Professor who is willing to work, might well be dispensed with, I attempted to arrange some few thoughts on the subject of Historical study which had occurred to me, on some sort of a plan, carefully disavowing however any attempt at complete or even systematic treatment ; I used the division of the subject which I then proposed, simply as furnishing pegs on which to hang divers desultory observations. The principle of division which I adopted was merely this ; that we should view our subject in three lights; first looking on the study of history as pursued for its own sake, secondly regarding it as an instrument of education or training of the mind, and thirdly regarding it in reference to the ulterior uses to which the results of such study could be most advantageously applied; in other words, the student or professorial view, the educatorial or tutorial view, and the popular or utilitarian view. Without, as I said, attempting any systematic treat- ment, I made the question of History for its own sake an occasion of saying a word or two on the current ideas touching the study ; the investigation of original materials, the doctrine of the necessary unity and continuity of History, and the much-debated possibility of the creation of a science of History, in the sense of science which involves the dis- covery of general laws and the classification of human wills 108 EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. [V. and events out of which the men of the future may prophesy. I have still the other two heads of my division to trifle with, and, as it is now too late to modify my plan, I can only ask for your tolerant attention, and proceed, in the hope that what I may have to say on the practical work of the subject may be better worth saying than what I said on the theory of it, a speculation on speculations. The first point to be stated in relation with the second head of discussion has merely to be stated ; supposing that the study of History is useful as an educational instru- ment, that is, not only as providing stores of knowledge or amassing tools for future use, but as having a disciplinary and formative virtue, what part of the mind is it on which the disciplinary process acts, and what power or virtue may it be supposed to develope by training ? It is perhaps un- necessary for me to say more than this, that I regard the judicial faculty, ' judgment,' as in vulgar unphilosophical language we call it, as that on which historical study pro- duces the most valuable results; I have so often said this from this desk that I feel shy of repeating it ; but it does not appear to me to be less true than it did the first time I said it. The study of the early stages of that history in whose later stages we know ourselves to be personally interested, the study of the modern world of which we are parts, as distinguished from that of the ancient world which, except as a matter of culture, is dead to us, affords room for the development of an equitable as well as an unbiassed judg- ment, which is a great advantage in itself and may be of great practical use in the world. The exclusive study of the more modern phases of history has a tendency to make men partisans or advocates ; but the study of the periods just a generation or two further removed produces far more effect on the judgment ; and the study of medieval History, that is, of the ages in which the things that are precious to us were V.] MEDIEVAL HISTORY. 109 rooted and sprang up, but had not yet entered into the phases in which controversy is most bitter, or in which the political questions of the day are most directly engaged, has always seemed to me to furnish very good training ; to enable us to approach questions in which we are ourselves engaged, with moderate and cautious treatment, to allow some of them to wait for solution, to determine others by the evidence of fact rather than by prepossession, and to let others alone altogether. Ancient History exercises the critical faculty in a comparatively narrow and exhausted field, although, as a matter of training, every student has to go over the field and exhaust its interest for himself before he gets the benefit of what he is reading; mere modern politics, as I have said, furnish training only, and that incomplete training, for the advocate and partisan ; the intermediate region is that in which real personal interest may be strongly engaged without much temptation to pas- sionate controversy, and in which therefore the judgment may be best trained for its own perfect development, and for the uses of practical politics when the time for prac- tical controversy and advocacy comes. We learn patience, tolerance, respect for conflicting views, equitable considera- tion for conscientious opposition ; we see how very differently the men of the particular time seem to have read the course of events, which seem to us to have only one reasonable bearing; we see how good and evil mingle in the best of men and in the best of causes ; we learn to see with patience the men whom we like best often in the wrong, and the repulsive men often in the right; we learn to bear with patience the knowledge that the cause which we love best has suffered, from the awkwardness of its defenders, so great disparagement as in strict equity to justify the men who were assaulting it ; we learn too, and this is not the least of the lessons, that there are many points on which no decision IIO MEDIEVAL HISTORY. [V. as to right or wrong, good or evil, acquittal or condemnation, is to be looked for ; and on which we may say that, as often the height of courage is to say I dare not, and the height of love is to say I will not, so the height of wisdom is to have learned to say, I do not know. I will however leave this point, as it is one on which I may have to say a word under mv third head. The next point after determining the nature of the dis- ciplinary value ascribed to historical study, especially modern historical study, is the question of method. And as I have already said that it does not follow that the best method of studying History in one aspect is the best way of studying it in the other two, I will, for the sake of simplicity, go directly to our own idea of teaching in this place as ex- emplified in the Examination Statute. That statute was the result of a good deal of consideration and discussion between men of very different views and extent of ex- perience, and I do not know that I should venture to say that it is incapable of improvement ; but it has worked well, and any improvement that may be made in it must be made on the lines of its own plan, which seem to me complete. I take it, however, as a peg for more general remarks. The main feature of it is, as you are doubtless aware, the threefold division into, first, a continuous read- ing of our national History, second, an epochal treatment of a portion of general European History, and thirdly, the special study of some character or period in the original authorities. The plan thus aims at realising two of the ideas which I discussed the other day, although of course only by way of introduction to the larger fulfilment of the promise ; it attempts in the continuous reading of one sub- ject to convey the lesson of continuity, and in the special subject to invite the student to see what original sources are like, and what is the pleasurable work of studying them. V.] OXFORD TEACHING. Ill Now I am not quite sure that our way of studying the special subject is exactly the best method of beginning work on original authorities, but it may very well be the best that we can incorporate in a plan of gaining, in a year and a half's reading, a mental training, or the begin- ning of a mental training that may serve a lifetime. I am not sure that it would not be more true to the idea, to require the student to read a single book and explore its mechanism and materials, rather than to set before him a character or institution and bid him look for illustration for it in a particular set of books ; but it must be remem- bered that the immediate object of the reading is to meet the test of examination, and that it would be almost im- possible to examine, on one set of questions, a set of men all of whom had been working from different points ; for essay writing it might be invaluable training, but for col- lective examination it would be unreasonable. I will, then, content myself with remarking that the special subject in the class schools should be regarded only as a starting- point in independent research ; a sort of first step in the study of original sources, which we hope may lead on to further and deeper investigation, but which, as it has to serve two purposes, can scarcely be likely to satisfy both ; it is a specimen of minute study, and it is a specimen of original reading; but the object of the minute study is not the book, but the hero or the plot of it. It is, how- ever, most encouraging to those who have the future of our History school at heart to know that the treatment of the special subject is always one of the best features of our examination ; that in which the best side of the mind of each examinee is as a rule most distinctly shown. Re- garded then as a study of a subject, rather than as a first step into the region of original authorities, this part of our work exemplifies one of two diametrically opposed 112 AN ART OF HISTORY. [V. methods of reading. And, whether there is or is not a science of History, and I believe that in the reasonable and intelligible sense of the word there is such a science, there is, I am sure, an art of writing History and an art of reading it ; and the educational use of it is an exempli- fication of the art. According to this, the reader or the writer may set before himself two opposite ideas ; he may either wish to produce a historical statue or group of statuary, we may say, or he may wish to produce a historical picture. In the former case he has to look out his materials first, then to construct from the careful view of them an idea or model of the object which he desires to reproduce, and then to work out his idea. It is necessary for him to look at his subject all round, to finish it off completely at every point, and, while seeking for statuesque unity and perfection, to make truth and reality the first object. Everything that in the remotest way bears upon the history of the person or institution that he is describing, has its special value ; original sources, the verdict of other historians, tradition, popular conceptions, poetic idealising ; the place which his object has occupied in the development of his- torical life, the results which historical experience has produced or may have produced upon the object; every species of illustration derivable from archaeology, genealogy, law, morals, and religious history, will have to be ransacked. The result will then, if the writer has chosen his subject well, and with a due estimate of his own powers, be an artistic unity, a perfect image, true to its author's idea, and, if he has not let his own idea prejudice him in the manipulation of his materials, true to the reality, so far as the reality can be discovered. It is of course in the life-like portraiture of great men that success of this sort is most frequently achieved, for it is in the realising of grand character that the strength V.] HISTOR Y AS STA TUAR V. 1 1 3 of historical genius chiefly displays itself. But the same method may be applied to an institution that has a well- ascertained growth, and the result in that case will certainly be not less valuable. Still there are certain unities of time, place, and interest, which are more readily united in biography than in institutional history. As valuable History may be so written, so a good deal of History may be so read, in a way, that is, to produce in the mind a perfect image of the character worth studying ; nay, the method is more applicable to the reading than to the writing of History, because it is easier for the mind to receive successive images or phases of the one character, than it is for the writer to reproduce them without becoming tedious ; the realisation in the mind may easily be a regular and orderly development, whilst in the written record of even the best historian it is liable to become a series of postures and attitudes, attended by tricks and mannerisms of style that are unworthy of the serious student. The second form of our art is analogous to painting, and its result to a picture ; it aims at reproducing not a character or a life, but a situation ; it requires a background and a foreground, scenery and perspective, as well as unity and symmetry; it studies the relations and positions, the features and habit of each of the persons or groups that the picture contains, and tries to make them true to the eye, whatever they maybe to the life. Thoroughness and complete realisation is not a requisite of this sort of work quite so much as accurate reproduction. The painter is not, like the statuary, obliged to look at his figures all round ; he need not go to the back of his picture, or if he does, he will see nothing : so the historian, who works at a situation, will often satisfy himself if his grouping is true and consistent for the moment which he wishes to seize ; and he will not spend much time in trying to show us how the scene comes to be what it is, satisfied 1 114 HISTORY AS PAINTING. [V. that his reproduction is an adequate representation of what it seemed to be. The result will have its value ; for first, the work need not be a whit less conscientious because it is less deep and searching ; and, secondly, because the good work- man will only try to reproduce scenes that are worth describing; the good painter will not waste his genius on revolting ^or worthless subjects, and the historian of true genius will choose for the employment of his genius scenes from history that may read good and noble lessons to the world that reads him. Such historical writing is far more brilliant, if it is well done, than that which I mentioned first ; but, like everything that is brilliant, it is liable to be counterfeited. Sensational and picturesque writing satisfies the popular taste, and sensational and picturesque writing, adopted as a historical style, is very apt to corrupt and destroy the more valuable features of painstaking and con- scientious truthfulness. Popularity is nowhere a greater snare than it is in this region of work ; and magazine articles, and review articles, the romance of history, and historic scenes and characters, are produced with great facility when the principal object is to attract the half-educated to read. But, notwithstanding this, both the writing and the study of history in this way has a great value, if it enables the student to realise the situations more vividly, to put himself in the place, so to speak, of his characters, and to represent to his mind's eye, for the purpose of forming an equitable judgment, the several circumstances of the case on which he is trying to adjudge, in somewhat the same way as that in which his characters themselves might have seen them. I should say, then, read history now and then with a view to the picturesque, but do not read it too much, and do not read it at second-hand ; do not write it, or dwell too much on the pictures which are not drawn by the first masters ; try to reproduce, not to copy. V.] HISTORY AS DRAMA. 1 1 5 A third form of the art, which combines and adds to these two, borrows its analogue from the domain of another of the arts, and attempts to read not only character and situation but plot also ; and this, I need hardly say, is in result at least very far in value beyond the other two. It involves the complete identification of persons, and the complete realisa- tion of relations ; of persons identified through long historical careers, and of relations varying from moment to moment during the long periods over which the drama extends. It can perhaps afford better than our second form of the art, to discard circumstances and characters that are not essential to the plot, but it cannot afford to neglect a single cir- cumstance or feature that may be essential to it. The result of such writing is seen in its best form in the history of great institutions, great empires that have had definite periods of growth, duration, and decline ; Church History, or different episodes in it ; the history of the Roman em- pire, or of Athens. It has all the unity of the statuesque, and all the vividness of the picturesque, but a continuity of life and argument that are its own. I need scarcely say that to write this sort of history requires the very highest mental powers, as well as patient training and incredible labour. For even the writing of episodes, as we call them, the minor plots of a great drama, the writer must combine qualities of mind that are combined in but few ; the clear sight that can apprehend the idea that gives life and truth to the story, and the labour that will apply itself to details as if it were only out of the study of the details that life and truth could come. But although to write such history may well be beyond the reach of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of each thousand of historians, there is no reason why every man who goes into the schools should not try to read history with a special view to the realising of the dramatic plan ; I 2 Il6 DRAMATIC INTEREST. [V. — ■■ ■- ■ ■ ■ ■ ■'■ * and I think that in our present scheme we hold out to the student the clue which he has to follow in order to succeed ; for both in the study of the general period, and in that of the continuous history of his own country, he will find the dramatic interest strong and capable of almost infinite illustration. More especially if he can throw him- self personally into the action of it ; not merely regarding it as an image, or a picture, or a piece of biography, but as part of the growth of his own life, of the laws, history, circumstances, that have helped to make him what he is ; acts that have taken place in scenes with which he is familiar, great deeds of war and peace done by the men whose blood runs in his own veins ; high aspirations, sym- pathies and instincts, that he knows are living in his own heart and brain, not merely by imitation or engrafted life, but with continuous, hereditary strength. I would not have him read as a partisan, with the likes and dislikes, the prejudices, the false and artificial antipathies of modern political life, but with the sympathies of an Englishman ; I would have my brother Yorkshireman, for instance, learn to look on Fairfax and on Strafford both as men of flesh and blood, with beliefs, sincerities and virtues that bring them very near to us, notwithstanding their antagonism to each other, and the gap that widens daily between us and both of them. I am sure that the more I know of both of them, the more I find that is admirable and love- able in them. But perhaps it is easier to grow enthu- siastic here than to maintain judicial calmness ; and I will proceed. There is yet another way of reading and of writing history which demands its place in our enumeration, which, however, can scarcely be regarded as educational, because the historic faculty, whatever it is, must have been already educated before it can attempt to approach the task. To V.] HISTORY FOR ITS OWN SAKE AGAIN. 117 read and write with the single and simple purpose of col- lecting, testing, and arranging the facts of history, to dis- cover causes and work out consequences, to determine the rights and wrongs of questions as they arise, the growth and decline of institutions as they emerge from and retire into darkness when their work is done, to build up history as a treasure-house of knowledge, that may enable the man who attempts the task to read with like facility the history of the past and present, to solve the difficulties of conflicting testimony, and hold the balance of equitable judgment between conflicting systems ; the study, for I must recur to the first of our three heads, the study of History for its own sake can scarcely be regarded as a method co-ordinate with the other three. But it unites the advan- tages of all three, and furnishes still more formative and disciplinary influence of its own. It is, in relation to its subject, an end in itself, and is not to be classed among means and methods ; if there be a science, this is the science. And yet, strange to say, this idea, like the others, is apt to be lowered and made vulgar by the impatience and in- tolerance of utilitarian theory; and of all intolerant things, utilitarian theory, or theoretic utilitarianism, is the most so. As however I do not wish to use language unnecessarily strong, I will leave this, and remark upon two other educa- tional theories connected with the subject. History may be read either backwards or forwards. That is, the man who has time for it may begin at the beginning and read on to modern times ; noting every influence in its origin and effects, the growth and decay, as I have just said, of institutions, the origin, complications, and counter- changes of rights and wrongs; and, whether he reads on a wide scale or on a narrow one, he will, if he lives long enough, arrive at such a knowledge of the situation of things at the present day, as will give him a right to make his Il8 READING FORWARDS. [V. opinion heard. This is the way in which members of parliament ought to read history, and I take leave to say that, if they would submit to hold their tongues until they have so read it, it would be all the better for the nation and for themselves. In working thus through the history of our own country, we should come, no doubt, upon many lines of inquiry as to institutions that have long been obsolete, and influences that have no direct representative among the influences of the day; we shall trace the pedigrees of extinct families, and the growth and disuse of worn-out fashions of thought, dress and manners ; but without such reading we cannot trace the origin of existing institutions and influences with anything like a true appreciation of their proportion and relation to national life. We may, as we proceed, have to discard much that has seemed historical as now become archaeological, but we cannot dispense with the recollection that without that obsolete material, that obsolete influence or form, that which has succeeded, survived and continued to flourish, could not have become what it is. The tree that has stood for centuries bears to the microscopic investigator marks of every winter that has passed over it ; it has not cast aside one dead leaf or rotten branch which would not, had it remained, have made the tree something different from what it has become. I do not advise microscopic minuteness in this study to the neglect of other methods, but I do claim for it a place and a function ; and further than that, I maintain that this synthetic reading of the subject is the best of all ways for those who have time and patience to follow it up. But here we must be cautious ; lest having begun to build we be not able to finish ; and having begun to read history at the Norman Conquest, we find ourselves stranded at the battle of Waterloo, or earlier still. Observing a due scale and proportion of study, much educational benefit will accrue V.] READING FORWARDS. 119 by beginning at the beginning ; neglecting the due scale and proportion, the student may find that instead of educating himself to take his place in the world, he has disqualified himself for being anything but a student all his life ; no bad thing perhaps, but not an educational result. The second and reverse method has strong recommenda- tions to other minds ; to take the interesting subject of the day and work back to its beginning, following every branch of inquiry that may present itself, but following it chiefly with a view to the leading idea with which you have started. Here too there is abundant exercise for the historic instinct, the desire of getting to the bottom of every- thing and looking at it all round; and, regarded as an analytic process, complementary to that synthetic process which I have first stated, some amount of such reading seems absolutely necessary to the education of the student. Still, I question very much whether it is wise to put this idea for- ward as the best. As the way in which men of modern ways of thinking, and with little time for study, may be in- vited, tempted to and interested in History, much may be said in its favour, and much has been said on very high authority. But surely it has, unless it be accompanied by some strong corrective, a tendency to educate men for advocates rather than for judges, it leads them into a habit of looking for all that may be said on one side of a subject, rather than for what may be said on both sides; and it certainly leads a man to give to the point from which his investigation started an exaggerated form and influence amongst the earlier competing influences which, as a matter of fact, it has outgrown, or of which it may itself be in some measure a resultant. The occasional use of this method as a means of study is one thing, the exclusive use of it is another; the use of it as a means of inviting popular attention to history is a 120 READING BACKWARDS. [V. third. And it is perhaps in this its third application that it should be regarded with the most favour, but only as a step towards something deeper and sounder. An audience may be attracted by an able lecturer to listen to him on any subject whatever ; he takes the subject of the day and works back ; Turkey and Russia, we will say. Of course, if his audience is really a popular audience, they bring sadly little information with them to the lecture; a large proportion probably of the elder hearers can go back as far as the Crimean War, most of the audience will have come into this world of trial since that date. Their ideas of right and wrong will be very much prejudiced by the fact that England took a side in that war, and by the grand principle that whatever England does is right ; some may be equally convinced, on equally sound principles, that whatever the Aberdeen ministry — that is supposing them to have heard of an Aberdeen ministry — did must have been wrong: probably some will have imbibed the belief that there is a subtle connexion between Russia and Ritualism, or be- tween Turkey and religious toleration as exemplified in the massacre of orthodox Greek Christians and the protection of Roman Catholics and Protestant Missionaries. Well, fur- nished with materials, prepossessions, fixed ideas and ex- pectancy, it would be a miracle if they did not come away fully persuaded of their competence to decide on the minutest questions of the last Protocol. Really it does seem to me that this is beginning at the wrong end, and yet I confess it is extremely difficult to suggest anything that is at once theoretically better and practically possible. If it were only for the fact that these questions of the day are to so large extent as they are, doubtful and party, doubtful or party questions; that mat- ters on which our acutest and most honourable statesmen feel bound to take sides diametrically opposed, are by this process V.] SPECIAL LECTURING. 121 subjected to the rough and ready manipulation of men who know nothing about the premisses and care nothing about the logical connexion between them and the conclusions, care nothing about the conclusions except in so far as they are the conclusions of a blue or an orange lecturer; the fact itself seems to me a reductio ad absurdum of historical lecturing. Yet, what is to be done? A little learning is a dangerous thing, but what of total ignorance, what of that ignorance which will not bear to be enlightened unless it is played on by passion or party ? How shall we remedy this ? Here is a question that extends far beyond the scope of my purpose, for it touches the whole great field of popular education ; it is an inviting subject, for we are so distinctly at the beginning of our work in this department that a man of my age may safely propound any nostrum, sure that he will not live to see its absolute uselessness proved by an adult generation of historically trained people. Let me just say, before I go on to the next and last point of my subject, that popular lecturing on history can be only one, ay, and only a secondary one, of the imple- ments of historical education, if the people of the next generation are to be qualified to use the power which the men of this generation have placed in their hands. The schools, the national schools as well as the public schools, must be made to begin at the beginning; at present the blind are leading the blind ; God help us, for we are very near the ditch. Lecturing is of little use, if it does not lead men to read for themselves ; in many instances it is worse than useless, if it be made a substitute for self-culture. So too with newspaper education ; imagine the state, rnoral and intellectual, of the man who tries to form his mind by reading the daily journals of England since the be- ginning of the last Long Vacation. What value will truth and justice have in the eyes of a man who has read history 122 UTILITARIANISM IN STUDY. [V. through such a medium ? But again I forbear : one word ; it has been said, perhaps the story is apocryphal, that one well-known politician of our own day, one too whose judg- ment would have been well worth having on present events, once said something to the effect that there was more valuable political training in one column of The Times than in all the pages of Thucydides ; I will venture to say that there are English journals now, claiming a world-wide circulation and assuming to be the very interpreters of history and political morality, in preference to whose lessons I should recommend the student to seek for lessons of history and political morality among the arrowheaded inscriptions of Assyria or the papyri of the Neapolitan Museum. But I have already run into the third division of my subject : that is the popular view of historic knowledge ; the aspect of it in which it becomes merely a tool or a stock of tools capable of employment for ulterior purposes ; and the methods of teaching it by which with the least trouble the learner can acquire practically useful information. I call this the popular or utilitarian aspect, because it belongs to the catchpenny theory of human life according to which the value of a thing is just as much as it will bring ; the theory that despises science and research, that regards politics as a game between Blue and Orange, that places the interest of Great Britain at the crown and apex of national ambitions, and regards education in general not as the training of the human mind for God's service, a development of powers to His glory and the welfare of our fellow-men, but as a means for the acquisition of a certain sum in the funds; the theory that regards human souls as factory hands, and ascribes to parliament the power of making a false statement true. But although it is the vulgar view of education, and in this extreme a very vulgar V.] STANDARD BOOKS. 123 view, it is founded upon a truth. There are many things which a mere acquaintance with the facts of history, however that acquaintance may have been gained, enables a man to do better than he would do them without it. There is a knowledge of history for ordinary practical purposes which may be acquired without either the love of the subject or going through the disciplinary study of it by way of culture. And this we must not undervalue, because a very little may be made to go a great way; and it is quite possible for a man to wish to take an independent and right view of public affairs and political duty, who has not, and never had and never can have, a proper education for forming a complete judgment. We respect the man who, when he has to vote on any public question, goes to his books to get up the question instead of voting as the party whip would wish him ; we would rather that his education had fitted him to do right at once, that he had studied public questions to begin with, or that he had, by the culture of educational reading, exercised his mind to discern between good and evil; but we do not despise him even if he votes wrong in the end. Even an indifferent Cyclopaedia is better than a paid party agent as a guide in doubtful questions. Now how can this sort of information be best provided ? I do not know of any expedient that has not been at one time or other tried; tried in vain, you say. Not quite in vain, if such expedient has, as I said, enabled a man to do better than he would have done without it. We do not condemn the use of a Ready Reckoner because we think that a tradesman ought to do and would do better without it ; it is much safer for his customers than that convenient leaden canon, the rule of thumb ; but we do not think that a banker who entirely depends on his Ready Reckoner will ever become Chancellor of the Exchequer. One has known 124 PARTY-SPIRIT IN BOOKS. [V. people too who have thought the Encyclopaedia Londinensis a useful sort of reading for Sunday afternoons ; no doubt it would enable you, like one of Dickens's heroines, to pass a number of remarkable opinions upon a remarkable number of subjects. But seriously, anything should be welcome that would save a well-intentioned man from the necessity of taking his rule of political conduct from the leading articles of party papers. We have had popular histories and pictorial histories, political Cyclopaedias, and Books for the Million ; a whole historical department of the Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge. Yet it seems as if even for such work, even where such work would pay, no one has the spirit to undertake it unless he is stirred by something stronger than the desire of being useful, the desire of ventilating some party view or destroying the character of some partisan opposed to him. Imagine a history of England in which the lying story of Hannah Lightfoot appears as an important clue to the difficulties of the reign of George III, and the triumphs of the Commonwealth are regarded as incomplete unless Henrietta Maria can be shown to have been an adulteress. These are extreme cases, because they are cases in which a coarse and violently prejudiced mind has undertaken the task of writing for party purposes ; but the infection is not confined to coarse and vulgar minds : it denies some of the very noblest works, especially historical works, that have ever been written. How can we recommend the man who wants to get up the rights of a case to a history like Macaulay's ? how easy must have been the victory of Macaulay's hero if all his adversaries were the pitiful knaves and fools that they appear to him to have been. I am not calling him a slanderer, I do not believe that he was one ; or ignorant or careless, for he was most learned and accurate ; nor insincere, for he was most sincere ; but for all that he was as much a party writer as Clarendon or Prynne, or Burnet, or Collier. And where such a man with V.] PARTY-SPIRIT IN BOOKS. 1 25 such power of portraiture as would make us believe his pictures, if not true, more lifelike and real than if they were true, — where such a man with such knowledge, such memory, such transparent honesty of belief in his own version of his- tory, cannot be relied upon, what shall we poor mortals do ? If all the advance in historical study is to result only in the better presentation of party views and party arguments ; if no one will write even cram-books without cramming his own disproportioned and one-sided theories down our children's throats, it seems as if it were time to turn over a new leaf; reconcile ourselves with party government and organisation and cut ourselves off from shams. Let men cease to pretend to exercise or to prepare to exercise conscientious judgment. Divide the world between Blue and Orange, and nail your colours to the mast. For my own part I do not see why an honest partisan should not write an honest book if he can persuade himself to look honestly at his subject, and make allowance for his own prejudices. I know it is somewhat critical work, and a man who knows himself in one way, may be quite ignorant of himself in another. I take Hallam as an illustrious example ; Hallam knew himself to be a political partisan, and, wherever he knew that political prejudice might darken his counsel, he guarded most carefully against it : he did not claim the judicial character without fitting himself for it ; and where he knew himself to be sitting as judge he judged admirably : so admirably that the advanced advocates even of his own views have long ago thrown him over as too timid and temporising for their purpose. Yet where he was not awake to his own prejudice, in matters for instance regarding religion and the Church, in which he seems to have had no doubt about his own infallibility of negation, how ludicrously and transparently unfair he is ! I do not see any necessity for this. I do not see why a 126 CHARLES AND OLIVER. [V. man should not say once for all, I like Charles I better than Oliver Cromwell : I like the cause for which Charles believed himself to be contending better than that for which Cromwell strove : Charles is attractive to me, Oliver is repulsive : Charles is my friend, Oliver is my foe : but, am I bound to maintain that my friend is always right and my enemy always wrong; am I bound to hold Charles for a saint, Oliver for a monster ; am I bound never to mention Charles without a sigh or Oliver without a sneer ; am I bound to conceal the faults of the one and to believe every calumny against the other? If you like, put it the other way, believe in the great Protestant statesman, treat Charles as the overrated fine gentleman, {he narrow-minded advocate of a theory which he did not understand, the pig-headed maintainer of the cause you dislike. You may be a partisan, but can you not believe that, if you believe your own side of the question, truth when it is explored will be found on your side ? mis- representation, exaggeration, dishonesty of advocacy will only disparage the presentment which you desire to make of your own convictions and your own prepossessions. Nay, I would go further, and say I should like Charles better than Oliver even if his cause were less my own than I conceive it to be. I am ready to stick to my friends and vote against my unfriends : but why should I shut my eyes to the false and foolish things that my friends do, or to the noble aspirations, honesty, and good intentions of those whom I think wrong in their means and mistaken in their ends. Yet, as I began by saying, without some infusion of spite it seems as if history could not be written ; that no man's zeal is roused to write unless it is moved by the desire to write down. Of course I seem to be stating extreme cases, but it is extreme cases that make their own advertisements, and that do the great mischief. Here the study of ancient history has its great advantage over modern ; yet battles are V.] POPULAR LECTURING. 12J fought over the character of Tiberius, and the 'lues re- habilitandi ' has given a new reading to the history of Marius and Sylla. The reason which led me to say that even an indifferent book is better than no book at all, that an encyclopedic history or a popular compendium, or a cram-book, or even a party pamphlet is better than no book at all, because even if it misleads and misrepresents, it deceives a man one degree less than he would be deceived by a mere party agent ; be- cause it makes him think, even if the extent of the thinking be that he thinks that he thinks ; because it either suggests to him that he ought to form a judicial opinion, or keeps before his mind the duty of inquiry and furnishes him with a starting-point; the same reason that led me to say this of popular books, leads me also to estimate at something more than their intrinsic value the popular lectures, or lecture- system, of which we have recently heard a good deal. We are told that even a short course of lectures, clearly and interestingly delivered, will be sufficient to put the popular mind in possession of such an elementary know- ledge of history, its course, influences and material lessons, as will enable men to approach the great questions of the day with some useful amount of foresight and theoretic experience. Now, if I have mis-stated this prescription, I am very sorry ; but I think I have not. I am quite willing to admit that a popular lecture may give information that is better than total ignorance ; I am inclined to value highly the inducement to begin real study which a popular lecture may put before the mind of the audience ; I am thankful to the popular lecturer, although he may get no further than to rouse the hearers to the sense of the fact that he is talking about things of which they have no comprehension at all ; at all events he tells them that there is such a study as 128 REAL MEANING OF LECTURES. [V. history. But I confess that I do not see my way to go much further, unless I may be allowed very much to modify the prescribed idea of a popular lecture. In the first place, as to lectures at all ; — that such oral teaching is an im- portant part of the discipline of education we are all bound to believe ; it is part of the system under which we have all grown up, and in a University course it is that one part of the system which is capable of the most development ; an implement which has been growing to perfection by the labours of many generations of tutors and professors. Yet of our best lectures, as well as of our worst, it may be cer- tainly said that that which a hearer carries away with him will be in exact and direct proportion to that which he brings : or that a lecture-system, unless it be added upon and followed up by independent reading, must be a deceptive and even useless system. Of course this is a platitude ; but just consider that, if this be true of us, and true of us in those very subjects in which we have been training ourselves ever since we were seven years old, how much stronger is the point of it when it is applied to lecture-audiences that have not studied their subject, that have not even the elements of the study made accessible to them before they come, and that have not yet the means of following up the lessons that are then first propounded to them. I fail to see that elementary lectures, short courses of elementary lectures, can convey anything to the mind of beginners, besides the most elementary teaching. Twelve lectures on the scale and plan of Mr. Freeman's Handbook of Universal History would no doubt contain the marrow and spirit of Universal History; but the working-man who could understand them at the first reading would be fit to be Prime Minister after a second course. If, then, elementary lecturing is ever to furnish material lessons to ignorant men, it must, I take it, go on in long and progressive courses, and V.] SPECIALISED LECTURING. 1 29 inculcate both patient hearing and the duty of independent reading. But, secondly, historical lecturing to uneducated people must surely begin by interesting them. And accord- ingly I would place the plan of lecturing on character and institutions, things in which every Englishman must almost of necessity feel his interest aroused as soon as he hears them, first; before the plan of elementary lectures to the people. Even where they do not see the direct application of the lesson, so offered, to their own circumstances, where there may be no such lesson, and no such application, they may be drawn to further study by a very inadequate ex- position of a noble life or of a great battle, or even by a historical survey of some scene with the landmarks of which they are familiar. When they are drawn to history, they will not be likely to wish their elementary lessons to be restricted to twelve or to a single course. Without then at all disparaging such a plan of elementary lecture, I feel certain that some preparation for it must be otherwise provided ; if that is to be by lecture, it must be something more directly addressed to our common humanity than an elementary lesson can be ; but I think that it must have begun at school, and that unless it has begun at school it will not do very much good. This is rather a dispiriting view for people who are too old to go to school ; but then we are not dependent on lectures altogether; there are books enough and to spare, and the man who wants to learn will find time to read. The moment however that people have, whether by reading at home or by hearing lectures, got beyond the elementary stage of historical study, my doubts about the expediency of popular lectures cease altogether ; and I am glad to say this because, in some of the remarks that I have made, you may have thought me unwisely cynical and inclined rather to discourage effort in this direction. Popular lectures to K 130 HISTORY IN SCHOOLS. [V. fairly well-educated people, who have not the time or the op- portunity of thorough courses of reading, must be valuable ; and the experiments which have been tried in some of our large manufacturing towns have been successful in a re- markable degree. I do not shut my eyes to the fact that in such schemes zeal often outruns discretion, that volunteer lecturers are far more likely to spring from the ranks of the unlearned than from the class that has grown old in con- vincing itself of its own ignorance, and that, as I have said of writing, it may be true of lecturing, the zeal for informing other people may arise from political feeling quite as often as from the benevolent desire of teaching them what is good for them. It is most unfortunate that such teaching should be one-sided : how one-sided it could be made we learned from the history of Mechanics' Institutes ; now we may hope that the exertions of the town clergy in their local societies are doing something to redress the balance ; and if I could see my way to an administration on sound principles, apart from party organisation, and in the hands of competent teachers, of such a scheme as that known as the University Extension Scheme, I should be inclined to hope very great things from it. I trust that it will be so shortly. If by these or any other plans we can induce men in authority to make the real teaching of History a part of the training of elementary schools, the first, and by no means the least, step will be taken towards furnishing the next generation of Englishmen with the means of exercising con- scientiously, honestly, and judicially, the great political power which is now lodged in their hands. They will learn how to vote, and how to guard against imposture, exaggeration, and unfairness in their leaders as well as in their opponents. And with real political awakening I shall trust that moral and religious progress will do more than keep pace. I go further ; if the study of History can really be made an edu- V.] THE DOOM OF RESEARCHERS. 131 cational implement in schools, it will raise up a generation who not only will know how to vote, but will bring a judg- ment, prepared, trained, and in its own sphere exercised and developed, to help them in all the great affairs of life. Therefore let us have lectures many and good, books few and good; but above all school teaching fair, honest, and thorough. Further I do not think we need look. I do not anticipate Englishmen ever becoming a nation of researchers. We may come, more of us, to love investigation for its own sake, and to love the study of History for the very exercise that it furnishes to our powers, and for the new regions of interest which expand before us as we proceed. Such study must however continue to be the portion of comparatively few, the few who have leisure, or who have the love in such strength as to enable them to overcome all obstacles. On them I trust the coming age will look more kindly than the present ; which has much praise for the mere material lesson, and worships the statuesque, the picturesque, and the dramatic, but certainly honours the inquirers, the researchers, with a scanty meed. It is an old, old story. Some of you may remember the passage in Saint Augustine's Confessions, the story he tells of one who was asked how the Deity, being from everlasting, was employed before the heavens and the earth were made ; the reply was ' joculariter,' the great doctor tells us, a very pretty repartee, 'Alta, inquit, scru- tantibus gehennas parabat.' He was preparing, to put it gently, a limbo for the advocates of research. ' Haec non respondeo,' says Augustine ; but there are people at all events in one house of parliament who seem to hold the same view : one is glad to see that their number is now reduced to twelve. K 2 VI. LEARNING AND LITERATURE AT THE COURT OP HENRY IL (June 11, 1878.) WE are at present suffering, and may for some little time to come continue to suffer, from a reaction against medievalism. I call it a reaction, for I think it is only caused by a recoil from modes of thought, art, and action, which have been pressed beyond reality, or have been pressed too rigorously. There are not wanting signs that even in architecture, in which the greatest and most per- manent traces of medieval genius are found, the world is growing a little impatient of Gothic buildings, whether as imitative creations or as the claimants of exclusive orthodoxy in their art ; in poetry it can scarcely be denied that the Arthurian legend has begun somewhat to pall upon most ears ; in ritual or ceremonial worship we see much of which we are tempted to ask whether it has any meaning whatever for nine out of every ten of those who profess to value it. The dear delightful middle ages are unfortunately growing into something like a by-word. We are perhaps witnessing the turn of the tide of fashion which set in with Sir Walter Scott, and found its great triumphs under Sir Gilbert ; of which, however, all that is real and natural and free will live, whilst that which is forced, unspontaneous and merely imita- tive, will not long continue to encumber the ground. If this be indeed the case, it will explain some things that touch the study of history. Three or four years ago I was RECOIL FROM MEDIEVALISM. 1 33 startled by the remark, which occurred in a review of Mr. Kitchin's History of France in the Athenccum, to the effect that all study of the early periods was thrown away, and that the true interest of history begins only where that history has begun to be illustrated by the genius of Mr. Carlyle. But I was scarcely prepared for the recommendation of my friend Professor Pearson, in his recent report on the subject of education to the government of Victoria, that the teaching of history in the Australian High Schools should begin with the year 1 700. And why ? because the ages that precede are so entirely unlike our own ; there were no railways, no large manufacturing towns, no newspapers to speak of, no such relations as now exist between Lords and Commons, no property tax, no taxation by excise, and a good deal of living religion, which religion exercised over the daily lives and political views of men an influence that is scarcely comprehensible at the present day. Such a theory, it seems to me, would go a long way to- wards dispensing with education altogether ; but the expres- sion of such a theory, if it be the result of anything else than a clever man's crotchets, is a mark of a reaction ; and such a reaction as is even painful to one who has spent the best years of his life in attempting to connect the several stages of his country's life and growth ; who believes that the age of railways, and excise and newspapers, would never have been had it not been for the free institutions and high ambitions that were nursed through the preceding ages, and that the present condition of the strength of the world is the direct and continuous result of historical growth and historical training. It is no wonder, I say, that to me, and those who have pursued the same line of study, this tendency should seem very much to be deprecated. I do not for a moment suppose that it is dangerous ; all experience, all belief in progress 134 HUMAN NATURE. [VI. and true culture, encourage me to believe that it is adven- titious. If Australia can content itself with the history of England since the reign of Queen Anne, America has found out long ago the mistake of crippling the historic instinct with any such limitation ; and American scholars, lawyers, and constitutionalists are working as zealously at the medieval forms as are the students of England, France, and Germany. And not only experience of the past and faith in the future, but sympathy with the historical world both past and future, if I may use such an expression, inclines me to a protest. Like the man in Terence, I say ' Humani nil a me alienum puto;' I have a sympathy with the struggles of the struggling ages, with the weariness of the weary ages, with the faith of the ages of faith, with the controversies of the ages of controversy, with the changes of the ages of change, with the light of the ages of illumination, with the darkness of the dark ages themselves. Nay, I am not sure that I may not some day have to profess myself a convert to the Unity of History and the Education of the World. For after all, human life is not essentially changed by railways or excise, or newspapers, or even by the property tax : the people be- fore the flood ate and drank, married and were given in marriage, planted and builded ; still Jacob finds his Rachel at the well, and David and Jonathan make their covenant to- gether, and David mourns for Absalom. Natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, have not done away with sin and sorrow, and, whatever evolution may have done in the producing of new types, those new types have not swept away the old. To go beyond and behind the ancients, what else do we find in Egypt, Babylon and Nineveh, in Japan, and in the China of immemorial sameness ? And as there is no history in which we do not find a sympathy, there is none in which we may not find a lesson. But to put aside generalities; the two or three truisms VI.] HENR V II. 135 which I have uttered, and the subject which I have chosen for these two lectures, are alike suggested by the discussion which we have seen recently carried on by Mr. Freeman and Mr. Froude on the subject of Thomas Becket. I am not going to interfere in a struggle between two such com- batants, nor shall I again refer to either of them, but the opposite lights in which those two champions approach the common subject, shed some rays on the fashion of thought which marks not only the two writers, or the two schools of which they may be supposed to be the dis- ciples, but the two ways of looking at the middle ages which divide cultivated men of the present day. And I have thought that I might, in attempting to sketch the literary life of an age, on which so many lights from various sides are now brought to bear, contribute somewhat, not perhaps to the true estimation of that age, but to a realisa- tion of, and sympathy with, the life of it, without which no estimation or even understanding of it can be thought possible. But the men of whom I am going to speak lived 700 years ago — 700 years; as long a time as separated them from Hengist and Horsa, or Hengist and Horsa from Alexander the Great, or Herodotus from the Trojan war ; or us our- selves perhaps from the New Zealander, who, on London Bridge, is to draw the conclusion that Thucydides ascribes to the toTs en-eiTQ and to recognise the disproportion between our ruins and our glory. It is true ; but the only thought that this suggests to me is that, if the New Zealander finds in the ruins of the British Museum half as many of the literary productions of our time, as we now possess of the reign of Henry II, the shades of the Victorian literati may, in the Elysian fields of the period, feel a thrill of satisfac- tion, and say that a great part of their life has escaped Libitina. 1$6 HENRY II. [VI. In truth, I would call your attention to a point which I have never seen fully set out ; the fact that the same age that originated the forms in which our national and constitu- tional life began to mould itself, was also an age of great literary activity; of very learned and acute men, and of culture enough to appreciate and conserve the fruits of their labours. We all know the debt that England owes to the great men of the thirteenth century, to its political, religious, and scholastic life : Simon de Montfort, Grosseteste, Edward I, and the rest; but I do not remember ever to have seen an estimate of the debt that the thirteenth owed to the twelfth, save and except in the recognition of Henry IFs constitutional work. I can now only attempt an outline of any such view as is needed for the purpose, but I think that, when I have briefly reviewed the period, you will allow that in other matters besides constitutional, the glories of the latter age were the result of, and not much in them- selves superior to, the glories of the former. I will begin with the king himself, for, as the medieval writers were never tired of quoting, ' vulgi turba movetur regis ad exemplar.' Henry II was by his very descent a champion of literary culture. Not to speak of his grand- father, Henry Beauclerc, whose clerkship was very probably of a very elementary sort, he was the lineal descendant of that Fulk the Good who had told King Lothar that ' Rex illiteratus ' was ' asinus coronatus.' He shared too those hereditary characteristics which so strongly marked his two uncles, Baldwin III and Amalric I, Kings of Jerusalem. Both of these princes were, according to William of Tyre, good scholars, and both extremely fond of history. Baldwin was the better professor ; Amalric the better examiner ; Baldwin the more serious and orthodox, Amalric the more superficial ; but both were students of history, and given to VI.] THE FAMILY TASTE FOR LEARNING. ltf reading and discussion — discussion which threatened now and then to go beyond the bounds of orthodoxy. Peter of Blois gives a similar character of Henry, and in words so nearly resembling those of William of Tyre that the two writers notably confirm one another's probability. And in Peter's sketch this feature comes in quite by the way, for he is describing Henry as a great huntsman. ' He has always in his hands bows and arrows, swords and hunting spears, save when he is busy in council or over his books. For as often as he can get breathing time amid his business cares, he occupies himself with private reading, or takes pains in working out some knotty question among his clerks. Your king,' he is writing to the Archbishop of Palermo, ' is a good scholar, but ours is far better ; I know the abilities and accomplishments of both. You know that the King of Sicily was my pupil for a year; you yourself taught him the elements of verse-making and literary composition ; from me he had further and deeper lessons, but as soon as I left the kingdom he threw away his books and took to the easy-going ways of the court. But with the King of England there is school every day, constant conversation of the best scholars and discussion of questions.' He had indeed been well taught; notwithstanding the troubled times in which his youth had been trained, he had learned literature at Bristol Castle in the household of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester; his tutor Matthew, who probably was identical with the officer entitled, in a few records of his reign, his chancellor, took him in charge when he was nine and kept him close at work for four years ; there doubtless he had the acquaintance of Gilbert Foliot, then Abbot of Gloucester, certainly one of the ablest politicians as well as of the best scholars of the time ; whilst, when political affairs allowed it, he might learn somewhat more under the eye of Archbishop Theobald 138 LEARNED MEN ABOUT COURT. [VI. of Canterbury, the patron of Vacarius the lawyer and John of Salisbury the philosopher. The hereditary taste for history may perhaps, to some extent, account for the considerable number of independent historians who flourished under him ; such chroniclers as those known by the name of Benedict of Peterborough, and Roger of Hoveden, bear intrinsic marks of having been royal historiographers; one distinguished officer of the Exchequer, Master Thomas Brown, kept a Roll on which were entered all the doings of the king: Richard FitzNeal, the High Treasurer of the Exchequer, composed a similar book, the Tricolumnis, in which he kept a regular register of Henry's acts and of the public documents of the time. There was, as we shall see presently, a fashion for writing history. But not only so ; Henry was also a lawyer. Very early in his reign we find him, in the Chronicle of Battle, dic- tating a new form of writ; he heard and decided law suits, he took an active part in devising budgets, he took an independent line on religious toleration, and refused to persecute. All these are signs of general enlightenment, but the man is even better known by his friends. Becket indeed was no great scholar in the early days when the king treated him as an equal and confidential friend, but later in life, when we find Henry choosing for companions such men as Hugh of Lincoln and Baldwin of Canterbury, both of them as remarkable for learning and eloquence as for piety, or even Giraldus Cambrensis, who had a fund of humour and cleverness that is as noteworthy as his ex- tensive reading; or Peter of Blois, who acted for some time as the king's secretary, and, with all his time-serving and self-seeking, was a distinctly learned man in both history and theology, we feel sure that Henry was neither the mere voluptuary that his enemies represented him, nor VI.] ELEANOR AND HER SONS. I39 merely the man of business that his more lasting works prove him to have been. It has been the fashion to suppose that some literary influences were brought into England from Southern France by Queen Eleanor, and that it was from her that Richard, and perhaps John also, inherited some instincts of the kind. But I confess that, as against the claims of her husband, Eleanor's title to our gratitude depends very much on con- jecture, and partly on a confusion between Aquitanian and Provencal civilisation. That Eleanor was a clever and cultivated companion for her husband we may accept as a matter of course, and she probably would have some share in the early education of her sons; but they were very soon removed from her influence, and after the year 1 1 73 she probably saw very little of either them or her husband : whilst in England, court or country, her direct influence could never have been comparable with that of the king. As for her judgments in the Courts of Love, I suppose, we may safely relegate them to the regions of romance, and if they were authentic they would not prove much as to her literary culture. But we may, I think, confidently assume that she was a well-educated woman for those days, and that in her long captivity she had something else to amuse herself with besides needlework. A woman who, after twelve years of seclusion, could come out of prison not only fit to take the reins of govern- ment during a short interregnum, but able to exercise great influence in European politics until she was nearly eighty years old, must have possessed not merely vitality and ability, but mental resources also of no ordinary character. However this may have been, some of her children, if not all, were educated with care, and appear as either possessed of learning themselves or as the patrons of learned 140 HENRY AND RICHARD. [VI. men. Henry, the eldest son, was, as we are told, devoted to arms; if he was not equally accomplished in letters it was not because such accomplishments were undervalued by the people whom he was expected to rule. There is among the letters of Peter of Blois an epistle written in the name of Rotrou, archbishop of Rouen, and at the ex- press wish of the Norman bishops, urging in strong terms, and by cogent examples, the importance of a literary training for a young prince. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, King David, Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian, and Leo are pressed into the service. No doubt the advice was taken ; but the stormy career of the younger Henry does not afford many indications of its results. One book we know, a book unfortunately lost, was especially written for his amusement. Gervase of Tilbury, who, many years after Henry's death, wrote for his grandson, the Emperor Otto, the Otia Imperialia, tells us that he wrote a Liber Facetiarum for the young king, in which no doubt he collected the amusing stories of the popes and emperors that were current at the time, some of which are probably preserved for us in the pages of Ralph de Diceto. It is possible that the Otia Imperialia were originally drawn up for the instruction of the same prince. It is curious, how- ever, that in none of the panegyrics of this unfortunate boy is any special stress laid on his knowledge of letters, and it is even possible that the epistle of Archbishop Rotrou was intended as a remonstrance against the ex- clusively military training of the heir to the crown; cer- tainly Thomas Becket, to whose care he is said to have been committed in his youth, would, at that period of his career, have been better qualified to instruct him in arms than in letters. With Richard it was otherwise. In his case we must certainly allow some amount of literary knowledge and VI.] HENRY AND RICHARD. 141 skill. We may not perhaps credit him with the quota- tions from the classical poets which the historians of the third crusade put in his mouth, but we cannot refuse to believe those writers when they tell us of the lampoons of the king's own composition which were sung in the camp in contempt of the Duke of Burgundy; and the stream of time, in which so many more precious things have been submerged, has brought down to us some few sirventes or satiric lays that entitle Richard to the name of a trouvere. His education in the south of France no doubt qualified him for such compositions ; but his father's foreign dominions may also have furnished him with more valuable instruction. At the schools of Tours his half- brother Geoffrey was educated, and there Richard himself may have obtained the elements of that 'scientia' which is markedly ascribed to him in contrast with his brothers. Of Geoffrey of Brittany we know no more than that he was an accomplished knight. John's reputation for scholar- ship seems to rest on the fact that he once borrowed a book of the Abbot of S. Alban's. But the real interest of such inquiries does not lie in the question whether such and such kings could read or write, but in the general character of the court which was kept about them; the king might be illiterate, but if the court around him was full of learned men we may safely infer that the central figure was no contemner of learning. Of the king's daughters we know little more than that they were all married to princes who took a conspicuous place among the pioneers of medieval culture. Matilda, the eldest, was the wife of Henry of Saxony, who was not only a great conqueror but a great traveller and collector of chronicles; Eleanor, the second, married King Alfonso of Castile, the founder of the University of Palencia ; and Johanna, the youngest, William, the good king of Sicily, who was not only, as we have seen, I, to see what the world was like, or like the admirable Crichton to air his own erudition and try the mettle of English scholars in literary tournaments, or like John of Salisbury to gather all the knowledge that he could, how would he fare ? He would land, we suppose, at Dover and be lodged in the Benedictine Priory there, where he would find that his visit was recorded among the visits of kings and ambassadors in a precious VII.] AN ITER ANGLICUM. l6j chronicle that embodied the annals of all public events and copies of public documents ; then he would go on to Canter- bury, where he would find himself at once in a great literary centre, with teachers and libraries and all appliances that stand to the population and society of the day in much the same proportion as the literary life of Oxford or Cambridge would at this moment. He would find Gervase, the sacrist, busy over the chronicles of the kings and the history of his own time ; Nigel writing his verses, polishing the great medieval satire Burnellus, or inditing the prose letter in which he castigates the faults of the secular clergy ; a monk in a strictish convent, but corresponding with the ministers of a powerful and politic court : there too he would find Odo the prior, a great theologian, William the sub-prior and Edward Grim, biographers of S. Thomas ; if he came after 1 1 86 he would find the whole convent busily writing Latin letters, letters in very fair grammatical Latin, garnished with quotations from Ovid and Lucan and the laws canon and civil. If he went on to Rochester, there he would be enter- tained by Archdeacon Paris, the nephew of Robert Pullus, possibly a near kinsman of the great chronicler of the next age ; there he might find Bishop Glanville, the preacher of the Third Crusade, one of the learned pupils of S. Thomas, and close kinsman of the great lawyer ; or if he went on to Chichester, he would fall in with the Dean Matthew, or Jordan, or Gervase, all of them members of the same company, and Herbert of Bosham in the close neighbourhood, the squire parson of the time, also a careful and admiring biographer. Going on to Winchester, he would be enter- tained either by the venerable Bishop Henry, whose memory was a very storehouse of history; the grandson of the Conqueror and depository of all the great traditions of the generation, the king-maker of the twelfth century, who also had his learned men around him ; or by Richard of Ilchester, 1 68 CANTERBURY TO EXETER. [VII. the confidential minister of the king, himself no mean adept in the writing of historical dispatches ; Richard of Devizes is there too writing the history of his time ; further on, at Salisbury, another of the eminent ministers is the dean, John of Oxford, a traveller, and lawyer and divine, a man whose very name suggests that he might have been one of the first magistri of his own University : possibly John of Salisbury might be there too, or Reginald, the bishop's son, as arch- deacon or bishop, a most intelligent and travelled diplomatist. At Exeter, early in the reign, he would find Bishop Bar- tholomew, the famous preacher and canonist, Baldwin, the archdeacon and scholasticus, afterwards archbishop and crusader, with his brother Joseph, the poet, who attempted in an Hexameter Epic to rival the glories of Virgil, and in his lost Antiocheis to build up a poetic memorial of the First Crusade ; no mean poet, although ambitious, but con- sidered worthy to rank with the classics edited, in usum serenissimi Delphini, with Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia. But if our friend was bent northwards, we might take him at once to London and introduce him to the Dean and Chapter of S. Paul's or the great Bishop Foliot and the king's court. At S. Paul's he would meet, ten to one, not only the lord mayor, aldermen, and justices, whom the canon in residence was specially bound to entertain, but any dis- tinguished strangers who happened to be in town : the venerable old dean, Ralph de Diceto, would show him the beautiful MS. of his Ymagines ; from the canon Richard, the high treasurer, he might learn the history of the Exchequer, or even borrow the precious Tricolumnis before it was lost ; Peter of Blois would be grumbling at the small profits of his archdeaconry, but wisely putting his pen to good interest ; Roger Niger perhaps just flying from the wrath of the king, whom he has exasperated by savage invective ; and VII.] LONDON AND THE COURT. 1 69 the great Foliot himself, the able statesman who pitted all his skill, experience, and learning against the zeal of Becket and lost the game, at least in the opinion of his contemporaries. At the court would be Ranulf Glanville, the father of the study of English common law, and the astute band of justices who shared with him the confidence of the most sagacious and business-like of kings. Our friend would find the historical mind fairly well awake to the importance of the era in which it found itself : the author of the Gesta Regis Henrici may not yet have chosen to be anonymous, but have been keeping a busy account from day to day of the king's doings ; Thomas Brown would be there with his roll, and Peter of Blois moralising ' de Praestigiis fortunae,' on the magic tricks of Fortune exemplified in the career of his royal patron ; and the author perhaps of the Draco Normannicus awaiting a reward for panegyrising the old Empress Maud; not to speak again of Ralph de Diceto and Gervase of Tilbury. At Westminster he would fall in with the Abbot Laurence, a theologian of some note in those days when almost every learned man was a theologian. In London indeed, or at Westminster, all the men whom I have mentioned might at any stirring time be found together : William Fitz Stephen, the biographer of Becket, possibly becoming a judge after he had tried his fortune as a scholar, but known to us by the lively picture which he has drawn of London in his own days ; Giraldus Cambrensis, the erratic Norman- Welshman, who, as he would be looked for everywhere, might safely be caught near the king ; even Roger of Hoveden, the learned Rector of Howden and chronicler of the north, but a king's chaplain and occasional justice of the forest. Time would fail him to learn even the names of all the subordinate scholars of London : he goes on northwards by S. Alban's and Peterborough. Nothing is more curious than the lively historic activity 170 LONDON TO LINCOLN. [VII. going on in the monasteries : MSS. are copied, luxurious editions are recopied and illuminated ; there is no lack of generosity in lending or of boldness in borrowing ; there is brisk competition and liberal open rivalry. S. Alban's is especially rich in the collected materials that lie at the foundation of her great code of chronicles. At Peterborough Abbot Benedict is equally busy, directing transcription and compiling or editing his own recollections of S. Thomas ; but every little monastery has its record : Crowland is thinking of hiring Peter of Blois, or some pretended Peter who borrows an illustrious name, to fabricate for her an apocryphal chronicle ; at Ramsey there is an invaluable chronicle kept, going far back into the old English times, and there is the same at Ely conducted by a succession of learned and patriotic monks. But at Peterborough the pen has just dropped from the hand of the native annalists. Coming to Lincoln, there is Walter Map with his poems and stories about the courtiers, acting as archdeacon or precentor ; the wise S. Hugh himself, the bishop, has stories to tell at the high table in the hall, and admiring disciples anxious to gather up every word that falls from his lips. So our friend goes on into Yorkshire ; if he stays at Howden by the way he may be put under contribution by the rector and made to tell what marvellous tale he can tell about his own country; perhaps to compare notes about the news from Constantinople, or the story of the enchantment that guided the storms in the Gulf of Satalia, or the last enormity of Swerre Birkbain and the fellow kings of Norway. For Roger of Hoveden is quite Herodotean both in the faithfulness of his personal relations and in the wish to incorporate in his chronicle all that he can gather touching the geography and history of strange lands. Going on -to York, the traveller finds himself in the midst of legal con- troversies ; there had been good schools there once, but the VII.] YORK AND YORKSHIRE. 171 head master was lost in a storm at sea in 1 177, and since then the canons have taken to quarrelling. There have always been two parties there and some black sheep in the flock. The archbishop too, since Becket's death, has been under a cloud, so the chapter is at sixes and sevens. Peter of Blois looks in occasionally when in residence at Ripon, and Hubert Walter, the dean, tries to keep matters fairly well together, but there are quarrels even within the precincts of the church, and in more than one case there are rival claimants for the same stall : on one solemn occasion the precentor stops the music to spite the treasurer, the treasurer puts out the lights to be even with the precentor. But, notwithstanding, there are quiet pens taking notes ; and a good deal of York news filters into the general history. There is the biographer of the archbishops, one or more than one; not far off, at Newburgh, in the Augustinian priory, is William, the little inquisitive and intelligent canon, who is writing a history of England, not in the mere receptive spirit of the annalist like Hoveden, nor in the didactic style of William of Malmes- bury, but like a thoughtful man who wishes to trace the origins and tendencies of the events that he records, who weighs his epithets and suspends his judgments, and, whilst he admits the marvellous, argues only when and where he has sufficient data. If William of Newburgh ever comes up to York, depend upon it he is well received by all the thoughtful men. The Prior of Hexham too is ex officio a canon of York, and he also is, as his predecessor was, a writer of history strikingly in advance of Lhe mere annotator of annals. If the visitor can be prevailed on to go so far north as Hexham, he may even reach Melrose, and there watch the process of annal making, and come home by Durham. There he will find a magnificent court under Bishop Hugh, the great prince prelate of the period, who lives in three-quarters 172 LOST BOOKS. [VII. independence between the kings of Scots and English ; and in his train poets, preachers and writers of histories, who are one after another continuing the work which had been begun by Bede, and continued after long breaks by Simeon and the Hexham writers. And so, having completely traversed the literary world of England, he may come south, through either the eastern or the western counties, sure to find at every monastery or cathedral he may visit some one employed in keeping up the record of public as well as local history, or otherwise attempting to keep alive the fire of literary zeal. He would go away, I think, from such a view with the impression that, whatever drawbacks there might be to the full enjoyment of life, England was a paradise of clerks. True, the cruel legate, Hugeson, had betrayed them to the king, had actually yielded the point, that most important point, about the forest law, and allowed the king to prosecute clerical offenders against the peace of the king's venison, and have them hauled before the sheriffs in the county court ; — but that was the only drawback to the free enjoyment of clerical society. So far as books were concerned, there was such a supply of writers and readers as would be found nowhere else in Europe, except in the University of Paris itself. Such an impression, I take it, would not be far from the truth : for the extant remains of the literary work of the period are so great, that, if we suppose them to bear the ordinary proportion to the lost works of the same age, they would prove it to be enormously prolific. I do not claim for it such a distinction, because I think that most of what was really worth preserving has been preserved ; preserved because the men whose task it was to take care of it were sensible that it was the work of an age of transcendent im- portance in every region of English life; constitutional, moral and intellectual. VII.] LA TIN POEMS. 1 7 3 The greater works of the time survived not only because they were the most famous works of the time, but because they were of really great value. Thus Glanville's work on the Laws became the manual and text-book of the lawyers ; the Dialogus de Scaccario the standing order book of the high Court of Exchequer ; the annals of Roger Hoveden the recognised book of authoritative chronicle record, to which, whenever a question of foreign policy or even domestic diplomacy arose, recourse might at once be had. That the lawyers and statesmen of the day were not above the study of history may be proved by the later use of these and the like chronicles ; especially when Stephen Langton produced the Charter of Henry I before the barons at S. Paul's, or when Edward I consulted all the cathedral and monastic chronicles of England in order to ascertain the true nature and extent of his claims over Scotland ; or when Edward III elaborated his claim to France ; or when the Commission of Doctors at Westminster searched all chronicles for informa- tion on the pedigree of the house of Lancaster ; or when Beaufort and Gloucester explored them to ascertain the constitutional position of a regent; or when, to crown all, poor Henry VI, who probably was the best historical scholar in his divided realm, was requested by the lords of his parliament to search, out of the chronicles which he had loved so well, the materials by which they might come to the conclusion that he was a traitor and a usurper. There have been, as I said, losses; but it may well be that the great value of the works that have survived may lead us somewhat to exaggerate the worth of those which have perished ; the Antiocheis of Joseph of Exeter, the Tricolumnis of Bishop Richard, the de Praestigiis Fortunae of Peter of Blois, the Liber Facetiarum of Gervase of Tilbury may not have been so permanently important as we should suppose; but there is no question of the serious 174 LATIN POEMS. [VII. importance of the lost leaves of the Gesta Stephani or the Draco Normannicus. I have, you may observe, given prominence in this lecture to certain names and certain sorts of names. I have given them prominence because it was desireable, even at the risk of repetition, to impress them on the memory, even if it should prove impossible to form or fix any individual con- ception of them : they are the greatest names, and the names of those who have left the most precious books behind them. But they are very far from all ; a reference to some such book as Mr. Wright's Biographia Britannica Literaria would furnish a long list of names of men who have places in the bibliographies ; both historians, philosophers and naturalists, according to the idea of those days. If we turn, too, to Leyser's Bibliotheca Poetica we find many names of English poets, Englishmen, that is, who wrote Latin verses, but of whom little else is really known, and whose verses are neither in manner nor matter so good as the poorest prose of the period. Geoffrey Vinsauf, who no doubt was the best known Latin poet of the time, has left no personal history; his work, framed on the Epistle to the Pisos, is by no means to be despised as a guide to the medieval ideal of Latin poetry, nor is it a mean work in itself. But the average of the poetry, with that exception and the Trojan War of Joseph of Exeter, is low, whether we look at the classical forms followed by these writers and some of the satirists or at the rhymed Latin poems of which Walter Map was so fertile a producer. A great many of the good prose writers, however, attempted versification. We have, starting with Henry of Huntingdon, a generation earlier, a fair list of good scholars who thought verse the best medium of enthusiastic panegyric. John of Salisbury mingles encomium and sarcasm in his Entheticus, a book in which he has described in enigmatic language most of the courtiers of the time, with praise or dispraise. William VII.] LATIN PROSE. 1 75 Fitz-Stephen, the biographer of Becket, courted the ear of Henry II with a poem which he presented to him at Brill, and which seems to have been so far successful that the king pardoned him for his adherence to the archbishop ; Giraldus Cambrensis wrote epigrams, Walter Map hymns and poems of edification as well as satires ; the author of the Dialogus de Scaccario and the Latin biographer of Richard I both run into what would be doggerel if it were not Latin, apparently out of the very glee of their hearts and devotion to their subject-matter. But as every one who could write prose thought that he could write verse, and as good Latin verse required a some- what higher strain than passable Latin prose, it is not surprising that the verse has been mostly forgotten. The question then which this point seems to suggest, to what did it all come, what amount of real, critical, and literary culture does this great mass of Latin writing truly imply? must be answered thus : The Latin of the twelfth century is fairly good and grammatical Latin; adjective agrees with substantive and verb with its nominative case; ut governs the sub- junctive, and the dependent sentence follows the mood and tense prescribed by the principal sentence. There is a great fertility of vocabulary, there are frequent and consistent uses of words which in classical Latin are somewhat rare, as if the writer prided himself on knowing how to use dumtaxat and quippe and utpote, and brought them in at every turn : but even here there is nothing that is laboured; the Latin, if too free, is scarcely ever unnatural. It is Latin written as by men who on literary matters talked and thought in Latin ; it is not a dead but a living language, senescent, perhaps, but in a green old age. The more pretentious writers, like Peter of Blois, wrote perhaps with fewer solecisms but with more pedantry, and certainly lost freedom by straining after elegance. 1 7 6 LA TIN PR OSE. [VII. Just think now what this common familiarity with Latin implies. It implies almost as ready a hold on all the great works of antiquity as the power of reading English at the present day implies with respect to our own national classics. To John of Salisbury, after his twelve years of study, all the writings of the Latin historians, poets and orators, the Christian fathers, the legists and the canonists, were not more ready of access than they were to the practical administrator, who could write freely and plainly an account of the details of his official board. This facility of learning was limited only by the scarcity of books ; a very fatal limitation, but not half so fatal as the common fault of these days, when there are so many more books than there are readers with a will to read. All these writers of Latin were readers of Latin, and many of them read a great deal. John of Salisbury's reading certainly rivalled that of Burton, the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, and his power of reference and quotation was assuredly not inferior. As he worked among the classics, Ralph de Diceto worked among the historians of the silver and later age ; Aulus Gellius and Seneca, I will venture to say, were commoner books in the hands of ordinary readers then than now: as for the poets, I have spoken before. The great Roman historians were, I fear, less directly known. Some parts of Caesar's Commentaries, Suetonius, Florus, Eutropius, Justin, were, I think, directly known ; I question whether Livy or Tacitus was ; except so much as had filtered through the Historia Miscella, or the translations and additions to the Chronicon of Eusebius. Seneca certainly was read and utilised ; there is indeed a manuscript of Seneca which contains on a fly-leaf a trace of having been at the English court about this very time. But John of Salisbury's acquaintance with Roman literature can only be estimated by a careful reading of the Polycraticus ; but we must remember that what he could read was at least within the reach of his contemporaries. VII.] I'ERNACULAR WRITERS. 1 77 I have not said much in these lectures about the vernacular writers of the reign, whether of the Norman or English race ; for indeed they can hardly as yet be said to be literary people. But I must not finish without a word about them, lest I should' be thought to undervalue them. The poem of Jordan Fan- tosme, on the rebellion of the sons of Henry in 11 73 and 1 1 74; the poem on the Conquest of Ireland; the original French poem of Ambrose, on which the Gesta Ricardi are founded ; the Life of S. Thomas of Canterbury, by Gamier of Pont S. Maxence ; the valuable poetic chronicle of Benedict of S. Maur, are the beginnings of a new literature the value of which is prospective; predecessors of Villehardouin and Joinville and the Chronique d'Outremer, after the law, if there be such a law, that in the development of a vernacular literature poetry takes precedence of prose. I sometimes think that the growth of this school or schools of com- . position was owing to the increased interest taken by women in the history of their country ; certainly the spread and strengthening of it tends to show that the classes to whom the use of Latin, except in the Church services, was becoming less and less familiar, were beginning to care to have a literature of their own. It shows, moreover, taken in con- nexion with that deadly liveliness of the Latin poetry which I have adverted to, that, whilst Latin was still a ready enough medium for serious writing, it was necessary to find some- thing better and freer than Latin verse to interest people. Medieval Latin prose never dies out ; medieval Latin verse continues to live only as a pedantic and attenuated survival from the moment that either Norman French or medieval English poetry comes into fashion. Into these fields of in- vestigation I do not now propose to intrude. I shall have done something to reconcile myself with the perfunctory and superficial way in which alone my irksome duty on these occasions can be discharged, if I have called your attention N 178 CONCLUSION. to the literary side of a period of our history which, although it may be the fashion to regard it as obscure and barbarous, still contains the germination and early growth of institutions which are vital portions of our national existence. An age so important as that of Henry II in constitutional growth could not be an age of barrenness and deadness in any department of culture, altogether; that it was not is amply proved not only by the remains of literary work which are still preserved to us, but by the glimpse they give us into circles of scholar-like activity, a highly stimulated growth of literature, and an extent of education which we ought to be the last to undervalue. VIII. THE MEDIEVAL KINGDOMS OP CYPRUS AND ARMENIA. (Oct. 26 and 29, 1878.) I HOPE that I need not apologise for my choice of a subject. The events of the last two years can scarcely be called to mind without much misgiving, both as to the way in which they have been construed by contemporary readers, and as to the way in which they will be judged by history. I am not one of those who hold that the main- tenance of an opinion contrary to their own belief, implies either moral delinquency or mental imbecility. I have been quite prepared to admit that two honest men, equally gifted and alike trying to be impartial, may come to diametrically opposite conclusions from the same evidence. But it is sickening to see the policy of a statesman, still more to see the question of a fact, debated, maintained or contradicted, by advocates whose arguments are not based upon attempts to find out the truth, but are simply weapons of attack and defence. ' This is to be believed because it suits the party ; this is to be discredited because it would damage the party: this is true because Pericles has said it ; this is false, or why should Alcibiades, or Cleon, or whoever it may be, have called heaven and earth to witness that it is true?' It will be a good thing if, after so much that is disheartening in the popular treatment of great questions, even one little benefit may be secured. Whatever may be thought of the Anglo- Turkish Convention, on whatever grounds, moral or political, N 2 l8o THE CRUSADES. [VI II. we may determine that the salvation of Turkey is possible, or that Cyprus is an unhealthy island, a professor of History may draw some little comfort from the fact that the attention of people has been called to a portion of the history of Christendom of which little notice has been taken of late years, and which is closely connected with one of the greatest movements that ever affected the history of the world. Having said this, I will add that my object in this lecture is not to ventilate dogmas, to impress any principle, moral or political, or to justify any foregone conclusion. I plead guilty to the charge brought against me of choosing subjects which are of no importance to any human being ; I wish simply to talk about a subject on which a good deal of in- telligent interest has arisen, and in the further discussion of which many fresh points of interest may be expected to present themselves. It is right, however, that I should preface one word of caution against myself. The Crusades are not, in my mind, either the popular delusions that our cheap literature has de- termined them to be, >nor papal conspiracies against kings and peoples, as they appear to the Protestant controversialist ; nor the savage outbreaks of expiring barbarism thirsting for blood and plunder, nor volcanic explosions of religious in- tolerance. I believe them to have been, in their deep sources, and in the minds of their best champions, and in the main tendency of their results, capable of ample justification. They were the first great effort of medieval life to go beyond the pursuit of selfish and isolated ambitions ; they were the trial- feat of the young world, essaying to use, to the glory of God and the benefit of man, the arms of its new knighthood. That they failed in their direct object is only what may be alleged against almost every great design which the great disposer of events has moulded to help the world's progress ; for the world has grown wise by the experience of failure, VIII.] THE LEVANTINE KINGDOMS. 1 8 1 rather than by the winning of high aims. That the good they did was largely leavened with evil may be said of every war that has ever been waged ; that bad men rose by them while good men fell is, and must be, true wherever and when- ever the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. But that in the end they were a benefit to the world no one who reads can doubt ; and that in their course they brought out a love for all that is heroic in human nature, the love of freedom, the honour of prowess, sympathy with sorrow, per- severance to the last, and patient endurance without hope, the chronicles of the age abundantly prove ; proving, more- over, that it was by the experience of those times that the forms of those virtues were realised and presented to posterity. This much I say, by way of a caution, that you may not accuse me of an attempt to impose upon you. The history of the Crusades has always had for me an interest that quite rivals all the interest I could take in the history of the Greeks and Romans ; and very much of that interest is of the same sort ; a half archaeological interest in a life and growth from which we have ourselves received some great impulses, but almost all the minutiae of which are important only through their connexion with those great impulses. Such a half archaeological interest I hope you may feel in the history of medieval Cyprus, and what little is to be told of its sister kingdom. The last decade of the twelfth century saw the establish- ment of two small Christian kingdoms in the Levant, which long outlived all other relics of the Crusades except the military orders; and which, with very little help from the West, sustained a hazardous existence in complete contrast with almost everything around them. The kingdoms of Cyprus and Armenia have a history very closely intertwined, but their origin and most of their circumstances were very .different. i8a ARMENIA. [VIII. By Armenia as a kingdom, is meant little more than the ancient Cilicia, the land between Taurus and the sea, from the frontier of the principality of Antioch, eastward, to Kelen- deris or Palseopolis, a little beyond Seleucia ; this territory, which was computed to contain sixteen days' journey in length, measured from four miles of Antioch, by two in breadth, was separated from the Greater Armenia, which before the period on which we are employed had fallen under the sway of the Seljuks, by the ridges of Taurus 1 . The population was composed '-largely of the sweepings of Asia Minor, Christian tribes which had taken refuge in the moun- tains. Their religion was partly Greek, partly Armenian, for the Armenian Catholicos, after resting for a century and a half in Mesopotamia, took refuge at Sis, and founded there an independent or national Catholicate at the close of the thirteenth 2 century. Their rulers were princes descended from the house of the Bagratidae, who had governed the Greater Armenia as kings from the year 885 to the reign of Constantine Monomachus, and had then merged their hazardous independence in the mass of the Greek empire 1 . 1 The boundaries of Armenia at its greatest extension are thus given by Du Laurier, in the Armenian volume of the Recueil des Historiens des Croisades, pp. xix. sq.: — Westward, Side or Eski-Adalieh ; eastward, the Pylse Cilicia-, or passes of the mountains close to the gulf of Alexandretta. The custom-house, towards Iconium, was at Pilcrga, and the passes westward were at Germanicopolis and Claudiopolis. ' J The Catholicate was without fixed residence from 1066-1114; it was then settled at Hrom-Gla, on the Euphrates, in the principality of Edessa, where it remained until 1292, when it settled at Sis. 3 The Armenian histoiians describe the Greater Armenia after the fall of the Arsacidse, under Arsaces IV, A.I). 387, as divided between Persia and Byzantium ; the Arsacide rulers governing as tributaries until 428. Erom 428 to 625 it was governed by Persian governors, ' Marzbans,' frequently native Armenians of the house of the Bagratidae; from 632 by a Curopalates or patrician named at Constantinople, sometimes by the patriarch, sometimes by the Khalif. In 885 the liagratide, Aschod I, was recognised by the Khalif Motamed as king, VIII.] ARMENIA. 183 After the seizure of Asia Minor by the Seljuks, the few of the Bagratidse who had retained possession of the mountain fastnesses of Cilicia or the strongholds of Mesopotamia, acted as independent lords, showing little respect for Byzantium save where there was something to be gained. Such was the lord Taphnuz of Edessa, on whose inheritance Baldwin of Boulogne founded his principality; such were the lords Leo, Thoros, Melier, and Rupin of the Mountains, who ruled Cilicia during the twelfth century; trying to balance their position between the Byzantine and Latin influences on each side of them. Rupin of the Mountain was prince at the time of the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin ; he died in 1 189, and his successor, Leo or Livon, after having success- fully courted the favour of pope and emperor, was recognised as king of Armenia by the emperor Henry VI, and crowned by Conrad of Wittelsbach, archbishop of Mainz, in 1198. This act, which, although Livon forfeited his position by obtaining recognition from Alexius Angelus, implied a cessation of the old dependence on Byzantium and an ecclesiastical reconciliation with Rome, was the typical act of Armenian history; the whole of which, save and except the defence against the Saracens and the Tartars of a later date, was an attempt to secure independence by skilful balancing of Greek and Roman influences; to obtain money and was crowned. His successors were Sempad I, 890; Aschod II, 914; Apas, 92S; Aschod III, the Merciful, 952; Sempad II, 977; Kakig 1,989; John Sempad and Aschod IV, 1020; Interregnum, 1040; Kakig II, 1042. Kakig gave up his kingdom to Constantine Mono- machus in 1045, and was murdered in 1079 These kings reigned at Ani. There was another principality at Kars, which surrendered to Constantine Ducas in 1004. Senekerim John, king of Vasburagan, had, in 1021, surrendered to Basil II, and received Sebaste in Cap- padocia; and Abelgarib had Tarsus as a separate lordship from Constantine Monomachus in 1042. The Bagratidse claimed an Israelite origin. S. Martin, Meinoires llislorkmes et Geographiques sur l'Armenie. 184 CYPRUS. [VIII. from the West and arms from Constantinople, to obtain alternate alliances by royal marriages, and ecclesiastical freedom by regular variations between the two poles. For this latter policy the position of the Armenian Church was peculiarly fitted. It was so far schismatic as not to be integrally a portion of either Roman or Byzantine obedience, and so little heretical that its alliance was courted by both communions. Hence its importance in the conciliar history of the middle ages ; an importance which has no sufficient parallel in the secular history of Armenia. The origin of the Latin kingdom of Cyprus is less obscure and more romantic. Cyprus had been seized by the Arabs in the early days of Islam (cir. 700-cir. 963), but recovered for the empire by Nicephorus Phocas, and ruled by dukes down to the reign of Manuel Comnenus. Its population was a mixed one ; there were Griffons or Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, Maronites, native Cypriots, Greek parceci, emanci- pated slaves, the descendants of Albanian soldiery of the empire, and of Venetian emigrants of the first Crusade. But the land was fertile, and they had dwelt together in peace. In the reign of Manuel the happy days of Cyprus ended and the period of calamity began. According to the anchorite Neophytus, who wrote the tract ' de Calamitatibus Cypri,' the native authority for the conquest by Richard Cceur de Lion, Isaac Comnenus, a nephew of the emperor Manuel, had been appointed by him to rule the Armenian frontier ; he had quarreled with the Armenians, been taken prisoner and sold to the Latins; that is, to Bohemond III of Antioch, whose step-father, Reginald of Chatillon, had many years before ravaged the isle of Cyprus in revenge for the hostility of Manuel Comnenus. He was ransomed from captivity by the emperor Andronicus, and, about the year 1 1 84, came to Cyprus and set up an independent tyranny. He called himself ftaat\(vs, but ruled as a despot of the VIIIJ RICHARD I. 1H5 worst order. All the better class of Greek inhabitants fled to Constantinople; and the state of Cyprus under Isaac Comnenus was only paralleled by that of Jerusalem under Saladin. On the evidence of Neophytus, Richard of England came not as a freebooter, but as a deliverer from utter misery. In this point there is a fair consensus of Eastern and Western testimony. Richard seized Cyprus not as a pirate, but as an avenger and emancipator. The story is short, or may be made so. After wintering at Messina, Richard having with him, in his fleet, not in his ship, his betrothed wife Berengaria and his sister, queen Johanna of Sicily, sailed for Acre on the 10th of April, 1191; the fleet was dispersed by a storm on Good Friday, April 1 2 ; and Richard, after being obliged to land at Rhodes, was driven by a second storm on the 1st of May into the Gulf of Satalia. Before this day the queens had appeared off Cyprus, and found anchorage off Limasol. Isaac had attempted by courteous offers to get them into his power, but his hospitality was presented in so military a fashion, that the guardians of the royal ladies took fright, and avoided landing. On the very day on which they were obliged to promise that they would go on shore, Richard's ship came in sight. His first act was to demand from Isaac an account of the treatment of the wrecked vessels which had been driven on the coast of the island and plundered by the emperor. Isaac replied contumeliously, and Richard landed in force. On the 6th of May Limasol was taken : the emperor was unhorsed by Richard in single combat, and fled to Nicosia. On the 12th of May Richard and Berengaria were married at Limasol ; and Berengaria was there crowned, not queen of Cyprus, for the island was not yet taken or claimed, but queen of the English. Negotiations for peace and alliance were on fool, when Isaac suddenly broke off the deliberations and fled to Famagosta. Richard, who had 1 86 STORY OF NEOPHYTUS. [VIII. now obtained the assistance of Guy of Lusignan and the prince of Antioch, and who was much pressed for time, left him no rest. Guy employed himself in capturing the chief strongholds; Richard, who was ill, after taking Buffevento, occupied Nicosia. There the emperor submitted to him on the 31st of May, and surrendered himself, his daughter and his treasures. Richard put him in silver chains, having pro- mised that he would not put him in irons ; placed the little girl under charge of the queen, and spent or distributed his treasure. Cyprus was conquered in a fortnight. Richard bestowed on the island the inestimable gift of his presence for five days after the emperor surrendered : Isaac he sent off under the charge of Ralph Fitz-Godfrey to Tripoli; he extorted from the Cypriots half their property, in return for a charter by which the laws of Manuel Comnenus were restored to them ; constables were placed in the several castles, and Richard Camville and Robert of Turnham were left behind to govern Cyprus as justices and sheriffs on the English model 1 . What followed is not very clear. Before a month was over Camville was dead, and Turnham had been obliged to put down a revolt and hang a pretender. Richard found his new acquisition a burden ; Neophytus briefly says that the 'Incliter' sold the island for 200,000 pounds of gold to the Latins. The Templars were the purchasers ; they also found the burden a heavy one, especially at a moment when the war with Saladin demanded all their energies. The small garrison which they were able to keep in the island was shut up in Nicosia by the angry Griffons, and there was every chance that Cyprus would be lost as rapidly as it had been won. This was the state of affairs in May 1192, when Richard, by a piece of rough diplomacy, prevailed on Guy of Lusignan to surrender his claim to the shadowy crown of Jerusalem, and to accept the 1 Ric. Divis. c. 61. VIII.] THE LUSIGNANS. 1 87 lordship of Cyprus instead. The Templars were glad enough to sell their rights, and Guy, with Richard's advice, bought them. A successful sally of the garrison of Nicosia saved the Latins from massacre, the alarm of which they avenged by an indiscriminate slaughter of the Greeks. Guy thus obtained his first hold on the island ; so much of the Greek population as was still spared fled in panic; and way was thus made for the institution, in this remote corner of the Levant, of a dynasty and government of the straitest feudal character; the introduction into a land, empty of all but the cultivating classes and slaves, of the fully developed and now crystallised block of feudal polity. The house of Lusignan maintained itself in Cyprus for nearly three centuries, during which, although fallen some- what from the blessedness which had been broken up by Isaac Comnenus, the island seems to have retained so much fertility and prosperity internally as to make its later history very dark"by contrast. The flight of the Greek population, which had begun under Isaac and been completed after the massacre of Nicosia, left the island open to colonists from the West. The peculiar privileges of the Cypriot Church, which was autocephalous, made it easy for the remaining prelates and people to accept the Western obedience, and enabled the house of Lusignan to appeal confidently for the support of European Christendom. The short period too during which, under Guy and his successor, the administra- tion of Cyprus was kept separate from that of the waning kingdom of Palestine, gave those kings a moment's breathing time, and this they improved with a success which the long continuance of their dynasty against fearful odds may be held to prove. Guy, we are told, received Cyprus for life only, and did homage for the island to Richard. As he already bore the title of king, the question whether he should hold Cyprus as l88 THE SUZERAINTY OF CYPRUS. [VIII. a kingdom does not seem to have arisen. He appears in the Lignages d'Outremer as ' seignor,' not as ' roi de Chypre ;' and no coins occur on which he is called king of Cyprus. On his death, in April 1194, Richard putting in no claim for the reversion, his brother, Amalric of Lusignan, constable of Palestine, entered on the possession as his heir; he was not as yet King of Jerusalem ; it was a matter of importance to him to be recognised as King of Cyprus ; and he accordingly did homage to the Emperor Henry VI. He was crowned by the Bishop of Hildesheim, who was sent over from Sicily to perform the ceremony; this was done in 1 1 97. Imme- diately after this, Amalric succeeded to the crown of Jerusalem ; the crown of Jerusalem which, after the year 1269, became permanently united with that of Cyprus, was an independent crown, and the king of Jerusalem an anointed king : the union of the crowns therefore seems to have precluded any question as to the tenure by which the kingdom of Cyprus should be held. The crown of Cyprus was conferred at Nicosia, that of Jerusalem at Tyre or at Acre, and, after' the capture of Acre, at Famagosta. The homage then due to Richard, or to the crown of England, ceased at the death of Guy; although the discontented barons of Cyprus are said to have revived the idea of such a relation when they wanted the aid of Edward I, in 1271. The homage secured to the Emperor by Amalric was possibly recognised until 1269, but was throughout complicated by the claims of Frederick II and his sons on the kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1459 the illegitimate pretender, James II, did homage to the Sultan of Egypt as suzerain of Cyprus ; but that act was not the recognition of a right ; it was only a bid for support, and was one of the immediate causes of the entire downfall of the house of Lusignan. Guy, however, does not seem to have troubled himself about his title. His reign lasted only two years, and his whole time was given VI 1 1.] THE LATIN LORDS SA r CYPRUS. 1 89 to the restoration of something like prosperity in the desolate land 1 . According to the contemporary 'Chronique d'Outremer ' he opened an asylum for the dispossessed Franks of Armenia and Palestine. These, to the amount of 300 knights and 200 men-at-arms, with a great number of bourgeois, he enfeoffed with estates of land in Cyprus; so liberal was he that he retained for himself only twenty knights' fees. Possibly the truth was that he was obliged to sell the land of the island to find the money due to the Templars; but the mode in which it was done proves that the feudal idea, on which a few years later the Latin conquests in Romania were apportioned, was full grown. The arrangement however made by Guy had to be altered by Amalric when he reached the dignity of kingship. He threw himself on the mercy of his vassals; they responded liberally, and surrendered to him so many of his brother's grants that at his death a royal revenue of 200,000 byzants was forthcoming. Guy had perhaps made as much as he cared to make of his life interest, but he was, like his patron, careless in the spending of money, whilst, unlike Richard's, his opportunities of acquiring it were very limited. Thus, however, the land system of Cyprus was restored ; the 300 knights, 200 men-at-arms, and extensive bourgeoisie, constituted one or two permanent estates of the kingdom. The nobles, who were, no doubt, included in the number of the knights, were the numerous lords who either had fled 1 There were five classes of native cultivators in Guy's time : — (1) Parici — irapoinoi— slave cultivators. (2) Lefteri — «\ei'0*poj— freed folk. (3) Albanesi — descendants of Albanian soldiery. (4) Veneziani bianchi — descended from the soldiers of Vital Michaele in the first Crusade. (5) Perperiarii, enfranchised l'aroeci — paying a tax of 15 perperi ; (cited from Lustron by Beugnot, Assizes of Jerusalem, i. 207). J90 THE LATIN LORDS IN CYPRUS. [VIII. before Saladin, or were so little hopeful of the event of the Crusades, that they thought it wise to look to Cyprus as a prospective refuge. Hence throughout the middle ages the Cypriot lords retained the titles of their homes in Palestine ; and the Palestine titles, when the families of their possessors were extinct, were conferred as a sort of life peerage at the will of the kings. Of the few Frank families that showed any vitality the house of Ibelin was far the most prominent and prolific ; the lords of Ibelin and Mirabel, sprung from the house of Puiset, viscounts of Chartres. and closely con- nected with the counts of Champagne and Blois 1 , had played a conspicuous part during the twelfth century in Palestine ; they were still more prominent in Cyprus : from them the royal house received wives and guardians for the infant kings ; two of the great recorders of the Assizes of Jerusalem were lords of Ibelin ; one as regent or bailiff of Cyprus conducted the valiant resistance to the claims of Frederick II : and in fact, if any one had cared to write it, the fortunes of the house of Ibelin would have been as great part of the history of Cyprus as those of the house of Lusignan. Other great families were those of Gibeleth and Bethsan, named from Byblus and Bethshan or Scythopolis. The whole peerage of Cyprus however contained only a few names, which sound strangely enough, as they illustrate the geographical unity of history. There were princes of Antioch. Galilee, and Montreal, lords of Beyrout, Sidon. Toron, 1 Balian le Francis, the first of the family, is described in the Lignages d'Outremer as brother of Count Guillin de Chartres; by which we are to understand that he was a relation of Hugh de Puiset, count of Joppa, son of Everard, and grandson of Celdewin, viscount of Chartres. His name Balian is probably a softened form of Waleran; see Du Cange on the Lignages, pp. 360, 361. One lady of this house married an English knight, Ilamo l'Estrange, who died in Palestine about 1272; this was Isabella, daughter of the lord of Berytus and widow of the young king, Hugh III. See Assizes of Jerusalem, ii. 449. VIII.] THE CYPRIOT CHURCH. 191 Csesarea, Tyre, and Tiberias ; counts of Jaffa, Tripoli, and Carpasso; there were also, as grand serjeanties, the double stewardships, constableships, and marshalships of Cyprus and Jerusalem, and the chamberlainship of Cyprus; these are all, or nearly all. They constituted a high court of baronage or parliament, as they had done in Palestine, and were the supreme council of the king, of which we have so much information in the Assizes of Jerusalem. As for the ecclesiastical estate, tradition assigns also to King Guy some trenchant measures which help to complete the parallel or the contrast between him and William the Conqueror. The old Cypriot church had an archbishop and fourteen suffragans ; the archbishop was Archbishop of Cyprus, and owed obedience to no patriarch. The flight or submission of the Greeks left the field open to the Latin clergy ; and Guy placed a Latin archbishop at Nicosia, with suffragans at Famagosta, Limasol and Baffo. This arrange- ment was sanctioned by Celestine III in 1196. As time went on, the Greek clergy returned, and Jacobites and Nestorians followed ; very uneasy relations were produced between the two chief hierarchies, one of which depended on Rome, whilst the other, now seated at Famagosta, claimed the ancient prerogative of the Cypriot church. The schismatic clergy were, however, subjected by Honorius III to the Latin bishops, whilst Alexander IV, in the year 1260, went so far as to forbid the election of a Greek archbishop after the death of the reigning prelate, and reduced the number of Greek sees to four, Soli, Leucara, Arsinoe, and Carpasso ; the bishops were also subjected to the Latin metropolitan, who was bound to administer justice among them. Probably Guy has obtained credit for some of the measures which properly belong to the popes and to a later date. The clergy of the island were as numerous as the difference of nationalities required. The Mendicant orders formed the 192 THE LAWYERS OF CYPRUS. [VIII. strength of the Latin portion, the secular priests that of the Greek and Armenian. Monasteries abounded. In Nicosia alone were 250 churches. These then being the estates of the realm, the powerful people were all Franks ; the returning Greeks and Armenians would only creep into an equality of privilege, or return into the enjoyment of their old customs, as the governing race allowed ; and, although they ultimately grew and prevailed while the governing race dwindled and perished, all political interest centres in the governing race. For them the exist- ing polity of Palestine was transported across the sea ; not as yet reduced to writing, for the system of Godfrey of Bouillon, ' the Letters of the Sepulchre,' if it were ever codified, had perished, and the Assizes had not yet taken their historic form. But the new kingdom was singularly rich in lawyers, and this was early recognised ; in 1 2 1 4 we find Lewis of France, son of Philip II, applying for a legal opinion on a point of procedure to Hugh I of Cyprus ; the old lords of Palestine spent their leisure in Cyprus re- cording the customs of their lost inheritance, and the extant Assizes of Jerusalem were the result of their studies. The names of the great legists are Philip of Navarre, John and James of Ibelin, and Guy le Tort. John of Ibelin, who died in 1266, and bore the title of count of Jaffa, Ramlah (Rames), and Ascalon, drew up the existing Assize of the High Court. It is in exact symmetry with Western usage, that this great compilation was not received as a code until the year 1369: like the ' Siete Partidas ' of Alfonso the Wise, it was but a body of jurisprudence, the use of which depended on its own reasonableness, or a collection of customs which were recorded because they were used, not merely used because they were recorded. The Highest Law was still 'the custom' recorded in the heart and mouth of the ' lawful man.' VIII.] THE ASSIZES OE JERUSALEM. 193 The Assizes of Jerusalem, then, although no doubt they describe what we may call the common law of the Cypriot kingdom, so far as concerned the Franks, cannot be regarded during the greater part of the period as an authoritative code; the native population of Cyprus, like the native Syrians of Palestine, had laws and customs, such perhaps as the laws of Manuel Comnenus for which they obtained Richard's confirmation; and the city of Famagosta at a little later period, after having been for some years under the government of the Genoese, was allowed to retain the laws of Genoa. Within the feudal fabric itself, custom, or perhaps principle, was more dominant than law ; the lords of the great fiefs did not accept the rules of the high court as binding unless they had themselves consented to them ; the unity of feudal jurisprudence lay rather in ideas than in cogent uniformity. Add to this the fact that the Frank population of Cyprus showed no tendency to ordinary increase, but was either constantly diminishing or recruited by arrivals from the West, whilst the Greek population was at home, strong, numerous, and wealthy, that the Latin Church accordingly, although powerful in the protection of Rome and of the Cypriot crown, was surpassed in wealth and historical greatness by the Greek and Armenian commu- nities ; and we cannot but conclude that in this, which is regarded as the most flourishing period of Cypriot history, there was little chance of strong government or adminis- trative development. The Assizes of Jerusalem lay like a crystal block, a model of usages, incapable of enforcement and incapable of growth. The kings lived for the most part the life of adventurers or knights-errant, playing their part in the defence of Christendom, but still, like the great military orders and fragmentary principalities of Palestine, only as an isolated garrison in the middle of a world out of which they were being gradually driven ; no more, as 194 STATE COUNCILS. [VIII. Richard had hoped, an advance post in the great campaign by which the East was to be humbled before the West. Hence, no doubt, it is that, notwithstanding the example of the kingdom of Naples, which was the nearest Catholic neighbour of Cyprus, we find no traces of a Cypriot parlia- ment. There were councils of nobles and councils of bishops ; there were high courts and bourgeois courts ; and there were, as elsewhere, three estates well defined, clergy, nobles, and burghers ; but if there ever was any attempt to range these in an organised body either for legislation or for money grants, I have failed to discover it. The ' Bancs,' or ordinances, with which the customs of the Assizes were supplemented, were issued by the king's pro- clamation : in two or three cases the participation of the court or of the barons is expressed. In 1362 we have an ordinance issued by the king, Peter I, by the assent of the men of his court. A few years before, his father, King Hugh, issued his laws by proclamation : ' Hear the ban of God and of my Lord the King, Hugh of Lusignan of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and of Cyprus ; know all men that on the 16th of May, 1355, the Lord King and his men ordained an assize.' Here it is possible there may be some reference to a general court or ' witenagemot,' but not, I think, to an assembly of estates. According to the Assizes of Jerusalem, every vassal who, whether immediately de- pendent on the king or on a mesne lord, had done homage to the king as chief lord, was a member of the royal court ; a usage which in so small a state must have crushed out every tendency to representative government 1 . In default of further evidence we must, I think, assume that, as in France before the institution of the states-general, the only check on the king was his court of vassals ; whereas, after the example had been set in the states-general, diets and 1 Assizes, i. 254. VIII.] THE SUCCESSION. 195 parliaments of the West, the national life of Cyprus was too much attenuated to allow it to reproduce such in- stitutions on an unfriendly soil. The Basse Cour or Court of Bourgeois, organised under the viscounts or sheriffs of Cyprus, with jurats and other machinery of courts of law, was an organisation of tribunals of justice and local govern- ment, not a legislative constitutional organisation : its assizes are therefore a book of procedure rather than a code of laws, and, like the Assizes of the High Court, rather a record of customs than a body of statutes. These courts also, like the court of barons, may be regarded as develop- ments towards constitutional growth, arrested and petrified at a certain stage. But I have said more than enough upon a subject which, somewhat repulsive by itself, needs severe study before it will begin to be remunerative. The Assizes of Jerusalem will always remain a mine of feudal principles and a treasure to scientific jurists ; they reflect infinite lustre on the Cypriot lawyers who, in an age of turmoil and exertion, continuous and overwhelming, found time and labour for recording them. We conceive that the lords of Ibelin must have been well acclimatised in more ways than one ; it is certainly curious that they supplied the main historical support to the kings of Cyprus in marriage, war, and jurisprudence. King Guy had a very short reign ; and most of the acts that are ascribed to him I have already noted. After the collapse of the third crusade and the three years' truce between Richard and Saladin in 1192, he seems to have retired to Cyprus, and to haw died in April 1194; the same year the old Emperor Isaac died in the custody 01 the Hospitallers at Merkeb. Isaac's daughter was still wandering up and down Christendom ; by the agreement for Richard's release she was to have been handed over o 2 196 AMALRIC OF LUSIGNAN. [VIII. to Duke Leopold of Austria, her kinsman, but when Baldwin of Bethune brought her to Austria, she found Duke Leopold dead ; she was accordingly brought back to Richard, and subsequently married to a Flemish knight, who came to the East in the fourth crusade in the retinue of John de Neesle, and, in her name, put in a claim for Cyprus, which King Amalric summarily rejected. The rights of Guy devolved upon his brother ; or rather Cyprus, for the re- version of which no arrangements had been made, fell to the lot of the possessor. Amalric of Lusignan had been, under his brother, constable of both kingdoms, and Prince of Tyre ; he was thus in com- mand of such military force as his brother had possessed, and succeeded quietly to his dominion : from Henry VI, as I said, he obtained recognition as king, and was crowned in 1197; in 1 1 98 he obtained the crown of Jerusalem, marrying, as fourth husband, the lady Isabella of Anjou, who had carried the right of succession first to Henfrid of Toron, then to Conrad of Montferrat, and then to Henry of Champagne. The German chancellor, Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim, who had crowned the King of Cyprus, negotiated the marriage and succession, and Amalric, leaving Cyprus under the administration of the Hospitallers, transferred his court to Acre. We hear no more of Cyprus during Amalric's reign. He was an able warrior, and as successful as mere warlike ability, coupled with very indifferent morality towards the infidels, could make him. With the aid of the German crusaders of n 97 he recovered Berytus, where the ceremony of his coronation took place; he also took Byblus, and besieged Toron ; but the difficulty of keeping terms between the Germans, the Franks, and the military orders, was too great for him. The siege was raised, the Germans retired, and Amalric had to make a truce with Saladin. The Crusade of Villehardouin passed over without any VIII.] THE FIFTH CRUSADE. I 97 direct effect on either Cyprus or Palestine. Amalric died at Acre in April, 1205, and was buried in the church of S. Sophia at Nicosia. He left the crown of Cyprus to his eldest son Hugh, the son of his first wife, Eschiva of Ibelin, under the guardianship of Walter of Montbeliard, his brother-in-law. The crown of Jerusalem, the right of which depended on Queen Isabella, was lefc unclaimed; John ot Ibelin, half-brother of Isabella, and uncle of the jurist, was lieutenant of that kingdom ; and he, after some years' searching, found a husband for Mary, the queen's eldest daughter by Conrad of Montferrat ; John of Brienne was accepted as king of Jerusalem in 12 10. The queen's second daughter Alice, the child of Henry of Champagne, was given to the young king, Hugh of Cyprus. The event of the minority was a descent made by Walter of Montbeliard on the coast of Asia Minor, the only result of which was booty. Hugh came of age in 121 1, and was in that year crowned at Nicosia. His reign was short, and was devoted chiefly to the restoration of order and prosperity in Cyprus. He encouraged the study of law, and was so learned in it himself that Lewis of France applied to him for an opinion on legal procedure, which was held as authoritative by the feudal lawyers. From Palestine he seems to have stood aloof, partly perhaps owing to the fact that the death of Queen Mary, who, dying in 1 2 12, left only an infant daughter, might seem to open the succession to his wife, Queen Alice. In 12 17 however he joined the expedition against the fortress of Tabor, persuaded by King Andrew of Hungary, who visited Cyprus on purpose to engage his support. The attempt on Tabor was un- successful ; and Hugh retired to Tripoli, where he died in February, 1218. It thus happened that neither the great Crusade of 1202 nor the expedition against Damietta in 12 19 directly touched the fortunes of Cyprus ; for the heir of King Hugh was an infant of nine months old ; and the Queen 198 QUESTION OF GUARDIANSHIP. [VIII. Alice, who with the aid of the child's great uncles, the lords Philip and John of Ibelin, was guardian, seems to have avoided too close alliance with the new troops of Crusaders. Cyprus was, however, a regular station for the pilgrim fleets, and as regularly an object of attack whenever the Sultans saw an opportunity of unresisted devastation. The little interest of the history runs rapidly on to the Crusade of the Emperor Frederick II, which brought about many other critical conjunctures in the history of Christendom. This particular portion of the history is of no small legal as well as historical interest. The kings of Jerusalem being men of action, practising little self-restraint and never taking care of themselves, generally died young, and left the fate of their kingdom in suspense on the life of their young children. Hence constant minorities, and the need of provisions for guardianship, a need which, as yet, had scarcely begun to be felt in the kingdoms of Europe. The practice therefore of the kingdom of Jerusalem in the matter of regency became a stock of legal cases, which, if not cited as occasion arose in corresponding circumstances in the West, afford to us at least a number of parallels. The earlier practice had been to give the wardship of the person of the heir to the nearest relation incapable of inheriting; that of the kingdom to the pre- sumptive heir 1 . But the rule laid down in the Assizes, which is really perhaps a generalisation from the earlier cases rather than a deliberate constitution, was that the mother of the heir should be his guardian ; in case of her death, the next relation on the side on which the kingdom moved, that is, the heir- presumptive ; in case no such person could be found, it was 1 Assizes, i. 261. If a vassal die the custody of the ward is not to be in the heir, but in the nearest kinsman on the side on which the fief cannot fall. Cf. Glanville, vii. c. 11 ; Etablissemens, i. c. 117. If he is a sovereign or suzerain, his men shall have care of his body and fortresses, the heir to guard the heritage (i. 435). See Itinerar. R. R. p. xcvii. VIII.] FREDERICK II. 1 99 for the barons of the kingdom to meet and choose a regent or guardian. The practice seems to have been to leave the queen-mother as regent, with a bailiff or high-steward to do the work of government. In the year 1228 the case in Cyprus was this: the King Henry, although old enough at seven to be crowned, was still a minor. His mother, Queen Alice, had married a second husband, Bohemond V, heir of Antioch, and had quarreled with the lords of Ibelin, who were not only her nearest rela- tions, but the most powerful and cleverest of the acclimatised baronage. These lords were the sons of that Balian of Ibelin who was supposed, by going to mass instead of to battle, to have ruined the chances of Guy of Lusignan at Nazareth in May, 1 1 87 : he had married the widow of King Amalric I, and his sons were thus half-brothers to the many-husbanded Queen Isabella, great-uncles to King Henry, and half-uncles to Queen Alice. So long then as the family party hung together, they formed a strong phalanx ; when they quarreled, all the internal strength of the kingdom was turned against itself. The second marriage of Queen Alice probably broke up the unity. Philip of Ibelin died in 1227; John of Ibelin, lord of Berytus, naturally expected to succeed him as bailiff; the queen proposed a baron named Amalric Barlais. John succeeded in maintaining his position, and became bailiff or regent under the nominal guardianship of the queen. But the struggle was still proceeding when Frederick II, on his way to Palestine, arrived in the Levant. Frederick II, as I need not remind you, was already the ' Stupor mundi,' the man of unbounded ambition and almost ubiquitous versatility, who never did a great or truly kingly act, or followed any but a selfish aim. He was, us son of Henry VI, heir of imperial aspirations that coveted the whole world, and, as the husband of Yolanda of Brienne, father and guardian of the young heir of Palestine. Yolanda, who must have been a child when she 200 FREDERICK II. [VIII. married him, died in this same year 1228, leaving an only son, the luckless Conrad. When then Frederick reached the Peloponnesus, he was met by five Cypriot barons of the queen's party, who asked his aid against the lord of Berytus. The emperor, whether desirous as he might well be to make Cyprus available for military purposes, or simply wishing to assert his right as overlord, undertook to deal with John of Ibelin ; the barons told him that the revenues of Cyprus were large enough to secure the conquest of Palestine, and Frederick thought them worth a trial. He arrived at Limasol, and wrote to John as his dearest uncle, begging him to come to him with all his family and concert measures for the crusade. John called together his friends at Nicosia and consulted them : they told him that to admit Frederick was to betray the infant king, but advised him to return a courteous answer, to meet craft with craft. But this John would not do ; he swore that he would rather die than let the Crusade fail by his default ; and therefore presented himself to the emperor with all his force, and with the little king in his train. Frederick received him ostentatiously, made him change his black mourning robes for scarlet, and entertained him at dinner : after dinner, the usual time apparently for quarreling, he turned round upon him and insisted on the resignation of the lordship of Berytus, which was a fief of the crown of Jerusalem, and also of the office of bailiff of Cyprus. John boldly told the emperor that this treatment was only what his friends at Nicosia had bidden him expect. The emperor changed colour at the reproach, which showed in what estima- tion his honour was held. But the friends of the Crusade interfered, and an agreement was made that the question of Berytus should be decided by the high court of Palestine, that of the regency by the high court of Cyprus. This was not carried into effect. John, dreading the emperor's treachery, fled to Nicosia : there Frederick besieged him and forced VIII.] FATAL DIVISIONS. 201 him to a compromise ; he did homage for Berytus, and the emperor was allowed to receive the revenues of Cyprus until King Henry reached the age of twenty-five, thus apparently exercising the rights, if not under the name, of an overlord ; but whether he claimed the right as emperor or as king of Jerusalem, or as representing the nearest kinsman, is not clear 1 . Frederick left Cyprus under charge of five barons of the island, and went on to Palestine. After his short stay in the Holy Land, and his politic but not very far-sighted treaty with the infidels, he left the East to take care of itself. For about three years the arrangement continued in force; but in 1 23 1 the emperor's marshal and deputy, Richard Filangier, tried to wrest Berytus from John of Ibelin, and threw him into open rebellion. John equipped a fleet, and, with the young king, landed in Cyprus. The marshal retired before him. John occupied Famagosta ; the marshal retreated to Nicosia; there he was defeated and forced to disband his army, which passed over into the service of the king of Armenia. Cherin held out until Easter, 1233; and then the last remnant of Frederick's army left Cyprus. John of Ibelin died in 1236; the imperial power was by that time broken up in Palestine as well as Cyprus; and now Queen Alice attempted to turn the tables on Frederick himself. The relics of the whole Crusading history were im- perilled ; Frederick would accept no invitations, nor would he send Conrad to assert the rights of Yolanda. Alice, therefore, as heir of Jerusalem, put in her claim for the regency of Palestine ; the poor barons clung to a straw ; they accepted her, and she named her third husband, Ralph of Soissons, 1 That Hugh bad to perform homage and swear fealty to Frederick II appears from the letter of Innocent IV, releasing him from the oath in 1247. See Mas-Latrie, Hist, de Chypre, vol. ii. p. 63. It is said that the barons recognised the emperor as suzerain, hut refused liege homage. 202 HENRY OF LUSIGNAN. [VIII. bailiff of Jerusalem. No sooner was he appointed than he left his post and went back to France. Jerusalem had already fallen to the Sultan of Damascus in 1239; after a brief restoration in 1243, it fell to the Kharismians in 1244 ; to the Sultan of Egypt in the same year. The crown became a derelict ; the title was borne after Conrad by his half-brother Henry, the son of Isabella of England ; and subsequently by a number of ruling houses, who seem to have clung to the name far more faithfully than they had ever clung to the reality of the dominion. The remains of substantive power devolved with the title on Hugh the Great, King of Cyprus in 1269. The rest of the history of King Henry is soon told. He came of age in 1232, married a daughter of the house of Montferrat, and lost her the same year ; a second wife, Stephanie of Armenia, died in 1250, and he then married Placentia of Antioch. Henry took a subordinate part in the Crusade of the middle of the century. His action is obscure, as are all the details of the period. In the expedition of 1240 he seems to have borne no part : Richard of Cornwall does not mention a visit to Cyprus either going or returning; but Henry seems to have, in 1246, asserted his right to Jerusalem on the death of his mother, and to have been recognised as king by Innocent IV, who included King Conrad in his father's doom. In the Crusade of S. Lewis, Henry is said by the Cypriot historians to have shared both perils and glories ; he certainly received the French king, and entertained him at Nicosia during the winter of 1248, which was so fatal to many of the French nobles. We are not told that King Henry furnished any part of the supplies that S. Lewis collected in Cyprus, the mountains of corn or the towers of wine casks ; all these were furnished by the emperor and the Venetians. The King of Cyprus entered Damietta with the French king in triumph in 1249; but he did not, as has been asserted, VIII.] HUGH II. 203 share his captivity. After this we read no more of him ; he died early in 1253, having been the sport of fortune all his life, and leaving the inheritance of his history to a child of a few months old, Hugh II, who reigned from 1253 to 1267. The only incident of the reign of Hugh II turns, like that in his father's reign, on the question of regency. Queen Placentia acted as regent, but in the second year of the reign went over to Palestine and married Balian of Ibelin, the reigning lord of Arsouf. As Hugh was the last of the Lusignans, the marriage seems to have been unpopular ; and, either in consequence of it, or after the death of the queen herself, a new bailiff was appointed. This was Hugh of Antioch, son of Henry of Antioch, and grandson of Bohe- mond IV ; his mother Isabella was daughter of King Hugh I. He was nearest in blood to King Hugh and his presumptive successor. One military exploit signalised the regency: in 1265 he led to the defence of Acre against the Sultan Bibars a fleet of Cypriot vessels. Then, says Sanuto, was the military force of Cyprus in great valour and of great pru- dence ; there were in the company 130 knights and much cavalry besides. The contribution however helped the falling cause but little. All in Palestine was going to ruin ; already the Venetians and the Genoese were at war ; the Templars and the Hospitallers were irreconcileable ; the Frank princes were selling their estates and returning westward. The lord of Sidon sold, in 1260, Sidon and Belfort to the Templars; Balian sold Arsouf to the Hospitallers. Henry of Antioch and his wife claimed the regency of Palestine as against the house of Brienne. In 1264 Bibars destroyed Csesarea ; and the defenders of Acre were obliged, in self-defence, to lay waste their .suburbs, and leave open to the Saracens the great poliandrum or cemetery of S. Nicolas, in which 124,000 men had been buried in one year during the third Crusade. In 1 261, the year before Hugh's appointment to the 204 THOMAS AQUINAS. [VIII. regency, the Latin empire of Constantinople fell. All the older medieval things were passing away in both East and West, and the tide which had led on the Crusades was turning. The child king, Hugh II, died in 1267; and the bailiff, Hugh III, succeeded as king. Hugh II was the last of the house of Lusignan who was left in the East ; in the West there were still many members of the prolific family. Our memory recurs most naturally to that large family of the Aliens, the half-brothers of our king, Henry III, who nine years before had been banished in consequence of their opposition to the Provisions of Oxford ; their father, Hugh X of Lusignan, Count of la Marche, was nephew to the Kings Guy and Amalric. Hugh of Antioch, too, the new king, represented the house of Poictiers, being sprung from Raymond of Poictiers, the uncle of Queen Eleanor, the wife of Henry II. The reigning house of Lusignan in la Marche came to an end in 1303. But although this was the case, the Cypriot dynasty continued to bear the name of Lusignan, to which by a female descent it was entitled ; and there are many Lusignans, in England as elsewhere, flourishing at the present day. Hugh III, the new king, had the advantage of acquiring the throne when he had age and experience to fill it : and he •eigned fourteen years, long enough to establish his own authority, and to see the downfall of all the Frank states around him. I will mention three points only in his history; for although he bore the title of the Great, ' Hugh the Great,' it was a very forlorn hope that he was called on to lead. He seems to have been the king of Cyprus to whom S. Thomas Aquinas dedicated the famous treatise ' De Regimine Prin- cipum;' a book which, owing to the great reputation of its author and the definiteness of the principles which it enun- ciates, became a handbook of the relations of Church and VIII.] THE CROWN OF JERUSALEM. 205 State in the middle ages. Of the work which we now possess under this name, only a book and a half out of the four books was the work of S. Thomas, the rest was added probably by Ptolemy of Lucca; but the book itself was a model which later publicists chose to follow or to comment upon. Many of these commentaries are found in our libraries ; and down to the age of Sir John Fortescue, the book addressed to the King of Cyprus occupied a position of authority inferior only to the Politics of Aristotle. It is not improbable that the book was originally written for the education of the young King Hugh II ; but it is certainly very curious that the composition both of the great Feudal Code of the Assizes, and of the manual of medieval politics, should have a direct relation to this remote little island. The second point to be noted is this : — Hugh saw nearly all the Crusading conquests lost. In 1268 Antioch was taken, and the prince, Bohemond VI, retired to Tripoli. In 1269 Hugh claimed the crown of Jerusalem, and was crowned at Tyre on the 24th of September. But this empty honour was not obtained with- out competition. The king's great-aunt, Mary of Antioch, daughter of Bohemond IV, and grand-daughter of King Amalric, contested the title ; she carried her cause to Rome for the arbitration of the pope ; and unable to make good any claim herself, she sold in 1277 her rights to Jerusalem to Charles of Anjou, the King of Naples, the brother of S. Lewis, and head of that Angevin house which transmitted the crowns of Jerusalem and Sicily to Rene of Anjou, the father-in-law of our King Henry VI. Hugh III then was King of Jerusalem when Edward I made his crusade. In May 1 27 1, and for several months later, the two princes were together at Acre; and during their intimacy Hugh put before Edward a question which bore a signally close relation to that on which so much of the interest of Edward's own 2o6 EDWARD OF ENGLAND. [VIII. reign was to turn. The documents concerning it are pre- served among the Assizes of Jerusalem. Unfortunately we have only the case, not the opinion which Edward gave. The question was, what obligation lay on the knights of Cyprus to feudal service within the kingdom of Jerusalem ; exactly parallel to the great question of 1297 in England, upon which the Confirmation of Charters resulted. It was not decided by Edward, but John of Ibelin had laid down the rule : ' Three things are they bound to do out- side the realm for the lord: 1. For the marriage of him or any of his children; 2. To guard and defend his faith and honour; 3. Por le besoing aparant de sa seignorie ou le comun profit de sa terre.' When we find a jurist named Accursi d'Arezzo practising at Acre in 1270, it becomes even probable that Edward picked up his friend Francesco there. It was possibly on this occasion that Edward laid down the rule that, for the recovery of the East, Egypt should be first occupied, then the Holy Land, and then Constantinople. When that was done, and not till then, would the Christian warriors, settled and established, be able to dwell safely. So at least says Marino Sanuto, writing in 132 1. But neither Edward's little army nor his legal skill could save King Hugh from discomfiture ; in 1 2 7 2 he was forced to submit to make a treaty with Bibars, which left him only Acre and the right of pilgrimage to Nazareth, and for this he had to thank, it was said, the diplomacy of Edward. After Edward's departure, and an attempt to sustain the Frank cause in Tripoli, Hugh seems to have devoted himself to the care of his island kingdom, which was itself threatened by the monstrous policy of Charles of Anjou. That wretched tyrant, by way of inaugurating his purchased sovereignty, wrested Acre from King Hugh in 1277. He did not live to recover it. After a siege of four months the Cypriot VIII.] SIEGE OF ACRE. 207 knights declared their term of service at an end, and the siege was raised. Hugh was a patron of learned men, and a founder of monasteries. Probably he saw that unless the Christians were unanimous he must be content to sit still. The Hospitallers supported him ; the Templars spited him ; the Genoese helped him ; the Venetians thwarted him. So he stayed in Cyprus, where the people to a great extent prospered under his care, and had sons and daughters. His wife was a lady of the house of Ibelin : he died at Tyre in 1284; he was buried in the abbey of Lapais. His eldest son, John I, who succeeded him, died in 1285; his brother and successor, Henry II, reigned from 1285 to 1324; wit- nessing a period of transitional history which affected the East as well as the West, and which furnishes material of more curious if not wider interest. So long as Acre held out against the Infidels, that is exactly a hundred years from the date when Richard restored it to Christendom, almost all the living interest of the Crusades centres in that curious stronghold ; for it must have been a very strange encampment of fighting and praying men of all nations. There each of the great orders had its strong tower, palace, and appointed share of the wardship of the walls. There the Hospitallers and the Templars issued from their palaces the orders that governed their brethren throughout Christendom ; the Genoese and the Pisans had their quarters in close neighbourhood ; the Venetians had their Tower far off, between the Tower of the English and the ward of the Hospitallers ; and the men- dicant orders had each their house and church to themselves. Immensely strong, and able to draw in supplies constantly from the sea, Acre was a standing menace to the Eastern world ; but without were fightings and within were fears. The very closeness in which the conflicting powers were encamped intensified the dangers of their disunion. There 208 LAST DAYS OF THE CRUSADES. [VIII. was still great appearance of strength ; the King of Jeru- salem and Cyprus was at least safe in the castle around which this fortified camp was spread; all along the coast northwards, of Syria and Armenia, were placed the strong munitions of the military orders ; over the sea, a little way, was Cyprus, the great granary of Palestine, and within the lines of Palestine itself were strongholds of both the knights and the ' pullani,' or acclimatised Franks, which were for- tified with great skill, and need indeed succumb to nothing short of famine. All this, however far short it fell of a well- adrninistered state or a well-regulated camp, was still a strong power, when the fatal quarrels in the West, the downfall. of the Hohenstaufen, the wicked policy of Charles of Anjou, the rivalry of the Venetians and the Genoese, combined to bring about the end. Acre held out almost to the last; Antioch had fallen in 1268 ; all Palestine proper, save Acre and the road to Naza- reth, had been surrendered in 1272; Tripoli was lost in 1289. Dependent on Acre were Tyre, Sidon, and Berytus, and a few straggling forts that must fall when Acre fell. That was on the 18th of May, 1291. The King of Jerusalem and Cyprus at the time was Henry II, the second son of Hugh III, who had succeeded his brother John in 1285, and had been duly crowned in 1286. The recovery of Acre from the forces of the King of Naples, which was effected before he could duly receive the crown of Jerusalem, was the one brilliant exploit of a long and otherwise unhappy reign. The assistance which the military orders afforded him on the occasion caused the regent of Naples to con- fiscate all the estates of those orders within the kingdom of Naples, which formed a precedent for the atrocious measures of Philip the Fair against the Templars. Five years after- wards the Sultan Khalil Ashraf besieged Acre : King Henry brought his forces to the rescue, but, on the day of the VIII.] CAPTURE OF ACRE. 200, assault by the Mussulmans, lost heart and sailed away. For three days the luckless defenders struggled and perished, and on the fourth day the city was taken. I shall not dwell on the valour of the knights or on the atrocities of the captors. The same day at evening the Franks of Tyre embarked and set sail for the West. The Templars left Sidon and went to Cyprus ; and the people of Berytus surrendered. The break- up of the great camp was followed by the dispersion of the forces of the Cross. The kingdom of Armenia began to falter in its obedience to the Roman Church. The Armenian Catholicos had to flee from Mesopotamia to Sis in 1292 ; and about the same time the relics of Antiochene chivalry took service under the Armenian king. The military orders were only kept in Cyprus by the gift of Limasol, which King Henry bestowed on them conjointly; but soon the Templars sought their Western preceptories, within a very few years to perish utterly; the Teutonic knights found work in the conversion of the North; the Hospitallers, maintaining a better heart, fitted out a new Crusade, and in 1308 seized the island of Rhodes, whence for two hundred and fifteen years they made the Mediterranean too hot to hold a Turkish fleet. The rest of the unattached Franks found a home in Cyprus. Amongst these was one little known and obscure knightly order, which Englishmen need not be ashamed to recognise ; the Order of the Knights of S. Thomas of Acre. This was a little body of men who had formed themselves into a semi- religious order on the model of the Hospitallers. In the third Crusade, one William, an English priest, chaplain to Ralph de Diceto, Dean of S. Paul's, had devoted himself to the work of burying the dead at Acre, as the Hospitallers had given themselves at first to the work of tending the sick. He had built himself a little chapel there, and bought ground for a cemetery; like a thorough Londoner of the period, v 210 THE KNIGHTS OF S. THOMAS. [VIII. he had called it after S. Thomas the Martyr ; and, somehow or other, as his design was better known, the family of the martyr seem to have approved of it ; the brother-in-law and sister of Becket became founders and benefactors, and a Hospital of S. Thomas the Martyr of Canterbury, of Acre, was built in London itself on the site of the house where the martyr was born 1 . Little indeed is known of the early days of the knights ; they were not numerous, and probably poor ; but when Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester and ex-justiciar, was in Palestine in 1 231, he placed them in a new church and under the rule of the Templars, giving them also in his will a legacy of 500 marks 2 . They had their proper dress and cross : according to Favin their habit was white, and the cross a full red cross charged with a white scallop ; but the existing cartulary of the order describes the habit simply as a mantle with a cross of red and white 3 . They were building a new church when Edward was at Acre; and in 1278 we find him writing to the King of Cyprus on their behalf 4 . The Chronicle of the Teutonic knights, in 1 In the ninth year of John, Oct. 13, 1207, messengers of the house of S. Thomas at Acre, being canons, had a safe-conduct. They had come to England to seek alms for the redemption of captives ; Rot. Pat., ed. Hardy, i. 76. The 'Terra Sancti Thomre ' abutted on the land of the Temple at Casale Album, near Coquet ; Paoli, Cod. Dipl. S. Joh., i. 468. Richard, the English tanner, at Acre, in 1273 sold two houses in the Street of the Tannery to the Hospitallers; ib. 195, 196 2 Matthew Paris, ed. Wats, p. 472. 8 MS. Cotton, Tiberius C. V. 4 Mas-Latrie, Hist, de Chypre, ii. 81, 82, where two documents are printed from the letters of Edward in the Public Record Office. In one of these the king commends Ralph de Coumbe, master of the Hospital of S. Thomas, to the good offices of Hugh of Lusignan, in Cyprus; in another, dated Sept. 15, 1279, Ralph de Cardolio and the brethren write to the king on the misfortunes of Palestine, and urge that the master of the Order should be sent into Syria. See the 7th Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Records, App. II. No. 2252 ; Royal Letters, MS. (Chancery), No. 4260. VIII.] S. THOMAS OF ACRE. 211 relating the capture of Acre, places the knights of S. Thomas at the head of the 5000 soldiers whom the King of England had sent to Palestine 1 , and Herman Corner, who however wrote a century later, mentions them amongst the defenders of Acre. We know from their cartulary that they had lands in Yorkshire, Middlesex, Surrey, and Ireland 2 ; their Master was called Master of the whole Order of the Knighthood of S. Thomas the Martyr, in the kingdom of Cyprus, Apulia, Sicily, Calabria, Brundusium, England, Flanders, Brabant, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Cornwall. Some few noble names of the masters have been preserved ; Ralph of Coumbe was master in or about 1278 3 , Henry de Bedford 1 Matthsei, Vet. JEvi Analecta, x. 182 ; Eccard, Scriptores, i. 942. a At Wapping, Plumstead, Coulsdon, and Doncaster. The estate at Wappingwas the gift of Tierri of Alegate ; MS. Cott. fo. 156. Coulsdon was confirmed to the master of the knights by a charter of Henry III, in 1 261 ; fo. 236: the Hospital of S. James, at Doncaster, was given by Peter de Mauley : ' Deo et militia? beati Thoma? martyris de Aeon ; ' fo. 258 : the benefactors in Ireland are enumerated by Edward I in a grant of confirmation, 5th June, A . 17; Fulk de Villars, John de laZouche, Edmund Bret, Gilbert Marshall, Walter Marshall, and Philip Horsey. James Butler, Earl of Ormond, was another at a later date. 3 Frater Radulfus preceptor fratrum Sancti Thoma? de Aeon in Anglia ; A.D. 1249. William of Huntingfield ' magister militia: hospitalis B. Thoma? Martyris de Aeon Londini ; ' MS. Cotton, fo. 166. Richard of Southampton was master of the Hospital, 11 Edw. II ; Thomas de Sallowe, ' magister domus,' 40 Edw. III. Aug. 7, 1323, Henry de Bedford, master general of the order, creates John de Paris prior and custos of the Chapel of S. Nicholas of Nicosia ; sealing with his seal for Cyprus. June 17, 1324, William de Glastingebury, preceptor of the house of S. Thomas of Acre, in the diocese of Nicosia, with consent of the chapter of the house, to wit, Nicolas Clifton, John of Paris, and William of S. Bartholomew, appoints Nicolas Clifton proctor against a brother Henry, who calls himself master; 'actum Nicosia? in capella Sancti Nicolai prcscntihus Henrico ct Thoma prcsbyteris Anglicis et pra?dicto Johanne priore dicta? capella?.' Aug. 30, 1344, Robert Kendale, master of the whole order, appoints Henry of Colchester and William of Brunill to collect money for the P 2 212 THE ORDER OF S. THOMAS. [VIII. in 1323, and Robert de Kendale in 1344. In 1350 the order was recognised as still existing by the German traveller Ludolf of Suchen. In 1357 Hugh de Curteys, the preceptor of Cyprus, invested one Richard of Tickhill with the habit of the order, in the presence of Robert Swillington, canon, Sir Richard Chatesby, an English priest, and William Gaston of England, Turcopolier to the king of Cyprus. The ceremony was performed in the church of S. Nicolas of the English in the city of Nicosia; one of the many churches which formerly, according to Father Stephen of Lusignan, adorned that city, of which the Venetians destroyed 130 in the process of fortification. [It is possible that it still exists, and is indeed that church of S. Nicolas, which our dear friend the bishop of Gibraltar tried to recover in 1879.] The hospital in London became, probably at the fall of the Templars, a mere Augustinian Hospital. Its church, or one built on the site of it, is now the chapel of the Mercers' Company *. England had not, with all her business under Henry III and Edward I, forgotten Palestine : some of her sons fell at Acre, and the remnant of the little order found a home at Nicosia. But the great king himself never forgot his first love ; in fact all the nobler Plantagenets, Richard of Cornwall, Edward I, Henry of Lancaster, Henry of Boling- order; 'dat. Nicosia' in the house of Guddefrid, archdeacon of the church of Famagosta, vicar of Philip, archbishop of Nicosia. Feb. 2, 1357, Hugh Curteys invests Richard of Tickhill ; 'actum in regno Cypri in Nicosia intra ecclesiam Beati Nicolai Anglicorum, prsesentibus Francisco de Gave burgensi Nicosia, domino Rob. de Swillington canonico, domino Ricardo de Chatesby presbytero Anglico; Cuillelmo Gaston de Anglia Turcopolo regis et pluribus aliis.' 1 The histoiy of the London house may be read in Newcourt, Re- pertorium, i. 553 ; and Mon. Angl. vi. 645 : it must be carefully distinguished from the Hospital of S. Thomas the Martyr in Southwark, the germ of the present S. Thomas's Hospital. See also Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, prsef. pp. cxii-cxiii. VIII.] ' LIBELLUS DE RECUPERATIONE? 213 broke, Henry V, and Cardinal Beaufort, all either made the pilgrimage or looked forward to a great crusade. To Edward I, in or about 1303, was addressed the very amusing 'Libellus de recuperatione Terra; Sanctas 1 ,' the work of an ecclesiastical judge in Aquitaine, whose name is unknown, but who speculates like a special correspondent of the period ; a book which shows a just sense of the evils which had rendered the united action of Christendom impossible ; points out ways in which all political dangers in Europe can be avoided ; stigmatises the crime of war between Christian princes, the ruinous discord between Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, and proposes to settle the military orders chiefly in Cyprus, and employ them in the recovery of the holy places. Curiously enough, one of the remedial measures proposed by the writer, who is especially strong on the subject of natural science, is that girls should be taught to practise medicine and surgery; they are to learn grammar, and logic also, natural principles, and mathematics, but it is that they may qualify as wives for the Oriental princes. But to return to Cyprus : Edward, as I said, was not the only one of his family who remembered it : Henry III had proposed to the Bishop of Bethlehem a marriage between his son Edmund and the queen-mother Placentia in 1256; the young king was also to marry one of his daughters 2 . The records however, of both that reign and the next, contain more references to Armenia than to Cyprus; thus in 1260 Alexander IV exhorts Edward to defend Armenia against the Tartars; in 1280 the Bishop of Hebron, vicegerent of the patriarch, sends the thanks of the Franks, and adds that Armenia and Cyprus have been laid waste by a plague of locusts 3 ; the same intelligence is sent by the master of 1 rrinted at the end of the second volume of Bongars' Gcsta Dei per Francos. 2 Feed. i. 341. s lb. 402, 586. 214 PROJECTS OF RECOVERY. [VIII. S. Thomas from Acre ; the wars of Charles of Anjou cut off all hope of succour, and the king of the Tartars had de- manded provisions from Acre. Boniface VIII was unwearied in impressing on England the importance of these regions ; in 1298 he urges the sending of a subsidy to Sembat, king of Armenia 1 ; in 1300 he is negotiating a general confederacy which will include the princes of Armenia and Georgia. Edward cannot do much, but if he cannot send knights he will send missionaries. The king of the Tartars sends envoys to him, and one of them is baptized. The last measures of Edward I and the first of Edward II are to the same purpose. Edward I issues safe-conduct to the bishop of Lydda and other Dominicans who are going to convert the heathen; Edward II sends a warning to the king of the Tartars against Mahometanism. The kings of Armenia, who have apparently little else to do, send constant appeals for money. Faithful Armenia, says Sanuto, writing in 1321, lies among the wild beasts ; on one side the lion, the Tartar ; on another the leopard, the Sultan; on a third the wolf, the Turks; on the fourth the serpent, the Corsairs. But these I must notice by and by. Henry II of Cyprus reigned nominally from 1285 to 1324; but during great part of the time he was superseded by one or other of his brothers : his quarrels with them form the whole history of his reign ; at one time he was a prisoner in Armenia, whither his brother, Amalric, the prince of Tyre, had sent him; another brother, Guy, the constable of Cyprus, was put to death by his orders for a conspiracy against him. The Popes were much exercised by this fraternal strife ; but it was not until after the death of Guy that Henry had peace. As so often happens after an unquiet reign, he outlived all his enemies, and died rather regretted than not. This was in 1324: he was buried in 1 Feed. i. 900, 742, 749, 902, 919. VIII.] THE KINGDOM OF ARMENIA. 21$ the church of the Franciscans at Nicosia. When he had been able to exercise independent authority he had used it well; he had welcomed the refugees from Acre and fortified Famagosta; he contributed largely to the judicial decisions which form the supplement to the Assizes, and he established a strong judicature in Cyprus. But he was an epileptic, which perhaps accounts for his incapacity to retain the rule ; and he left no children. With the accession of his nephew, Hugh IV, begins a more stirring, and, perhaps, the most interesting, period of the Cypriot history. Before however entering on the outline of this portion of our subject, we may just look back to Armenia, where the native kingdom and the native dynasty were nearly coming to an end. Leo I, the first king, who was regarded by the Armenian writers as a really great and patriotic ruler, died in 12 19, leaving an infant daughter, who carried the crown to her husbands in succession ; Philip of Antioch first, who, failing to make himself agreeable on the Church question to the native lords, especially a great lord called Constantius, or Constantine, was put to death with his partisans. The second husband was Hayton, the son of Constantius, who reigned for nearly fifty years, at first under his father's directions, and after the year 1237 in- dependently. Hayton was thus king during the whole of the crusading period of the thirteenth century, and had dealings with Lewis IX in his first Crusade, and with Edward of England during his stay in Palestine. He was moreover the king of Armenia in whose time Marco Polo set out on his travels in Asia; and it was through his means that the Western kings became acquainted with the Tartar dynasty at Samarcand and its tendencies to favour Christianity. For the Tartar rulers during this period were far from being committed to Islam; they received and favoured missions . and protected Christian doctrines in a liberal fashion, without 2l6 HAYTON THE MONK. [VIII. understanding them or finally committing themselves 1 . Hayton may possibly have the credit of having stirred up the Mongols against the Khalifate of Bagdad, which Hulaku brought to an end in 1259. The alliance with the Tartars brought down the Sultan of Egypt on Armenia ; and, after the capture of Antioch, Hayton resigned his throne and retired to a monastery, where he took the name of Macarius, and died soon after. His brother, the constable of Armenia, Sempad, Sembat, or Sinibald, was the author of an Armenian chronological history of authority. A better-known person, also of the royal house, was the monk Hayton, who about the year 1305 wrote a history called the Flower of the Histories of the East. Hayton's career is curious. He had been lord of Gorigos, or Corycus, on the Mediterranean coast, and had both fought in Palestine and negotiated among the Tartars, where the Armenian princes were con- stantly tantalised with the hope of converting the khans. About 1290 he went to Cyprus and became a Prsemon- stratensian canon, as Brother Antony. From Cyprus he turned westward and came to France, where the Pope was. It was at Poictiers that he dictated his history, which ac- cordingly was written in Latin. It has been printed both in Latin and in a French translation of the same century, but contains more about the Tartars than about the Franks. It is not improbable that to Hayton's influence we may trace some of the interest shown in Armenia by Edward I and Edward II. King Hayton, however, who died in 1271, was succeeded 1 Mosheim in his ' Historia Tartaroram ' has collected all the notices accessible in his time of the attempts to convert the Tartars, which for a long time had a show of success. After dallying with Christianity, the Khans seem to have become finally Mahometan and hostile at the beginning of the 14th century. But the subject, since the publication of the Armenian authorities, has become susceptible of much more elucidation. VIII.] SUCCESSION IN ARMENIA. 21 7 on the Armenian throne by his son Leo II, who seems to have clung to the Tartar alliance as against Egypt, and to have come to an open rupture with the Pope on the other side. He was likewise in close alliance with Byzantium, and, although his history is obscure, he seems to have asserted an independent position for which his successors toiled in vain. He reigned eighteen years, and was followed by four of his sons in succession. Of these Hayton II purchased the support of the West by reconciling himself and his people to Rome ; he was a poet and historian also, and ended in becoming a Franciscan as Friar John. With his brother, Thoros, who on his withdrawal became king, he went to Constantinople to obtain help from Andronicus Paleologus. On their return they found themselves unseated by a third brother, Sembat ; fled to Cyprus first and then to Tartary, but were taken ; Hayton was blinded and Thoros strangled. Sembat had thrown over the Roman alliance and been crowned by the Armenian Catholicos ; but, finding the Saracens still gaining ground, he changed his tactics, and obtained from Boni- face VIII a bull for a subsidy, which was circulated in England in 1298 1 . He was supplanted in his turn by his brother Constantius. He, after a short reign, was succeeded by Leo III, son of Thoros, who reigned under the guardian- ship of his uncle, the blind brother John, who had been king as Hayton II. Both Leo and his uncle were put to death by a Tartar general, at the suggestion, according to the Roman writers, of the discontented Armenians, who had been again too summarily reconciled to the papacy in a council at Sis, in 1307. Oissim, who succeeded in 1308, was another son of Leo II. He was connected with the Cypriot history, taking part with the brothers of King Henry against him ; and he also obtained a confirmation of the union with the Roman Church in 1316. Leo IV, who was the last of the 1 Feed. i. 900. 21 8 WAR IN THE LEVANT. [VIII. native dynasty, succeeded his father Oissim in 1320. His whole reign was a continued struggle against the Moslems, who were encroaching on every side, and his name became very well known in the West. It was in his defence that John XXII proclaimed a Crusade in 1333; and among other helps Edward III, in 1335, allowed his ambassadors £40 from the London subsidy. Leo found himself before his death reduced to the few mountain fortresses from which his ancestors had emerged two centuries before. He failed to gain the support of the Armenians, and was thus thrown on that of the Latins, who could really give him no aid. He was assassinated about 1342, and his dynasty ended with him. The five remaining Kings of Armenia sprang from a branch of the Cypriot house of Lusignan, and were little more than Latin exiles in the midst of several strange popu- lations all alike hostile. We have now to return to Hugh IV, King of Cyprus, a prince who is known in literary history as the king to whom Boccaccio dedicated his genealogy of the gods. He reigned twenty-five years, and has the merit of setting on foot the great alliance between the Venetians, the Pope, and the Knights of Rhodes, to which the chief successes of his reign and that of his son were due. It is true that these successes wear to modern eyes the look of mere piratical exploits : but we have two points to remember in this connexion. All naval war, not only during the middle ages, but down to the seventeenth century, was more or less piratical ; and the war between the Christians and the Saracens, although interrupted now and then by truces, which both parties felt ashamed to make and took the first opportunity of breaking, was really continuous and internecine. The coasts of Asia Minor had been gradually lost to the Christians ; the coasts of Egypt were to some extent open to reprisals. The fact that the coast of Syria and Palestine afforded so few harbours had, VIII.] ATTEMPTS AT CRUSADES. 210. when once the fortified harbour of Acre had fallen into the hands of the Saracens, the effect of removing the seat of war to the Asiatic and Egyptian coasts. That was the deliberate opinion of King Edward I, who had ruled that Egypt must be the first point of attack, then Palestine, and then Con- stantinople. Hence the two attacks on Damietta in 12 19 and 1249. Now, after a long period of defence, the Christians took the initiative. The leaders and fighters in all this from 1308 to 1523 were the Knights of Rhodes, but Cyprus was very frequently the head-quarters and source of supplies, and the Western pilgrims were not chary of labour, blood, or treasure. In all the great achievements of the time too some English pilgrims were associated. The single exploit however of King Hugh's reign was a descent on Smyrna in 1344. John of Biandra, Grand Prior of Lombardy, the head of the expedition, made himself master of the citadel ; and Smyrna remained in the hands of the Knights until the close of the century. The King of Cyprus had contributed a con- tingent towards the fleet, but, except by weakening the Saracen power a little, he obtained no immediate benefit for his state 1 . The great plague of 1349 fell with especial fatality on Cyprus ; only one castle, that of Dieudamour, was safe for the king to dwell in ; and the island got such a reputation for unwholesome air that the trade almost ceased. The Frank population especially diminished. In 1349 the traveller, Ludolf of Suchen, described the barons of Cyprus as the richest in the world : after the plague Hugh had to recruit the ranks of the nobles by conferring titles on the merchant class. The succours sought in Europe were only scantily afforded. The King of Armenia cried louder and got more 1 Paoli, Cod. Dipl. Orel. S. Joh. ii. 93, gives a commission from the Pope to the Archbishop of Candia to recover from the King of Cyprus, the Grand-Master of Rhodes and the Doge of Venice, the money covenanted for the defence of Smyrna. 220 ENGLISH PILGRIMS. [VIII sympathy than the King of Cyprus. Still some brave men vent out to the East. It is at least to this period that we have to refer the pilgrimage and warlike exploits of Henry of Lancaster, the great duke-palatine and father-in-law of John of Gaunt. He, according to his biographer Capgrave, about the year 1351 made his grand tour, and fought not only in Prussia, where he went first, but also in Rhodes, Cyprus, and the East, ending his military education with a campaign in Granada. William Lord Roos of Hamlake died in 1352, either in Palestine or in Cyprus, on a more distinctly religious pilgrimage: to 1357 we have referred our last glimpse of the English order and their church at Nicosia. In 1352 Henry Lord Percy left by will 1000 marks sterling in florins of Florence for his son Henry to make the pilgrimage. But the French war in the West, and the struggles of the Venetians with the Genoese, prevented anything like national or united expeditions. In the midst of turmoil King Hugh died in 1359, and was buried in the Blackfriars' church at Nicosia. His eldest son, Guy, prince of Galilee and constable of Cyprus, had died before him, leaving a son, Hugh of Lusignan. He, on his grandfather's death, went into the West to obtain some support in his claim on the crown, which, owing to the fact that repre- sentation was not allowed by the laws of Cyprus, failed to obtain recognition. This is that Hugh of Cyprus whom the Pope in 1360 made senator of Rome, and who really ruled there from January to August 1361. He has been confounded by some of the Cypriot historians with his grandfather, who accordingly is made to abdicate and die at Rome. Hugh, having failed to find employment for his military genius at Rome, resigned the senatorship, and we hear no more of him *. 1 Gregorovius, Gesch. d. St. Rom., vi. 393 ; Theiner, Diplom. S. Sedis, ii. 391. VIII.] KING PETER. 221 The crown of Cyprus had been secured by Hugh IV to his second son Peter, whom he had had crowned, before his death, at Nicosia. Peter, with apparently some characteristics of genius, had several more or less allied to insanity. He had made a vow of slaughter against all Mussulmans generally, and, for the purpose of keeping it, wore his naked sword hung round his neck. Our acquaintance with him is largely due to Froissart, who follows his exploits with some minuteness ; but we have a more valuable record in the work written by Philip de Mazzeriis, chancellor of Cyprus, on the life of the legate Peter Thomas, whose period of activity nearly coincides with the reign of King Peter, 1 361-1369 *. Peter Thomas was a native of Guienne, a born subject of Edward III, and was probably instrumental personally in creating the interest felt in England and Guienne in the plans of the King of Cyprus. He crowned Peter at Famagosta, and made an attempt to bring over the Greek population of Cyprus to the Roman obedience. The first exploit of King Peter was the voyage across the enchanted gulf to Satalia, and the capture of the place, where, as Froissart tells us, he slew without exception all the inhabitants of both sexes whom he found there. In this expedition he was assisted not only by the Catalans and the fleet of Rhodes, but by an English force, or a force under an English knight, whom the Italian historians name Robert of Toulouse 2 , and describe as sent into Armenia to demand tribute from the princes. If Robert of Toulouse was engaged in the sack of Satalia, we must hope, for our national credit's sake, that he was only an Englishman by courtesy, a Knight of Rhodes of the langue of England, which would contain knichts drawn from the continental estates of the Plan- 1 Acta Sanctorum Boll. Jan. ii. 995-1023. s The name is variously given : Dulaurier reads it I.usugnan ; it also appears as Julassan, which looks like a corruption of an English name. 222 PILGRIMAGE OF KING PETER. [VIII. tagenets. Having fleshed his maiden sword at Satalia, King Peter set out on a mission westward, a general canvass of Christendom. Having gone by way of Rhodes to Venice, the legate, making known the approach of the king, applied for succour to the ' communitates, dominos et tyrannos ' of Lom- bardy, and then passed on to Avignon. In March 1363, King Peter himself reached Avignon, where the Pope gladly received him, and determined to preach a new Crusade, of which King John of France, who had just emerged from his prison in England, should be the leader. After settling this, the king went to Prague, where he saw the emperor Charles IV, and so to Juliers, Brussels and Bruges. Every- where he was received with suppers and tournaments, in both of which he seems to have played his part. Whilst he was enjoying himself, the legate was negotiating, and it was determined that the Crusade under King John should start from Marseilles in the following March. Froissart follows the movements of King Peter through Picardy to Calais, and on to London. At London he was well entertained; Queen Philippa made him handsome presents ; King Edward gave him a ship named the Catharine. The mayor, Henry Picard, gave him a dinner, and allowed him to win fifty marks at play : but when the mayor won his money back, and fifty marks more, as the poor king did not lose with a good grace, he gave him his money back again. Of substantial aid he got little ; and Edward was not liberal even with promises ; he himself was too old to go, but his sons and nobles might. Peter went back therefore to France. Before he went he was robbed by some English highwaymen ; as however Edward paid all his expenses, he was probably no great loser. King John had during this time returned to England, where he took part in the festivities, but died soon after, in April 1364, thus putting an end to one part of the great design ; and one of Peter's first acts after returning through VIII.] CRUSADE OF KING PETER. 223 Guienne to Paris, was to attend King John's funeral, May 7, 1364, and the coronation of his successor. He seems then to have revisited the emperor and the kings of Hungary and Poland, a route which hindered him from reaching Venice until the legate had left. The legate had been called away to Cyprus to settle a quarrel between the Genoese and King Peter's officers. Peter appeared at Venice rather forlorn ; but he had obtained the support of some English lords, one of whom, the Earl of Warwick, must, if the traditions of the Beauchamps are to be trusted, have gone on before him ; for in the great battle in Turkey, fought Nov. 1, 1364, he took prisoner a son of the King of Lithuania, whom he brought back to England and made a Christian. Two other Englishmen of distinction are known to have followed Peter ; John Lord Grey of Codnor, and a knight of the house of Stapylton, who had been especially impressed by the virtues of the legate. Having got together as many volunteers as he could, and a considerable fleet, King Peter sailed from Venice and joined the fleet of the Hospitallers. The great stroke to be made was the capture of Alexandria. This was effected with no small bloodshed and very rich spoils. Alexandria taken, the next object was to strengthen the fortifications and make it the head-quarters of a Crusade. But here the English auxiliaries objected. There can be no doubt that the story is true, for it is from the pen of the legate himself: they refused even to stay all night in Alexandria, and having conspired with a certain prince, whose name the legate feels bound to keep secret, set sail for Cyprus. They sent word home too that the city was only half taken 1 . It was a great disappointment to the ardent crusaders; but no doubt the English lords who had had experience in foreign warfare 1 ' Recesserunt Anglici qui videbantur fortiores, facta conspiration cum principe cujus ex parentela et dolosa sequela nomen tacere debeo;' P. de Mazz. AA. SS. 1. c. p. 1016. 224 RESULT OF THE CRUSADE. [VIII. saw that Alexandria was untenable, and the season, for it was now the ioth of October, 1365, was too far advanced. The failure of the Crusade was bitterly commented on by Petrarch, who in a letter to Boccaccio writes, at the time, in the severest way of the greediness and irresolution of the Transalpines 1 , and many years after laments, in an epistle to Philip de Mazzeriis, the loss to Christendom, and the wretched effect produced, by the failure, on the character and fate of the king 2 . The English lords seem to have stayed sometime longer in Cyprus : the legate died at Famagosta in January, 1366, and they brought back to England the biography by Philip the Chancellor, which has furnished the most certain details of the story. After the Alexandrian expedition the Venetians, whose commerce was suffering, prevailed on Peter to treat for a peace with Egypt, which was to establish Cypriot consulates and reduce the customs in the ports of the Levant; but the attempt failed. The next year, with the Genoese and the Hospitallers, he ravaged the Syrian coast, but again had to make peace. He then visited Rome in search of succour, and returned finally to Cyprus in September 1368. The rest of King Peter's life was very wretched : he had left his queen during his long visit to the West, and she had proved faithless : he retaliated on the nobles who had been her favourites, and gave rein to his cruelty and lasciviousness. If he were not mad, as 1 ' Siquidem Petrus Cypri rex Alexandriam cepit in Egypto, magnum opus et memorabile nostrreque religionis in immensum amplificandce fundamentum ingens, si quantum ad capiendam tantum ad servandam urbem animi fuisset ; qui certe non defuit, ut fama, nisi comitatus ejus ex transalpinis maxime gentibus collectus, melioribus semper ad principia rerum quam ad exitus, ilium in medio proestantissimi opens deserentes, ut qui pium regem non pietate sed cupiditate sequentes, collectis spoliis abiere piique voti impotem avari voti compotes fecere ; ' Petrarch, Opp. p. 843 ; Ep. Senil. lib. 8. ep. 8. a lb. lib. 13. ep. 2: 'Petrus rex Cypri, indigni vir exitus sed sacrae memorise nisi,' etc. VIII.] TROUBLES. 12$ seems most probable, he was desperate ; and his family took the lead in getting rid of him. He was assassinated by a body of nobles, who acted with the concurrence of his brother John, the prince of Antioch, on the 16th of January, 1369. His wife was Eleanor of Aragon ; and it was this connexion, no doubt, that gave him a higher place than his predecessors had enjoyed in the estimation of the Western kings. Peter II, who succeeded him, was a boy of thirteen ; his uncle John acted as regent. Peter reigned till 1382. He avenged his father's death by murdering his uncle in 1375. His reign witnessed a fatal rupture between the Venetians and Genoese, which accelerated the fate of Cyprus. The representatives of the two republics quarreled about prece- dence at the coronation : the court decided in favour of Venice. This was complicated by a quarrel between the queen-mother and the prince of Antioch. The Genoese took up arms and overran the whole island. The boy king was taken prisoner, and to secure his ransom had to pledge Famagosta to the Genoese. This great city and the port, which Sir John Mandeville thought the finest in the world, was permanently lost to the kings, for it was subsequently made over to the Genoese altogether in order to obtain the release of James, the king's uncle and successor, who had been detained as a hostage by the admiral Fregoso. The particular interest which attaches to the struggle of Venice and Genoa, — a struggle which only ended when the Levant was left to the Turks, and was one great cause of the abridgment of Christendom at the close of the middle ages, — and the glorious exploits of the knights of Rhodes, however close to our subject, are far too wide and engrossing topics to be discussed incidentally. But the fate of Armenia, where the very succession of the kings is very obscure, demands a word. The first Latin king, according to the native his- Q 226 KINGS OF ARMENIA. [VIII. torians, was John of Lusignan, also called Constantine, who reigned only a year; his brother, Guy of Lusignan, who succeeded in 1343, was connected by marriage with the Cantacuzenes, and even addressed Edward III as cousin 1 . Both the brothers were little else than adventurers. Guy reigned for only three years. In 1347 his successor Con- stantius, or Constantine, was, through an envoy of the same name, collecting money in England by virtue of a brief issued by Clement VI 2 . He seems to be identical with Constantine, who, in 1351, was on the throne ; in his favour also alms were collected in England. He died in 1361. After an interval of three years, during which the crown was offered to Peter of Cyprus, and an unknown fourth king may possibly have reigned, Leo V appears on the throne in 1365. He had a hard fight for it; from 1371 to 1373 he was lost to his people, concealed in a mountain fortress where he had been obliged to take refuge. A new king was sought for, a husband for the supposed widow, and Gregory XI offered the crown to Otto of Brunswick. He, however, preferred to marry Johanna of Naples, and Leo emerged from seclusion. But with little better prospects; taken prisoner by the Egyptian sultan in 1375, he was re- leased in 1382, to be thenceforth a wanderer and a pensioner on the Western princes. After his release he made the pil- grimage to Jerusalem, and went thence to Avignon and so to Spain. In Spain he obtained a provision. King John of Castile gave him three lordships, one of them Madrid ; and as lord of Madrid King Leo granted a charter to the burghers of the town. But he did not stay in Spain. In 1384 he was in France offering his services as a mediator between Charles VI and Richard II. His offers were not welcome to the English lords, who then held the king in tutelage. They refused him in the first instance his passport 1 Feed. ii. 1220. 2 lb. 1234; iii. 103. VIII.] THEIR WANDERINGS. 22J — said that though he proffered peace he only wanted money; he was an illusor, and they would have nothing to do with him. Notwithstanding this he obtained not only a safe-conduct but a permit for a cargo of French wine to be brought to England for him ; he made an eloquent speech before the king and council at the palace of Westminster ; and received a pension of £1000 a year; the first instalment of which was paid into his own hands in gold nobles. He had a passport again in 1392, a few months before his death. His pension was still paid in 1391, in the fifteenth year of the unlucky king : at that time Leo, it was said, had been driven from his dominions ; the pension was to be continued until he regained them. Fortunately for the English exchequer, it was not required, for according to the epitaph of King Leo in the Church of the Celestines at Paris, the very noble and very excellent Prince Lyon of Lusignan, fifth Latin king of Armenia, rendered his soul to God Nov. 29, 1393. He left no legitimate issue, and his claims devolved on his cousin of Cyprus. The name of the kingdom of Armenia was thus familiar in English ears at this time. English sympathy had not flagged during these years. In 1383 another Lord de Roos, Thomas, son of the lord who died in 1352, had set out for the East, but died before he left England ; his son John fulfilled the vow, and having reached Cyprus, died at Paphos in 1393. A large party of English visitors had appeared there in that year. James I, the uncle and successor of Peter II, reigned from 1382 to 1398, and was on excellent terms with England. There is a letter addressed by him to Richard II, in July, I 393 1 > in which he acknowledges the receipt of the epistle of commendation brought by Lord de Roos, and tells him that it was needless, because all the King of England's friends were welcome. He thanks him too for the message which 1 Raine, Extracts from Northern Registers, p. 425. Q 2 228 HENRY OF LANCASTER. [VIII. he had received by his most noble cousin, Sir Henry Percy. We learn from this that Hotspur had made Cyprus a part of his great tour; and, as the same year is fixed for the pilgrimage of Henry of Bolingbroke, we may surmise that they came in company. Henry of Bolingbroke, having sailed in July from Lynn, went by way of Prussia, Poland, Hungary, and Venice to Jerusalem ; on his return he visited Cyprus, and so back by Italy and Bohemia 1 . King James was a kindly old man, but much tied up between the Venetians and the Genoese. He had accumulated three crowns; he had received that of Jerusalem at Nicosia, as Famagosta was now lost; in 1393 he received that of Armenia, which he handed on to his successors. James had been a hostage or prisoner at Genoa when the Cyprian crown fell to him ; he had been sent thither when the per- fidious Admiral Fregoso had seized the island ; and at Genoa his son, King Janus or John II, was born. The reign of Janus, thirty-four years long, was one sad struggle, with the Genoese on the one hand and the Turks on the other. The main features of the story are these. King Janus, with a very natural ambition, stimulated more- over by hereditary and personal enmity, made it his first object to recover Famagosta from Genoa, and for this end, in the year 1402, prepared a force and fleet to besiege the Genoese there. The days of Genoese greatness were over. In 1396 the Doge Adorno had submitted to Charles VI of France, and Genoa had become a French dependency. Famagosta had been won by the Fregosi, the opposite faction to that of Adorno, but the French were, as usual, ready to maintain their claim to conquests under whatever regime they were acquired. On the alarm of war in Cyprus, they sent Marshal Boucicault with a small fleet into the Levant. King Janus prepared for resistance, but the Grand- 1 Capgrave, Illustrious Henries, p. 100. VIII.] WARS OF KING JANUS. 220, Master of Rhodes, Philibert of Naillac, interposed as mediator, and a collision was avoided ; the poor king had to pay 150,000 ducats for the expenses of the expedition. Peace was however made, and both parties turned their arms against the Mahometan neighbours. The Genoese ravaged the Syrian coast ; King Janus plundered the shore of Egypt. Booty was abundant, but the inexorable vengeance of the Sultans was aroused ; the ravaging of Syria ended in the loss of the last fragments of Armenian sovereignty; and the plundering of Egypt drew down the Mameluke Sultan on Cyprus. Truces and treaties were made, but were kept on neither side. In the midst of war Cyprus was again, for the third time since the Black Death, devastated by the plague ; and the Sultan saw his opportunity; in 141 7 he took and wrecked Limasol. In 1420 he swore the entire destruction of the Cypriots, and prepared for a final conquest. Four years after, during which King Janus, although he continued his policy of piratic expeditions, had made scarcely any pre- paration for defence, he attacked the island, including Cypriots and Genoese in a common purpose of extirpation. Famagosta was taken and pillaged. Two years later the king was defeated and taken prisoner, and Nicosia was sacked. The king's imprisonment lasted fifteen months; during which an attempt was made by an Italian, Sforza Pallavicino, to seize the government. In this he was de- feated by the Queen Charlotte of Bourbon, who sent against him Carion of Ibelin, one of the last, if not the last of that great house, of whom anything historical is recorded. Ran- somed at an enormous cost, Janus returned in 1427, but thoroughly broken in spirit and despairing of the fortunes of his house. One of his last acts was to marry his daughter Anne to Lewis of Savoy, a connexion which in the next generation helped to place the nominal crowns of Cyprus. Armenia and Jerusalem, among the honours of that aspiring 230 THE LAST DAYS. [VIII. house. He died in 1432, and with him the last sunset gleams of Cypriot glory vanished. The native historians date the beginning of the downfall to the murder of King Peter in 1369; and if that date be taken we must allow that Petrarch, who thought that that event determined the loss of the East, was gifted with some- what of prophetic spirit. But I think that, unfortunate as that event was for the Lusignan house, the doom of the Levantine principalities was already sealed. The great plague had swept off the old acclimatised Franks, especially those nobles who, like the lords of Ibelin, had increased and multiplied in the land. With all their faults these nobles were bona fide Crusaders ; men who, like the first champions, were ready to cast in their lot in a Promised Land, and not, like the later adventurers, anxious merely to get all they could out of it, to make their fortunes. They were swept away. Then there was the antagonism of Genoa and Venice, a piece of history which, so long as history is read in books written in direct hostility to Venice, will be read two ways. Genoa had from the very early Crusades been the ally of France, as Pisa had been the ally of England. Venice had succeeded to the political connexions of Pisa ; the tower of the English at Acre abutted on the ward of the Venetians and the Hospitallers ; not that during these ages the English national power was of any weight in the Mediterranean, but a good deal of national piety and knight-errantry found ex- pression in pilgrimages which were now conducted by way of Venice, in alliance with the Teutonic knights and the Hospitallers. The final acquisition of Cyprus by Venice, and the extremely unfair way in which it was acquired, seem to have afforded the grounds for supposing that the republic had long coveted the island, and that her policy had been for several generations directed to that end. This crooked policy is contrasted by the hostile writers with the open VIII.] VENICE AND GENOA. 231 violence of the Genoese exemplified in the war of 1374, and the seizure of Famagosta. But I confess that I see little to choose between the two, and that what little there is seems in favour of Venice. Neither republic looked at the defence of Christendom as the great thing to be sought. The trading interest, or territorial ambition complicated with trading interest, was the main thing. If Venice profited most by the common policy, it is not so much a proof of previous diplomacy as a result of her longer tenure of power. That the Venetians however had an equal share with the Genoese in weakening the Frank kingdom it is impossible to prove : the Genoese hold on Famagosta was a fatal if not a mortal wound. But still more powerful agencies were at work. The hands of Christendom were paralysed, and the barbarians were gaining strength and unity. The close of the fourteenth century, an exceptional but a very critical era, seems to show us all nations, all royalties, churches, religions, civilised and barbarous, in a cauldron or a whirlpool from which there was very small chance of emerging whole. A madman on the throne of France, an impotent drunkard claiming the crown of the Caesars, a frantic absolutist overthrowing the constitution of England ; the see of S. Peter divided between two, three, four Popes ; the Emperor of Constantinople begging money openly in the courts of the West ; the three barbarian powers pitted against each other — providentially, we may say, for who could have resisted their united force ? — the Ottoman sultan the prisoner of Tamerlane; the Mameluke sultan only sustained in independence by the contest between the Turks and the Tartars. Yet Europe does emerge ; the battle of Nicopolis puts an end to the Crusades; the retreat of the Tartars enables the Ottomans to recover their ground ; Byzantium has a respite of half a century, and Egypt of more than a hundred years of Mameluke tyranny. It takes a 232 QUEEN HELENA. [VIII. century more to constitute the great national factors of modern history. But out of the whirlpool little states like Cyprus do not emerge ; and after the death of King Janus, the causes that were at work worked quickly and steadily. The immediate cause of the break-up was connected with the same sort of religious disputes which, after occupying half the century in councils and debates, left the Byzantine empire defenceless before the Ottomans. King John III, who succeeded in 1432, took for his second wife, in 1435, Helena, the daughter of the despot of the Peloponnese, Theodore Paleologus. The house of Lusignan had been hitherto, as a matter of necessity, devotedly Catholic ; the house of Paleologus was devotedly orthodox ; Cyprus was a Catholic kingdom with an orthodox population; a Latin king with a Greek people ; the Latin Church was rich, and the Greek Church was not poor, but the political power was engrossed by the former. Helena would not see this. She determined, if she could, to make Cyprus orthodox ; she, through her husband, who was a weak and vicious man, refused the papal nominee to the archbishopric of Nicosia, imprisoned him, and was accused of poisoning him. The grand-master of Rhodes came in, as usual, in the part of a peace-maker, and prevailed on the king to receive the prelate ; and soon after, in 1458, both Helena and her husband died. But the quarrel had shaken the tottering kingdom ; the grand Caraman, the Turcoman ruler of Caramania, took the opportunity of these quarrels to seize Corycus, the last Frank stronghold of Armenia. The Cilician and Syrian begs, with the Egyptian sultan, formed a league for the conquest of Cyprus, which was foiled by the Rhodian galleys, or the Latin kingdom would have succumbed before the capture of Constantinople. The end was clearly coming, and it was not now a question between Venetians and Genoese, but between Christian and Moslem, which should take the VIII.] CATERINA CORNARO. 233 island as a derelict. The royal house was nearly extinct. Charlotte of Lusignan, the only legitimate child of John III, succeeded him in 1458. She was the widow of John of Portugal, prince of Antioch, who had been poisoned by the creatures of Helena in 1457. She married, in 1459, ner cousin Lewis count of Geneva, of the house of Savoy, who was crowned the same year. Her bastard brother, James, archbishop-elect of Nicosia, the son of a Greek lady, whose nose Queen Helena had bitten off, was disappointed of the succession, and turned traitor. He aspired to the vain glory of sovereignty, and, having done homage to the sultan of Egypt, invaded Cyprus. For four years Queen Charlotte was besieged at Cherin ; in 1464 she fled to Rhodes, and thence to Italy, where, in 1485, she made over her rights and the three crowns she wore to the house of Savoy. James II, a prince of some power, governed or commanded in Cyprus from 1464 to 1473, an d to some extent justified his usurpation by taking Famagosta from the Genoese, but his reign was one long series of conspiracies. He was assassinated two years after his marriage with Caterina Cornaro (in 147 1), who bore a son after her husband's death. This was King James III, who died when he was two years old. The Venetians held that the rights of the infant king devolved on his mother, and in her name governed Cyprus. On the details of the Venetian title I cannot now enter ; the whole history has been accepted on the evidence of the enemies of the republic, whose story is briefly this. In order to qualify Caterina for a foreign marriage she was declared the adopted daughter of S. Mark, and her husband the son-in-law of the republic. The republic, anxious for the succession, poisoned the son-in-law, who in his will entailed the crown on his children, posthumous ami illegitimate, with remainder to the house of Lusignan. But this was set aside 234 DESCENT OF CLAIMS. [VIII. by the connivance of Caterina with the Venetians, who, after they had ruled Cyprus for fifteen years in her name, obtained from her a renunciation of her rights in favour of the republic; this was done in 1489; and then, formally as well as actually, Cyprus became a Venetian dependency, tributary to the Sultan of Egypt. Caterina herself retired to the Venetian territory, where she lived at the villa Paradiso in the Trevisan mountains, painted by Titian, and patronising the scholars of the renaissance, until the year of her death, 15 10. After eighty-one years spent under Venice, Cyprus was conquered by the Turks in 1570. From the date then of Caterina's surrender, and indeed from the 'death of King James, the history of the island falls into the mass of that wonderful Venetian history of which we read so little, but which must contain so many lessons, and so many warnings for a nation like our own. The titles of the several royalties which thus came to an end were claimed, as titles easily may be claimed, by other competitors : the Dukes of Savoy called themselves Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem from the date of Queen Charlotte's settlement ; the Kings of Naples had called themselves Kings of Jerusalem since the transfer of the rights of Mary of Antioch, in 1277, to Charles of Anjou; and the title has run on to the present day in the houses of Spain and Austria, the Dukes of Lorraine, and the successive dynasties of Naples. The kingdom of Armenia must, I think, have been dropped ; but the Savoyard claim to Cyprus was held as an offence to the Venetian republic, a point of ceremonial which, in the seventeenth century, put a stop for thirty years to any diplomatic intercourse between Venice and Savoy. The suc- cessors of Richard I never put in a claim to the reversion ; the quartering of the arms of Cyprus, which is said to appear on the tomb of Queen Elizabeth, being no doubt a part of the bearings derived from her great-grandmother, Jacquetta of VIII.] ENGLISH HOSPITALLERS. 235 Luxemburg, whose daughter, Elizabeth Wydville, carried the blood of the house of Brienne and the Dukes of Athens into the line of York 1 . The Kings of Sardinia continued to strike money as Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem, until they became Kings of Italy. There is no recognised King of Cyprus now, but there are two or three Kings of Jerusalem; and the Cypriot title is claimed, I believe, by some obscure branch of the house of Lusignan, under the will of King James II. So much for the archaeology of the question. The interest of England in the affairs of the Levant did not come to an end with the surrender of Cyprus to Venice ; for the Knights of Rhodes maintained the defence of Christendom for half a century longer, and England was a close friend of the order until Henry VIII confiscated its estates. The Turcopolier of the Knights Hospitallers was always an Englishman ; he was the commander of the light infantry of the order. I have found no list of the Turcopoliers ; but in the fifteenth century we have the names of Peter Holt, Thomas Launcleve, or Langcliffe, Hugh Middleton, and John Kendall ; all of them would seem North-countrymen. In the last century a medal of John Kendall was found in Knaresborough Forest, and it 1 The descent is a long one, and there is a question whether the arms are those of Cyprus at all. But certain claims to represent the elder house of Lusignan had come into the family of Luxemburg. Jacquetta was daughter of the Count Peter of S. Pol, whose mother, Marguerite of Enghien, carried the representation of the Counts of Brienne to the Luxemburgs. Mary, daughter of Hugh I of Cyprus and his queen, married Walter IV of Brienne, father of Hugh, and grandfather of Walter V, duke of Athens ; Walter V had a daughter Isabel, who married Walter IV of Enghien, father of Lewis, Count of Brienne and Conversano, and grandfather of Margaret, who was the heiress of Enghien. She married John of Luxemburg, and was mother of Peter, Count of S. Pol. As a claim to the throne of Cyprus, this descent was worthless ; but it was a royal descent, and, after the extinction of the Lusignans and the house of Antioch-Lusignan, might be thought to have a value of its own. Queen Elizabeth, however, was in no sense the heiress of S. Pol, much less of Lusignan. 236 SUGGESTED QUESTIONS. [VIII. would appear that he was a member of the family which was particularly marked by its devotion to S. Wilfrid of Ripon. The last known brother of the Order of S. Thomas of Acre, Richard of Tickhill, must also have been a Yorkshire man. The Cypriot king also had a Turcopolier, who, in 1357, was an Englishman. But these are trifles. I said in beginning my'lecture that I should draw no moral or political lesson from the history of Cyprus and Armenia. No lesson can safely be drawn from it, if by lesson we mean absolute instruction or warning that it would be foolish to despise. But it does suggest some generalisations and prompt some questions. We can see that the loss of the Levantine states in the middle ages, that is, the cessation of the defence of Christendom against Mahometanism, was mainly caused by the jealousies of the Christian powers themselves : the determination of the Venetians and the Genoese to set their respective commercial profits above all other considerations. Whilst the Teutonic knights were fighting in the North and the Rhodians in the South, Cyprus, the storehouse of Palestine, was left a prey to the evils out of which the Genoese and Venetians could make their market. It was so in the age that followed : the alliance between Francis I and Solyman paralysed all action by which Charles V and Ferdinand I would have defended the provinces on the Danube and Transylvania, and suffered the Turkish dominion to grow almost unimpeded, until the world began to think that the Turks had a vested interest in the lands they devastated. But the questions which arise are not easily stated, and not easily answered. How can the East be redeemed by the acclimatisation of Northern races ? are the Northern races the only races that can redeem the East, and if so, how are they to be saved from the evils, moral, intellectual, and political, which acclimatisation seems invariably to bring with it? Are the Eastern races to be VIII.] CONCLUSION. 237 redeemed at all, or is that part of the aspiration of the Christian Church and of social philanthropists to be a vain dream ? Is the task of empires to conquer or to colonise ; the task of colonies to extirpate or to develope ? Is a commercial or a military policy the surest agent of civilisation ? Can a worn-out nation be revived and refreshed and recruited by a bracing treatment ? can it be revived at all ? Does the difference between European and Asiatic history consist in the vitality of the historic nations in Europe and the inex- haustibleness of the hive in Asia ? If not, how is Europe to treat Asia, so that the march of civilisation may affect the lands in which the stream of history seems to have long been stayed ? if it is so, how shall the East be rescued from the successive waves of barbarism which may be now im- pending, and how kept alive when those successive impulses are exhausted ? Small as our subject was, it was a part of that which touches all, the world's government and the long patience of Providence. ' And I said, it is mine own infirmity, but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most Highest.' IX. ON THE CHARACTERISTIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEDIEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY. (April 15, 1880.) IF I were asked for what reason I have, in my teaching in this place, preferred medieval to later modern history, I should answer, because I think that for the training of the judgment, the former furnishes material more readily applicable to educational purposes than the latter. It is further removed from the arena of political controversy, and, whilst it possesses interest quite sufficient to awaken every sentiment that may lawfully affect the judgment, it stirs no emotion that could reasonably be expected to pervert or overbalance it. We find in it heroes and heroines quite heroic enough to justify hero-worship ; we find in it questions of controversy quite sufficiently exciting to divide parties ; and points of sufficiently continuing and permanent import- ance to kindle our zeal in a moderate degree in connexion with the questions and interests of to-day. The rights and wrongs of the political life of modern Europe are rooted in the medieval history of Europe, and we can trace sufficient connexion between the extreme past and the present to give interest to the earliest investigations. So we try to train the judgment by investigating causes, effects, ideas and results, rights and wrongs, in a subject-matter sufficiently akin to modern life to engage lively feeling, and yet sufficiently apart DISTINCTIONS. 239 from it to prevent party views from being predominant. I have said this so often on these occasions that I am almost ashamed to say it again ; I must however go on until I can find some one to believe me. The use to which the trained student may put his judgment when he has educated it is a quite different thing : only I believe that whatever side he may take, or, even if he turn his back altogether on the line of study along which I have tried to lead him, he will approach questions of the day with a more balanced judgment ; he will be less disposed to see all good on one side of the great questions, and all evil on the other ; he will come to the strife of politics with his weapons more carefully chosen, better handled and better sharpened than if he had never passed through the training. Medieval History is a history of rights and wrongs ; modern History as contrasted with medieval divides itself into two portions ; the first a history of powers, forces, and dynasties ; the second, a history in which ideas take the place of both rights and forces. The point of time at which we should mark the separation in the latter is the first French revolution. There is a continuity of life through the three; the funda- mental principle, which still holds its ground in the struggle of ideas, is distinctly traceable in the primitive struggle of rights and wrongs ; and far more and more distinctly in the more modern struggle of the balance of power; but in the first and second period, ideas have little weight compared with rights and forces; in the first rights are more potent than forces, in the second forces are more potent than rights ; and now rights, forces, and ideas are matched in the arena of modern politics in such a way as to make right and force themselves ideas. At this moment — I use an illustration which ought properly to grow out of something that must show further on — Austria may be regarded as representing the more ancient form of right, Russia as representing the Z40 RIGHT AND RIGHTS. [IX. form of force, and Germany, Italy, and France different forms of leading idea. I do not mean that Austria is justified on appeal to right, or that Russia relies solely on force, or that the other three states have not ample grounds, both in right and force, for their present position, but that historically those are distinctions essentially characteristic. You may wonder at my temerity in the use of such very abstract terms, and you have a right to bid me define more clearly the historical periods of which I am speaking ; I will then define medieval history for our present purpose as beginning with the eleventh century, and proceed to state next what sorts of rights, forces, and ideas, I consider, mark differentially the three periods at which I have been looking. It may almost provoke a smile that I should use words so, that I should speak of rights and wrongs in ages in which all was done with the strong hand, or of forces where intrigue and policy conspicuously take the place of violence and bloodshed, or of ideas in connexion with the present age at all. I do not care now to justify my use of these particular words, but I can tell you what I mean, and then, if you can supply me with better formulas, I will use them. Our first position then is, that the idea of right or rights was the leading idea of the middle ages. I say now right or rights, because, whilst in the greatest men of the period there was a conscious attempt to exalt law and a willingness to abide by it, there was in the inferior actors, in the worse men, a disposition to maintain their own rights within re- cognised limits, and, when they attacked the possessions or infringed the apparently equal rights of their opponents, to do it on the ground of legal pleas. We all know how enormous is the debt which English law owes to the great legislators of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries ; Henry II and Edward I are, both of them, conspicuous examples of both the tendencies which I have coupled under the term; in IX.] GROWTH OF LAWS. 241 their better actions defenders of the law, in their worse actions captious defenders of their right. The same is approximately true in other countries ; Lewis IX is not only the great legislator of France, but almost the single example of the period, in which the more powerful sovereign grants to his competitor, even in the hour of his utmost weakness, the full extent of his legal right; the treatment of Henry III by S. Lewis is a very striking example of the respect for rights that do not happen to be your own. As to generalities, I need only remark that the names of Frederick II and Alfonso the Wise stand by those of Edward and Lewis as the founders of the non- Roman jurisprudence of Europe, and that in Germany in the fourteenth century the two great legis- lators are the two champions of the rival houses, Lewis of Bavaria on the one side, and Charles the IVth on the other ; the codification of Bavarian law and the issue of the Golden Bull were at all events attempts in the direction of civilisation in accordance with the highest existing ideal. The foundation of legal studies in the Universities, the attempts by legal means to control the customs of private war, — private war being itself an example of the strength of the idea of rights, — the proclamation of the public peace from time to time in Germany by emperors who had the will but not the power to enforce it, and the multiplication of central tribunals in the place of local ones, are examples of the same. No doubt they are developments, evolutions of the uncon- scious progress of civilisation ; that I am not enough of a philosopher to dogmatise about, but if they were, that is the line which the development or evolution took. The middle ages proper, the centuries from the year 1000 to the year 1500, from the Emperor Henry II to the Emperor Maximilian, were ages of legal growth, ages in which the idea of right, as embodied in law, was the leading idea of statesmen, and the idea of rights justified or justifiable by the letter of law, R 242 LAW AND SCIENCE, [IX. was a profound influence with politicians. It may seem fanciful, but I cannot help adding a parallel illustration. The scholastic philosophy was an attempt to codify all existing knowledge under laws or formulae analogous to the general principles of justice. It was no attempt, as is sometimes said, to bind all knowledge with chains to the rock of S. Peter, or even to the rock of Aristotle; just as right is one and in- divisible, and all rights are referable to it (if we only knew where to find it) as the ultimate touchstone and arbiter, so Truth is one and indivisible, and the medieval philosophy found its work in reconciling all existing knowledge logically with the One Truth which it believed itself to possess. What logic was to the philosopher legislation was to the statesman and moralist, a practical, as the other was a theoretical, casuistry; an attempt to justify all its conclusions by direct reference to first principles. You may tell me, if this is true, the age of which you are speaking ought to have been a scientific age, or at least a mathematical age, and it was not. I reply that it was a scientific age in many respects, only it had misunderstood to some extent the character of its subject-matter ; it applied scientific method to matters which were not capable of being scientifically treated, an error which it had in common with a good deal of the scientific philosophy of other ages, the present age not least signally. It used principles and ap- plied demonstration in matter to which neither the principles nor the method were properly applicable ; it argued too rashly from the known to the unknown, and relied too im- plicitly on its own implements. But that is by the way: our present parallel is simply, that in both philosophy and law the middle ages exemplified a like tendency to generalise and to syllogise ; the names of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus stand over against the names of Edward I and Lewis IX as leaders of thought, emancipators for the time, IX.] FREDERICK III. 243 imprisoners for the future, in a far wider realm than that of practical legislation. But this has taken me rather off the point. The great men, I have said, were law abiding ; so also were the small men : and the same standing ground furnished the strength of both. Perhaps the easiest example to take is from the end of the period, the Emperor Frederick III; a man whose history, if it did not fall in a period of worn-out influences, in which the old order was vanishing in the twilight that ushered in the new, would be worthy of the deepest study. Here was a man, nominally the master of the world ; a man capable of the highest aspirations for the future of his house, able to lay his plans and to compass designs which, read by the light of his existing means, look like the merest dreams of the merest visionary; a man of capacity and a man of ambition, but possessing with the crown of the Caesars hardly a rood of land in his own undivided possession ; — within his reach, with but an infant's life between, a great inheritance to which he might assert a colourable claim, and which ultimately fell to his descendants, yet silently, patiently waiting, and holding back his hand from all unrighteous aggression : his designs, dreams as they seem, come to fruition in the third generation, and his impoverished house becomes mistress of half, or more than half, the world. He contented himself with his right and his rights, and the idea was still so potent as to lay the basis for the powers of the next age. Unfor- tunately no one can be enthusiastic about Frederick III, but he has his place in the moral history of kings. But to proceed ; the continued existence of small states throughout the middle ages is a very important illustration of the subject before us; another is the extreme dislike, apparent in both continental and English history, to the forcible extinction of historical claims to territory. I do not mean to say that there were not some very remarkable r 2 244 RECOGNITION OF WEAK RIGHTS. [IX. instances of departure from this rule; indeed, as I shall show, two at least of the most important changes in the map of Europe, the most potential and far-reaching changes, were produced by the breach of it; but the rule as a rule was observed. In England we know how the long-suffering of the Plantagenet kings allowed the continuance of such houses as the Mowbrays, the Ferrers, the Mortimers, the Despensers; how, when generation after generation had proved that disaffection was a part of the hereditary con- stitution of the offending races, the heirs of the traitors were restored or rehabilitated, until, in the wars of the Roses, the opposing houses perished in one another's downfall. There was no fear of shedding blood, but there was great fear of destroying right. So, too, with small states abroad. The little principalities of the Low Countries subsisted side by side with their powerful neighbours ; the small kingdoms of Spain united and separated according to the special law of inheritance that was recognised by each ; and where an attempt at infringement was made, the aggressor found him- self matched against a wide and powerful union of powers instinctively actuated by the intention of right. In France we see this exemplified, not merely by the long continuance of the Plantagenet inheritance in the South, but by the existence of Provence, by the toleration of the accumula- tions of the Burgundian inheritance, by the independence of Flanders and Lorraine. In all these cases there were con- ducing causes, but in each case there was also the plea of right. Proprietary right, we say; the recognition by kings that, if they do not recognise the proprietary rights of the weaker, then the stronger will not consider theirs; proprietary rights, the leading idea that the tenant belongs to the land and the land to the landlord, and if the principle be broken down in one case, it cannot be maintained in another : pro- prietary right, I grant, but still right, still something that may IX.] SMALL STATES. 245 be justified by law, not merely by the logic of the strong hand. The whole history of Germany is, during this period, full of the same idea: small states continuing to exist side by side with larger ones ; each of them in one aspect a centre of light and political culture, in another a centre of intrigue and petty tyranny: I am not concerned to defend them, but to adduce them as facts. Italy can show parallels, but her history is, to a great extent, here, as elsewhere, exceptional, and may more instructively be made to furnish counter illustrations; but the long struggle of the Hohenstaufen in the South, and of the Lombard cities in the North, is capable of being read in the same light : they would have perished before they did, if not as they did, if it had not been for the idea of right, inspiriting the weak, dismaying the strong, and affording a rallying point for the wronged from generation to generation. But two great influences in the medieval world, the medieval empire and the medieval papacy, how are we to class them ? Is the permanent toleration of their existence to be accounted for by the fact of their legal claims, or by that sort of prestige which might seem to throw them into the class of ideas ; the inherited dignity of Caesar and of Peter? The imperial dignity, during a great part of the period before us, was shadowy in the extreme ; nay, during the whole period its substantive existence depended on the strength which the families who passed it on amongst them- selves derived from their patrimonial estates. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufen, the imperial dignity became in itself an almost honorary distinction ; either shunned for its costliness or coveted for the chances which it gave to a second-rate house of increasing its power by such little wind- falls as might come to it. Yet it continued to subsist when any one of the great vassals might with impunity not only 246 CONTINUANCE OF THE EMPIRE. [IX. have declared his own independence but have extinguished the dignity which had ceased to symbolise, not only universal empire, but even national unity. From time to time the phantom empire clothes itself in power and strength ; the house of Bavaria fails to hold the dignity, but, on legal pleas which, if their legality were con- tested, it could not vindicate by arms, possesses itself of two or three electorates, and founds a distinct family policy of most important consequence. The house of Luxemburg, a little county under Henry VII, gains in the third generation the superiority of the two non-Teutonic kingdoms, and under Sigismund, knight-errant and political pedant, sways the destinies, for the moment, of Christendom itself. The house of Austria, in the same way, lays thus the foundation of that empire which is to be one of the great forces of the next age ; not by fraud, not by^violence, but here by a politic marriage, here by a well advocated inheritance, here by a claim on an imperial fief forfeited or escheated : honestly where the letter of the law is in her favour, by chicanery it may be here and there, but that a chicanery that wears a specious garb of right. The imperial idea was but a small influence compared with the superstructure of right, in- heritance, and suzerainty, that legal instincts and a general acquiescence in legal forms had raised upon it. In the counter influence, that of the Roman see, there is perhaps more of the idea and less of the substantive right. I am speaking, of course, politically, and not theologically. The idea of the Petrine succession was a developing idea, that of the Csesarean succession was a waning and diminishing one : the latter was the declining from a great fact, the ancient dignity and power of imperial Rome ; the former was the growth into a great fiction, the temporal supremacy of papal Rome. The empire astonishes us with the vitality which the IX.] CONTINUANCE OF THE PAPACY. ' 247 universal acquiescence in its rights, however attenuated, con- serves to it : the papacy appals us by the arrogance and grandeur of assumption which it raises on a foundation that seems to be itself a hypothesis, to say the least. Yet, as the languishing empire lives by law, the aspiring papacy must live by law, and rights and proprietary rights too. So the forged donations of Italian territory, the baseless claims to feudal supremacy within the Sicilian kingdom ; the spiritual position based on the false decretals ; all of them attempts to supply to the rising power the sort of strength that sustained the falling power. When the point of sub- stantive independence is reached, how are the wider claims made to rest on the firmer basis of spiritual and religious obedience : the law of papal Rome becomes the living voice of the Catholic Church, the voice of the pope in cathedra an infallible utterance ; the jurisprudence of the decretals a universal jurisprudence; the sovereignty of Innocent III and Boniface VIII a sovereignty which it is blasphemous to deny, criminal to gainsay. But when the idea has gained recognition, far be it from us to say that the power so won was used unlawfully. No, the spiritual claims of the papacy, however unjustifiable in their early history, were to a large extent justified by the beneficial use to which they were put by the better pontiffs. The Court of Rome was a tribunal for international arbitrament, the efficiency of which was one great proof of the law-abiding character of the ages which it influenced. I do not forget the wars of the medieval papacy, wars, some of them, which were en- couraged and even prompted by those who were ex officio the peace-makers of the world : but when we consider how, witli all those exceptions, the influence of the Church, during these ages worked from the Roman centre, was as a rule employed for the prevention of war, for the shortening of inevitable struggles, and for the healing of wounds 248 LEGALITY IN WAR. [IX. that could not otherwise have been healed, we cannot deny to it such justification as belongs to men who believe themselves to be the ministers of a higher than human righteousness. But I have no wish to touch more on controversial points : let papal Rome, as the law-giver of the medieval Church, have all the credit of her great achievements : however based, on law or on idea, her position was a standing protest against brutal force, a standing offer of peace and goodwill to those who could pay for it ; a great office of incipient diplomacy, a great treasury of legal chicanery, but still a refuge against overbearing violence. The position of both empire and papacy is historically maintained by a public sense of law and right. But perhaps the field in which the most abundant illustra- tions of the thesis will be found is that in which a priori we should be least inclined to look for it ; in the region of war ; in the drum and trumpet territory in which, according to the new reading of history, so little can be found to indicate the growth of human thought or the development of national character and life. Medieval wars are, as a rule, wars of rights: they are seldom wars of unprovoked, never wars of absolutely unjustifiable, aggression ; they are not wars of idea, of liberation, or of glory, or of nationality, or of pro- pagandism. Ah, you will say to me, you are wrong there ; how about the Crusades, how about the Norman Conquest, how about Scottish independence, how about Lewis of Bavaria and John XXII, how about the Hundred Years' War? Not one of these was simply a war of aggression which those who waged it felt it to be without justification, except perhaps the Norman Conquest ; and we all know what an amount of special pleading was thought necessary to justify that. Do not mistake me : if I had meant to say that law and right were the ruling ideas of medieval IX.] ENGLISH WARS. 249 politicians, I should have said so at first ; but I could only- have proved my thesis by showing that there was no war at all. There was war in abundance, public war and private war : the Temple of Janus could not have been shut for all those centuries, if it had been still standing and put to its mythical purpose. What was meant was not that men loved law, but that they did so far respect it as to wish to seem to have it always on their side. They did not attack their neighbours because they wanted glory; or because they could not bear rivalry, or because their neighbours' armies were too strong for their safety, or because their neighbours' armies were so ill equipped that they might be an easy con- quest ; but they alleged a legal claim or a legal grievance ; and in the majority of cases really legal claims and really legal grievances. Of course, if law had been supreme, the wrong-doer would have yielded at once, the false claimant would have hid his diminished head at the first expression of the opinion of a competent counsel or an authorised judge ; we know how often that is done in these days in quarrels great and small. But I make no such claim for those ages ; I only say that, when a man coveted his neighbour's vine- yard, he went as it were to law for it, and did not simply take it by force. The Norman Conquest of England, I need hardly say, is scarcely a fair illustration. It is at least as much a viking invasion as a war waged according to the international law of the age ; yet the pleas of bequest, the legacy of Edward the Confessor, the papal sanction, the oath of Harold, the legal election by the witenagemot of the humbled race, alike the inventions and the ceremonial of the succession, were a concession to a public sense of right. Take the other great wars ; of England first : we cannot doubt that in all the quarrels arising from the Norman, Angevin, and Poictevin inheritances, the right of proprietary succession was on both sides distinctly recognised : the wars 250 WARS IN FRANCE. [IX. arose not on account of the mere wish of France to re- vindicate her alienated provinces, but on account of the disputed right to a feudal superiority, or the possession of a debateable frontier, or the division between two co-heiresses, or the existence of a custom of representation. When, as under Philip Augustus, the design of aggression was strong enough to take a more decided line, still it was on no false pretext that war was waged, and on no merely imaginary process that forfeiture was decreed; the barons of Poictou legally impleaded John for his treatment of the Count of la Marche, the barons of Brittany legally arraigned him for the destruction of Arthur: as his feudal lord, Philip summoned him, and John, as a contumacious vassal, suffered judgment by default. In the execution of the sentence Philip had on his side, not only the popular hatred of his com- petitor, but the conscious recognition that legally John had lost his cause. Normandy and Anjou were practically un- defended ; Philip's victories were justified by the recognition of the countries which renounced their old rulers for sound and lawful reasons. There were no nonjuring bishops in Normandy and Anjou. It would not be difficult to show how the legal aspect of the Poictevin succession affected the different fate of Guienne and Gascony; but I pass on, for I have mentioned that already in reference to Henry III and S. Lewis; I may just add that when Lewis, in 1259, obtained from his brother-in-law a final surrender of Nor- mandy and homage and fealty for Guienne, Henry formally acknowledged the justice of the sentence under which his father had forfeited the former, and Lewis practically acknowledged the justice of the claim by which Henry retained his hold upon the latter. A piece of legal for- malism this, we say; yet it was so powerful a piece of formalism that it unquestionably made the breach between Simon de Montfort and the royal party an irreparable IX.] SCOTTISH STRUGGLE. 2$1 breach, and led directly to the catastrophes of Lewes and Evesham. We come next to the French and Scottish wars of Edward I. The claim of the Scottish overlordship was made with every pretence to legality, and, there can be little doubt, was believed by the king himself and accepted by the lords of Scotland as long as they remained hopeless of their national independence or blind to their chances of escape. John Balliol's forfeiture, his renunciation of homage, his cession of the crown to Edward, were all legal acts : the attempt of Philip the Fair to exert over Edward the same sort of jurisdiction that Philip Augustus had successfully exercised over John, was foiled by Edward, but was in itself an almost exact parallel to his treatment of Balliol. The Scottish war was again, in his eyes, an attempt not to choke national independence, but to enforce legal right. As the age ad- vances, we find Philip of Valois and Edward III comparing pedigrees before they go to war ; for more than a century two rival kings, Philip and Charles, kings of the French, and Edward, Richard and the Henries, kings of France, dispute the sovereignty of a great nation which is not con- sulted under which lord it will live, but has to abide by the conflicting judgments of varying courts appellate on the field of battle. After that come the wars of the Roses ; wars which were at once fought out in battle, camp and court, pamphlet, book and parliament. In the wars of York and Lancaster, just as in the war of Stephen and Matilda, the legal recognition of the rightful king, the existence of the king de facto as a bar to the recognition of the king de jure ; the solemn character of the ties that unite the baronage to the head, which they are determined to disown, but will not disown without a formal legal sentence; the parallels furnished by the cession of Edward II and Richard II, the curious 252 GERMAN WARS. [IX. pedantic circumstantiality of processes which, before they reached the stage of reality, had cost the lives of thousands ; all these mark not merely the legal character and instinct of Englishmen, but the characteristic of the long medieval centuries, the conscience that war is justifiable only by law. If we turn to Germany, the great struggle of the In- vestitures is in its outer aspect a struggle about legal forms : there were deeper causes at work, the national schism between Saxony and Swabia, caused by the legal wrongs which the Saxons believed themselves to have endured from Henry III, and the religious schism which arose from the rival ambitions, personal and ideal, of Henry IV and the popes ; but the bone of contention was a legal claim. The struggle of the Welf and the Hohenstaufen was a legal struggle; although the weaker went to the wall, his cause was capable of very definite defence ; the sentence under which he fell, although unrighteous, was formally legal. Other illustrations are furnished by the dealings of the Hohenstaufen with the popes ; the great house falls by manoeuvres and expedients of much the same sort as those by which it had destroyed the Welfs : the papacy expands the principles on which it had claimed the inheritance of the countess Matilda, and at the same time formulates the claims by which in the fourteenth century it was to cripple the central power of Europe and reduce, itself an exile, the rival influence to the shadow of a shade. Let these, however, suffice for the pattern wars ; the same characteristics belong in varying intensity to all the minor quarrels, down to the lowest grades of recognised private wars ; war for the right of a bridge-toll, a mill or a pigeon- cote. War was, in one aspect, a sublime ordeal, but, like the ordeal, it was attended with all the forms and ceremonies of law : public war was an ordeal resorted to when all IX.] PRIVATE WAR. 2$$ inferior tribunals had failed to satisfy the litigants; and private war was little else, except that there the coercive power of the tribunals which should have been appealed to was greater, and the waging of war in contempt or despite of them a bolder defiance of the laws of human society. Public war was not, like private war, branded as a social crime, because the one tribunal which might have decided the questions at issue without bloodshed was both dishonest and weak. Private war was not only a contempt of com- petent jurisdiction but a sin against social order. Yet down to the close of the period, the habit of private war was in a great part of Europe unbroken and unrepressed : in the empire the successive proclamations of the peace were in- operative ; in the other states the custom was extinguished only with the independence of the powers that practised it : wherever there was disorganisation, wherever the feudal spirit broke the bonds in which constitutional rule had limited its powers, there private war was regarded as the ultimate appeal : men went to law to avenge their wrongs and to vindicate rights, and, when they could not get law that was strong enough to enforce itself, they went to war. Lastly, look at the Crusades. The Crusades were the great exception to the rule as I have stated it ; they were not wars waged for proprietary rights ; they scarcely even pretended to be so. The Holy Land, the patrimony of the Crucified, as the Crusaders called it, was not theirs by any title of law ; historically the only power which had a legal claim to Palestine was the Byzantine empire, but the ter- ritorial claims of the Comneni were, throughout the crusading period, defied where they were not ignored ; the Crusaders believed the Greek emperors to be either in league with the Moslems, ready to betray Christendom for a price, or else, as schismatics, one shade more or less culpable than 254 THE CRUSADES. [IX. the Mahometans. The Crusades were, moreover, at least in the commencement, originated not by the national au- thority, king or emperor, of a Christian state, but by adventurers, who might for the purpose be called private adventurers, acting under the exhortations of the popes. In one aspect they were wars of speculation, in another wars of religion, in another wars of defence. The first Crusade was perhaps more than the others a war of specu- lation, the second a war of religion, the third a war of defence ; in the fourth, again, speculation under Venetian influence threw both religion and defence into the shade : and all the later Crusades were wars of defence. Yet, although to say this is a partial condemnation, I cannot go further. The conquest of Palestine was to Robert of Normandy, Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Tarcntum, a sanctified experiment of vikingism ; but to Godfrey of Bouillon, to the great mass of the Crusading armies, to the popes even, it was something far different. It was a war of idea ; a going forth to recover the heritage of Christ, the land, as they termed it, on which His feet had stood : it was a going out of the petty range of proprietary rights and wrongs, out of the petty interests of armed litigation. As I have said before in this place, the Crusades, with all their drawbacks, were the trial feat of a new world, a reconstituted Christendom, striving after a better ideal than that of piracy and fraternal bloodshed. In the character of wars of defence they need not be defended: they stemmed the tide that but for them must have covered Europe, as it had covered Asia, with desolation. Perhaps I need go no further; but there is one class of wars which I have not yet noticed, and which yet are very characteristic in their history of the principle for which I have been contending. The civil wars which were waged for national liberties were not in any great measure wars for IX.] CIVIL WARS: 255 ideas, but wars for rights. I do not mean to say that this was quite the case in Italy : in Italy the question of rights had become so complicated that nothing but the infusion of an element of idea could have produced even a semblance of order out of the chaos. The old sway of Rome, the successive deluges of Goth, Lombard, Greek and German, had thrown rights and wrongs into an inextricable hotchpot. The restoration of order was the initiation of liberty ; with liberty, or the idea of it, came new forms of organisation, democracies, aristocracies, municipalities, tyrannies, mon- archies ; each formulating rights and laws as they arose, but less bound by laws of rights and obligations because for the most part they lacked historic basis. What the faction of to-day might set up, the faction of to-morrow might pull down : the exiles of to-day were the governors of to-morrow, the forfeitures of to-day only the reprisals of the forfeitures of yesterday. In England it is very different. Here the rights struggled for are historical rights, and the liberties secured are historical liberties. Step by step, from precedent to precedent, the national growth asserts itself, and the kings, yielding their consent, recognise the justice of the claim, or, exchanging resistance for sympathy, throw new but still historical energies into the common growth. We have in the medieval growth of our constitution little to be ashamed of; little of conspiracy, little of fanaticism, little — as little as there can be in the essential character of a politician — of self-seeking. There is enough of the idea of liberty and sound government to lift the struggle out of the region of mere legal resistance to mere legal oppression : there is a growth towards liberty in all the vindication of even class rights and special privileges : a growth towards liberty so spontaneous, I had almost said so little self-conscious, as to show that it is a natural, not a factitious growth: it is not taught by philosophers, it is 256 CONCLUSION. not extorted by agitators, it is the outgrowth of law and a law-abiding spirit, tending by its very nature to freedom and order conjointly. The transition from medieval to modern history is in this department of national life not an abrupt transition, but a growth befitting a land of settled government ; ' A land of just and old renown, Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent ; Where faction seldom gathers head, But, by degrees to fulness wrought, The strength of some diffusive thought Hath time and space to work and spread.' X. ON THE CHARACTERISTIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEDIEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY. (April 17, 1880.) IN the lecture which I gave the other day, and of which the present is a continuation, I made an attempt to show what I meant by a distinction which I had drawn between medieval and modern history in the two divisions into which it is separated by the gulf of the French revolution. I had begun by a little self-justification in the preference of medieval to modern history as an instrument of education, and, while treating the subject from a higher point of view than that of mere utility, had run off into a disquisition on the distinguishing characteristics of the divisions in question. On the remark which I have made elsewhere that the leading influence of early medieval history was the strong insistance on law and right, I had founded a somewhat rambling examination of the main points of the history of the middle ages, the characters of their great men, the permanence of their institutions, and the peculiar character of their wars. I had marked the characteristics of the second division as power or force, and that of the third as the influence of ideas. I now proceed to explain what I meant by this and to illustrate it, leaving my hearers to infer, as I proceed, what my reasons have been for preferring the earlier portion as the subject of my own teaching. When I have said what will no doubt appear s 258 THE BALANCE OF POWER. [X. to you to be more than enough about that, I shall venture to make some remarks on the influence of the ideas by which at the present day politics and politicians seem or profess to be guided. In that division of the subject I may seem to become somewhat political myself; if I do, I shall not ask your pardon. I have never been ashamed to express my convictions where they happened to differ from those of my friends with whom on most other subjects I should be willing to agree. I shall not, therefore, I think, rightly be thought rash or disputatious if I venture to express difference from those modern political schools with which I feel that I cannot sympathise at all. So now to the subject. Almost any student who has read the usual books, if he were asked to mark what was the foremost idea of the three centuries that intervene between the year 1500 and the year 1800, would reply that it was the idea of the balance of power. The balance of power, however it be defined, i.e. whatever the powers were between which it was necessary to maintain such equilibrium, that the weaker should not be crushed by the union of the stronger, is the principle which gives unity to the political plot of modern European history. Whether the balance is to be maintained against the preponderance of the house of Hapsburg, or the preponderance of France, or the pre- ponderance of Catholic powers as opposed to Protestant ones ; this is the key to the plot. But it is not the existence of the key or the character of the plot, but the existence of the drama of modern European politics, that is the first feature of our sketch : the existence of the powers by whom the drama is played and between whom the balance is maintained. Medieval history may, it is true, be read as a drama, but it is not one in which the plot is obvious ; it is rather more a series of dramas which may be combined, like Greek trilogies, but have unities and plots X.] GRADUAL TRANSITION. 2^9 of their own. The history of each great nation is a drama by itself; the blending of the several dramas may be so read as to show how the nations were severally being educated for work on a stage in which they should appear together : in the modern life of Europe they do appear together, and take each the part for which it has been educated in the earlier stage. But that early preparation had been carried on, to a great extent, separately. England and France had been no doubt training one another for centuries, but the balance of power between England and France never came into the great plot of later days ; the discipline of Spain had been worked out within the walls of the peninsula ; between France and Germany there had never been a great war ; between Germany and Italy, as nationalities, no struggle had as yet been possible; and the border warfare of the border states had been carried on without any great amount of interest or interference from the greater or growing agglomerations of territory which under the name of nations, states or dynasties, now come to the front. The Crusades had been a common field of work and a common stage of action, but the nationalities which in the Crusades had fought side by side in union or in rivalry, had long retired from the uncongenial work, and all the zeal of the best popes and the most heroic kings had been unequal to the task of uniting Christendom again for the common emancipation. There was, however, no great crash at the passing away of the old things and the coming in of the new. The new influences, many and various in character, quickly combine to produce the new actors and to clear the common stage. The concentration of power in the royal hands in France, under Charles VII and Lewis XI ; the creation of a compact and solid kingdom out of a number of rival and hostile feudal provinces or dynastic appanages, a concentration for which, during the whole of the medieval period from Lewis VI s 2 260 CONCENTRATION' OF STATES. [X. onwards, the kings had been working, but which only became possible when the long struggle with England had made it necessary ; a concentration of power which signified not only territorial union, but administrative autocracy; which reduced all powers except that of the crown, states general, par- liament, clergy, feudatories, all to a shadow ; a concentration in which, in the language of the time, France emerged from tutelage and attained to such maturity of manhood as might be expressed in the later formula ' The state, it is I myself; ' — this compactness, this concentration, equipped France for her part. Just at the same moment England emerged from the terrible dynastic struggle in which, with the competing houses, the very bone and sinew of liberty seemed to have perished. The baronage, attenuated to a shadow of its former bulk, and with its power as attenuated as its numbers ; the Commons wearied, exhausted with political struggles, turning their back on politics altogether to seek new and more profitable interests in new channels, and to leave the battle of rights and wrongs to settle itself; the clergy, on the one side left alone among the estates to continue the tradition of liberty, but on the other declining rapidly from their function of the national conscience and memory, to be mere officials, servants of the great monarchical administrative unity that towered so high over the prostrate estates; all three alike, in isolation or in pitiful sympathy, left the national action at the disposal of a king, a king like Henry VII, who would be a tyrant only in self-defence, to be succeeded by a son who would be a tyrant in very self-will. England, growing rich in the peace which its politic king and its busy people alike left all else to cultivate, growing stronger in wealth and union and abeyance of liberty, was likewise ready to act as a force at the will of one man. Spain had finished the seven centuries of her crusade, and X.] CHARLES AND FRANCIS. 26 1 the two rival kingdoms, rid at last of the enemy, met and were united in the Catholic couple. In Germany Maximilian had at last concentrated in his own hands the territorial acquisitions of his house, had united Austria and her outlying states, had obtained for his son the accumulation of Burgundian fiefs, and for his grandsons the crown of Spain and Sicily, the reversion of Hungary and Bohemia besides. The Hapsburg power is a union of many unions, ill compacted, heterogeneous, uncongenial, but of extremely great might, a power consolidated by legal titles, happy and unhappy marriages, legal wind-falls, traditional pretensions, but yet the most important factor for many years to come in the welfare of Europe. The strength of France is in her compactness and concentration, that of Charles V, for in him the Austrian force is first impersonated, in its extent and universality. To that extent and universality the discovery and the rapid pouring in of the wealth of America gave still new weapons and greater opportunities. France and Austria were both equipped for their struggle. The minor actors had somehow girt up their loins also : the popes, giving up their place as the overseers of a too wide dominion, had begun to accumulate the territorial aggregate of provinces in which they also could call themselves the state. Gustavus Vasa was reconstructing Sweden ; although the attempt to unite the Scandinavian kingdoms had failed, the same influence that was knotting up the south into bundles was knotting up the north. And so the struggle of powers begins. First comes the rivalry of Francis I and Charles V ; with Henry VIII and the popes hovering round the combatants, aspiring to hold the balance between them, and made alternately their tools and scapegoats. The struggle is a curious one : the older idea of rights to be fought for has not altogether disappeared, but now the interest is not in the right, but in the battle. So 261 the reformation: [X. it has been since Charles VIII, marching into Italy, had opened the new drama. Rights were sought out and put forward as the pretexts of the struggle, but the struggle was for superiority and the hold on power. The action of the house of Austria was in itself defensive action ; on every side its spreading dominions were at the mercy of the strong enemy whom they seemed to hem in ; the action of Francis and Henry II was necessarily aggressive ; wherever they turned, except seawards, there were the forces of Austria watching them ; over the Pyrenees, over the Alps, over the Rhone, over the Rhine, within the historic limits of France, northwards and eastwards, there was the rival power, and even on the sea-board there were the hostile fleets. Next comes the Reformation, a struggle it may be said of ideas, as the Hapsburg struggle with France is a struggle of rights, but primarily a struggle of powers ; the rights in the one case, the ideas in the other, being the occasion rather than the essential ingredients of the rivalry. But setting the idea side of the Reformation for the moment in the background, follow the rivalry of the fore- most powers. In this aspect the Reformation cuts curiously across the earlier dividing lines : it breaks up such unity of German action as has yet existed, and gives France its first great advantage : the strange alliance of Henry II with the Protestant powers, an alliance most distinctly of force, not of idea, strikes the first hard blow at the preponderance of Austria, and the irrecoverable loss of the three bishoprics is one of the mortal wounds of the empire. The next act is the rebellion of the Netherlands and the contemporary wars of the league in France ; the Austrian heritage is broken in two, but the family interest and alliance for a time supplies the place of personal union. For a generation, however, Austria proper stands outside the struggle of the balance ; she has to repress the movements towards religious X.] HENR Y IV. 263 reformation, and to ward off the attacks of the Turks on the side of Hungary. Where her weight is at all operative it is thrown on the side of Spain. Spain is the overshadowing, all-threatening force ; France doing her best to produce the disruption of the Netherlands, Spain doing her best to produce the disruption of France ; again the reformed party, acting as a force rather than a sentiment ; for although on Philip's side the interests of Spain and religion are at one, France is persecuting at home the very ideas for which she intrigues abroad. After a while the balance wavers: the strong hand of Philip II is taken off, the unworthy hand of the Valois lets- fall the sceptre which it had held with so weak and vacillating grasp. Henry IV becomes the dominating in- fluence. Henry IV is a man of ideas, a man of sentiment, a man of force ; not of much sense of law and right. To his mind a reconstituted Europe was the ideal ; not of course to accept as his the minute remodelling of the map which was once ascribed to him and his advisers, we can yet see enough of his design to know that he planned a forcible partition of the Hapsburg inheritances, the erection of a counterpoise to the empire in Germany itself, and the re- arrangement of the minor states in a way which would have left France the civil and religious arbiter of Christendom. His day is but a short one, and the ideas which he or his counsellors conceived came to bearing in the struggle of forces which occupied the long reign of his grandson. But the scene of the drama changes at the same time. The United Provinces have gained recognition ; the action of Spain is becoming languid, and its energy bears no pro- portion to its still subsisting power and mass. The great act is now in Germany, the Thirty Years' War : a war of two forces, two rights, two ideas : Austria against the princes, Catholic against Protestant, ancient territorial right as against 264 THE THIRTY YEAR& WAR. [X. new territorial force. Here too the religious influence produces cross division ; the Lutheran and the Calvinist will not fight side by side ; the Bavarian sets Catholicism before imperialism ; Austria sets the family interest before either ; yet Austria is as Catholic as the Jesuits and as imperial as the jurists can make her. But notwithstanding this cross influence of rights and ideas, the Thirty Years' War is mainly a war of force, a war for determining the balance, not between ideas or rights, not between competing religions or competing liberties, but between armed sovereignties and territorial aggregations. Make the utmost of the idealism of Gustavus Adolphus, the legal pretexts of his interference are even worse founded than those under which Denmark in the earlier stage of the war had thrown in her lot as against the empire; and the idealism of Gustavus, his high and noble purpose of coming down as the saviour of religion, ends in the artificial aggrandisement of Sweden, as the luckless intriguing policy of Christian ends in the complete humiliation of Denmark. The interference of France, without sympathy of idea, without pretext of legality, is a simple intrusion of force. But I pass on. The Thirty Years' War exhausted Germany; even the victorious powers were worn out, much more the defeated ones : the stage is left clear for the glories of Lewis XIV. • The state is myself.' ' The right is the glory of France.' Perhaps the lurid glare of the glories of this act, the act of the Great Monarch, throws a shade on minor actors and less prominent motives, but it can scarcely be misread ; it is the triumph of force over both old rights and new ideas ; a regime in which might is construed as right. The dominance of the idea of force in the aggression produces a corresponding influence in the resisting powers. They are bound not by sympathy but by necessity; the alliances that resist the great monarch are alliances of expediency, not of principle, and X.] LEWIS AND FREDERICK. 265 when the resistance is past they are ever ready for new combinations. The struggle of the Spanish succession followed, a struggle in which ancestral right was matched against the doctrine of the balance, and the force of the stronger determined the verdict. The struggle of the Imperial succession next led on to the triumphant career of Frederick II, and that unmistakeably to the new forms of political combination and antagonism which emerged from the French Revolution. Lewis XIV and Frederick the Great impersonate the two principles, or aspects of the one principle, that might gives right ; Frederick was far the greater man, of course ; Frederick had rights; he had claims old and legal on Silesia, and the old question of the Cleves Juliers inheritance had been a burning question for a century before he began to fight; and he had ideas — who so many? Lewis XIV had scarcely any plea of right for his aggressions, and his sole idea, as his sole policy, was himself, his interest and glory and that of France in him. But it all came to the same thing. Frederick knew that he was strong, and revived old pleas that his father had let slumber. Lewis knew that he was strong : the rival powers at both conjunctures were exhausted; war, policy, money, philosophy, intrigue, rights and ideas, all gave way or led on to the triumph of force. The right, the idea, the balance of power, was on the side of the strongest battalions. But now I must turn back to the Reformation, for there can be no question that, in the changes that brought about and resulted from that crisis, both rights and ideas were very strong within certain circles of their own, and to make the balance of power, the struggle of material forces, the sole lesson of this portion of history, would be a serious mistake. Yet I think even here we shall see that the principle of the idea was less operative that the principle of force, the policy 266 CONCENTRATION OF POWERS. [X. of force more effective than the policy of idea. The crisis of the Reformation is not less remarkable for its results than for its causes. The throwing off of the Roman supremacy, in doctrine and ecclesiastical government, was, in those countries in which it was permanently effected, a most com- plex proceeding. No doubt there was throughout Europe much religious disaffection at the opening of the sixteenth century; but for a century before there had been even more prominent doctrinal disaffection, and only just a century before the Church had passed through a most dangerous schism, which threatened its substantial organisation as well as its doctrine. The desired reformation in head and members had been familiar all this time. But it did not come till now; till the stage had, as we have seen, been cleared for the new actors. We might conjecture that whilst the concentration of the new powers gave them in them- selves greater vitality and more manageable force, it would exhaust the vitality of the older organisation, which had kept them together whilst the divisions were smaller and the common action less vivid. Whilst all the powers of Christen- dom were busy with their own internal rights and border quarrels, a languid acquiescence in the undivided supremacy of Rome was more a powerful influence than it could be when two or three new and well girt combatants were ready to assert their own atrdpiceia ; still more, when the new com- batants saw the truth that they must be lords in their own houses. As we saw, the concentration of power in Spain, France, and Germany meant more than the absorption of weaker states ; it meant the absorption of inferior powers in the state. The strong actors in the new drama must be strong governors at home as well as strong combatants abroad. Great designs, great rivalries, demanded concen- trated energies, determined wills. Strong government came in with the sixteenth century, and strong government was a X.] THE REFORMATION. 26 J very strong element in reformation history, for it weakened the solidarity of the Catholic Church and prepared the way for the formula 'cujus regio ejus religio,' the disruption of national churches as well. But neither these causes, religious disaffection and the dis- integration of the weak church organisation by the growing strength of absolutism, nor the ideas of the new learning, nor the rivalries of political rulers fostering abroad forms of discontent which they persecuted at home, nor the lust of enlarged territory, nor the coveting of ecclesiastical wealth, nor the envy of unprivileged classes, nor the new power of the press, would alone have sufficed to do the work that was done. Who could have reckoned on the coincidence of the Indulgence agitation in Germany, the divorce agitation in England, the growth of Huguenotism in France, the rising up of men like Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Knox in such rapid succession, and with such marked differences, and such diverse contributions to such a complex result ? There was unquestionably, in conjunction with the yearnings for spiritual change, a deep and strong impulse for breaking with the past ; breaking with national traditions and with religious traditions ; a tendency which would, if it had been unchecked, unobstructed, or not diverted into other channels, almost of necessity have amounted to revolution. Strong government had not come too soon ; but for that, with all its oppressions, its repressions, and its persecutions, there would have been a period of anarchy in the breaking up of the deeps of old society. Well, however it was to be met, reformation came; the absorption of a great part of the lands of the churches followed or accompanied reformation ; either, as in England, by the seizure and surrender of monastic estates, or as in Germany by the adoption of transparent fictions which enabled Protestant princes to lay on ecclesiastical positions 268 PROTESTANTISM. [X. a hold which was never to be relaxed ; or, as in Scotland, by sweeping away the old fabric altogether. The ancient right of territorial ownership was weakened, and the process of secularisation, which was in Germany completed at the peace of Westphalia, set the seal of legality on the status quo. Protestantism had done its utmost to shift the balance of power. Yet, as I said before, it had really done little more than produce a cross division in the conflicting parties. Where Protestantism was an idea only, as in Spain and Italy, it was crushed out by the Inquisition ; where, in conjunction with political power and sustained by ecclesiastical confisca- tion, it became a physical force, there it was lasting. It is not a pleasant view to take of the doctrinal change to see that, where the movement towards it was pure and unworldly, it failed ; where it was seconded by territorial greed and political animosity, it succeeded. But so it has been with many of the changes by which in the long run both Church and world have been benefited. In the case of the English reformation, it is certain that without the redistribution of monastic estates the change must have been long delayed, and might have been suddenly and permanently reversed. Anarchy and confusion were imminent under the puritan rule of Edward VI, as well as under the papal reaction of Mary. If Elizabeth and her advisers had leaned to either, the flood must have poured in ; unsympathetic as is the Elizabethan Church rule, little as we can find to love among the men whom she set up as Fathers to the Church, it was their strong rule that saved England from revolution far more dangerous, far more calamitous, than all the mistakes, the terrors, the persecutions, the reactions, of the so-called rebellion and revolution periods of the seventeenth century. But again the subject is one that tempts to too wide digression : only, after what I have said, whether you agree with me or no, you will see why I have thought it better to X.] DIPLOMACY. 269 treat the Reformation under the aspect of force rather than idea. We must not, however, imagine that in any but the ex- tremest cases of change, political, territorial, or religious, the old landmarks were so entirely swept away that none of the earlier ideas of rights remained. No : it was the conflict between the old influence of right and the new influence of force, between old legality and new strong government that forced into existence the diplomacy of the sixteenth and following centuries, — diplomacy, in its beginning a sort of kriegspiel, in which threats and bribes on paper took the place of mobilisations and marches, sieges and invasions. Most curious are the beginnings of the diplomatic policy of Wolsey and his master; the restless attempts to make the political force felt without the cost of exerting it ; how as soon as they have concluded an alliance, do they begin to work for a counter alliance ; how they seem to conclude treaties with one high conflicting party that overlap the treaties they have just made with the other ; what secrecy, what mystery, what bribery, what intimidation ; and amid all, a little sour grain of conscience, that the old law-abiding, treaty-keeping faith and loyalty would have been better. A plea must be sought for every aggression ; no compact must be broken without hesitation unless a flaw can be found. Whether it be true that Charles V justified the imprisonment of Philip the Magnanimous by the misreading of a single letter in the word which had induced him to surrender, I do not know ; the story may be false, but the moral is true : men were loth to own themselves actuated by simple greed. And as diplomacy was in its beginnings, so it lasted for a long time ; the ambassador was the man who was sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. Rights, pleas, grudges, were regis- tered against the time when strength would accrue to make them real weapons of argument and instruments of aggression. 270 GROWTH OF IDEAS IN POLICY. [X. But as the old influence of right lingered on, the new influence of idea was from time to time giving distinct warn- ings of a further change. There was an idea of religion, there was an idea of liberty, struggles for the vindication of historical nationalities, although, as ideas, they were over- borne or absorbed by the mightier forces which played around them. It could scarcely be but that strong govern- ment should force up premature longings for liberty, or that religious repression should compel a desire for tolerance. Yet we must not make too much of the first glimmerings of the changes that were coming. The revolt of the Nether- lands was perhaps the most resolute attempt at liberty that had been seen since the middle ages opened ; the idea of nationality was strong in the Spanish provinces of the Haps- burg inheritance and in the Bohemia of the Thirty Years' War. But they never became ruling principles; nor were they likely to do so until they were emancipated from the mere selfish and localised interests with which they were bound up. Class liberties, isolated nationalities, local privileges, may keep up the memory, the tradition, of liberty, nationality, and privilege, but they do not become leading ideas until they have been accepted as universally just and desireable, until they can command assent and inspire sym- pathy. The religions that demanded toleration but meant tyranny were no true exponents of religious liberty: the classes that would limit royal prerogative to lay their hand heavier on their own vassals were no true exponents of constitutional government. The hand that cherishes nation- ality in Italy, and represses it in Greece, is no true defender of nationality. But the clock and the limit of my paper warn me to pro- ceed at once, imperfectly as I must have indicated or sug- gested my view, to the third portion of the subject. Later modern history, the history of the last hundred years, seems X.] GROWTH OF IDEAS. 27 1 to me to differ from that of the two preceding divisions, by the prominence and real importance of ideas, as compared with the earlier reigns of right and force. I need not repeat that the prominence and real importance, the theoretical and practical weight, of political ideas being admitted, we need not suppose either of the preceding principles to be extin- guished ; nor, on the other hand, need we suppose that the ideas which latterly come to the forefront were either unknown or unappreciated in the earlier periods. I have just said that liberty, nationality, and the like were strong agents before they became the strongest ; we may freely admit that both force and right still exercise a strong influence, though not the strongest, in modern politics. Keeping this in mind, you will not expect me to discuss the origin and growth of the ideas in question ; rather it will be enough to indicate the point at which they seem to take such hold on the political mind as to presage their future importance. It seems to me that the partition of Poland, in the last century, was the event that forced the idea of nationality upon the world, and the revolt of the American provinces of the British empire that which forced the idea of self-govern- ment, not as a local British invention, but as a sort of political gospel, upon general belief. You will not suspect me of being a believer in the ' rights of man,' or in the legal position of the American revolutionists ; you will not, I trust, suspect me of believing that territorial right can ever be made a justification of moral iniquity or of abandoned misgovernment and tyranny: and yet I may insist more strongly on territorial right and believe more strongly in the universality of true principles than others who talk politics more fluently than I can deliver public statutory lectures. But to stick to facts: as the suppression of Poland, on the one side, forced on the world the conscience that nationality is more than a geographical formula, on the 272 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. [X. other hand, it showed how easily force and fraud could remove the ancient landmarks of territorial right. It was, therefore, a two-edged experiment, and no doubt it cut the hands of all the intermeddling powers. As the vindication of American liberties made a precedent for the ideas of the French Revolution, the partition of Poland pointed to the reconstruction of the map of Europe ; the destruction of that kingdom was a precedent for the destruction of any king- dom ; the extinction of that nationality aroused a sympathy, awakened an idea of the importance of nationality as a re- constituting idea in reformed society. Well, the French Revolution set at liberty all the dis- ruptive influences that existed in the weakly governed states of the continent, and roused to a somewhat rash, hurried, and incautious hostility the instincts of the strongly governed but ill-prepared powers like Prussia, Austria, Russia, and England. And the first attempts at a propaganda of liberty, and the first attempts at a propaganda of nationality, were marked by great excesses and great mistakes : excesses and mistakes so potential that the propaganda of the two in- fluences together determined, in the Napoleonic empire, the tyranny and glory of France and the privilege of all nations to acknowledge and toil under the shadow of her supremacy. Liberties were enunciated in fulsome language, nationalities were carved out with amusing caprice ; but glory and victory were the real aim ; force exerted itself as strongly under Napoleon as under Peter the Great and Frederick the Great and Lewis the Great. By and by came the recoil. Napoleon was humbled ; the map of Europe was reformed on a plan which showed a respect for territorial rights, and a just recognition both of the earnings of force and of the growth of ideas. But the end was not yet; liberty, though recog- nised, was distrusted ; nationality, though allowed some weight, was everywhere set beneath territorial right and X.] MODERN STRUGGLES. 2j$ material power : and self-government made very little way in the world for at least fifteen years after the battle of Waterloo. When the world had rested, when politics began to move again, both these ideas came to the front : the nationality of Greece ; the independence of Belgium, a distinct nation- ality as regarded the state with which it had been bound up : these were the first notes of the triumph of one idea : the second French Revolution cannot be said to have opened the campaign of self-government, for the revolt of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies had done that ; but it was an important contribution to the cause among the old countries of Europe : the German principalities had to hasten the gift of constitutional governments which had been long deferred, and were, even when granted, to a great extent illusory. An uneasy time of peace and repression were the seventeen years that followed: since 1848 the action of the drama has been exciting and unintermitting. France, dissatisfied with her government, threw Europe again into turmoil ; again there was a cry of liberty and nationality, again force and legality were equal to the occasion, and society was saved. France sank under a military despotism which subsisted by keeping the world in arms. But the ideas were stronger at each revolution and each struggle. France went to war for the idea when she had nothing else to go to war for ; and, having bound liberty hand and foot at home, proclaimed herself again the apostle of liberty. It was liberty for your friends, humiliation for your enemies, as usual : but the result far outran the intention. After the Crimean War, of which I will not trust myself to speak further than to say that I believe it to have been a profound misunderstanding of the current of the world's progress, a mistake of legality, a miscalculation of force, a T 274 IDEAS OF 1880. [X. misconception of idea, but which had the sole merit of teach- ing the generation of soldiers to fight and of diplomatists to conjure ; after the Crimean War we get, first, the reconstruc- tion of Italy on the principles of nationality and with a free constitution; then the reconstruction of Germany, then the reconstruction of Austria; of Germany on a principle of nationality and self-government which has yet to find a balance for the preponderance of force, and in Austria on a principle of nationality and self-government that has yet to determine its relations to the older rules of legality on which historically the unity of Austria depends. And within the last two years the world has been kept alive by the struggle for nationality and freedom, between Russian force and Turkish tyranny. Out of the crucible, out of the fiery furnace, against the will of the potent actors, as if by a law that may not be- broken, the victory of the idea is rapidly being realised. There are, of course, other ideas, counter ideas, ideas which are only the old legality and the old material force disguised under new names. Such ideas may be Pansclavism, or Internationalism, or Nihilism, if it be anything but a negation of ideas. Such ideas may be that of Russia at Constantinople, of a restored Poland, of a free church in a free state, of uni- versal voluntaryism, of scientific frontiers. I am not here to justify or to condemn, much less to prophesy; and whatever it is that is coming, I am sure we are only at the beginning of it. At present Russia stands before the world, really as representing force, in pretension, — pretension which I am far from believing to be insincere, — as the liberator of the Christian races of the East. Austria is far the most con- spicuous defender of historic territorial right; and all those who are not afraid of the nickname of reactionists will be slow to condemn her for the maintenance of a principle on which she has grown into power, and which she is doing her X.] THE PRESENT. 275 best to reconcile with more potent ideas and influences more likely to be permanent. France to some extent represents democracy, to a far greater extent she still, as ever, represents the old claim to arbitrate in Europe. Prussia or Germany, in the same way, represents the force which, relying on the strength of nationality, has for the moment made her the leading power in Christendom. For the perishing remnants of Turkey a faint plea of territorial possession has gone forth, but the conscience of friends and the determination of foes have alike repudiated it as an excuse for misgovernment and palliation of tyranny. There is no idea, no such justification for that curse of Christendom. Turkey means nothing, re- presents nothing but butchery, barbarism, and the vilest slavery. What does England represent? "What is she to represent in the future ? What would w : e wish for her but clear-sighted justice and living sympathy with what is good and sound in the progress of the world ? Having achieved that sentiment, I must now slip into bathos. I have preferred medieval history to modern in my own teaching, partly because I believe the study of rights is more wholesome as an educational study than that of the balance of forces, partly because I think it a safer study altogether than the theoretical study of political ideas. Political ideas are apt to lay hold on the fancy and on the affections, and to make men partisans before they are at all competent to weigh the merits of parties, to adjust the balance between order and progress, between historical right and historical growth: and there is in the study of them verj little training. Educationally, I prefer the first division. I may also be turned towards it by certain legal tendencies and documentary tastes of my own. I am only justifying myself, not laying down a law for others. There are other sorts of studies here besides law and history. I can conceive the man who has spent his terms here on philosophy taking more T 2 2 7 6 CONCLUSION. [X. naturally to the examination and analysis of ideas, and the mathematician being more charmed by the thought of reading national complications as illustrations of the parallelogram of forces : the student of physical science will no doubt soon be able to infer the national idiosyncrasy of races from the shape of their skulls. With all this I am so far from finding fault that I rejoice and delight in the thought of so many minds and so many studies working towards my truth. But I plead for a toleration which I have done my best to justify. XL THE REIGN OP HENRY VIII. (June 7, 1881.) I SHALL not trouble you with any detailed reasons for my choice of a subject for this Term's statutory lectures ; it is enough to observe that I have been busily employed upon the reign of Henry VIII for some months of ordinary lecturing, and that there is every probability that I may have to work upon him for some months to come. You will at once admit that Henry VIII is too big a subject to admit any rival on the same canvas, or under the same hand ; whoever undertakes him at all must be content to devote himself for the time entirely to him. This being said, you must further concede to me that, although the subject is interesting enough, two lectures, in which anything like a bird's-eye view can be offered, must be very dry ; I will not say dull, but so concentrated as not to allow much extraneous illustration. That granted, I propose to put before you, in as concise a form as possible, the main points of importance in the reign, in some degree adopting the method which I have followed in the analytical chapters of my Constitutional History. If, in doing this, I succeed only in drawing out a plan on which the long history of the reign may be ar- ranged for subsequent reading, I feel that I shall have done something. I intend to try to do more, but I may not, in the further aim, satisfy you, and I certainly shall not satisfy myself. 278 ENGLAND AT HENRY* S ACCESSION. [XI. My plan will be to offer you, at the beginning and end of the lectures, some general remarks on the position and character of England and her king at the beginning and end of the reign ; but to devote the main part of our discussion to the definite arrangement of the particular acts and measures of the period, saying as little as possible about external matters, but fixing as accurately as we can the framework of internal history; its principal changes and their tendency. I will not now anticipate any general conclusions, but simply propose an arrangement under the ordinary heads of taxation, legislation, administrative action, ecclesiastical reform, and parliamentary history. The position of England at the opening of Modern History, the position which she had assumed under Henry VII and in which Henry VIII found her at his accession, was that of a young, well-concentrated and well-equipped, but untrained, actor for the great drama of European politics. England had had more than twenty years of such peace as amounted to a disuse of warfare ; that is, her yeomanry had only maintained the use of arms as a part of their education, they had no practical acquaintance with military tactics or with blood and iron. But in other respects she was well furnished ; she had money, and good intelligence, and astute ministers, men of wide mind like Wolsey, and of minute experience, and of no small ambitions. I am not going to say that England came upon the stage with more real wisdom or with more honesty of purpose than the other powers : her diplomacy seems to have partaken quite as much of the character of chicanery as did that of Spain, France, or Austria : but her interests in the struggle of European forces, which is now commencing, were not so direct as theirs; her sympathies were not definitely with cither the one side or the other; and, if her hereditary antipathy to France might seem likely to throw her too unreservedly on the side of France's enemies, the cool way in XL] HIS FOREIGN POIICY. 279 which, on all occasions except when money was wanted, her attentions were received by the Imperial administration in Spain and the Netherlands, was quite enough to repel any approach to sympathy. So, as a rule, throughout the reign of Henry VIII, the cool heads among English politicians dreamed of nothing more for their country than the position of an arbitrator, an umpire between great rival parties on the Continent, from whose humiliation nothing was to be gained, and from whose over-exaltation something was to be feared. Henry VIII might sometimes dream of the Empire, or of the recovery of Normandy and Aquitaine, as Wolsey might dream of the papacy; but the wiser heads contemplated no such shadows; nor, I think, had those aims more than a slight and momentary influence on the king and cardinal ; the people were not unwilling, up to a certain point, to fight and, up to a certain point, to pay : but they did not care to sacrifice their blood and money, and win neither spoils nor glory. So, although there was much talk of war, and much money spent on armaments, money well spent perhaps in part, for the armed power of England was a not unimportant qualification for her position as arbitrator, there was very little real war; there were countless treaties, leagues, unions, truces, armistices, sufferances, neutralities and abstentions, but the expeditions of Dorset and Howard to Spain and France in 1512, the king's expedition to Tournay in 15 13, the invasion of France by the Duke of Suffolk in 1523, and the expedition of Henry to Boulogne in 1543, are the sum and substance of Henry's military doings outside of Great Britain. A momentary effort, a little advantage gained, time taken to secure it, and the utmost terms exacted for the surrender of it, is the whole story. In spite of many leagues with France, the sword is never really drawn against Charles ; 280 FOREIGN POLICY. [XI. and, in spite of many leagues with Charles, war of England against France has no other direct object than the acquisition of a stronghold on or near the coast. Money is spent in loans, or dangled in the shape of promises, there are threats of diversion and plans of united campaigns which come to nothing more. England claiming to be an arbitrator is really a make-weight. I cannot therefore agree with those who would extol the foreign policy of England in the beginning and end of the reign as a masterpiece of diplomacy. Honesty would have been the simpler, the wiser, and the cheaper policy ; and so I think the nation itself felt. Far more would really have been gained by letting the competitors fight out their quarrel and exhaust themselves ; and the position of England could have been made safe at a tenth of the cost. But it was a new game, a new drama, and England as represented by Henry must have a leading part. Within the borders of the island, the old struggle of Scotland, allied with and prompted by France, is a matter of secondary interest ; and the two great crises, the battle of Flodden in 151 3 and the death of James V in 1542, great as they are in picturesque and personal interest, scarcely trouble the current of peace at home ; the border warfare, seldom intermitted, the party struggles of the Scots themselves, whether the time is one of truce or of hostility, furnish opportunity for military and administrative occupation, and for the energies of uneasy men. I pass then rapidly and generally over these external points in which so much of contemporary history is expended, and prefer to look more closely at home. And let us first look at the king. I am not one of those critics who incline to a very disparaging estimate of Henry VIII. He was not, as a man, more vicious than many kings who have maintained a very fair reputation in history. In XI.] THE KING'S CHARACTER. 28 1 force of character there are few indeed that come near him ; if he seems to act upon pure self-will, he is able to give a reason for his acts, and that such a reason as we cannot on mere prejudice determine to be unreasonable ; he makes his way with good men and bad men alike, and, with a few notable exceptions, he is able to overrule all protest. On mature consideration, I am inclined to regard Henry himself as the main originator of the greatest and most critical changes of his reign; and I am sure that, after the fall of Wolsey, there is no minister, great or small, who can claim anything like an original share in determining the royal policy. He could keep More as his chancellor, and Warham as his archbishop, whilst he was pushing measures which they abhorred ; he could send Cromwell to the block the moment he discovered that he was pursuing designs of a colour which did not recommend itself to him; and to Audley and Wriothesley no one would dream of giving the name of an independent or original minister. Cranmer and Gardiner he tolerated alike and in turn, but Cranmer kept his place by abstention from politics and by the facility with which Henry could use him when he wanted ; whilst Gar- diner, on the other hand, sank the ecclesiastic in the politician until his time came. So, for all the critical years of the reign, Henry's strong will threw the advice or agency of any subordinate politician into the shade. Henry was every inch a king ; the king, the whole king, and nothing but the king. Another of our kings, George IV, I think, who also had matrimonial troubles, in writing to his ministers used to employ an expressive phrase to describe a contingency which it was useless to con- template. ' If I were an individual,' he writes, ' I might, should, or would do so and so.' Now Henry VIII in that sense was never an individual : he was always a king, looking on himself as a thing apart from mankind, on kingship as an 282 THE ROYAL IDEA. [XI. end in itself, on kingly volition as the only and ample reason for anything whatever ; on his dignity as such a complete vice-Deity that, under his fiat, municipal law rose, without any further sanction, to the level of divine revelation. His marriages are royal marriages, his murders royal murders, his diseases royal diseases. There is nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. Bessie Blount is as much a fact as Anne Boleyn, and Anne Boleyn as Katharine of Aragon. If they are to his taste they are honoured and worshipped with him ; if he is tired of them the country is tired of them too ; they are abominable ; they confess themselves guilty of impossible sins; send them by parliamentary petition to the block. What is strange in all this is not the idea itself, which George IV may have had as strongly as Henry VIII : it is the force of character that makes the idea tolerable to other men ; that makes More, Warham, Cranmer, Gardiner, Crom- well, faithful administrators of the idea ; and that forces, against their will evidently, but still effectively forces, Parlia- ment and Convocation, Lords, Clergy and Commons, to register simply the peremptory orders of the king as their own wishes. There were cliques and parties at Henry's court during the whole of his reign, there was a strong party against Wolsey, there was a protestant and a catholic party, and a Norfolk and a Suffolk party ; but I am sure that it is a mistake to regard Henry as pulled by one or other of these alternately ; or to think that the changes of his policy, and I am not at all sure that the changes were at all so great as they are commonly regarded, were dictated by any other than his own despotic will : he used, I think, the parties, not they him ; what influence he allowed them was allowed for his ends, and the moment he saw them pursuing their own ends he stopped them. Of course such a theory about him, if true, necessitates xi.] mo re's caution. 283 the belief of great development of design and new purpose in the king himself: but that I think is the most natural solution of most of the critical questions of the reign. The words which More addressed to Cromwell, soon after he resigned the chancellorship, seem to be a key, almost prophetic in simplicity, to the after-history. ' Master Cromwell,' he says, ' you are now entered into the service of a most noble, wise, and liberal prince : if you will follow my poor advice, you shall in your counsel-giving to his grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do.' ' For if a lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.' From the very beginning of his reign, he is finding out what he can do ; from the fall of Wolsey, and especially after the sacrifice of More, he is coming to regard what he can do as the only measure of what he ought to do : he is becoming the king for whom the kingdom is, the tyrant whose every caprice is wise and sacred : he turns the theory of kingship into action ; the king can do no wrong ; there- fore men shall call right all that he does : he is the king, not an individual ; what in an individual would be theft, is no theft in him; all property is the king's, he can take it, and he takes it ; all that proceeds from his mouth is law ; the king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, therefore all that comes out of the king's heart is the Lord's doing. Yet with all his grotesque and inhuman self-absorption, the miserable and growing result of the long tenure of irresponsible power, we cannot wisely deny the king some great qualities besides mere force. Contemporary foreigners, the justice of whose general judgment is amply proved by later history, and whose opinion, according to Lord Bacon's dictum, is generally that which future ages will be found to confirm, are unanimous in their glorification of Henry's personal and mental gifts. His beauty was of that sort that commended itself to the taste of those times. And mere 284 henry's ability. [xr. than that : for the painters of his portrait have succeeded in giving him an individuality and a humanity which shows either that he possessed a remarkable physique, or that they took more pains with him than they did with his wives — the deadly-lively sort of ladies whose portraits are, if not a justi- fication, at least a colourable occasion for understanding the readiness with which he put them away. Henry's portrait, I said, would fill any canvas ; and, allowing for what must be allowed for, dress, expression, and attitude, it must be allowed to be the portrait of a personable king. His mental abilities I rank very high : he had been care- fully educated by good scholars, and had made remarkable progress ; not so great, Lord Bacon tells us, as his brother Arthur ; but still remarkable at a remarkable time : he did not let his knowledge acquired in boyhood fade out of his mind : after his accession he must have continued his reading ; his book against Luther, which, whatever assistance he may have received, was in conception and execution entirely his own, was an extraordinary work for a young king ; and the intelligent interest which, down to the last, he showed in religious and other ecclesiastical questions, even when he was most capricious and peremptory, evinces both memory and a real appreciation of subjects on which contemporary kings thought it sinful to think at all. If it were not for the miserable self-will and self-worship which runs through these, there might be something to admire. Well, it is not for us to judge. The king is apart from other men in his opportunities, in his excuses, in his tempta- tions ; even in his responsibility for the direct results of his acts ; and he must stand alone in the judgment. But I will leave the remaining sentiments or reflexions which suggest themselves, to be justified after the review of the reign which I propose to take now. The first question, who were Henry's responsible advisers, xt.] henry's ministers. 285 is capable of a very short answer considering the length of his reign : he succeeded a king who had been his own first minister, and who had under him two sorts of secondary ministers ; one set, like Warham and Fox, trustworthy men to whom he gave official confidence, that confidence which a self-confident autocrat can afford to give to men whose interests are the same as his own ; and another set, like Empson and Dudley, whom he used as tools, responsible tools, to be used as long as they were useful, but to be held responsible the moment their use was over or the outcry they provoked became more noxious than the ends they served were advantageous. Henry VIII, doing everything on a larger scale than his father, had the same ideas of ministerial usefulness : during a reign of thirty-eight years he had only five chancellors, Warham, Wolsey, More, Audley, and Wriothesley; and the office of lord high treasurer was held by two dukes of Norfolk in succession during the whole reign. Of the chancellors, Wolsey alone was displaced against his will ; Warham had been long anxious to retire ; More resigned in disgust ; Audley retained the seals to his death, and Wriothesley was chancellor when the king died. Of these seven ministers we may summarily conclude thus : the two Norfolks and Warham were in position ministers of the old type, official and confidential, but not leaders of political parties, until, after the fall of Wolsey and, in the later years of the reign, after the fall of Cromwell, the second duke undertook the more onerous and critical position which in the end was so nearly fatal to him. Wolsey was too great a man, and More too good a man, to be tools of Henry, especially after the inclination towards tyrannic caprice became more pronounced ; Audley and Wriothesley were tools, either altogether selfish and un- principled, or, like Cromwell, able to combine self-aggrandise- ment and servility with some quantum of ulterior political 2 86 HIS COUNCIL. [XI. design, which raises them above that common herd into which Empson and Dudley fall. Besides these ostensible ministers, Henry had a council, in which perhaps more influential advisers might be looked for : such as were his brother-in-law, friend, and boon companion Suffolk, who, worthless enough himself, still was no man's enemy; Cromwell, the greatest and most famous, whose character and career are even more mysterious than his master's; and the men who made their position and reputation by their share in the business of the divorce, such as Cranmer, of whom, in this aspect, the less said the better, and Gardiner, the rough and ready, faithful, skilful, imperious yet adroit minister, on whose back history has laid so great burdens. It is no doubt within the walls of the council chamber that we have to look for the suggestions of such parts of the royal policy as were not due to Henry himself: we can hardly, except in the cases ofWolsey and Cromwell, very distinctly lay our hand on the authorship of a particular scheme : and it is quite certain that, when a particular scheme that pleased the king was started, he adopted it as his own with an ardour and pertinacity fully in keeping with his own idea of his infallibility. So, although for a time Wolsey, and after him Norfolk, and after him Cromwell, and after him Norfolk again, seem to be the prime ministers of a country in which for at least two centuries such prime ministers had been constitutional facts, and although there was in the council a fertile seminary of politicians creeping into power, yet on the whole Henry was his own chief counsellor; in spite of his inconsistencies the most consistent, and in spite of his changes and caprices the most persistent, of all the men who changed, at this great critical juncture, the whole face and attitude of England. What more need be noted, in such a brief outline as I am now drawing of these things, of the vast industry and broad XI.] FINANCIAL SUMMARY. 287 views of Wolsey, of the wisdom and virtue of More, of the mysterious unconscientiousness of Cromwell, and the like, may be taken as we proceed. The first region of constitutional action that lies before us is the finance of the reign ; a subject on which we have abundant, though not very conclusive data, in the acts of the parliaments which now begin to put on record the amounts expected from the several grants ; in the subsidy rolls, which show how the sums granted were assessed and collected, in the correspondence of the period, which sets before us what the estimated expenditure was from time to time, and in the incidental references of the annalists which tell us how the imposts were from time to time felt by the people. Of the thirty-eight years of the reign, twenty-one passed away without a parliament, and therefore without a budget ; and long prorogations had now become so much the rule, that only nine new parliaments, nine general elections, were held during the whole time ; the country therefore had not much opportunity of showing a change of feeling in this respect. It is thus comparatively simple to state the parliamentary grants : tunnage and poundage, and the subsidy on wool, woolfells and leather, were, in the first parliament of the reign, granted to the king for his life : the ancient vote of tenths and fifteenths was made on eleven occasions, some- times as a sufficient grant and sometimes as a supplementary grant when a more grasping exaction had disappointed the officers of the Exchequer; and nine several subsidies of a new kind, a graduated income and property tax, were levied at more critical periods, as for the expeditions of 151 2 and 1 51 3, for the payment of expenses in 15 15, and for the warlike preparations made in 1523, 1539, and 1543. These latter taxes were exactions on lands and goods according to fixed scale, minutely drawn out in each of the acts that 288 ESTIMATES OF EXPENDITURE. [XI. sanctioned them: but, as the impost invariably fell short of the amount expected from it, we must conclude that, like the old tenths and fifteenths, it was assessed on fancy valuations and produced no very pressing hardships ; judging from the existing returns, it pressed very lightly upon individual payers, from the highest class to the lowest. Besides these legal taxes from the laity, the king had votes from convocation following those of parliament in due pro- portion, the clergy paying a tenth whenever the parliament voted a tenth and fifteenth, adding a subsidy when the parliament granted a subsidy; and, after the parliament of 1534, paying to the king a whole tenth annually, which had been previously paid, almost if not quite regularly, as a con- tribution to the funds of the papacy. These were the regular and constitutional sources of income. Besides these, we have to include in the list of the king's resources, first the heavy loans which were exacted by a regular process, not very far removed from compulsion, in the years 1522-8 and 1542, and which were so fully remitted by the parliaments of 1529 and 1543, that even those unlucky creditors whom the king had paid were obliged to refund the money; secondly, the exactions from the clergy under the threat of praemunire in 1531, amounting to about £120,000 ; thirdly, the very large payments of tribute from France under the treaties of Edward IV and Henry VII; and, fourthly, the enormous revenue, enormous at the lowest estimate, which accrued during the last years of the reign from the spoils of the shrines and the plunder of the monasteries. Besides these, there was an occasional devotion money, like that collected in 1544 nominally for war against the Turks; a benevolence, or amicable contribution, such as in 1525 produced con- siderable disaffection in the country; and lastly, enormous sums raised under occasional forfeitures. I shall not attempt a summary of these taxes, but may mention a few data that XI.] ESTIMATES OF EXPENDITURE. 289 may be relied upon : the value of a tenth and fifteenth was £30,000; of a clerical tenth, £10,000; the estimated amount of the subsidy of 151 3 was £160,000; the estimate for the royal expedition made in 1522, £372,404 \%s. ^d.; the estimated sum of the loans of 1523 was £260,000 ; the income from the monasteries cannot be stated in reasonable figures ; but of this a considerable part was during the few years that it accrued expended in pensions. Of estimated outlays we have but a few illustrations ; the expenses of the household were a little over £20,000 a year, but these of course represent only the fixed charges, not the king's lavish personal expenditure; Wolsey's estimate for the war of 1513 was £640,000; and when we find Giustiniani estimating the outlay at half of the ten millions of ducats which was the treasure supposed to be left by Henry VII, we are inclined to conclude that the estimate was not below the mark; anyhow the cost of the expedition to Tournay was such as to recommend a peace policy for several years. The time may come when these accounts may be subjected to a formal historical audit, that is when the researches at the Record Office furnish us with a complete view of extant material ; but it would be very rash now to define with any exactness either income or outlay for a reign of such abnormal character. The only general conclusion that I can come to is that, in despite of Wolsey's financial ability and the cleverness of the agents who were trained under him, the policy of the whole reign in this respect was a hand to-mouth policy, assisted by occasional godsends in the shape of forfeitures and benevolences. In this department the parliaments showed some spirit, as we shall see ; the result of that was the grant of subsidies to reach over several years; under these subsidy-acts the king collected as much as he could, and then collected money in other ways until, the patience u 290 A HAND-TO-MOUTH POLICY. [XI. of the lenders being exhausted, a new parliament was got together to wipe off the old debt or promise a new subsidy. There can be little doubt that some of the most important legislative acts were carried, at least through the Commons, by the inducement that the king would be able to dispense with direct taxation ; and, although that undertaking was a fallacious one, men could be found to overawe opposition or make a show of self-sacrifice which was sure of sub- sequent reward. I may note some of the parliamentary methods when I reach that part of our subject : for this is the only point on which Henry in his parliaments had any real difficulty. A hand-to-mouth policy has this drawback ; that, on critical occasions, it involves critical demands, and critical demands produce special irritation. That rule is exemplified very clearly in the reign of Henry VII, whose financial policy was much safer than his son's ; it was not a hand-to-mouth policy, but a severely economical one ; and both policies coincide in having nothing to spare for emergencies ; accordingly we find, on every imposition of a subsidy in the reign of Henry VII, an outbreak of popular disaffection, taking hold of some political quarrel. There was under Henry VIII something of the same sort ; but it was, as a rule, more easily localised, and put down at once ; the restoration of law and order by his father had borne this good fruit. In 1497 a rising in Devonshire caused by an income tax, utilised by a faction and facilitated by the weak- ness of local organisation, could affect all Southern England, and force the king into the field. In 1536, even a great religious movement like the Pilgrimage of Grace sinks into a local and provincial rising, an abortive tumult. It is not necessary, however, at this point to formulate a general con- clusion as to the oppressive character of Henry's financial administration : the legal taxes were not excessively heavy, XI.] THE GREAT DIVORCE. 29 1 and the illegal exactions were condoned by subservient parliaments. The question of the high-handed confiscations leads on to further questions. I do not wish in these lectures to give more than its proper prominence to the great question of the divorce ; even to give it its proper prominence would involve discussions far more lengthy than I have time for now; I shall therefore hope that you will take as read all the details of the negotiations concerning it, and simply look upon it as a force, or the ap- plication of an impact, which had much greater consequences, and originated a larger developing series of measures, than could have possibly been calculated on. In a word, to use Sir Thomas More's expressive formula, it opened the eyes of the lion as to what he could do ; not all at once, but by a very gradual process, which may indeed be traced most dis- tinctly with reference to the Reformation history, but is also apparent in the other departments of administration. It is clear, from the beginning of his reign, that Henry was a prince who had only to learn the extent of his powers, in order to attempt to exercise them. If we may believe the law reporters, as early as 151 5 he had declared himself determined not to allow any superiority of external spiritual courts in a country of which he was sovereign ; and there are signs, in Wolsey's history, that the imminent danger of the king's taking advantage of the Statute of Praemunire was in his mind long before he was actually sacrificed. But the earlier years of the reign were remarkably free from occasions on which any great constitutional crisis could arise. Henry's ambition, like Wolsey's, was mainly set upon an influential place in the councils of Europe, and among the people at large there was contentment. Henry had been brought up very strictly, and married, very young, to a wife, to whom he gave his full affection; the good impressions of his train- ing were, at least for several years, strong enough to keep u 2 292 IMPORTANCE OF THE DIVORCE. [XI. him out of the domestic scandals that divide courts ; and although Bessie Blount and the Duke of Richmond became prominent about ten years after the reign begins, it is not until 1524 or 1525 that the divorce question even looms in the distance. Up to that time the want of constitutional principle in the king and his minister has been chiefly appa- rent in the matter of money-getting. Soon after this Henry seems to have fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, and to have begun to contemplate the divorce. The mere formalities of obtaining such a divorce were not formidable ; but the parties interested in preventing it were very formidable indeed. The emperor was the queen's nephew. The pope's power was being rudely shaken both in Germany and in Italy. To be brief; the pope was prevailed on to commission Wolsey and Campegio to determine the validity of the king's marriage ; when the trial had begun, the cause was called back to Rome; Henry felt that his only chance of getting the divorce was to have it tried in England ; the pope felt that the only chance of avoiding a crisis, in which between Henry and Charles he must certainly either temporally or spiritually be ruined, was to keep the discussion languidly dragging on at Rome until the parties were tired, or something else turned up. This, thus early, Henry had the sense to see; he therefore de- stroyed Wolsey, and that by the very Statute of Praemunire at the evasion of which he had so long connived : his eyes were opened to the powers of the Praemunire, and in his confiscation of Wolsey's estates he had his first taste of spoil. He saw that the Praemunire made him absolutely master of the clergy, and, as absolute master, the primary owner of all Church property. Hence the great chain of ecclesiastical statutes follows in an order that we might almost dignify by the name of Evolution. As lord and master of the Church, he could utilise Church machinery to obtain the divorce and the marriage on which he had set his XL] THE PRAEMUNIRE. 293 king's heart ; and, when he was tired of the second wife, he could obtain, from the archbishop he had made, an annulling of that marriage as easily as he could obtain a Bill of At- tainder from the parliament ; and, when in time he married another woman whom he did not like, he could by a com- mission to the national synod obtain another judgment of nullity of marriage, and by negotiating with parliament an- other petition for another marriage. This wonderful Prae- munire, of which the foreign residents at the English court speak with horror as a mystery of which the king alone possessed the key, might be a lash brandished over laity and clergy alike so long as the papal supremacy was admitted by either. Thus the desire of spoil, the ambition of uncontrolled sovereignty, and the facilities of gaining his own immediate ends in marriage, urged on the king in the line of doing, not what he ought, but what he could. In 1531, by the threat of Praemunire he compelled the clergy to recognise him as the supreme head on earth of the Church of England, and to pay him £118,840 by votes of Convocation: he tried the same policy with the Commons; endeavouring to compel them to purchase their exemption from the same sentence, if not by votes of money, at least by modifications of the land laws in the direction of wills and uses. In this he was for the moment defeated by the vigilance of the Commons, but he kept this line of legislation before his eyes, and with singular pertinacity; the Statute of Uses was delayed until 1536 and the Statute of Wills until 1540, but both statutes were promulgated in 1532, and formed part of a policy which we may compare, not favourably, with that of Edward I; but which has a special legal side of such importance, that only the superior importance of the ecclesiastical questions of the time can account for its being overlooked. It is true that, in their later results, the two statutes of which 1 have spoken 294 DEFIANCE OF THE POPE. [XI. seem small and beneficial as compared with the mischievous results of the Church policy, but they were, like it, distinct puttings out of the claws of the awakened lion, which would have gone much further and held much tighter if they could. But I proceed with the ecclesiastical evolution. The re- cognition of the king in 1531 as supreme head on earth of the Church of England was closely connected with the appro- priation of the £118,840 by the supreme head. But the facility with which the Church parted with its money opened the supreme eyes a little wider. If they will pay money they will surrender power : a form of three articles is sent to Con- vocation in 1532 by which the clergy are to renounce their right of spiritual legislation without royal licence, and consent to a reform of the canon law under the king's authority. After some discussion, with the fear of another Praemunire, the clergy consent to that also. By crafty dealing with the House of Commons, the Court, in which Cromwell is now becoming a leading man, obtains an address complaining of the ecclesiastical courts, their use of canon law on the one side and their practical abuses on the other ; if the commons will help the king against the pope, the king will help the commons against the spiritual courts ; he will not press the Statutes of Uses and Wills if they will agree that he shall forbid the payment of annates. The commons resist, but their strong men have gone over to the king. The Annates Bill is passed ; the Submission of the clergy is exacted ; and More, the good and wise chancellor, resigns the seals. He and the foreign ambassadors saw which way the Lion was looking better than the Lion himself. If the clergy accept the Submission, says the Imperial resident, they will for the future have less power than the shoemakers, who at least can make regulations for their own craft. That was done however. XL] TREATMENT OF THE CLERGY. 295 In the autumn Archbishop Warham died ; it became clear to the king that, if he appointed Cranmer, who was already committed to him in the question of the marriage, that long- standing difficulty could be got over. As yet there was no formal breach with Rome, his hand had lain heavy only on his own Church ; the Annates Bill even had not been con- firmed yet. Cranmer should be regularly consecrated, com- missioned, and made legate, and then called on to act up to his expressed convictions. So certain was the king of his power, that, in anticipation of the sentence, he married Anne Boleyn ; appointed Cranmer archbishop, obtained from him a sentence of the nullity of his previous marriage and of the validity of his new marriage, and got opinions from the divines and canonists in convocation which had a similar effect. Then, and not before, he confirmed the act about Annates, and defied the papal power. But, having gone so far, why not go a little further ? In the parliament of 1533 he obtained the passing of the Statute of Appeals, founded on what seems to be the true theory of Church and State; forbidding the carrying of appeals to Rome at all, and providing sufficient machinery for appeals at home : the Annates Bill had provided for the confirmation and consecration of bishops, and the two together proclaimed with one breath the emancipation of the Church from Roman supremacy, and its competence for complete internal ad- ministration under the supremacy of the king. But from this moment the ecclesiastical reforms became involved more and more with the king's marriage policy. Anne Boleyn, her father, and Cranmer, who seems to have been their family counsellor, were bent on further measures of hostility to Rome ; and Cromwell, who was the king's minister rather than the queen's, was likewise politically a protestant. The year 1534 saw the clergy, both secular and regular, com- pelled to make a new submission, to recognise the validity of 296 MORE AND FISHER. [XI. the marriage and the succession, and to admit a new and comprehensive oath for the maintenance of the two. A new statute of Appeals, founded on the Submission of 1532, modified the appellate jurisdiction, and furnished a recourse to the king in chancery as the final reference which in the former statute had been left to the Archbishop and, in causes touching the king, to the Upper House of Convocation; a new statute on Annates reformed the regulations for the appointment of bishops ; the synodical declaration which denied the authority of Rome, and a statute which forbade all payments to Rome, swept away all signs of the old subjection. But there is no step, in parliament at least, towards doc- trinal change : the law of .heresy is reformed but not made less stringent, and it is no longer heretical to speak against the pope. Even in the Articles of 1536 the progress to- wards change is defined by the simple elimination of dis- tinctive papal doctrine; the convocation urges an authorised translation of Holy Scripture as the best antidote to heresy. But events were proceeding more rapidly than ideas: the oath of succession necessitated the imprisonment of More and Fisher; a second session in the autumn of 1534 gave the secular recognition to the king's style as supreme head on earth of the Church of England ; that title was publicly promulgated by letters patent in January, 1535; and the accusation of attempting to deprive the king of this desig- nation brought the two worthiest men in England to the block during the summer of that year. The death of Fisher, the confidential friend of his father and grandmother, and that of More, who represented all that was good in his own early experience, whether they were wrung from him by the importunities of his wife, or coldly acquiesced in as cases in which all human feeling must be sunk before the self-idolatry of the theoretic kingship, seem to prove and to have proved XI.] DISSOLUTION OF MONASTERIES. 297 to the king himself that no scruples should ever hereafter touch him. The next step of change was the dissolution of the smaller monasteries : Wolsey, in his great scheme for church reforms, had led the way to this. He had seen the increasing import- ance of the great towns of England, and the increasing mis- chief caused by the incurable uselessness of the monastic foundations; and he had obtained bulls of legation from Rome enabling him to suppress convents and establish bishoprics. That had opened the king's eyes to a new possibility, and, although he waited several years before he executed his scheme, all that was good in the scheme was Wolsey's, all that was bad in it wears an unfortunate air of having been done by Cromwell. But it was almost a point of honour with Henry to show that without the pope he could do all that Wolsey had been empowered to do. So in the autumn of 1535 Cromwell and his agents effected a visitation of the monasteries, the report of which insured their condemnation ; and, in the last session of the Long Parlia- ment in 1536, the dissolution of the smaller houses was decreed. A new Court, the Court of Augmentations, was founded to manage the property which by the same act was vested in the king and his heirs. The greater monasteries survived a little longer, and in their case the process of sur- render took the place of a general and compulsory dissolution. In the session of 1539, however, a similar act vested in the king the properly of the surrendered houses, and in that year the abbots disappeared from parliament. At the same time the king was empowered to establish new bishoprics ; suffra- gan bishops had been the subject of legislation in 1534, when the act was passed which supplied to the more aged and busy prelates the assistance that had been hitherto furnished by titular bishops in partibus commissioned at Rome. These acts very nearly complete the series by which 298 DOCTRINAL ATTITUDE. [XI. Henry evolved the idea of a regal papacy out of the royal supremacy. For some subordinate purposes, as for dis- pensations and faculties, he allowed the Archbishop of Canterbury to exercise a quasi-legatine authority under himself, and with a check in Chancery on his proceedings ; but in all such matters he was himself the fountain of power. The climax was reached when, by the appointment of Cromwell as Vicar-General, with an authority and pre- cedence above all prelates and nobles, he emulated the papal assumption of exercising direct powers through a legate a latere. Unluckily for himself, and for Henry also, the royal legate a latere proved too great a power to manage ; meddled with too many things, provoked too much hostility, got his feet entangled in the marriage net he had provided for the old lion, and perished more sadly, because more ignominiously, than his predecessors in power and ruin. I have spoken thus far mainly of Henry's ecclesiastical measures as they affected endowments and jurisdictions ; but there is a side, the side of doctrine, which is not less important. He never forgot that he was the defender of the faith ; nor, whatever were his eccentricities and aberrations in minor particulars, does he seem ever to have gone in this region further in the direction of change than the more enlightened popes and cardinals of his own age would have gone. Wolsey would have agreed with him in the dis- solution of the monasteries ; the convocation had petitioned for a translation of the Bible ; the worship of the saints and the excessive devotions at their shrines had long been a burden to the souls of men, not merely men like Erasmus, but of far more unimpeachable orthodoxy. The supremacy of the chair of S. Peter was by no means as yet an article of unquestioning faith ; even the marriage of the clergy was a point not beyond discussion. But there were things which, quite irrespective of the pope and his claims, could not be XI.] DEFENCE OF THE FAITH. 299 touched without the taint of heresy. And of these Henry, with all his inconsistencies, was a constant defender. He might tolerate a certain evangelical obliquity in Boleyn's eyes ; he might choose to be blind to Cromwell's sympathies with foreign protestantism ; he might tolerate Mrs. Cranmer, as he had not looked too curiously into the semi-matrimonial connexions of the great cardinal ; he might even go the length of marrying a lady like Anne of Cleves, in whom, through the phlegmatic impenetrability of the Flanders mare, some instincts of unorthodox skittishness might be detected. But Henry was royally orthodox. If, for any purpose of the moment, he relaxed the stringency of the courts, he kept the law very strong against heresy. This acted in a curious way. The king's idea that he was supreme in Church and State, whilst in some regions it led him to maintain the administrative machinery of the two severely separate, in others led him to some mixture of his functions. In his first act of heresy he repealed the statute of Henry IV ' de hereticis comburendis ' which seemed to give too much power to the bishops, but re-enacted those of Richard II and Henry V which tended to make heresy an offence at common law. A similar intention is clear in the Act of Six Articles of 1539, and, with this light upon it, in the several modifications of the Six Articles which were proposed in the later parliaments. I shall not speculate on the possibility that, if he had lived longer, he might have developed more in the direction of protestant doctrine ; I think however that it is unlikely; doctrinally, although quite able to maintain his own line, he clearly symbolised consistently with Gardiner and not with Cranmer. The extinction of the Norfolk interest might have led him to further negotiations with protestantism abroad, but of any sympathy with domestic puritanism, such as that by which Somerset palliated his greed for confiscation, there is no trace 300 PROGRESS OF REFORM. [XI. in Henry. For spoil however the old lion went c n yearning to the last ; the dissolution of chantries and colleges, to follow that of the monasteries, was one of the measures of his last parliament. It may strike some of us t 1 at he process of change had now gone far enough ; the English Church was freed from the yoke of Rome, but she retained all her proper frame- work and at least half of her old endowments ; I say at least half, I should not like to commit myself to a statement that there was much more. She had obtained the Bible in English and the use of the chief forms of prayer in the vernacular, and was preparing for a revision in form of the Sacramental Services ; she had rid herself of a mass of superstitious usages. It is true that the king remained a believer in Roman Catholic forms of doctrine ; but it must always be remembered that those forms had not yet, by the Tridentine decrees, been hardened into their later inflexibility ; and, when we consider the terrible risks which, in the next reign, the Church of England ran, of losing all sense or desire of continuity, identity, or communion with the historic Catholic Christendom, we may feel thankful that such risk was run under a weak king and feeble ministers, not under the influence of a strong will and strong hand like Henry's. You will see thus that I believe him to have been a man of purpose; not the mere capricious tyrant who found it a pleasant exercise of despotic power to burn Catholics and Protestants on the same day, or found a malicious gratification in making Cranmer support the Catholic doc- trine of the Eucharist and Gardiner the doctrine of un- limited obedience : further than this I do not go. I believe him to have been a man of unbounded selfishness ; a man to whom the acquisition of power was precious mainly as a step towards the acquisition of greater power; a man XI.] DOMESTIC POLICY. 30 [ of whom we may say, as I said at first, that he was the king, the whole king, and nothing but the king ; that he wished to be, with regard to the Church of England, the pope, the whole pope, and something more than the pope. You remember how in his early days Maximilian had tempted him with the offer of the Empire, he himself to retire on the popedom with an inchoate claim to canonization. Henry was determined to have in England at least both Empire and Papacy, to make the best, or rather the most, of both worlds. I have said more than in proper proportion I ought to have said with reference to Henry's ecclesiastical policy, and left but little time for the analogous features that may be traced in his temporal policy : one reason for that is the greater interest we all feel in the religious question of the Reformation ; another is in the fact that his ecclesiastical measures had a much more lasting consequence than his temporal ones. We have long rid ourselves of all the secular burdens imposed by what we call the Tudor dic- tatorship, but we are still living under religious or ecclesias- tical conditions that owe very much, even of their present form, to the hand of Henry. You will, I hope, know me too well to misinterpret me in these expressions ; you will not suspect me of making Henry VIII the founder of the Church of England; but I do not conceal from my- self that, under the Divine power which brings good out of evil and overrules the wrath of man to the praise of God, we have received good as well as evil through the means of this ' majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome.' If now we attempt to find in Henry's treatment of the temporalty a reflexion of the principles on which he dealt thus summarily with the spiritualty, what do we find ? The answer to one important part of that question I propose to 302 TAXATION AND LEGISLATION. [XI. take in the next lecture, in which I shall work with rather more detail than is possible in so wide a re'sumt as I have attempted in this, an examination of his dealings with the administrative machinery of the parliaments. But in a general way I will attempt to state the answer now. As for taxation, we have seen how, by his early as well as his late policy, the real hold on the purse-strings was wrested from the hand of the nation. A king who had over his parliaments the strong hold that Henry had, who could dictate to them the measures he wished to pass, even down to the smallest details, and even make them petition for acts when he was the only man in the king- dom that desired them, might, we think, have contented himself with taking money through the overawed or sub- servient Commons. But he did not ; he chose to exact money by loan and then to come to the nation that, lent the money for exoneration ; the very fact that he went about the loan by exactly the same process of assessment and collection that he used in assessing and collecting a legal tax, shows that he saw what he was doing : he saw that he had the power, and he used it. Wolsey might dislike the idea of meeting a parliament that might speak un- reservedly about himself; Henry had no such dislike; he could browbeat, or bribe, or bully, or divide, or balance parties, but he never could have doubted for a moment that in the end he should get his own way. Next to taxation, perhaps even more important than taxation, was the right of legislation ; legislation of the temporally could at no time be carried through without the king's enacting words ; and the submission of the clergy in 1532, embodied in the Statute of Appeals in 1534, had established the same rule for the spiritualty. But this did not content the Lion. In the Proclamation Act of 1539 the parliament is made to surrender to the king the power XI.] POLITICAL EXECUTIONS. 303 of legislation; as head on earth of the Church he might already issue, and had issued, proclamations touching Chris- tian faith; and by the natural power of king he had issued proclamations for the public peace : but, O strange wilful- ness of human nature ! men had not much minded : these proclamations alike were set at nought by those who would not consider the divinity of royalty ; therefore, lest the king should be tempted to become a tyrant, lest the king should be compelled by the wilfulness of his subjects to extend beyond their natural limits the liberty and supremacy of his royal power and dignity, what was to be done ? Was he to renounce the power of proclaiming, and bind the par- liament to codify the temporal law, as he had promised to the spiritualty to codify and reform the canon law? Quite the reverse; in order that he might not be tempted to usurp the functions of legislator, the parliament was to invest him with those functions, and, provided his proclamations did not contravene the existing laws, to give to them the full force and virtue of acts of the whole body of the realm. Here was a 'lex regia' indeed; a dictatorship which, with all conceivable limitations, left the 'king master and only master ' in his own house. The security of life and property was of course worth little when such things were possible : but Henry had a strong executive force at his disposal, and the actual working of this despotism did not affect the body of the people so much as might be expected. The clergy were of course in constant terror of the shadow of a praemunire ; the re- formers, alternately flattered and banished, had no easy time of it; and the position of even a bishop's lady must have been, to say the least, peculiar. But on the great men, the taller poppies, the actual pressure occasionally fell. The nation had fought hard for justice in the tribunals and for the limitation of the doctrine of treasons. Bills of at- 304 CONCLUSION. tainder, trials in Star Chamber, and multiplication of treasons, form the dark side of the policy cf Henry VII ; they come to full development under Henry VIII. Edmund de la Pole, Buckingham, Wolsey, Fisher, More, Anne Boleyn, Cromwell, the Marquess of Exeter, the Countess of Salisbury, Montacute, and last of all Surrey and his father, were victims of a system, of various contrivances but of one purport, for destroying without law, or without trial, or without defence, those whom the king determined, from whatever motive of policy or of caprice, of jealousy or of satiety, to sacrifice. Add to these the religious or ec- clesiastical holocausts, and the number of inferior victims who were involved in the fall of the great ones, and for whom there was no need to violate laws that could so easily be manipulated. The liberty of the subject to act or speak, or even to think, was reduced to a minimum under an executive familiar with constructive treasons. But it is time to close this part of our discussion ; and I must leave some, especially of the legal measures of the reign which would most naturally have fallen in with the line of this lecture, for the more formal treatment, which I propose to take in the next lecture, of Henry's dealings with parliament. Perhaps when we have looked at these, we may find time to inquire to what extent he really ful- filled the office of dictator, anticipated the line of history, or carried with him the wishes of the nation. XII. PARLIAMENT UNDER HENRY VIII. (June 9, 1881.) THE great question of the reign of Henry VIII is, no doubt, this : to what extent did he, in the remarkable career of destruction and reconstruction, of public and private self-will, of commingled revolutionism and conser- vatism, carry with him the assent and goodwill of his people ? then, when we have determined to what extent the national participation in his measures is to be admitted, would be the time to ask by what means he obtained that assent and goodwill. I do not flatter myself that I am going to answer the question or to solve the problem, either to your satisfaction or to my own. Far too many considerations are concerned in both, far too many facts of doubtful interpretation, and certainly too many historical theories. All that I can undertake to do is to prepare the clearing of the way for some later and more fully equipped investigator; more fully equipped, I say, because, as you will see, there is every reason to hope that in a few years, owing to the labours of the scholars employed in calendaring the State papers, many of the facts which are now capable of contradictory interpretations will be set forth in their true light and relation to one another. In the former lecture I confined myself to such illus- trations of the subject as belong to the royal character of Henry VIII himself; and you will not have mistaken my provisional conclusion that the great factor in the whole complication is the strong, intelligent, self-willed force of x 306 PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY. [XII. the king ; that that alone seems to give purpose and con- sistency to the eventful policy of the period ; that Henry VIII is neither the puppet of parties, nor the victim of circum- stances, nor the shifty politician, nor the capricious tyrant, but a man of light and leading, of power, force and fore- sight, a man of opportunities, stratagems, and surprises, but not the less of iron will and determined purpose; purpose not at once realised or systematised, but widening, deep- ening, and strengthening as the way opens before it ; a man accordingly who might have been very great, and could under no circumstances be accounted less than great, but who would have been infinitely greater, and better, and more fortunate, if he would have lived for his people, and not for himself. But the subject of the present lecture is the parliamentary history of the reign; and I will keep back any general or personal remarks until that has been treated as it can be treated in a public lecture. It helps to answer the question and problem which I have stated, for it is through the Parliament that Henry inquires of the goodwill and support of the nation, as it is through the Convocation he inquires of the goodwill and support of the clergy. If we believe the Acts of Parliament, we shall find the nation not merely acquiescing in but petitioning for measures, some of which had no importance except as fulfilling the wishes of the king, others of which were in strong opposition to all that is known of national feeling both in and out of parliament ; if we look at the early ecclesiastical measures we find the same acquiescence in great constitutional changes, abdi- cations of power which could not be spontaneous, and acknowledgments of the truth of statements and principles which, if true at all, were far too novel to have been accepted without discussion. We may, if we please, admit the con- clusion that the nation accepted the king's action as that XII.] NATIONAL PARTICIPATION. 307 of a divinely constituted dictator; a theory which involves the assumption, which is altogether groundless, that the nation saw, or thought they saw, the existing circumstances to be such as demanded a dictatorship. I do not think they did, and I am persuaded that the theory is based on that process of reading history backward, which it has been my fate, in this Chair, to have constantly to struggle against. There was nothing in the circumstances of Europe during the whole life of Henry VIII, such as there was under Queen Elizabeth, which might persuade people then living of the need of such an extraordinary officer. We, looking back on the time, may see how dangerous a time it was, how full of pitfalls and snares, and how, in the result, a great advantage was gained by England having had such a hand as even the blood-stained hand of Henry to guide her through : but the critical character of the time was not apparent to the time, or to the leading men of England during it ; and the later reading of it cannot be made to account for the condition of feeling and action that we are now contemplating. The opposite view, that Henry and his advisers concocted the parliamentary acts and manifestos in such a way as to make them embody a national adhesion, sympathy, and even enthusiasm, by the simple process of falsification, is, on the other hand, too arbitrary, too shameful, for us to con- template with equanimity : history may be, and ought to be, tested at every turn ; acts of parliament, when they are tested, may, and often do, turn out very unsound and unsatisfactory in their statements of fact, and disputable and inconsistent in their statements of law ; but, if we could believe in such a wholesale perversion of evidences as this theory involves, we must resign all theories of historj at once, and relegate the inquiring world to a combination x 2 308 CONSTITUTION OF PARLIAMENTS. [XII. of natural laws with historical novels. The fact of the matter, I take it, we may accept : that the nation and the Church accepted, acquiesced in, and petitioned for, in parlia- ment and in convocation, the things which the acts of parliament and convocation declare that they accepted, acquiesced in, and petitioned for; but the question remains how we are to interpret that co-operation, and by what means the conceivable measure of co-operation was obtained. With so much preface, more than I intended, let us ap- proach this branch of the subject, the history, modifications, and alterations of the government by parliament and con- vocation, as it appears to be modified and altered or maintained during the great changes of the reign. I have already mentioned that Henry VIII held nine parliaments in his thirty-eight years, and that of those one was extended over the best part of seven years, that is the great organic parliament, which began in 1529 and ran on to the spring of 1536: a parliament which, both on account of its length and for the importance of its acts, may deserve the title of the Long Parliament of Henry VIII. Of the other eight parliaments, two, that summoned in 15 12 and that summoned in 1542, ran over three years with short sessions; the others are all shorter, of one or two sessions. All these parliaments were held in London, either at Westminster or, in one instance and possibly an oc- casional sitting, at Blackfriars, and in the old places of assembly ; the convocation of Canterbury met at S. Paul's, and so continued to meet, as it still does on the first day of the session. In 1523 Wolsey summoned it to West- minster; and, after the Submission in 1532, it was frequently adjourned from S. Paul's to Westminster for the convenience of the bishops, whose hands were full of business in both chambers. The House of Lords continued to meet in the parliament chamber, and the Commons sat in the chapter- XII.] HOUSE OF LORDS. 309 house or refectory of the Abbey until the end of the reign ; Edward VI, in his first parliament, took the Commons to S. Stephen's Chapel. The parliament chamber, or the chamber of the Holy Cross, the situation of which is un- known to me unless it was the Painted Chamber under a new name, was the place of opening the session under Henry VII and Henry VIII. Our first question, however, is concerned with the per- sonal composition of the assembly. The House of Lords is the chamber that undergoes the greatest modifications during the period. We take the lords spiritual first; the parliaments of Henry VII had contained two archbishops, nineteen bishops, and twenty-eight abbots; Henry VIII added three abbots, the abbot of Tewkesbury in 151?, the abbot of Tavistock in 1514, and the abbot of Burton in 1534; and after the foundation of the new bishoprics, he added the six new bishops of Oxford, Peterborough, Gloucester, Bristol, Chester, and Westminster : but before that was done the abbots had disappeared from parliament ; so at the beginning of the reign the number of spiritual peers was 49; at the maximum in 1534 it was 52, and, after the dissolution of the monasteries, it fell to 26. The number of lay peers varied little, for there were few new creations except where an old peerage had been extinguished. The minimum number was called in 1523, being only 28, several of the peers being that year employed in military affairs abroad; the maximum was in 1536, in the par- liament called to approve of the destruction of Anne Boleyn, and the number was 51. In the other parliaments it varied between 36 and 46. It will be thus observed that, until the dissolution of the monasteries, the spiritual lords were always in a numerical majority, but that the tendency was decided towards an equalisation ; a tendency which is ocularly perceptible in the journals where, in the list of 310 HOUSE OF COMMONS. [XII. attendances, which from 1515 onwards are marked daily, the two bodies are arranged in parallel columns. It would, however, be wrong to infer from this that there was an equality of voting bodies, for of the clerical members the attendance was throughout the reign very irregular; and the proportion, on most critical occasions, seems to have been about 20 bishops and abbots to 30 lay lords. It is true they both had the power of giving proxies, but the irregularity of attendance does not seem to be compensated by the proxies: the prelate who is attendant one day is absent the next, doubtless without proxy ; and some are absent for whole sessions. Convocation during the whole reign sits at the same time with the parliament ; and generally the Friday in each week, sometimes the Tuesday also, is marked by adjournment that the prelates may attend convocation, the Wednesday in some cases being likewise surrendered for the session of the Star Chamber. No doubt the business of the Upper House of Convocation engrossed the time of most of the absent bishops and abbots, for that assembly was, before the dissolution, a very large body, nearly as large as the House of Commons ; it included, as is seen in the great divisions on the divorce, between two and three hundred abbots and priors; and much of the business undertaken in it was of a far more critical character than that which was gone through in the Parliament. The House of Commons was a little, only a little, so far as concerns England proper, modified by Henry VIII : Preston, Lancaster, Thetford, Orford, Berwick, and pos- sibly one or two more towns, gained the privilege of representation ; but by bestowing representation on the towns and counties of Wales, Calais, and Chester, Henry added in 1543 thirty-two members, knights and burgesses, to the old number. XII.] THE SPEAKERS. 311 The suffrage, as we know from the case of Leicester, was in the corporate towns being altogether appropriated by the councillors and other officers who constituted the corpora- tion. This loss of distinctly representative importance is accompanied by a certain rise in the position of the borough members. Up to this time the office of Speaker has been engrossed by the knights of the shire, and the only names of men who have taken a prominent part in the debates of the Commons have been those of county members. In this reign, however, Humfrey Wingfield, member for Yar- mouth, was chosen Speaker in succession to Audley; and the only persons who are found taking a leading part in the discussions of the Long Parliament of 1 529-1 536 are Thomas Cromwell, member for Taunton, who before he placed himself in the king's service had succeeded in throwing out the bill of attainder against Wolsey, and Mr. Temys, the member for Westbury, who had proposed that the king should be asked to give up his plan for divorce. Still we do not possess journals of the proceedings of the Commons before the year 1547. Those of the Lords begin in 1509, and furnish us with much of the information that we have looked for in vain in the older Rolls of Parliament. From them we learn to how large an extent the use of proxies prevailed in the House of Lords, notwithstanding the careful way in which it was limited and tested ; a usage which shows how it was so easy for the king, by dealing with one or two of the more prominent prelates, generally to secure an ecclesiastical majority in parliament, and even in convocation. In the Lower House the Speaker of the Tudor reigns is in very much the same position as the Chancellor in the Upper House; he is the manager of business on the part of the crown, and probably the nominee either of the king himself or of the chancellor. Although 313 THE SPEAKERS. [XII. the forms of election, apology and protest, of address to the king and royal admission, were maintained and de- veloped, we know both from Sir Thomas Smith and from Coke that the king appointed the Speaker : even in the House of Lords the sovereign exercised the same right when the chancellor was not a peer; in 1529, as we learn from Chapuys' dispatches, archbishop Warham was elected, but set aside as too old. The result was that the Speaker, instead of being the defender of the liberties of the house, had often to reduce it to an order that meant obsequious reticence or sullen submission. Happily it was not every Speaker that was like Rich, whose extant addresses to the king are nauseous compliments on his majesty's gifts of nature, fortune, and grace, the beauty of his person, the felicity of his enterprises, the perfect virtue of his character; compliments which the king deprecates with a modest refer- ence to the Giver of all good gifts, but with a conscious acquiescence as ridiculous as the mock humility of the Speaker. But where even More himself had the greatest difficulty in behaving with decent independence, so poor a creature as Rich may stand excused. The Speakers of the reign were Sir Thomas Englefield, M.P. for Berks ; Sir Thomas Sheffield, for Lincolnshire ; Sir Thomas Nevill, probably for Kent ; all men of dignity and simplicity. The Speaker of 1523 was Sir Thomas More; he was succeeded in the parliament of 1529 by Audley, who succeeded him also as Chancellor in 1532. Humfrey Wingfield, whom I have mentioned, succeeded Audley; Rich was Speaker in 1536, Sir Nicolas Hare in 1539, and Sir Thomas Moyle in 1542. Moyle's speeches were formed on the model of Rich's; Hare's speech in 1540, although scarcely less complimentary, was better put together: he congratulated the realm on the felicity of having such a king as Henry, who had won, a boon which had fallen XII.] SPEAKER HARE. 313 to the lot of no other Christian commonwealth, the dis- tinction that under him, without any single calamity, the land had not only flourished but had been restored to her perfect freedom. These words had a meaning; no doubt the absence of external calamity was a feature of Henry's reign, and was one cause of his influence with the people : on the other hand, the recovery of what seemed to the age to be spiritual liberty from Rome was a real thing in Hare's mind, not the mere compliment that was designed in the comparison by which Rich equalled Henry with Solomon, Samson and Absalom; or with the sun itself, as drying up noxious vapours and cherishing the growth of all good seeds. Hare, however, had a difficult part to play, for, just before he made this speech, he had been sent to the Tower for offending against the king's pre- rogative ; he had regained his liberty and his appointment as Speaker by a complete submission. There is no evidence, so far as I know, that the Commons had treated this im- prisonment as a matter of privilege. It would be easy to parallel from the speeches of the chancellor the fulsome compliments of the Speakers, but I must hasten on to the more important questions of the direct dealings of the king or his prime ministers with the two houses ; and, as it would be impossible to go into any thorough details on this, I must content myself with occa- sional illustrations. Henry was generally present at the opening and closing of the sessions, but he did not, in his later years, scruple to interpose from time to time in the delibera- tions of either house, and influence the voting. The first sensational event of the kind is Wolscy's adventure in the parliament of 1523, when More was Speaker. The great chancellor had in the usual way come down to the Commons and told them that the king's needs amounted to a sum of £800,000, and to raise that amount a subsidy of a fifth 3 14 WOLSEY AND THE COMMONS. [XII. would be required, payable in five years. After the Cardinal's departure a discussion arose on particulars, which is amusingly described by Cromwell as a communing on war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnan- imity, force, activity, temperance, treason, murder, felony, and how a commonwealth might be edified and continued in our realm. But the economical discussions were pulled up by the announcement of another visit from the chancellor. Then arose the question, how is he to come ; is he to come as chancellor, or as cardinal in state ; let him come as cardinal, for then, if there should be a riot, the blame can be laid on his attendants. So he comes in state, and asks an answer about the subsidy. He is met with sullen silence ; not even Mr. Marney, who is just going to be made a baron, and whom Wolsey applies to directly, will utter a word. Then poor More, on his knees, has to represent to the cardinal, who had made him Speaker, that this manner of coming, on which, you observe, he and the House had already calculated, was not expedient or in conformity with ancient liberties. So the cardinal had to go away in a rage ; the Commons were willing to listen to him, but would not debate in his presence. Still the visit was not in vain; the deliberation was resumed, and a very heavy impost was agreed to, when Sir John Hussey, the member for Lincolnshire, who also was made a peer soon after, proposed a substantial addition on the tax from land ; only eleven or twelve members voted for it, but, notwithstanding the abstention of the majority, it was allowed to be added ; then the session was prorogued. After the vacation it was proposed by the knights of the shire to extend to goods the tax which Hussey had fixed on the land ; a division took place with the curious result that all the county members voted one w r ay and all the burgesses the other; yet, notwithstanding the enormous majority against XII.] THE SESSION OF 1 5 20. 315 the tax, More, in his capacity of the king's agent, prevailed on the House to pass the bill. Here you have a very illustrative case of the way in which even a most unpopular measure could be forced through par- liament ; well might Cromwell conclude the letter in which he describes the session, ' after seventeen weeks of discussion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that is to say as well as we might, and have left off where we began.' I do not think that any of the fourteenth-century parliaments would have stood this ; Wolsey can have been no believer in parliaments, for this is the only one that was held whilst he was chancellor. I pass on to the Long Parliament of 1 529-1 536, of the early doings of which, thanks to the chronicle of Hall and the reports of the Imperial ambassador, we know more minute detail than we do of any preceding session. Cromwell's defence of Wolsey in the first session, which prevented the passing of the bill of attainder in the House of Commons, is a fact which rests on historical testimony too good to be rejected ; but the circumstances in which it took place are obscure; there can be little doubt that Henry acquiesced in, perhaps prompted the rejection ; and it is quite certain that to have forced it through parliament would have made a serious addition to his already awkward complications. There were two other pieces of debateable policy in the short session of 1529 : the remittal of the loans of 1523-8, and the opening of the attack on the minor privileges of the clergy. The convocation passed the bill of remittal, and it was like- wise read three times by the Lords; the Commons however were sorely perplexed by it; hitherto the royal receipt and promise to repay had been regarded as good security; new debts had been incurred on the strength of it and nan had left it to their children as an adequate and safe provision. Now 31 6 ANTI-CLERICAL ACTS. [XII. it was proposed to deprive pay, receipts and bonds, of all validity; the Commons refused to pass the bill without con- ditions, and the only condition to be got was a general pardon, out of which the penalties for praemunire, which had been so fatal to Wolsey, were omitted : the nominal victory was with the Commons, the substantial fruits were with the king, who saw his way to the great exaction from the clergy obtained in the next session. The other contest involves more interest and more ques- tions. Already Henry was beginning to feel his way against the clergy; the clergy themselves were discussing points of reform, and these points were even hinted at in the opening speech of the Chancellor More. The points raised seem to us, in the light of the later history, only small points ; the expenses of probate and mortuaries, non-residence and pluralities, and the interference of the clergy as farmers and tanners with the trade of the laity. But unfortunately they were points that divided the ecclesiastical interest : the bishops were willing to enforce discipline on the lower clergy; the lower clergy were willing to reduce the profits of probate which went to the officials of the bishops ; but the lower clergy would defend their trade and their benefices, and the bishops could not allow the profits of their courts to be touched. Both would have agreed in strong measures against heresy ; and both agreed in regarding the discussion of these things in parliament as an attack, as indeed they were, on the Church itself. Bishop Fisher, in his apprehension, pro- claimed that lack of faith ruins the country in which it pre- vails, as it was ruining Bohemia. This imputation roused the spirit of the faithful Commons ; the Speaker Audley and thirty other members were sent to complain to the king, and the bishop had to explain that he meant only to refer to Bohemia. Archbishop Warham and six other bishops attesting this apology, the king accepted the excuse and XII.] ROYAL MANIPULATION. 317 reported it to the Commons. Fanning the flame of dis- sension, he then suggested that the Commons should pass the two most obnoxious bills, strike a blow at the bishops by the bill on probate, and at the parochial clergy by the bill against mortuaries. This was done. The other points, non- residence, pluralities, and trading, were decided likewise : the lords spiritual by their majority in the upper house rejected the bills ; the Commons insisted on pressing them ; the king suggested a conference, in Star Chamber, of eight members from each house ; the lay lords on the committee voted with the Commons, and by this contrivance the bills were passed. This little trick shows that it was not by force alone that the parliament was manipulated to pass the king's bills. More as chancellor must, in this business, as in 1523, when he was Speaker, have acted as the king's agent, but the burden was already too heavy for his back. If I were now tracing the progress of the Reformation, I might say more on the antagonism thus established between the clergy and the commons ; it is enough however to observe that Henry had clearly got a parliament on which he could depend ; and that every point he now gained became a fresh vantage-ground from which he could grasp at more. In 1530 there was no parliamentary session; the king and his agents were busily collecting opinions about the divorce ; and the constitutional struggle begins again in 1531. Not even now did the king think matters ripe for discussion of the divorce in parliament ; and, in the council which was held preparatory to the session, it was determined that the queen's business should not be brought forward ; the chief thing proposed was the exaction of money from the clergy under the threat of praemunire. The Duke of Norfolk, who was to all intents and purposes the prime minister, was negotiating with the emperor, and is said to have sworn that nothing in that parliament should be done against 31 8 RECOGNITION OF SUPREMACY. [XII. Katharine; Anne Boleyn and her father were drawing to the Protestants, but their time was not yet come. All the important business was done in convocation. Parliament, as the imperial envoy remarked, was employed on nothing more serious than cross-bows and hand-guns. But in the convocation matters were important indeed ; the king was the only person who had the skill to understand, or the will to define, the doctrine of praemunire, and it was not by praemunire alone that he could manipulate the clergy; he tried to tamper with Warham, threatened intrigue with the German Protestants, or the restraint of mortmain, or the appointment of a council of heresy which would take that question out of the hands of convocation, and other things which, vague threats at first, became realities of oppression as soon as they were familiarised to his mind. By threats and blandishments he obtained the Recognition of his head- ship of the Church, and the payment of £100,000. It was not done all at once ; the clergy kicked against the pricks very hard : they offered 160,000 ducats, the king insisted on 400,000 ; the papal nuncio was pressed into the service, and even forced his way into the lower house of convocation : but the clergy, following the example of the commons of 1523, stopped their ears, and bade him negotiate in the right way through the Archbishop : as yet there was no breach with Clement VII, and in the delay of the divorce both parties were for the moment at peace. At last the clergy granted the king's terms ; but they did not like the form of Recog- nition, and in the end it was passed by an evasion for which Warham must answer. He proposed the form suggested by Lord Rochford, and, in putting it to the vote, added, ' qui tacet consentire videtur.' The clergy by an anticipation of Jesuitic subterfuge, and by a practical Irish bull, cried out, ' Itaque tacemus omnes.' By this levity the great act was consummated, which was to be the fulcrum for the whole XII.] THE PARDON OF 1 53 1. 3 1 9 ecclesiastical policy of the future ; the Recognition was under- stood to be passed unanimously. But not even here were matters completely arranged ; the king now haggled about the praemunire ; the clergy threatened to withdraw their promise to pay unless this mysterious mon- ster were denned as well as remitted. It ended however as I have said ; the clergy voted the money and the king promised the pardon. But the pardon must be secured by the con- firmation of parliament ; and, when the bill came before the Commons, they soon saw that it did not comprise the laity, and refused to pass it. The king's agents urged that this opposition would damage the clergy and not benefit the Commons ; that the king could not be compelled to pardon, and that, without their consent, he could pass the pardon under the great seal. The Speaker and a committee at- tended the king, and, getting no other answer, went away sorrowing and declaring that Cromwell had betrayed their proceedings to Henry. Then there was some bitter talking about the exactions and the remittal of the loan ; but at last the king issued the pardon, and the Commons, knowing that something would be taken for the boon, sulkily ac- cepted it. The next day the chancellor laid before them the docu- ments touching the divorce, and the Commons were en- lightened by speeches on the subject from the Bishops of London and Bath. But they remained sulky; whether it was that the king was not prepared to go further, or that the attitude of parliament, still faithful to the queen and in- disposed to quarrel with the Pope, dismayed him, there the matter stayed, and the Commons were ordered to earn down to their constituencies the information laid before them. So the session ended, and the convocation, which had engaged on the reform of grammar schools and the publishing of a uniform Latin grammar, in addition to the restoration of 320 SESSION" OF 1 53 2. [XII. discipline and the translation of the Scriptures, was pro- rogued at the same time. The same measures which passed the Canterbury Convocation were likewise adopted at York ; that is the clergy remitted the loans, paid £18,840 for the pardon, and acknowledged the supremacy. Bishop Tunstall however made a protest against the form of Recognition, and proposed that for fear of misinterpretation by heretics, the words in temporalibus post Christum should be inserted ; but this had only the effect of offending the king, who directed that the bishop's house at Auckland should be searched for heretical books; and also, according to Chapuys, omitted to summon him to the next session of parlia- ment. I go on now to that third session of the Long Parliament ; it opened on the 22nd of January 1532. Its events are ex- tremely important, and fortunately are illustrated fairly well by contemporary evidence. It was understood, says the im- perial resident, to have been called for two purposes, money and the divorce. The king wanted 2,000,000 ducats; Rochford and Anne Boleyn were apparently given carte blanche as to their dealing with the clergy for the divorce ; Henry, however, keeping watch, and ready to make the most of an opportunity. The clergy were now having their eyes opened ; a bold attempt made by the Boleyns to ' suborn,' that is, I suppose, to bribe Archbishop Warham, at last shook the old man's faith in the stability of things. Norfolk and Rochford, who were now acting together, proposed that matrimonial causes should be declared a matter of temporal jurisdiction. Warham, as an old lawyer, protested in a formal document against all legislation which might be enacted against ecclesiastical or papal power. This protest seems to have had the effect of deterring any further procedure on the divorce itself during the archbishop's life, but to have provoked the king to more trenchant action against the XII.] THE ANNATES BILL. 32 1 constitutional arrangements which Warham and his party now saw to be assailed. The history of the session falls into two sections, divided by a short recess at Easter for about a fortnight. The first portion was devoted to the question of supplies, the second to that of Church reform : convocation sat during the whole time. The measures proposed by the king with a view to increase the royal revenue were fair enough, and were, as it seems to me, in strict analogy with the policy of his greatest ancestor, Edward I. The first was the bill for the with- drawal of Annates from the pope ; a measure intended to secure for the king the profits and firstfruits on all appoint- ments to bishoprics ; the act allowed the king to compound with the pope for all reasonable payments, and also provided for the confirmation and consecration of bishops without recourse to Rome. As a companion to this measure the king introduced bills of the same purport affecting the laity; just as on the transmission of ecclesiastical property the firstfruits went to Rome, so, on the transmission of lay property in land, by the operation of the doctrine of wills and uses, the king lost his reliefs and primer seisins ; accord- ingly he proposed two measures, or one measure with double purpose, — a statute of wills, allowing a man to devise half his land by will, provided the other half, left to the heir, secured the king in his feudal rights ; and a statute of uses, intended to take the force out of the old practice of feoffment to uses. Both these statutes ultimately passed in a modified form, the Statute of Uses in 1536 and the Statute of Wills in 1540. By that time it would seem it was discovered that they might be accepted as boons, now they were vehemently objected to, and the opposition they excited threw the Commons for the moment on the side of the pope, and into opposition to the Annates Bill. The latter hill was presented to the Commons as a measure of their own : the king pro- Y 322 CONFLICT OF 1 53 2. [XII. tested and pretended, sending Norfolk to assure the imperial ambassador that the Commons had called for it ; that he himself Avas borne on and overpowered by their zeal for re- form ; the prelates had refused their consent, but the people willed to have it; at last by the 19th of March, after two personal visitations, the king forced it through the Lords ; all the bishops and two abbots voted against it ; of the lay peers only one lord, Arundel, had the courage to support them ; thirty lay lords formed a majority for the bill and it went down to the Commons. There also the king's presence was required ; in the house the noes had it. Then Henry insisted on a division ; a taking of single votes which, from some other illustrations which it would be tedious now to refer to, we infer to have been as yet an exceptional method of ascertaining the sense of the house. Partly by promising that there should be no more acts against the pope, partly by the terror of his majestic eyes, he obtained a majority; men could not comfortably vote in the presence of the definer of all praemunires. This much was accomplished before the Easter adjournment ; the Statutes of Wills and Uses passed the Lords but were rejected by the Commons, and the king did not press them at the time. The question of the Annates had opened his eyes to his power of obtaining further concessions. In the beginning of March, by the contrivance of Rochford, the parliament was discussing the possibility of transferring to the king all the power and authority of the archbishops and bishops : the divorce question was simmering in both houses; and Warham had plucked up spirit to speak up for the queen. This was not to be endured. Accordingly the old antagonism of the Commons to the spiritual courts Avas utilised, and an address drawn up by the king's secretaries Avas put in their hands to be delivered to the king as the prayer of the Commons. Audley, as Speaker, and a number of his XII.] ANSWER OF CONVOCATION. 323 own servile party presented it ; it contained a bitter attack on the canon law and ecclesiastical jurisdictions generally, and, in twelve clauses, some of greater and some of less importance, singled out points for reform. The king re- ceived it on the 18th of March, and, as soon as Easter was over, it was laid before convocation for an answer. Both Houses of convocation discussed it in detail ; the Upper House prepared an answer on the points that touched the bishops ; the Lower on those touching the parochial clergy : both agreed in demanding a specific statement instead of general charges. The answer was sent to the king about the 27th of April; and the king was of course prepared to find it unsatisfactory. On the 30th his Majesty sent for the Speaker and showed him the answer, referring it, as a very slender production, to the consideration of that 'grete sorte of wise men to be found in the House of Commons.' There were indeed both wise men and foolish in that assembly ; and both had the divorce business in their minds. They were again busy on the supplies : Henry wanted money to fortify the border and the coast: they offered a tenth and fifteenth, £28,000; that was not enough ; the Statutes of Wills and Uses were again broached and rejected. Independent members went further. Mr. Thomas Temys, M.P. for Westbury, proposed, and found a seconder, that the king should be asked to take back his wife ; ' if he would, there would be no danger from the emperor ; if he would not, fortification would be useless.' The king could not stand that : he sent for Audley, and through him explained to the Commons what a horrible conscience a man had who married his brother's wife. The question of the divorce was not before them : if they would mind their own business he would help them against the clergy; if not, not. Whilst this was going on in Parliament, convocation was Y 2 324 SUBMISSION OF THE CIERGY. [XII. asked for a grant: the clergy discussed the subject, and determined to send to the king a supplication for help. They were in a strait ; the Commons were insisting on severer measures against heresy, and still were impugning the laws and courts, by which only heresy could be extirpated. Rochford and Cromwell were intriguing with the heretics; Henry himself, pretending to stand aloof, was watching every point of vantage. But they got little comfort : in answer to their supplication, the king sent down to them in a bill the three points of submission, the abdication of the right to legislate in convocation, the consent to the reform of ecclesiastical law, and the sufferance of existing canons only under the king's approval. The day after this bill was sent to the clergy, Henry, still intent on exciting the Commons against them, summoned Audley and his friends, and put before him the oath taken by the prelates to the pope on appointment ; an oath which he declared incompatible with their allegiance to himself. That was something for the Commons to consider : the Lords were consulted on the points which had been laid before convocation. The im- perial ambassador was on the watch for results : the king was proposing, he heard, to abolish synods and synodal legislation, and to take into his own hands all coercive juris- diction on heresy ; the bishops might have the souls of the sinners, he would have their bodies ; it was a strange thing ; priests would be of less account than shoemakers, who at least might regulate their own trade. The Venetian am- bassador foresaw a new praemunire, and fixed the amount of money that the king would take, 400,000 crowns from the clergy, a vote of a fifteenth, and a year's income as succession duty. Evidently a storm was rising. The royal propositions were, however, on the 1 5th of May, accepted by convocation, after brisk discussion and several significant divisions. In the House of Lords the chancellor and the bishops opposed XII.] RESIGNATION OF MORE. 325 them, and prevented them from becoming law as yet. The great Lion was nearer a defeat than he had ever been before : and, when More resigned the great seal, which he did on the day that the Submission was presented, the king became very sulky. On the day of prorogation he would not show himself: as for the grant of money, the fifteenth, he did not care about it; he would neither accept nor refuse, and the clergy would not now grant more ; as a matter of fact no subsidy was granted. But the clergy were brought to their knees, and the king lost his wisest and most faithful adviser. The session ended on the 14th of May: convocation was prorogued on the 15th, and on the 16th More resigned. His successor was the Speaker Audley ; a change indeed. After losing More, Henry seems to have acted more and more on the counsels of the Boleyns ; and circumstances rapidly accelerated the course of events. Gardiner, who was probably his near kinsman and who certainly had helped him in every way until now, left the court, and was in disgrace for refusing to preach in favour of the divorce. Warham's death, in the following August, removed the last of the old party whose advice had any chance of being listened to. A visit to Francis I in the next month seems to have determined the king to cut the knot by peremptory action. Immediately on his return he is said to have married Anne Boleyn. As each old friend dropped off Cromwell rose a step, and the royal determination increased. Cranmer was designated for the primacy ; Audley from being Lord Keeper was raised to the Chancellorship; the parliament, which had been pro- rogued to November, was adjourned to January, and in January both Houses and Convocation met. For the session of 1533 we have no journals, and the reports of the Venetian ambassador do not supply the gap caused by the imperfect continuation of the Austrian dis- patches. Two subjects, however, alone occupied both the 326 SESSIOJV OF 1533. [XII. secular and the ecclesiastical assemblies : the divorce and the abolition of appeals to Rome. In parliament the divorce business proceeded slowly ; the king visited it more than once with a view to expediting that, and the provision of an army against the Scots ; but the month of February passed over without any real business being done. • At last Henry resumed the plan by which he had succeeded in 1532, putting the initiation of his own measures in the mouth of a private member of the Commons; on the 15th of March a London member was found to propose that the judges of the divorce should be appointed in England. Immediately after this Cranmer was consecrated, and he undertook to deal with convocation. In convocation the two questions on which the divorce turned were debated in the manner of University disputations; the theologians disputed as to the dispensability of a marriage with a brother's widow, the canonists on the facts of Arthur's marriage with Katharine : there were formal divisions, but the conclusion was foregone, the bishop of Rochester was the only steady opponent. In the same way the York convocation was dealt with by Arch- bishop Lee. Notwithstanding the acquiescence of convocation, the Commons as late as April 10 were still reluctant. We are told that one of the members for London offered to raise £200,000 if the king would refer the question of the divorce to a general council. But in vain. The servility of Cranmer and Lee had provided a short and easy method; on the 23rd of May, at Dunstable, Cranmer, on the strength of the opinions thus obtained, pronounced in favour of the divorce and the Boleyn marriage ; and on the 1st of June Anne Boleyn was crowned ; parliament having adjourned from April 1 2 to June 7. The other great act of the year was the statute of Appeals, of the discussion of which we have few data. On the 1 4th of XII.] STATUTE OF APPEALS. ^ 2 7 March, according to Chapuys, it was proposed in parliament to make a statute declaring that the pope has no authority in this kingdom ; the king was set upon it and was arranging all his policy to that end. On the 30th it is mentioned in the Venetian dispatches as being then pushed in convocation. The next day the imperial envoy announces that the con- vocation has passed the Divorce Bill, but the House of Commons has refused to pass the Statute of Appeals, mainly on the ground that, if the pope were offended, he might injure the wool trade. But before the 10th of April he has to record that the opposition has given way before the king's threat to enforce the penalties of praemunire against the laity. A week later he reports that he has remonstrated with Henry and put him in a rage. Yet raging, still he was not without hope; he had sent to tell the pope that if, even now, he would send a dispensation for the second marriage, he would undo all that, in his wish to please his people, he had done against Rome. It is no doubt an exaggeration of Chapuys when he says that the nation would have welcomed the emperor as a deliverer, but there can be no reason to question his statements as to the sincerity of the opposition. The work of the year ended there; no business session was again attempted; the question of supplies, which had been brought forward in February, dropped and no grant was made. The next session, that of January 1534, was a heavy one: we have the Lords' Journals, but very scanty details about convocation, which is unfortunate as the most important business was ecclesiastical. We know, however, from the Lords' Journals, that the clerical assembly sat on regular clays, every Friday and sometimes on Tuesdays, the lords adjourning on those days for the convenience of the prelates, and on the Wednesdays for the session of Star Chamber. The attendance of prelates in the House of Lords was very 328 SESSIONS OF 1534 AND 1536. [XII. scanty, and they were generally outnumbered two to one by the lay lords : there were discussions and differences of opinion between the Lords and Commons; a Bill on the consecration of bishops sent up from the Commons was rejected by the Lords, and a new Bill drawn by the Lords was passed by the Commons. The Submission Bill or second Statute of Appeals was presented by the Commons in a body on the 27th of March, and passed on the 30th. In convocation, on the 31st, the question that the pope has no more power than any other bishop was determined ; this being probably regarded as their formal judgment on more than one of the statutes which had passed the Commons. We look in vain for any more determined or resolute action on either side. And again the session passes without a money grant. A second session was held in November mainly for this purpose; and a second meeting of con- vocation, in which the king was petitioned to expedite the authoritative translation of the Bible. I enumerated I think in the last lecture the important acts of these sessions. There was no session in 1535. The Long Parliament came to an end in 1536. Of its last session we have no definite details, simply the Acts which it passed : the Journals of Convocation deal only with the question of the subsidy. Henry had, we may presume, quelled all opposition in Par- liament ; and, if contemporary annotators had been minded to preserve particulars, they were lost in the grand and tragic interest of public events. The dissolution of the monasteries, the death of Queen Katharine, the awful tragedy that closed the career of the Boleyns, the pilgrimage of grace, and mutterings of rebellion in north and south, fill the pages of the annalists. For the second Parliament of 1536, that newly elected after the fall of Anne Boleyn, we have much material : it sat for six weeks, and has left full journals, as has Convocation XII.] THE SIX ARTICLES. 329 also. There is no reaction traceable in either. If the Seymours inherited the influence of the Boleyns, they were even more zealous for change and plunder than their pre- decessors : but the real hero of the hour is Cromwell, doing his master's work with zeal. Cromwell, as the king's vice- gerent, claims for himself or his deputy the presidency of Convocation, and by his presence there invests the proceedings of that body with an importance that Cranmer could not have given. All that he proposes in the way of change is passed without show of division ; and, even in the direction of doctrinal reform, he carries things as far as the king allowed. The legislation in parliament likewise is mainly ecclesiastical ; and the journals record nothing but assents. I must pass on very rapidly now. The session of 1539, in which the dissolution of the greater monasteries was accomplished and the Bill of Six Articles passed, was likewise held under the predominating power of Cromwell, who had, however, learned to sink his protestant tendencies before his master's stern orthodoxy. Convocation again worked with the Parliament, and there are traces also that the clergy attended under the prsemunientes clause ; but the new prelates of Henry's nomination now outnumbered the old, and in both assemblies the abbots and priors knew that they appeared for the last time. Yet abject as was the condition of a parliament which could pass the Proclamation Act, there were still two parties at work in it. The secret history of the Six Articles, when it is known, will show that Cromwell's influence was already shaken. The king proposes to abolish the diversities of religion ; Cromwell, the two archbishops, and six bishops, are named as a committee on the 3rd of May. On the 1 6th the Duke of Norfolk announces that the committee cannot agree, and proposes that the Six Articles be discussed 0,0,0 LATER PARLIAMENTS. [XII. in parliament. After some delay two committees are, on the 23rd, appointed to draw up alternative schemes for the king's approval on the following Sunday; the king approves apparently that which is subsequently chosen. It goes down in Cromwell's hand to the Convocation and is accepted there on June 2. Between June 7 and June 16 it passes the Lords, and the Commons also adopt it before the 28th, on which day the session ends. Of the other important acts of the session that which empowered the king to create new sees was passed through the whole of its stages in both houses in one day : the Proclamation Act, and another for the rehabilitation of the religious, were, on the other hand, rejected by the Commons, redrawn, and passed after several days' discussion. I must now pass very briefly over the incidents of the remaining parliaments. In that of 1540 the king's matri- monial relations with Anne of Cleves were, by petition of parliament, referred to and discussed in the convocations : the abbots finally disappeared from parliament ; the House of Lords agreed that Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays should be devoted, by the Royal Commissioners appointed for the purpose, to the preparation of measures of religious reform. Bishop Tunstall is bold enough to draw up a protest against the subsidy, but this is the only trace of opposition. Cromwell's fall was sudden and without sympathy; the Bill of Attainder for treason passed the House of Lords without an opposing vote ; the Commons added attaint for heresy as well as for treason ; not a voice seems to have been raised for him. Nay, in the House of Lords not a single measure of the king's was opposed at all, and it is left on record in the most unsentimental of all registers, the Journals of the Lords, that not a single division occurred during the whole session. In 1542, in the same way, no protest is made against the sacrifice of Catharine Howard. XII.] SCRAPS. 331 But the king is not satisfied with silent acquiescence; he does not hesitate to urge both houses to work harder at that and other public business ; again we find Tunstall protesting alone against some minor measure : the most remarkable event, from our point of view, is the withdrawal from the House of Lords, at the request of convocation, of a bill allowing laymen to act as ecclesiastical judges ; a measure which, though withdrawn now, became law in 1545- The convocation itself was very busy in the matter of the translation of the Bible and Scriptural formulae of prayer and belief. The same work occupied the session of 1543, in which we find Lord Mountjoy voting by himself against the amplification of the Proclamation Act ; and four bishops opposing the Bill for Collectors and Receivers. Clearly the independent spirit has nearly evaporated. The eccle- siastical bills pass without a protest, but the Lords are not reduced so low as they were in 1540. The remaining sessions, those of 1544, 1545, and 1546, furnish nothing that illustrates our subject : the journals record no opposition or protest ; the king has his own way in everything. Time would fail me if I were to attempt to go into the minor parliamentary cases of privilege, or to clothe or colour the dry facts that I have been retailing to you ; or I might describe how, when the Duke of Suffolk opened parliament. all the members, every time the king's name occurred, bowed until their heads all but touched the ground ; or how Henry himself closed the session of 1545 with a sermon on charity; how in 1 515 parliament and convocation were so com- fortably at one that Taylor, the clerk of the parliament, was prolocutor of the Lower House of Canterbury : or how ecstatically Hare and Moyle praised the beauty of their royal master; or how, when he brought the news of the king's death, the rough old Wriothesley could not speak for tears : or how weary the clerk of the parliament was of Audley's 332 CONCLUSIONS. [XII. speeches, which took such a long time to deliver, and so much more to write out and read. All our authorities, even the dry journals themselves, furnish matters of amusement to inquiring minds. But time has failed me already, and I must wind up with a few words of sentiment. I think, that after what I have said, you will allow me to say that I have grounds for believing that Henry VIII was the master, and in no sense the minister, of his people : that, where he carried their good-will with him, it was by forcing not by anticipating or even educating it. I am obliged altogether to reject the notion that he was the interpreter in any sense of the wishes of his people : the utmost that he did in this direction was to manipulate and utilise their prejudices to his own purposes. I allow fully the truth of the theory that one great principle of his policy was to obtain for his measures, for all his measures, the acquiescence of his people, and thus to invest them with a safe, irrefragable authority; but I must add that he knew how to turn opposition into acquiescence, or to take acquiescence for granted. Further, I am convinced, as I said in the last lecture, that he was his own chief, I might say sole, counsellor, not one of his other advisers, after the fall of Wolsey, succeeding in becoming anything more than the instrument of a grand, imperious, ever encroaching will. And now let me confess that I do not think so badly of Henry VIII as the received views of either his advocates or his enemies would suggest. The unhappy, most unhappy history of his wives, has brought upon him an amount of moral hatred which is excessive. Nine kings out of any ten whom you may pick out of the list would have saved their character for humanity by simple self-indulgence. No absolutely profligate king could have got into the miserable abyss in which we find Henry VIII struggling during the XII.] WHAT HENRY WAS. ^33 latter half of his reign. I do not believe that he was abnormally profligate : in this region of morality he was not better perhaps than Charles V, but he was much better than Francis I, and Philip II, and Henry IV. But he was cruelly, royally vindictive ; there was in him an ever- increasing, ever-encroaching self-will, ever grasping and grasping more and more of power : a self-will guided by a high intellect, and that sort of sincerity which arises from a thorough belief in himself. I am not prepared to deny that deep, cunning, unscrupulous men, like Cromwell, traded on their knowledge of his character ; but not one of those who tried to work their own ends through Henry escaped the doom to which false friends and open foes alike found their way. Well, you say, you would not wish to see him worse cursed. I do not condemn him. God forbid, in whose hand are the hearts of kings. I do not believe him to have been a monster of lust and blood, as so many of the Roman Catholic writers regard him. I cannot accept at all the picture which Mr. Froude has drawn. I think that even Lord Herbert's estimate of him is deficient in the perception of his surpassing self-wilfulness. I do not attempt to pourtray him after my own idea ; but I seem to see in him a grand gross figure, very far removed from ordinary human sympathies, self-engrossed, self-confident, self-willed ; un- scrupulous in act, violent and crafty, but justifying to himself, by his belief in himself, both unscrupulousness, violence, and craft. A man who regarded himself as the highest justice, and who looked on mercy as a mere human weakness. And with all this, as needs must have been, a very unhappy man, wretched in his family, wretched in his friends, wretched in his servants, most wretched in his loneliness : that awful loneliness in which a king lives, and which the worst as well as the best of despots realises. Have I drawn 334 CONCLUSION. the outline of a monster ? Well, perhaps ; but not the popular notion of this particular portent. A strong, high- spirited, ruthless, disappointed, solitary creature ; a thing to hate, or to pity, or to smile at, or to shudder at, or to wonder at, but not to judge. XIII. THE HISTORY OF THE CANON LAW IN ENGLAND. (April 19, 1882.) IT requires no small amount of moral courage to approach a subject of legal history without being either a lawyer or a philosopher. A lawyer, no doubt, would make short work of it, and pronounce a definitive judgment, without misgiving, on any subject, historical or other, human or divine, on which he had evidence before him ; and a philo- sopher would systematise to his own satisfaction any ac- cumulation of details that could possibly be referred to the categories of cause and effect. The student of history has not, ex officio, any such privilege of infallibility; the highest point to which he can rise is the entire conviction of his own ignorance and incapacity before the vast material of his investigation ; the highest approach to infallibility is the willingness to learn and correct his own mistakes. If he wishes to learn something of a subject, his best policy is to write a book upon it, or to deliver two public statutory lectures. Here then you have my motive ; wanting to know something of the history of Canonical Jurisprudence, I undertake to lecture upon it. I shall be wiser, that is, more convinced of my own ignorance, before I have done. If I were a philosopher I should begin thus: The legal history of a nation or institution must be the history of the successive stages by which it develops or adopts laws, ac- cording to the stages of its social, or moral, or political, or religious development; or thus: As a nation develops in 33<5 DEVELOPMENT OF LAW. [XIII. civilisation, or foreign policy, or in specialised ambitions, or in consciousness of nationality, or in peculiar constitutional identity, it has to develop new branches or systems of law, or to borrow them ready-made from nations whose polity is in advance of its own, who have made themselves repre- sentative nations in the particular branch of sociology in which it desires to regulate itself. Hence, in England, on the original superstructure of ancient popular law is super- induced, in the age of the Conquest, the jus honorarium of the royal courts; and, when the royal courts have become the courts of common law, on their rigour is superinduced the moderating influence of Equity and Appeal : on the conversion of the nation to Christianity a religious discipline is a necessity, and on that religious discipline, as the frame- work of the Church is built up, there is based a canonical jurisprudence ; if the nation is in close communication with foreign churches or a great Catholic religion, it naturally adopts, from them or it, its religious legislation; if not in such close intercourse, it develops a system of its own, and, when the intercourse becomes closer, modifies its own until it is more or less in harmony with that of the nations round it, always retaining more or less of its own home growth. Or again, still as the philosopher, I might say: Religion, Law and Morality cover the area of human action with rules and sanctions, and, with different origins, motives, and machinery, regulate regions of common energy, a number of acts that fall within reach of each or all. The fact that they spring from different sources necessitates the formation of distinct systems; the fact that they cover the same ground accounts for the possibility of conflicting operation ; the fact that, whilst they overlap one another, their proper areas nowhere coincide, necessitates some sort of definition and limitation of the scope and system of each, which definition and limitation must be supplied either by a concordat between XIII.] MATERIALS OF CHURCH LAW. ^J them or by the subordination of one to the other. And once more : within the region of religious activity itself there are provinces which demand varying degrees of distinctness in definition and graduation of discipline ; there are matters of doctrine, of discipline proper, of property and of judicature ; there are legislation, jurisdiction, administration ; there are functions for the theologian, the casuist, the canonist, and the civilian ; questions of doctrine for the theologian, of morals for the casuist, of discipline for the canonist, of pro- cedure for the civil lawyer. . Well, philosophical or not, these considerations seem to give us a clue to the method of our investigation, and suggest a division into two heads : first, the tracing of the growth of the ecclesiastical law, including both the material and the scientific study; and secondly, the history of its working in competition with and in general relations to the other systems of law. In such a cursory attempt to examine these heads as is possible in such a lecture as this, it is necessary to limit the field of survey as much as possible. I shall therefore restrict myself chiefly to the history of ecclesiastical jurisprudence in England, taking liberty, where it is necessary, to go beyond, but not attempting any general treatment. I have, you will observe, coupled together four topics under two heads; I propose to take the two heads separately, but to discuss the two topics that fall under each conjointly. The first head is the growth of ecclesiastical law, and its two branches are the materials and the study. The materials arrange themselves thus : the New Testament contains not only all doctrine necessary to salvation, but all necessary moral teaching, and as much social teaching as was needed for the age in which it was propounded, and for the society which in the first instance was embodied under apostolic government. But in the very nature of things, and you z 338 CANONS AND PENITENTIALS. [XIII. must here recollect that I am trying to look at the subject rather as a philosopher than as a divine, Christianity, as a growing religion, was certain to require an expansion, in expanding circumstances, of the principles which were clearly enough stated in the Gospel, but the application of which had to be regulated by some other process than the will of the individual. The moral teaching had to be expanded authoritatively, the dogmatic teaching had to be fenced by definitions, the administrative machinery had to be framed with some attempt at uniformity, so that, whilst the Christian society remained a simple voluntary society with no power of enforcing its own precepts by material sanctions, it should have a common jurisprudence recognised by the conscience of its members and by their general consent. Hence from the days of the apostles there were councils, and canons, and constitutions, and books of discipline ; at first the canons, councils, and books of discipline covered all the ground of which I have spoken — doctrine, discipline, and administration, although some councils may be more famous for their de- cisions on one point than on another. Not perhaps to speak of the Apostolic Constitutions, take the council of Nicea for an example, and remember that we owe to it not only a formulated creed, but directions about consecration of bishops and ordination of priests, and likewise rules for the treatment of the lapsed and apostates, and the prohibition of usury. The legislation of Constantine added a new element which worked itself into all these three ; giving a coercive and material force to rules which had been hitherto matters of conscience and consensus ; the church was empowered to enforce her doctrinal decisions, her rules of discipline, and her frame of administration ; and that so completely that from this date the ecclesiastical administration in Christian countries under the empire became so wedded to the secular administration as to be at times almost indistinguishable X11I.] RULES OF PENANCE. 339 from it except on close investigation. From this date then our materials begin to sort themselves : the doctrinal defi- nitions are embodied in the Creeds, and need not be pursued further than the fourth, or, at the outside, the sixth general council : but the canons of discipline and administration are worked into great detail for a long period and in many countries. And here I must take a new point : the coercive authority given to the churches in matters of morals becomes henceforth a branch of jurisdiction, but there still remain branches of moral discipline which depend on voluntary obedience, in which a powerful offender, or a man who does not choose to confess, may defy law and order. For the latter were invented what may be called manuals of casuistry, the Penitentials ; for the jurisdiction proper there remained the canons of the councils, now possessing cogent authority, and the laws of the empire, now framed on a strict conformity between church and state. Here then we reach the historical materials on which is based the later canon law ; and almost at the same time the date at which the conversion of England began. In the middle of the sixth century Dionysius Exiguus, a Roman abbot, compiled the collection of canons which was the germ and model of all later collections. Nearly at the same time, both in the Eastern Church under John the Faster, and in the extreme West under the Irish and other Celtic mis- sionaries, began the compilation of Penitentials ; and in the same century the emperor Justinian completed the great body of the civil law. Thus you get the three conjoint systems of jurisprudence : not distinct in fact from each other ; over- la] >ping everywhere, and even containing much common matter, but distinct in basis. Take the Penitential first : that was in reality a list of sins and their penances ; sins so ticketed and valued as to please even the most abstract philosopher; pcrmutated and combined to mathematical pre- z 2 340 PENITENTIAL SYSTEMS. [XIII. cision. This sort of literature, belonging- especially to ages and nations brought into close contact with heathen abomina- tions, was very important in the last converted countries of East and West ; Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, the Venerable Bede, Egbert of York, and among the Celts Columbanus, Cummian, Vinniaus, and Adamnan, founded the penitential system here : from them the Frank and German churches adopted their rules, and by and by, when Anglo-Saxon literature was borrowing from the Continent, our scholars translated back with interest the developed systems which their predecessors had sent abroad. These rules of penance continue to be elaborated in England to the time of the Conquest ; and bear some analogy to the early laws of the Anglo-Saxon kings, which consist so largely of definitions of crimes and penalties. It is to be remem- bered, however, that the Penitentials were private compila- tions, the authority of which depended on the estimation or dignity of their authors, and not on any legislative sanction ; but, notwithstanding that, there is sufficient harmony amongst them to show that they incorporate the rules on which the episcopal jurisdiction pure and simple generally proceeded ; they were a sort of customary church law for their own province. But over and above these there were the canons, or authorised church law ; and of these also there was a series of important collections. I am unable to say how far the collection of Dionysius Exiguus was received in England and Ireland at first : but from the beginning of the Church History of United England, a series of new canons began to be added to the early collections : Theodore himself added the decisions of Roman and Byzantine councils to the re- solutions of his own national synods : a great and important succession of Anglo-Saxon councils issued canons which were received with great respect in all the Western churches, as we know from S. Boniface's letters and the remains of the XIII.] IRISH CANONS. 341 canons themselves. From Ireland likewise proceeded a great collection of canons — the famous Collatio Hibernica, which, beginning with the edicts of S. Patrick, went on to embody the results of ecclesiastical legislation in West and East, and, by the time of Dunstan, whose copy of it we possess in the Bodleian, had added by successive accretions all that was thought worth preserving even in the capitularies of the Frank kings. The Anglo-Saxon Church possessed no such comprehensive collection of its own ; but abroad the codi- fication of church law proceeded rapidly. I have seen in the National Library at Paris some invaluable MS. collections earlier than the date of the forged decretals ; and the forged decretals themselves were probably not the work of one man or one generation. Not however to tread again this well- trodden path, pass on to the collectors of genuine or less suspected canons : of whom the most important is Burchard of Worms. He, at the beginning of the eleventh century, got together and arranged systematically all the materials he could find : borrowing authoritative determinations from the penitentials, the canons of councils, articles of the civil law as known to him by the Theodosian code, and the capitularies of the emperors. A century later, bishop Ivo of Chartres produced the Pannormia, a similar collection, im- proved on that of Burchard by the use of the Digest and Code of Justinian. Ivo was a contemporary of Henry I of England, and his date carries us past the Norman Conquest and the Hildebrandine period. We must revert to the third element of church law, the religious laws of the kings. Of these the history in England is straightforward enough. The Anglo-Saxon sovereigns, acting in the closest union with their bishops, made eccle- siastical laws which clothed the spiritual enactments with coercive authority, and sometimes seemed to ignore the lines which separate the two legislatures; such sacred laws of 342 RELIGIOUS LAWS. [XIII. Alfred, Canute, and Ethelred only affect our subject so far as they operated on the common law of the country in such matters as tithes, observance of holy days, and the like; they do not become by themselves a part of the later church law. On the Continent there is this difference : — the Theodosian code had to a great extent won its way over Western Europe ; it enters into the codes of the barbarians, into the law of the Pays du droit e'crit, and into the canon law of France ; the capitularies of Charles the Great and his successors, even to a greater extent than the Anglo-Saxon laws, combine eccle- siastical with secular dooms ; and such of them as are accepted find their way into the Church law. But, over and above this infiltration, comes the necessary requirement of developing jurisprudence. The New Testament, the canons of the General Councils, the Penitentials, the De- cretals, did not invent new systems of procedure. Where the Roman courts existed they became the model of the Church courts, and where they did not the ecclesiastical procedure followed the lines of the national and customary tribunals. Hence, wherever the Theodosian code spread, it carried the Roman procedure as a part of church ad- ministration; where, as in England, only faint scintillas of the civil law were to be found, the Church courts must have proceeded on much the same rules as the popular courts. And this is a matter to be seriously noted as we reach the critical point of the Norman Conquest. It is true we know very little about ecclesiastical procedure before this date, and what we do know is not very clear; we may however affirm pretty confidently that there was, over and above the strictly private discipline of the Confessional, a system of church judicature with properly designated judges, and a recognised though not well-defined area of subject-matter in persons and things. To put it very briefly, sacred persons and sacred things, men in orders, monks and XIII.] ANGLO-SAXON COURTS. 343 nuns, sacred places, churches and churchyards, sacred pro- perty, lands, books and die furniture of churches, were under the special protection, and, as protection implied jurisdiction, under the jurisdiction of the bishops, who like- wise had authority in matrimonial and like causes. There was a territorial episcopate, and the bishops exercised their judicial powers with the help of archdeacons and deans. But, it would appear, these judicial matters were transacted in the ordinary gemots of the hundred and the shire. Just as the court baron, court leet, and court customary of a manor are held together, so the court spiritual and the hundred or county court were held together ; and the pro- ceedings were probably in strict analogy. Just as suretyship was the rule in the hundred court, it was in the bishop's court ; so also compurgation and ordeal, the law of witness, and the claim of the mundborh over the person of the litigant. I am not prepared to say that through intercourse with the French Church some portions of the Roman procedure may not already have crept in, but, so far as I can see, I am inclined to the belief that, whilst there was a customary canonical law and a substantially canonical judicature, the character of the procedure was customary and primitive, and differed in nothing materially from the lay procedure. The bishop declared the ecclesiastical law as the ealdorman did the secular, the assessors determined the point on which evidence or oaths were to be taken, and the suitors were technically the judges. Of course all this is stated subject to correction : but this I suppose to be the case at the Conquest, and more or less the case until the close of the reign of Henry I, for the changes introduced by the Conqueror were not instantaneous in their effects. And we come now to the consideration of the effects of the Conquest on this branch of our constitutional system. 344 THE NORMAN CHANGES. [XIII. Here we have to remember two things: first, that the Norman Conquest coincided in time with the Hildebrandine revival ; and secondly, that the Conqueror carried through his most important measures of change by the work of Norman ecclesiastics, many of them lawyers rather than theologians; of whom Lanfranc, the representative of a family of Lombard lawyers, was the chief. These two points enable us at once to estimate the importance of the act by which William separated the work of the bishops' courts from the work of the sheriffs' courts, and promised the assistance of the royal or secular justice in carrying into effect the sentences of the episcopal laws. In the first place he had substituted for the native bishops, used to national law and customary procedure, foreign bishops learned in the Hildebrandine jurisprudence and the Roman procedure ; and in the second he had liberated the Church judicature from its association with the popular judicature. But, you will observe, much still remained to be done; for not yet had either Ivo or Gratian collected the Decretum, nor had Irnerius and the Bolognese lawyers begun to lecture on the Pandects ; there was not as yet a recognised canon law or a complete civil law procedure. One immediate result more I will notice, the breaking up of the dioceses into archdeaconries ; for up to this time the bishops had done most of their own work. Dunstan had sat at the south door of Canterbury Cathedral and had ad- ministered supreme justice; and one archdeacon, generally in deacon's orders, had been a sufficient eye for the bishop where he could not be personally present. The Norman bishops wanted more than one eye, and, almost immediately after the Conqueror's legislative separation of the courts, we find that the archidiaconal service is formed on the plan of that of the sheriffs ; the larger dioceses, such as Lincoln and London, being broken up into many arch- XIII.] CIVIL AND CANON LAW. 345 deaconries; and the smaller ones, such as Norwich, following the example. There was a vast increase in ecclesiastical litigation, great profits and fees to be made out of it; a craving for canonical jurisprudence and reformed judicature analogous to the development of constitutional machinery ; and with it the accompanying evils of ill-trained judges and an ill-understood system of law. This continued to be the case throughout the twelfth century, and very con- spicuously so in the earlier part of it. The archdeacons were worldly, mercenary, and unjust ; the law was uncertain and unauthoritative; the procedure was hurried and ir- regular. The evils were not confined to England, although they were here intensified by the fact of the novelty of the system. On this condition of things a new light arose in the middle of the century; the resuscitation of the jurisprudence of Justinian and the codification of the canons by Gratian. The one supplied the necessary procedure, the other the necessary law. I place them together, because their operation reaches England nearly at the same time ; more minutely, the civil law revival precedes the canon law revival by about forty years. I must say also that, when I speak of the civil law as remodelling procedure, I do not mean that it intro- duced any sudden changes, but that it supplied principles and precedents for the due development of the older Roman procedure, which had become as much a matter of custom as that of the popular jurisprudence was. The real founder of the medieval canon law jurisprudence in England was Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was consecrated in 1 1 39 and ruled the Church until 1161 ; he is best known popularly as the rival of Henry of lilois, Bishop of Win- chester, and as the patron of Thomas Becket ; but his real importance is irrespective of personal matters. He saw the mischief which the maladministration of the archdeacons was 346 DIGEST AND DECRETUM. [XIII. doing, and instituted a nearer official of greater authority and more direct responsibility. John of Salisbury, the phi- losopher and historian, was, as secretary to Archbishop Theobald, the ancestor of the diocesan chancellors, officials and vicar-generals, who begin to execute with more regu- larity and intelligence the law of the Church. Henry of Blois when legate had, as we are told, greatly encouraged the practice of appeals; and an immense proportion of John of Salisbury's letters, written in the name of Theobald, are concerned with questions of appeal, on the rights of advowsons, and other branches of clerical discipline. But that was not all. In the year 1149 Theobald brought from Lombardy and settled at Oxford as a teacher Master Vacarius, who had given himself to the study of the Code and Digest, and drawn up handbooks of procedure sufficient to settle all the quarrels of the law schools. Stephen, the reigning king, set himself stedfastly against this new teaching and expelled Vacarius ; he had on his side the unintelligent dislike of foreign manners, the prudent conservatism of the elder prelates, and the personal jealousies of his brother Henry, whose opponent in political matters Theobald was. Accordingly the civil law was for the time banished. In the year 1151 Gratian completed the Decretum, the con- cordance of the canon laws ; and they shortly found their way to England, where however they were scarcely more warmly received than the civil laws had been, but were not directly banished. It is curious that both Prynne and Selden, not to mention Coke, have confounded the teaching of Vacarius with the attempt to introduce canon law. It is certain that what Vacarius taught was the Corpus Juris of Justinian; but the two systems are thus closely joined together both in time and in essential character. And from this time dates in England that extremely close connexion between the two systems which is recognised in the XIII.] HENRY II. 347 'Utriusque juris doctoratus' and in the fact that every great canonist throughout the middle ages in England was also a great civilian. The first result perhaps of these novelties, so far as English law is concerned, was the improvement in legal education. Although Bologna and Pavia could not be suffered to come to England, England might go to Bologna; and a stream of young archdeacons, at the age at which in England a boy is articled to an attorney, poured forth to the Italian law schools. Many and varied were their experiences; but invariably they get into debt and write home for money; some of them fall in love and become the quasi-husbands of Italian ladies ; some get a bad char- acter for learning the Italian art of poisoning; some are killed in frays with the natives; some remain abroad and become professors ; all more or less illustrate the scholastic question which John of Salisbury propounds, Is it possible for an archdeacon to be saved ? There are some few exceptions, but they seem to be generally of the men who stuck to theology and went for their education no further than Paris. The scrapes of the archdeacons however I have spoken of before ; they are a really amusing feature of the epistolary correspondence of the time. I pass on to some- thing more important. Great as the advantages might be of an improved code of laws and system of procedure, neither the canon law nor the civil law was accepted here ; they were rejected not only by the stubborn obscurantism of Stephen, but by the bright and sagacious intellect of Henry II. Now, con- sidering the close political connexion between Theobald and the Plantagenet party, it is not at all impossible that Henry II may have been among the pupils of Vacarius : certainly he was more of a lawyer than mere empirical education could make him, and, as certainly, he was awake 34^ COMMON AND CANON LAW. [XIII. to the difficulties to which too ready acceptance of the reformed jurisprudence would expose him. How great a lawyer he was I need not tell you; how directly his diffi- culties were owing to the new doctrines of the canon lawyers we know from the history of Becket. I will only mention two points that illustrate his permanent relation to the sub- ject : first, his Assize of Darrein Presentment removed all questions of advowsons and presentations from the ec- clesiastical courts where they were the source of constant appeals to Rome ; and secondly, by the Constitutions of Clarendon he did his best to limit the powers of the ec- clesiastical lawyers in criminal matters and in all points touching secular interests. Against this must be set the fact that to his days must be fixed the final sliding of testamentary jurisdiction into the hands of the bishops, which was by the legislation of the next century permanently left there, in a way which, however accordant with the policy of the papacy, was an exception to the rule of the rest of Christendom. Henry, although not by any known assize or constitution, must have restrained the ecclesiastical judi- cature from interfering in secular matters, except in the two points of matrimony, which was closely connected with a sacramental theory, and of testamentary business. These two, however, furnished matter sufficiently remunerative for a school of church lawyers ; and the more distinctly ecclesi- astical jurisdiction over spiritual things and persons pro- vided much more. A thoroughly learned class of civil and canon lawyers is required over and above the thoroughly learned class of common law and (to anticipate a little) chancery lawyers of the royal courts. Here then we begin to mark signs of increasing di- vergence. The common lawyers of England, the men who tread in the steps of Glanville, who are closely allied with the baronage and with the customary theories of prerogative, XIIT/] LEGAL EDUCATION 1 . 349 are opposed to the introduction of either branch of the Roman law. Glanville, anticipating the decision of the Statute of Merton on the question of legitimisation of children by the subsequent marriage of their parents, speaks of the ' canones legesque Romanorum ' with the same tone of aversion. The ecclesiastics who followed the common law were as adverse to the Roman law as were the knights and barons who learned secular jurisprudence in the discharge of executive office : and very rarely do we find a great judge of the courts of Westminster taken from the ranks of canonists or civilians. Yet the educational influence of these two great systems was making itself felt very early indeed. Not only does Glanville, in the preface to his manual, cite from the Institutes the language in which he addresses his master, but large importations from the civil law procedure must have come in as the jurisprudence de- veloped ; and Bracton, who wrote a century after Glanville, makes direct citations from the compilations of Justinian. If I were not afraid of the lawyers, I should venture to say that the whole theory of Appeals and the whole subject of Equity are strange to the national growth of the common law, and, although widely differing in details, far more akin to the civil law, the practice of which in ecclesiastical causes was steadily before men's eyes whilst they were developing the new systems. But I dare not venture to say this without more authority. As we proceed, however, we are struck more and more with the prominence of the scientific element in legal educa- tion. The great compilations are not received as having any authority in England, but they are the sole legal teaching which is to be obtained in the schools where Englishmen go to learn law. The common law judges may not be canonists or civilians, but the statesmen, in many cases at least, are ; certainly archbishops Langton 350 LEGAL EDUCATION. [XIII. and Boniface and Peckham and Winchelsey. And even of the common lawyers it must be affirmed that their teaching, such as they had, was not merely empirical, not the mere knowledge of customs and the few statutes that were as yet incorporated in the common law code : but scientific, that is, learned from the writings of jurists who treated not merely of the letter or the case, but of the spirit and reason of legislation. Glanville's is indeed but a book of procedure, but Bracton, Fleta, and Britton are jurists, and whilst they illustrate and explain the common law, bring to the interpretation an intelligence and authority that look to something far higher than precedent. We see how long the old doctrine of the authority that is in the mouth of the judge stands out against the new doctrine that is in the letter of the law. Like the ' decretum,' like the ' responsa prudentum ' of the Pandects, the work of Bracton is a scientific rather than an authoritative text-book. But I am anticipating what I ought to put in proper order somewhat later. Whilst the study of these foreign systems was becoming increasingly important and increasingly common, the popular dislike of foreign law was not in the least diminished. I must here couple the two Roman systems together, for to all purposes of domestic litigation they were inseparable : the ' canones legesque Romanorum ' were classed together and worked together, mainly because it was only on ecclesi- astical questions that the civil law touched Englishmen at all, but also because without the machinery of the civil law the canon law could not be worked ; if you take any well-drawn case of litigation in the middle ages, such as that of the monks of Canterbury against the archbishops, you will find that its citations from the Code and Digest are at least as numerous as from the Decretum. Moreover the accretions of the Decretum, the Extravagants as they XLII.] LONDON LAW SCHOOLS. 351 were called, that is the authoritative sentences of the Popes which were not yet codified, were many of them conveyed in answers to English bishops, or brought at once to England by the clergy with the same avidity that lawyers now read the terminal reports in the Law Journal. The famous decision which Glanville quotes about legitimation is embodied in what then was an Extravagant of Alex- ander III, delivered to the bishop of Exeter in 1172, founded no doubt on a Novel of Justinian but not till now distinctly made a part of church law. And this point further illustrates what I was saying : for it is the point on which the great dictum of the council of Merton turns in 1236. The English hatred of the foreigners was in that year fanned to white heat by the importation of the king's half-brothers and the new queen's uncles : it was an unlucky moment for Grosseteste and the bishops to press that the English law of bastardy should be altered to suit the canon and civil law of Rome. The murmurs were already rising that William of Valence was going to change the constitution. Notwithstanding the influence of Grosse- teste, the king and the barons declared ' Nolumus leges Angliae mutari.' That is a well-known story ; but it is perhaps not equally well known that the king had just a year before issued an order which stands in close parallelism with the banishment of Vacarius. By a letter to the Lord Mayor of London, dated Dec. 11, 1234, he had directed that no one should be allowed to hold law schools in the city of London or teach the Laws. What laws were these ? Coke thought that the king referred to Magna Carta and the Carta de Forestis; but Selden, and Prynne after him, pointed out that this was inconceivable; and that doubtless the Laws were the canon laws. I think that under the term Leges both civil and canon law were intended, but certainly at the moment the danger from the canon law was greater. 3j2 otho and otiiobox. [XIII. In the year 1230 Gregory IX had approved of the five books of Decretals codified by Raymund of Pennafort from the Extravagants of the recent Popes and added to the Decretum of Gratian. In 1235 Matthew Paris tells us the Pope was urging the adoption of them throughout Christendom. But they were not received in England, although they continued to be the code by which English causes were decided at Rome, and began to be an integral part of the education of English canonists. And here again we have to distinguish between the scientific or implicit and the explicit authority of these books. Great as the influence of Justinian's code has been, there are very few countries in Europe where it has been received as more than a treasury of jurispru- dence ; the ' Siete partidas ' of Alfonso the Wise was a book of jurisprudence, not a code of law ; the independence of the Gallican Church turns, as a historical question, on the non-reception of Roman decrees, the acceptance of the council of Basel, and the non-reception of portions of the Tridentine canons, the incidental working of which must, notwithstanding, have been irresistible and undeniable. So in England neither the civil law nor the canon law was ever received as authoritative, except educationally, and as furnishing scientific confirmation for empiric argument ; or, in other words, where expressly or accidentally it agrees with the law of the land. Nay, the scientific treatment itself serves to confuse men's minds as to the real value of the text; and in both laws the opinions of the glossers are often cited as of equal authority with the letter of the law or canon. But this same date 1236 brings me to another point; the beginning of the Codex receptus of Canon Law in England ; in spite of the Council of Merton and the closing of the law schools of London. Since the Conquest most of the arch- bishops had held provincial synods and issued provincial XIII.] ENGLISH CONSTITUTIONS. $$•$ canons ; but many of these were acts of a temporary char- acter only, and, even when they received support and confirmation from the kings, seldom amounted to more than the enforcement of discipline which had previously been authorised by papal or conciliar decrees. These canons are extant in the pages of the annalists, but remain rather among the Responsa Prudentum than as materials for a code. Just, however, as the statute law of England begins with the reign of Henry III, so does the codification of the national canon law. Archbishop Langton's Con- stitutions may be set first, but next in order, and even of greater authority, come the Constitutions of the legate Otho, which were passed in a national council of 1237. After these come Constitutions of the successive archbishops, es- pecially Boniface of Savoy and Peckham, which were drawn up in a very aggressive spirit ; Boniface taking advantage of Henry Ill's weakness to urge every claim that the English law had not yet cut down, and Peckham going beyond him in asserting the right of the Church against even the statutable enactments of the state. Between Boniface and Peckham in the year 1268 come the Constitutions of Othobon, which were confirmed by Peckham at Lambeth in 1281, and which, with those of Otho, were the first codified and glossed por- tions of the national church law. In the reign of Edward III, John of Ayton, canon of Lincoln, an Oxford jurist it is said, collected the canons adopted since Langton's time and largely annotated the Constitutions of Otho and Otho- bon. Contemporaneously with this accumulation of national materials, the Corpus Juris of the Church of Rome was increasing ; Boniface VIII added the sixth book to the five of Gregory IX, and John XXII added the Clementines in 131 8; and his own decisions, with those of the succeeding popes, were from time to time added as Extravagants un- systematiscd. The seventh book of the Decretals was a a 354 LYNDWOOD 'S PROVINCIALE, [XIII. drawn up under Sixtus V as late as 1588; so that prac- tically it lies outside our comparative view. Of course very much of the spirit of both the sixth book and the Clementines found its way into England, but the statute law was in- creasing in vigour, the kings were increasing in vigilance, and after the pontificate of Clement V the hold of the papacy on the nation was relaxing. Occasionally we find an archbishop like Stratford using the papal authority and asserting high ecclesiastical claims against the king, but the age of the Statutes of Praemunire and Provisors was come, and no wholesale importation of foreign law was possible. Not to multiply details, I will summarily state that in the reign of Henry V William Lyndwood, the Dean of the Arches, collected, arranged, and annotated the accepted Constitutions of the Church of England in his Provinciale, which, with the collections of John of Ayton generally found in the same volume, became the authoritative canon law of the realm. It of course was proper in the first instance to the province of Canterbury, but in 1462 the Convocation of York accepted the Constitutions of the southern province as authoritative wherever they did not differ from those of York, and from the earlier date the compilation was received as the treasury of law and practice. Nor were any very material additions made to it before the Reformation; for although the Church of England was deeply involved in the transactions of the Council of Basel, and might, if the matter had been broached as distinctly as it was in France, have formally accepted its canons, no such incorporation of those canons ever took place here as was accomplished in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438. Still, authoritative as Lyndwood's code undoubtedly was, it was rather as the work of an expert than as a body of statutes that it had its chief force. The study of the canon law was a scientific and professional, not merely mechanical study; and XIII.] CANON LAW IN ENGLAND. $5$ just as much was the study of the civil law also. I think that I am right in repeating that it was mainly as a branch of church law that the civil law was studied at all ; but I do not mean that it was so exclusively. In the infancy of inter- national law and the administration of both admiralty and martial law, the English jurists had to go beyond their insular practice, and to no other source could they apply themselves ; hence the association which to the present day has subsisted between the curiously unconnected departments of maritime and matrimonial jurisdiction. It is really owing to the dis- tinction between scientifically and empirically trained lawyers. Of the indirect influence of scientific jurisprudence on the common law and chancery I have spoken already. England has then for at least two centuries before the Reformation a body of law and a body of judges, for eccle- siastical and allied questions, quite apart from the law and judicial staff of the secular courts ; and, with the growth of the Universities, she begins to have educational machinery for training her lawyers. In this department of work, how- ever, the scientific study has a long start and advantage over the empirical. The common law has to be learned by practising in the courts, or by attending on their sessions. The apprentices and Serjeants of the Inns of Court learn their work in London ; their study is in the year books and the statute book, a valuable and even curiously interesting accumulation of material, but thoroughly insular, or less than that, simply English. The canonists and civilians have also their house in London, the 'Hospitium dominorum advocatorum de arcubus,' but they are scarcely less at home at Rome and Avignon. The canonist and civilian learn the legal language of entire Christendom ; the London lawyer sticks to his Norman-French. The Norman-French of Westminster is unintelligible beyond the Channel and beyond the border. Scotland, the sister kingdom, is toiling without a a 2 ■^6 IN OXFORD. [XIII. a common law system at all until, in the sixteenth century, James V introduces the law of Justinian as her treasury of common law, and thus gains University training and foreign experience for her lawyers : but England has an ancient system and is content with her own superiority ; her common law is of native growth, strengthening with the strength of her people ; she sees the nations that have accepted the civil law sinking under absolutism ; as distinctly as ever ' non vult leges Anglise mutari/ But she has ceased to banish the skilled jurist. Oxford and Cambridge have their schools of both the faculties. The civil law at Oxford had its schools from the fourteenth century in Cat Street, on the north of S. Mary's, in Schidyard Street, and in the great civil law school in S. Edward's parish where Archbishop Warham learned law. The canon law school was in the neighbour- hood of S. Edward's church also, and was rebuilt in 1489 by subscription of the canonists. Wood enumerates no less than seven distinct sets of Scholar Legum, the majority being for civil law. In the colleges legal study has its proper endowments. At Merton the study of the canon law is by the founder's statutes permitted to four or five of his scholars, that of the civil law is allowed to the canonists as subsidiary to their proper study, pro utilitate ecclesiastici regimifiis. At Oriel five or six fellows, with consent of the seniors, might read the canon law, and by dispensation of the provost, the civil law also. At Exeter, one of Stapledon's fellows was to study Scripture or the Canon Law. We learn from Mr. Mullinger's invaluable book on Cambridge, that at Gonville Hall, founded about seventy years after Merton, each fellow was allowed to study canon law for two years. It might be possible to trace in the successive foundations vestiges of the old subsisting and often revived jealousy of the studies ; for Merton was founded at a time when, as Roger Bacon tells us, the civil law was looked on with jealousy as a mere XIII.] CANONISTS AND CIVILIANS. 357 professional or money-making study, whilst before the foundation of Gonville Hall the conflict between John XXII and Lewis of Bavaria had made the political tendencies of these studies more important and obvious. At Trinity Hall, which was nearly of the same date as Gonville, ten civilians and seven canonists were seventeen out of the twenty statutory fellows. At New College, out of seventy there were to be ten civilians and ten canonists, but these were reduced by Waynfiete to two civilians and four canonists. At All Souls, sixteen out of forty were to be lawyers; at King's College, Cambridge, out of seventy, two civilians and four canonists ; while at Catharine Hall both the canon and civil law were excluded. These variations depend no doubt on the special intentions of the founders to promote scientific study, or to insure the worldly advancement of their pupils, and, to some extent, on the varying relations between theology and law of which I must speak in the next lecture. It is however clear, at the lowest estimate, that abundant encouragement and opportunities for the study could be found in both the seats of learning. Closely allied as the canon and civil laws were, they composed two faculties ; with regular schemes of lectures, fees, and exercises ; the doctor of the civil law had to prove his knowledge of the Digest and the Institutes ; the doctor of the canon law must have worked three years at the Digest and three at the Decretals, and studied theology also for two years. It is, you observe, not the national church law, but the universal or scientific material, on which he is employed. In a great number of cases the degrees were taken at the same time; but as the era of the Reformation approaches, the canonists become more numerous than the civilians at Cambridge, and probably at Oxford also. But these points belong to a view of the subject on which I cannot pretend to enter now ; and indeed it is in the conflict of laws rather than the conflict of studies 358 CONCLUSION. that the present interest of the subject lies. In the next lecture I shall have to recur for some points to the ground which I have attempted to cover in this, for the struggles and jealousies of the rival and allied systems of jurisprudence do not date from the Reformation only. Here, however, I stop now, having in a cursory way traced the history of the materials of the canonical jurisprudence so far down. We shall have to begin by looking at the later history from the theological as well as from the legal side, and to follow it through the Reformation period, steering clear, as much as possible, of questions of modern controversy. XIV. THE HISTOKY OF THE CANON LAW IN ENGLAND. (April 20, 1882.) IN the first of these two public lectures I attempted to give a sketch of the growth of the Canon Law; its origin and materials, its introduction into England and the limits of authority which it attained here, its relation to the civil law of Rome, and the distinction between the scientific study of the Decretals in the Universities and the professional use of the Provinciale in the Ecclesiastical Courts. The second branch of the subject, as I proposed to treat it in opening the lecture, is the history of its working in competition with and in general relations to other systems of law : a branch of the discussion which compels us at once to go back to the very root of the subject. Canon law as a code, and the civil law of Rome as a treasury of procedure, working together in the hands of ecclesiastical lawyers, may be for the moment looked at together ; and the first aspect which our subject then takes is the attitude of the system towards theology on the one side and to the national, or, as lawyers would perhaps call it, municipal law on the other. From the Conquest to the Reformation canon law, proceeding by civilian method and being able to call on the municipal executive to put its sentences in force, is a strong link between theology and national discipline ; but a link with so much intricate work- manship employed upon it as to be offensive in many ways both to theology and to the common law. The theologian saw the great commandments of God, and the statutes of the Church, and the voice of conscience, lowered by being made dependent for their cogency on an elaborate system of human invention which fettered freedom of action, and in some 360 SECULARITY OF CANON LAW. [XIV. respects freedom of thought also; which reduced moral obligations to a system of penances, pecuniary commuta- tions, monitions, and excommunications, and which made use of the sacraments of the Church as the mere means and appliances of a coercion to external good behaviour, which ought to be a free-will offering and the instinctive product of a sincere heart. Do not think that I am exaggerating the attitude of repulsion in which the pure theologian and the pure moralist stood to the ecclesiastical lawyer who was making money out of the practice of the Courts Christian. You remember how John of Salisbury had doubted whether an archdeacon could be saved : Roger Bacon declares that the study of the civil law, attracting the clever men among the clergy, threw the study of theology into a second place, and secularised the clerical character, making the priest as much a layman as the common lawyer; while Richard of Bury, the author of the Philobiblion, and Holcot the great scholastic, declared, the one that the civilian, although he gained the friendship of the world, was an enemy of God ; the other, that under existing relations the handmaid Hagar, despising the true wife, was in apt analogy to the contempt under which neglected theology sank in the estimation of the world as compared with the law. It is true that these remarks have a primary reference to the civil law, but, as I showed, the civil law was learned chiefly as the executive of the canon law, and it was by its relations to the canon law that it became practical and remunerative. I need not go into much detail about this, but, if I am speaking to any who attended my lectures on Ockham and Marsilius, they will remember how not only those great writers, but a crowd of minor ones, attack the canon law and its professors as the great enemies, not only of civil government but of vital religion : an exaggeration no doubt, but founded on a true principle. 'Who,' says John of Salisbury, himself a canonist, XIV.] CONFLICTS AND JEALOUSIES. 36 T ' ever rises pricked at heart from the reading of the laws, or even of the canons x ? ' The practice of these studies stood to theology, stood to religion itself, in the relation in which the casuistry of the confessional stood to true moral teaching. When however we turn, as we must do, to consider the attitude of the national law and the national lawyers, we see more distinctly how incompatible were the systems which, for four hundred years, from the Conquest to the Reformation, stood side by side, with rival bodies of administrators and rival or conflicting processes. Look first at the area of matters with which the canon law assumed to deal : it claimed jurisdiction over everything that had to do with the souls of men, and I think there is scarcely a region of social obligation into which, so defined, it would not claim to enter. It claimed authority over the clergy, in matters civil and criminal, in doctrine and practice, in morals and in manners, education and dress, in church and out. It claimed authority over all suits in which clergymen were parties, or in which ecclesiastical property was involved; I say, mark you, claimed, rather than ex- ercised, for some of these are the points in which the struggle with the national law arises. It claimed authority over the belief and morals of the laity, in the most comprehensive way. The whole of the matrimonial jurisdiction, the whole of the testamentary jurisdiction was, we know, specially regarded as a branch of canon law ; but by its jurisdiction for correction of life, 'pro salute animae,' it entered into every man's house; attempted to regulate his servants, to secure his attendance at church, to make him pay his debts, to make him observe his oaths, to make him by spiritual censures, which by the alliance with the State had coercive force, by the dread of a writ of capias excommunicatum. to keep all the weightier matters of the law, not only 1 Job. Salisb. i. iy6, epist. 138. - ; - ■ - I I : ■ .. ." - - - uii :-mirn .. • "- ... ate: d el an£ anmal i m - '---'- - - ' ----- ■-- - " : m i ■-..■— -L- viL-jti i man nor- :;..:" nam "-----• - ■ " : a : - - ; .-.. ODSfll HB9&B . ■ a i - ■ " --"• -"- .._:-. Id inn .. -my--.--- . - .. - - .- D .. ... ... . ma -. - . :: ■ . . - ■- Xiv.l CONFUSION OF FUNCTIONS, y\) had no provision, it is not likely that the kings would have boon jealous of papal or archiepiscopal enactments, or would hive stood on their rights when the exaet line was occasionally overstepped. But the extravagance of eccle- siastical claims provoked them to opposition and justified it. When the archbishops of Henry Ill's reign claimed exclusive jurisdiction in suits o( advowsons, the right to exact personal tithes, and to try all questions of credit granted ' tide interposita.' even so gentle a worm as the king turned again ; and we find among his letters, and still more among those of his son, constant cautions to the primates and their convocations not to attempt anything to the prejudice of the crown and customs of the land, as well as innumerable pro- hibitions to ecclesiastical judges against their trying other civil suits than those which touch testamentary or matri- monial matters. Edward II had to prohibit the employment of imperial notaries. In the spiritual matters proper, the kings seldom interfered ; only where a political motive was suspected, or where a servant of the crown was attacked, or where the spiritual judge had clearly gone beyond his discretion. The Church history of the thirteenth and four- teenth centuries is full of cautions and prohibitions, and of Struggles between the officers who had thus to interfere with one another ; and the definitions of the ' Articuli Cleri ' under Edward II which prescribed the points on which prohibitions were to be granted, and the Statute of Prae- munire under Edward III, which forbade the multiplication of appeals to Rome, did little to ameliorate relations. When however heresy became a matter of litigation, the two systems deliberately worked together ; and, although there were many hitches, during the whole of the Lancastrian period there was more definite co-operation and less conflict. The com- mon law was really becoming more a matter of scientific treatment, and the greatest judges were men who had had 364 EARLY JEALOUSIES. [XIV. scientific education on both sides. Sometimes there was, as was natural, a little inconsistency and awkwardness ; the bowsprit got mixed up with the rudder; as when Morton, at once archbishop and chancellor, allowed his judgment on a fraudulent executor to be modified by the reflexion that he would be 'damne'e in hell.' But this may have been exceptional. It must not however be supposed that the fault in this rivalry was altogether to be ascribed to the canonists. The English-trained lawyer was as infallible in that age as in this ; and when we find him, and his brethren in the parliament, constantly hampering the legitimate work of the church, we see that there were two sides to the question ; when in the fourteenth century the Commons petition that the clergy may not make in their convocation canons to bind the laity, it is rather a relief to find that the canons in question relate to tithe of underwood : but when in 1446 we find the clergy remonstrating that the professional lawyers 'pretended privilege, by what right,' they say, 'we know not, to interpret acts of parliament and explain the mind of the legislature, and by thus practising upon the statutes sometimes ground their opinion on mysterious and un- intelligible reasons, and so wrest the laws contrary to the meaning and intention of parliament;' or petitioning that the judges who showed such strong bias should no longer issue prohibitions, but, when questions arose concerning the limits and jurisdiction of the rival courts, indifferent persons should be pitched upon to judge them; or the lawyers, on the other hand, striking at the root of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction as if it were a transgression of the Statute of Praemunire 1 , — well, when we look at these things, we shall see that there were questions unsettled even before the Council of Trent, and hear opinions and 1 Wilkins, iii. 555 (1447) ; Parker's Antiquitates, 429. xiv.] the reformation: 365 complaints that sound like echoes beforehand of voices with which in these days our ears are too familiar. I must, however, now proceed to the Reformation, and endeavour to determine, as strongly and as clearly as I can, the bearing of that most critical era on our subject. Henry VIII had, as early as 15 15, seen a struggle between the secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in Standish's case, in the course of which he is said to have expressed himself as determined to endure no division of sovereignty in his own realm. Whether that was really said or merely put into his mouth afterwards, I cannot say ; but certainly no scheme of change in the relation between Church and State was set on foot for nearly seventeen years. Then the business of the divorce at Rome, and the discontent of the king with the half-hearted support of the clergy at home, completed his disgust, and he set out in the course of radical change. Having in 1531 compelled the clergy by the threat of prae- munire to recognise him as supreme head ' quantum per Christi legem licet,' he induced the Commons in 1532 to present a petition or remonstrance against the whole theory and practice of the canon law. They attacked the power of the clergy to make canons in convocation, they protested against the exaction of fees and mortuaries, and deliberately impugned the honesty and purity of the episcopal courts in all their branches and with reference both to jurisdiction and to procedure. This petition had two results; the parliament passed bills to limit the benefit of clergy and forbid feoffments to the use of churches. An earlier session in 1529 had attempted to deal with probate and mortuaries ; this, by the Statute of Citations, cut down the power of the Archbishop of Canterbury to entertain suits from other dioceses except by appeal or on request, and so struck at the root of the universal jurisdiction enjoyed by the Court of Arches and its advocates. The same term — the second result of the 366 SUBMISSION OF THE CLERGY. [XIV. king's policy — the Convocation was compelled to surrender its right of meeting and legislating, and to consent to a revision of the canon law to be carried into execution by a mixed body of clergy and laity whom the king should appoint. This last concession sealed the fate of the old scientific study of the canon law, which, as we have seen, was a distinctly popish study; and, if it had not been accompanied by a limiting clause, allowing the old canons, so far as they were not opposed to the law of the land, to stand until the revision was published, there would have been an entire abolition of ecclesiastical jurisdiction of any kind. In 1535 Cromwell, as the king's vicegerent, visited the two Universities, and in both issued injunctions, that both the old scholastic teaching of the Sentences should cease, and that the teaching in the Decretals and the conferring of degrees in canon law should be abolished. What the exact legal force of Cromwell's injunctions was has never been determined; but in these points they were obeyed : the Universities ceased to teach the systematic theology of the Schools and the systematic jurisprudence of the Decretals ; and the ancient degrees of bachelor and doctor of the canon law are known, except during the reign of Mary, no more. How did this affect the civil law ? you ask : well, just as it might be expected ; the scientific study was abolished, the old canons were in abeyance, but the courts continued to practise, the civil law procedure was as lively as ever ; and students who intended to practise as advocates took degrees in civil law instead of in both. Oxford dropped the canon law degree altogether ; Cambridge, by adopting a more general form, retained a shadowy pre- sentment of the double honour. And now we come again to an Act which shows the con- tinuity of the inherent rivalry between two systems which, for the sake of mutual profit, had so long worked together. XIV.] CIVILIAN-CANONISTS. 367 In 1541 a bill was introduced into parliament which enabled married D.C.L.'s to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction as chancellors and commissaries ; it did not pass in that year, being withdrawn on the request of Convocation, but was re- introduced and passed in 1545. So long as the two degrees were granted together the D.C.L.'s were, as doctors of decrees, bound by the canon which forbade a married man to act as an ecclesiastical judge ; but now the right of the D.C.L. simple, both to marry and to act as a judge, was secured : as the civil doctors of Bologna had done in the thirteenth century, their successors in England now married ; before this they were probably, as a rule, in minor orders. I must pass over the more important of Henry VIII's other acts, especially the Statutes of Appeals and Sub- mission, except just to recall the fact that in the preamble to the former of those Acts passed in 1533 he had expressed himself confident that the realm of England would, as it always had done, provide a sufficient number of spiritual men to decide spiritual questions, and of secular men to decide secular questions, under his own supreme authority and to the exclusion of any foreign jurisdiction. The other matters in which those statutes affected ecclesiastical juris- diction lie somewhat deeper than our present speculations. We are not however to suppose that, when the king practically abolished the canon law, he intended to hand the clergy over to the common lawyers. The procedure was, as we have seen, still kept in the hands of the civilians ; but the theologians were a body of men whose functions had been to some extent usurped by the canonists, and who now for some years, under Tudor and Puritan and Laudian influences, were to come to the front. The theo- logians or divines divided with the canonico-civilians the authority of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction : the character of a bishop in itself was that of a divine, not of a lawyer, and 368 THE REFORMATIO LEGUM. [XIV. we might almost say that whilst questions of application of law and procedure belonged to the lawyer, the interpre- tation was claimed for the divine. In cases of heresy, for instance, the theologians formulated the definition, whilst the canonists and civilians examined the teaching of the accused and determined how far he had contravened the definition. So in the question of Henry's divorce, the divines had been called on to define ' Can the pope dis- pense with a marriage with a deceased brother's wife ? ' the canonists had to determine whether the marriage between Arthur and Katharine was such a marriage as precluded the dispensation. This rule of combining theologians with canonists or civilians for commissions on ecclesiastical suits continued long after the Reformation, and ought never to have been disused. These measures of change, sufficiently drastic one would think, had in this department satisfied Henry VIII ; the scheme for revising the canon law hung fire; the powers granted to the king in 1534 were renewed for three years in 1536, and again for his life in 1544, but nothing was done in the matter during the remainder of the reign. But what had sufficed Henry VIII did not suffice Somerset or North- umberland, or the poor boy-king who succeeded him. The second statute of the first year of Edward VI went as near as possible to extinguish the episcopate ; there were still to be bishops, but they were to be nominated by the king without any form of election ; they were as a matter of fact appointed during good behaviour ; and their jurisdiction was henceforth to be exercised in the king's name. In him all ecclesiastical authority was vested, they were to be his minis- ters, their writs were to be issued in his name, their seals were to bear the royal arms; and it was only to such of them as he pleased that even such authority was to be intrusted. It was proposed, though not passed, that a Court XIV.J CODIFICATION A FAILURE. 369 of Chancery should be erected for ecclesiastical causes. The revision of the canon law was to be urged on, and the Uni- versities were to be further purged from the old leaven. All this was done : in vain the Protestant bishops pleaded in the House of Lords that their position was intolerable and their dignity a mere mockery, that the moral discipline of clergy and people was entirely broken down; no act for rehabi- litating them was got through parliament ; the dominant interests were opposed to it. The injunctions sent to the Universities prescribed some renewal of studies; the poor canonists of course were left out in the cold, although not treated as if they were illegal or irregular : the civilians were authorised to read the Institutes, and the D.C.L., when he had reached that dignity, was exhorted to devote himself more zealously to the study of the king's laws, both temporal and ecclesiastical. And work was to be found for him : bills were introduced to lodge ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the hands of students of the Universities, who were admitted by the archbishop. By these, however, all special privileges of the advocates were endangered and the bills dropped after passing most stages : four bills on this point were before the parliament of 1550. But again the revision of the canons was dragging behind. The king's power of nominating revisers was asserted by an act of 1550 to last for three years, and an abortive attempt was made in the session of 1552 to renew or enlarge it ; but whether it was that Cranmer found it impossible to obtain skilled assistants, or that the division of parties prevented a joint effort, it was not until near the end of the reign that the project was carried on : in 1 55 1 and 1552 Edward issued two commissions of thirty- two, composed of equal numbers of bishops, divines, civilians, and common lawyers ; the number thirty-two was reduced to eight; practically the work was done by Peter Martyr, the Oxford Professor of Divinity, under Cranmer's eye, and B b 370 THE MARIAN REACTION. [XIV. the result was the compilation known as the Reformatio Legum; a curious congeries of old and new material which really pleased no party ; showing too much respect for antiquity and divine ordinance to please the Puritan, and too little to satisfy the men who had guided the Reforma- tion under Henry VIII and those who were to do so under Elizabeth. The legislation and policy of Mary were directed to uproot everything that Edward VI had originated ; his bishops appointed ' quamdiu se bene gesserint,' were dispossessed without a struggle ; his laws were repealed, many of them never to be revived ; his advisers, where they would not comply, were exiled or burned : but the efforts to reinstate the old system were not successful ; the monastic property could not be restored ; the ranks of the lower clergy, reduced to a fraction by the abolition of chauntries and private masses, could not be recruited ; and all the restored fabric hung on the life of a woman and a few worn-out old men. For the moment the canon lawyers lifted up their heads, and a few civilians took the doctorate of decrees at Oxford and Cambridge ; but the complete extinction of reactionary forces, on Mary's death, showed that the Papal system, with all that was dangerous to national life contained in it, was, so far as England was concerned, practically extinct : six years of blood and fire, of tears and prayers, of cruel jealousies and heartbreaking divisions, wrought this; and Elizabeth for some years after her accession had before her a task, not certainly easy, but not encumbered with insuper- able difficulties. The subject which we are treating now contracts its limits; for to attempt anything like circumstantial discussion of the legal history of a period into which ecclesiastical quarrels so largely enter, would be to lose oneself at once in a wilderness of controversy. I must content myself with a few generalisations XIV.] POLICY OF ELIZABETH. 37 1 and a few significant facts. The Elizabethan settlement in Church and State was a compromise, satisfactory to no party, and very unsatisfactory indeed to the constitutional lawyer or historian ; but, possibly, the best arrangement com- patible with circumstances. She began her reign, of course, by a reversal of her sister's legislation ; but she did not restore the Edwardian system ; she did not revive the Act of Henry VIII which had asserted the king's headship of the Church, or the Act of Edward which deprived the bishops of all original jurisdiction : the doctrine of the headship was opposed both by the Puritans and by the Catholic party; the abolition of all the high functions of the episcopate which was aimed at by Edward's advisers was a measure which contemporary history was showing to be dangerous. But, whilst she minimised the definition of authority, she retained the virtual exercise of it : her explanation of her supreme governorship might have satisfied every one but the most Tridentine papist, but she re-enacted the most stringent part of her father's act of supremacy; and, whilst she allowed the continuance of the church jurisdiction, she kept all con- trol over the religious discipline of clergy and laity under the hands of the Court of High Commission. The Court of High Commission, consisting of a large number of lawyers and laymen and a small number of bishops and divines, stands to the Church in much the same relation as the Court of Star Chamber stands to the Courts of Common Law, and the Court of Requests to Chancery, a legal but most uncon- stitutional relation, and one which, however long it might be tolerated, was sure in the long run to endanger the whole fabric. As for legislation, Elizabeth acted, as we know, on a high principle of supremacy; such measures of church discipline as required coercive authority she allowed the parliaments to pass, but she forbade any interference what- ever where that authority was not necessary. As for the b b 2 372 POLICY OF ELIZABETH. [XIV. ecclesiastical legislation in Convocation, she exercised her veto, i. e. she granted or withheld the consent which would make it valid, according to her own views of high policy. The rulers of the Church, who were not free from the same humiliating bondage of adulation that influenced all around the great queen, tolerated a system which gave them the sub- stance of power, although in an unpopular and unhistorical shape. Their legislative authority was paralysed, but they could exercise a real authority as the queen's advisers ; and the jurisdiction, which they had difficulties in enforcing through their own courts, they could enforce as members of the Hi°:h Commission Court. But the ecclesiastical law — how did it fare under the circumstances ? In the first place the forms of the courts were maintained, and were enough to sustain the civilians who worked in them ; the Prerogative Court and the consistory courts lived on the testamentary and matrimonial jurisdiction ; and before the spiritual courts were tried the smaller cases of discipline which were not important enough for the High Commission Court. Doctors' Commons, which had dwelt before in Paternoster Row or at the Queen's Head, under the auspices of Dr. Henry Harvey, built itself a new home, with hall and library and plate and privileges for importing wine. Knowledge of canon and civil law was in parliament, as in 1585, regarded as a special quali- fication for service in the House of Commons on committees. In the parliaments of 1559 and 1563 were introduced bills to make a University degree necessary for ecclesiastical judges. And the canon law, as drawn up by Lyndwood, and the civilian procedure, subsisted, for the revision which had been completed by Edward's commissioners did not approve itself to Elizabeth or her advisers, and after an abortive attempt to carry it through the parliament of 1559, took its place on the shelf of broken projects. Even the Court of High Com- mission, novel as its functions were and unfettered as it was XIV.] THE PURITANS. 373 in the exercise of them, condescended to borrow from the canonical jurisprudence some of its most offensive details, its ex officio oath and the censures by which it would enforce its sentences. It was a strange composite system, perhaps the only one possible consistently with the retention of historic continuity, but obviously and most certainly tolerable only for a time. What was the attitude of theologians, of common lawyers, and of canonists towards this critically-balanced structure ? To the true theologians, whether Catholic or Puritan, the whole was repulsive : we see this in the half-hearted, almost despairing adhesion of Archbishop Parker, and in the strong and justifiable protests of the Puritans; and I mention them with respect here, because this opposition to unconstitutional tyranny is the only point in which I have any sympathy with them ; their tenets I hold to be untenable, and their methods of promoting them by calumny, detraction, and coarse ribaldry I think entirely detestable ; but I do think they were right in denouncing the Court of High Commis- sion and all its works. Even conservative churchmen like Hooker, in their defence of the ecclesiastical system, are hampered by the consciousness that much of what existed was indefensible. The bishops saw their position as bishops ignored, and the Puritans saw the power which they thought should be exercised by their own ministers exercised through a royal commission : the bishops however had the power and endured the ignominy, the Puritans suffered and waited for their turn to persecute. The lawyers were not all of one mind ; Coke the great lawyer was himself of two minds ; he liked the crown better than the episcopate, but he loved the common law better than the crown ; and his inconsistency produces some curious results on his teaching. This leads us to two or three facts. From 1587 to 1591 the famous Cawdrey's case drew its 374 cawdrey's case. [xiv. grievous length along. The High Commission had deprived Cawdrey for nonconformity; the question arose, had the Commission under the terms of the Act of the queen's first year exceeded its authority? The resolution finally adopted by all the judges, and recorded and approved by Coke, affirmed that the ecclesiastical prerogative of the crown was such that the powers of a commission issued by it were not limited by that statute, but covered the whole range of ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and therefore the sentence was good. The judgment in Cawdrey *s case, full of bad law and worse history, is often referred to even now by lawyers with a respect which it does not merit; here it is useful as showing to what lengths the common lawyers under Elizabeth would go in support of the authority of the crown over things ecclesiastical. It stimulated the Puritans in and out of the Church to bitterer action, and disabled the hands of the bishops who, like Andrewes, would rather have taken the responsibility of their own acts. Twenty years later Coke himself declared against the constitutional character of the Court of High Commission, and, by refusing to act upon it, paved the way for its downfall. But Coke was then in opposition to the king's advisers, and made it his account to be an independent judge. But I am anticipating. The change of Elizabeth for James I was a critical event in English Church history. James's dealings with the Church are not among the strongest, but are perhaps among the least reprehensible parts of his administration. He willingly confirmed the canons of 1604, which make a substantive addition to the canonical lore of the clergy. He failed to secure co-operation between the House of Commons and the Convocation, or between the bishops and the Puritan divines. But this is no wonder. A House of Commons which could listen to Sir Herbert Crofts declaring that the Church had declined ever since doctors began to wear boots ; or could XIV.] JAMES I AND THE PURITANS. 37 5 expel Mr. Sheppard, M.P. for Shaftesbury, for explaining that ' dies Sabbati ' meant not the Sabaoth as they called it, but Saturday, and suggesting that as David danced before the ark, the legality of dancing was a question on which the bishops might decide before it was altogether forbidden, — such a House of Commons was not likely to impress men like Hooker or Andrewes with respect, or King James either. It is clear I think that, if the Puritan party had been well represented at the Hampton Court Conference, James would have seen justice done to them ; but he saw their intolerance and their frivolity, and the balance remained unredressed. One of their minor complaints, against the issuing of eccle- siastical sentences by lay chancellors, touches directly on our subject : their idea was to give all the disciplinary power to the clergy, but to their own clergy: the prelates of the time chose to maintain the status quo which left the power where it was. On this point the civilians were peremptory. Some of the prelates, either wishful to promote their sons or willing to lodge Church discipline in clerical hands, appointed clergy- men to be chancellors. The doctors took umbrage at this, petitioned King Charles I in 1625, and obtained from him an order to remove the intruding officials and to substitute qualified civilians. Another interesting point arises at James's accession. In the hurry of his first parliament the Act of Mary which re- pealed the 1 Edw. VI. c. 2, by which the conge d'eslire and the independent jurisdiction of the bishops were abolished, was itself repealed ; and the lawyers, or some of them, held that the Edwardian law was revived, that the whole episcopate was intrusive, and the whole of the Church courts illegal. This was long in controversy, and it was only in 1637 that the judges finally resolved that the law of Edward, as contravening a law of Henry VIII which had been formally re-enacted, was not revived by the repeal of the 376 ARGUMENT ON PROHIBITIONS. [XIV. Marian statute. If that resolution had not been accepted, the whole existing fabric of the Church must, so far as secular interests were concerned, have fallen to the ground. But the opening of James I's reign is important for a third critical question. In 1605 Archbishop Bancroft presented from Convocation a series of articles against the proceedings of the common law judges in issuing prohibitions and claiming the exclusive right to interpret acts of parliament touching the Church. The long argument on this subject, which is to Coke's Second Institute what Cawdrey's case is to the Reports, is of considerably greater weight ; no doubt there was much to be said on both sides, and the voice of the Convocation of 1605 was in harmony with that of 1559 and 1446, where the claims of the theologians to inter- pret acts that touched theology were fairly stated ; but Coke embellishes the report with words that have an amusing cogency even in the present day; 'for judges expounding of statutes that concern the ecclesiastical government or proceedings, it belongeth unto the temporal judges, and we think they have been expounded as much to the clergy's advantage as either the letter or intention of laws would or could allow of: and when they have been expounded to their liking then they could approve of it, but if the exposition be not for their purpose then they will say as now they do that it appertaineth not unto us to determine of them.' Anyhow the judges agreed that they were the proper interpreters of the acts of parliament ; and as the whole liturgy, and indeed the Bible also, might be brought under those terms, there was practically no limit to their assumption of infallibility; for the common law judges could not, like theologians, afford to leave any question unsolved. Well, Coke was right as to the bishops, as was proved in 1 61 2, when the common lawyers allowed bishops King and Neill to burn two heretics under a common law writ, for XIV.] PERSECUTION. 377 which Coke's authority might be pleaded, although all the earlier legislation against heretical pravity had been ab- rogated. The invulnerability of the common law which had maintained the High Commission in Cawdrey's case, now treated the issue of the writ ' de heretico comburendo ' as a matter of its own, and brought equal shame on theology and jurisprudence. The heretics who were burned were men whom the Puritans did not care to defend ; they would have burned them as willingly as they would have done the bishops. And here let me say by the way, great as the horrors of religious persecution are, they cannot be properly estimated without some consideration of the value set upon human life both at the period in which they occur and at other times : I believe that I could show that all the executions for religious causes in England, by all sides and during all time, are not so many as were the sentences of death passed in one year of the reign of George III for one single sort of crime, the forging of bank-notes. But I must pass on, leaving the Laudian period altogether out of sight : and indeed it is not, for our purpose, so im- portant as the earlier portion : Laud and Charles were, neither of them, men who were satisfied with such things as the High Commission Court, and the sinking of ecclesiastical discipline in the state administration; but they did not make their way to any better system, and supported that which was to them for the time the only possible system. With the opening of the struggle in 1641 the Court of High Commission fell to the ground, and at the Restora- tion its abolition was confirmed by the first parliament of Charles II. During the Elizabethan and Jacobean period the study of church law had not been neglected ; for it had shared the benefit of the great historical and antiquarian revival of tfS LAW DEGREES. [XIV. which Parker was the first leader, to which Spelman belonged, and which reached its climax in Selden and Prynne. Both of these eminent writers studied canon law from antagonistic grounds : Selden regarded it as a philosopher ardent for liberty ; Prynne as an enthusiast, who had his own persecu- tion to avenge and the thesis of royal prerogative to defend with all the zeal and learning of a convert. Selden was a real jurist ; Prynne an indefatigable searcher of records. But, when at the Restoration the removal of the incubus of the High Commission, and the political education which the Caroline divines had gone through, enabled them to restore the old ecclesiastical jurisdiction with some hope of honest and successful issue, the canonists and civilians showed that life was still in them. The old black-letter Lyndwood was taken down from the shelf, rebound, and annotated. Dr. Sharrock in 1664 abridged the Provincial for the use of students, and in 1679 the Oxford edition, which rapidly displaced the black-letter, was published with all Lyndwood's commentaries and Ayton's work on the Con- stitutions. The study of the civil law needed no revival ; it had been kept up by the antiquaries and admiralty in the worst times ; and, in the Universities, the faculty fellowships secured at least a languid succession of law degrees. The D.C.L. of Oxford too had achieved the dignity which now belongs to the honorary degrees at Commemoration ; and in 1649, at what Antony Wood calls the Fairfaxian Creation, both Fairfax and Cromwell were made doctors of the civil law. According to Wood, in 1659 Nicolas Staughton, of Exeter College, was admitted doctor both of civil and canon law; and it is not impossible that there were other attempts to revive the canon law doctorate as an adjunct to the degree in civil law. Cambridge had always retained the shadow of the double degree, for the Leges or LL. to which she admits her doctors are a possible survival of the ' Utrumque Jus ' of XIV.] HIE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 379 the old University system; and in 1669, Richard Pearson, brother of Bishop Pearson the commentator on the Creed, claimed to be admitted in distinct terms to both faculties. The Archbishop of Canterbury also, under the Dispensation Act, has the unquestioned right to make a doctor of canon law, although I am not sure that it has ever been exercised. But at Oxford the designation of the degree had latterly come to be restricted to civil law; and when in 1 715, or thereabouts, Mr. Charles Browne of Balliol College applied to the Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Gardiner, for leave to proceed as bachelor and doctor of the canon law, he was told that he could not be prevented from doing so if he wished it, but that it would give the University a great deal of trouble ; and the poor man died before he achieved the object of his ambition. These notes are, however, of little importance, except as illustrating the revival of the ancient study, and the attention which the ecclesiastical questions of the day were calling to ancient practice. In point of fact, the whole of the second and last act of the Stewart dynasty was full of ecclesiastical questionings and excitements, which, though they did not directly touch our subject, stimulated the studies most closely connected with it. The struggle under James II, the position of the Nonjurors, the relation of Convocation to Parliament, the Whistonian and Bangorian controversies, all drew in lively partisans to the investigation of legal and ecclesiastical problems. The names of Hody, Kennet, Atterbury, Wake, and Gibson, all leading Oxford men, and men of deep research and minute if not accurate reading, are conspicuous in this regard; and, as for constitutional purposes it may be said that the very dust of their writings is gold, it would be ungrateful indeed to speak of their earnestness in the main object as misplaced. Gibson stands out more distinctly than any of the others as a great canonist, and his Codex or Collection of English Church Statutes is still the standard 380 RECENT CHANGES. [XIV. work and treasury of all sorts of such lore. There were too Johnson, Wilkins, and many other honest and subordinate workers on the theological as well as on the legal side. But the history of this department of law draws quickly to an end. The Hanoverian policy with regard to. the Church and Convocation fell on all politico-ecclesiastical life as a blight. The Nonjurors were left out of the pale of the recognised laity, the common lawyers edged the theologians out of the court of delegates, the Convocations were silenced, and the bishops, almost as much as in Elizabeth's time, made their position in the House of Lords the fulcrum of all the force they ventured to exercise. Except for testamentary causes, and rare occasions of matrimonial and slanderous causes, the Church jurisdiction ceased to exist, and so continued dormant until in our times, in 1849 an d hi 185°, the Gorham case roused the attention of both lawyers and clergymen to the fact that without knowing it they had let the centre of ecclesiastical gravity become seriously misplaced. Into this region of discussion, for many reasons, I must not attempt now to make my way. A few years after the Gorham controversy, a change or series of changes set in from another quarter : the matri- monial jurisdiction was remodelled when the facilities for divorce were increased, and the whole testamentary jurisdic- tion was withdrawn from the nominal superintendence of the archbishops. The Courts, the profits and privileges of which had so long maintained the close corporation of Doctors' Commons, and had caused the study of canon law in some at least of its branches to be languidly pursued, were radically and fundamentally changed ; and, although it was difficult at once to improvise new forms and rules of procedure to take the place of the ancient forms and those which had grown out of them, these forms also were doomed. In the still more recent remodelling of the whole judicial system further XIV.] CONCLUSIONS AND WARNINGS. 38 1 changes have forced themselves in ; and where the lawyers could find it their policy to acquiesce in the consolidation of the common law and chancery, they could without the slightest reluctance throw the ecclesiastical and admiralty law into the same cauldron. Out of that cauldron arises a new supreme judicature, which requires, every two or three years, to be amended and strengthened. It is supposed that thereby justice is quickened and law made so cheap, that any man, poor or rich, may ruin himself with a light heart. It yet remains to be seen whether this amended system, easier and less intricate than the old, supplies as good material for training or provides as sound schools of lawyers. It is no doubt philosophically more capable of perfection. The lore of Coke and Selden, like the lore of Eldon and Stowell, is for the present at a discount. Of course looking on all this with a historical eye, one is apt to be a little disconsolate ; but time will avenge them, and the neo-legal jurisprudence will soon have an array of reports and decisions that will outweigh, physically at least, the Year-books and Institutes. As for the ecclesiastical law, which by its very nature, if it loses continuity, loses identity, in the present changing aspect of the world's politics, I for my part do not intend to prophesy. No one can investigate the letter and working of the canon law without being struck by the marvellous mixture of lofty and eternal principles of right, with arbitrary and disingenuous evasions of obligation : it reads as if the jurists, finding that the Church could not be ruled by the true principles, were determined to rule by special pleadings and artful circumventions. For the future the theologians must look to the true principles, and let the canonists and civilians pass with their evasions and circumventions into the twilight of archaeology. Whether that will be so or not, or how soon, we may some of us live to see. XV. THE REIGN OP HENRY VII. (April 24, 1883.) MY kindest friends will hardly be able this year to charge me with having chosen the subject of my public statutory lectures with a view of attracting an audi- ence. I never, in the course of a long historical experience, met with any one who wished to attend a second course of lectures on Henry VII, or indeed with any one who ex- pressed any interest in him at all. It is just possible that I may be suspected of a design to attract the admirers of the lady Margaret, by advertising a discourse upon her son ; but, although the idea did occur to me, I set it aside as feeling it my duty to guard against any over-sanguine expectations. No ; I chose the subject because I have to lecture, and, after sixteen successive ceremonies of humiliation, I thought that I had a right to throw some part of the imputation of dulness off myself upon my subject. If the men will not come, let it be as much Henry VII's fault as mine. Yet, to begin with, it is a curious thing that the subject should be so dull ; and perhaps my first point should be to account for that. I do not question the fact. It is so ; but why ? The period is full of interest : it is the beginning of modern as distinguished from medieval history ; it exhibits to us, in their first definite and specialised forms, the forces which constitute the dramatic elements of the state of society in which we are living; the great powers in their newly consolidated condition, the balance of which makes up Euro- pean history ever since. It is the age of the discovery of the New World, the age of the birth of modern commerce and colonisation ; it is the eve of the Reformation, and of that THE NEW AGE. 383 wonderful renaissance which I believe exists at the present day, in prize essays and schools examinations, much more vividly, and alas in much greater solid bulk than it ever had in the most flourishing days in rerum natura. And it is a period too in which we begin to have, more distinctly and more numerously than before, representative men as they are called ; that is, men whose greatness and prominence consists not in their being exceptions to or protests against, or glories or shames to the age in which they lived, but in concentrating in themselves and giving force to the ideas, the accomplishments, the hopes and aspirations, the great- nesses and littlenesses of their own times. In the play of character also there should be something interesting in a period wh'ch embraces Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, the delightful old Frederick III, and the still more charm- ing Maximilian ; the age of Charles VIII and Philip the handsome, not to speak of the Borgias, the Medici, and the Farnesi. Yet the reign of Henry VII is dull. Look at it in relation to English history ; there also it should be important ; there also it comes between the ancient and the modern ; bridges over the strait between the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation, between England isolated and England taking a first place in the counsels of Europe, between England weak and England strong. The reign itself may be almost exactly divided between fifteenth century influences and sixteenth century influences ; the one series winding up in final bloodshed, the other opening with initial intrigue. We are really able to trace the last links of the chain of political murders which had begun when Warwick and Lancaster slew Piers Gaveston, and which ends or almost ends with the sacrifice of Edward of Warwick and the de la Poles; and we trace the first links of the policy which grew and strengthened in intensity to the days of Waterloo. 384 PARCHMENT OR PAPER. [XV. But still it is dull : we do not much care about the effete struggles of the dynastic parties, and we cannot get up a lively interest in the negotiations for the Scottish or Spanish marriage. It is our own fault perhaps that we want more sensationalism. But there is a lack of it notwithstanding. One reason I will shortly dismiss. I verily believe that one reason why this period is dull is that it was the period of the discovery and development of printing, and of the use of paper instead of parchment. Men began to write freely and to destroy freely ; instead of writing for private purposes of record, they wrote for other men to read ; they wrote not what was worth writing, but what would catch readers ; they wrote what it was safe to write when every one could read ; they wrote because they could write, not because there was a necessity for them to write ; that is, anybody wrote, and few wrote what was worth preserving. One popular book de- stroyed a thousand chances of having invaluable records of timid private annals. And, when destruction began, it found paper more easy to dispose of than parchment : the age that could make tailors' measures out of Magna Carta, lighted its fires with State papers. Growing criticism, careful public administration, even before the age of destruction began, had not learned to be careful as to what should be preserved and what should be destroyed. And when the age of de- struction did come, it was divided between the Roman Catholic force that destroyed everything new, and the Puritan force that destroyed everything old. So it is not so much a wonder that we have so little documentary remains of Henry VII's reign, as that we have anything at all. The only strictly contemporary account of the king's life and character is to be found in a few half-rotten, half-legible paper sheets in the Cottonian Library. All the more circumstantial parts of the history have to be worked out of the annalists of the next generation. XV.] THE MAGI OF THE RENAISSANCE. 385 But there must have been a deeper cause. Why should a king with a good character and a romantic career subside into a historical fogey ? Look closely at Frederick III, the splendid old gipsy, in name governor of the world, ever august, and increaser of the empire, yet owning no more territory than an English alderman ; sitting in his study elaborating a horoscope with destiny of universal dominion for his grandchildren unborn, inventing the motto of empire for an Austria that was yet in embryo : honourable, perhaps, and careless about selfish gains, but a dreamer, about whom the strange thing is that so many of his dreams came true. Look at Maximilian, the most delightfully unprincipled hero of the £ge of transition ; always in every feast and every fray, always wanting money and selling himself for promises, and never getting the money and never keeping his engage- ments ; a good deal of the rake and a good deal of the knight- errant; to himself a portentous politician, a reformer of Church and empire, yet willing to set Church and empire to sale, and himself to retire from the Csesarship, to accept the chair of S. Peter, and provide before his death for his own canonization ; yet with all that the founder of one of the great powers of modern history, grandfather of Charles V, and contriver of the scheme which placed half Christendom under his grandson's sceptre. I have often thought of Maximilian in contrast with Henry VII ; all the balance of real goodness, what measure there is of politic honesty, purity of life, reality of character, straightforwardness in religion, intelligent appreciation of his people's needs, every moral consideration is in favour of Henry Tudor : yet we like Maximilian better. With all his undeniable faults, his absurd dishonesty which did more harm to himself than to any one else, his grotesque pretensions, the astounding in- consistency between his undertakings and his fulfilments ; there is an attractiveness about him which there is not c c 386 THE LABOURS OF HERCULES. [XV. about Henry VII. We will not stay to compare him with Charles VIII or Ferdinand the Catholic ; I do not know that we can care much for either, but we do care very little for Henry VII. Yet, again, here is the uniter of the Roses, the founder of the Tudor dictatorship which steered England through the age of the Reformation, which projected and secured the union with Scotland, which started England in the race of commercial enterprise ; here is the hero of romance, in whom the prophetic eye of" the saintly Henry of Lancaster had seen the Joash of the British Zion ; the child of exile, hunted, like David, as a partridge on the mountains ; the knight-errant coming to rescue the distressed lady, as Perseus to Andro- meda ; the avenger of blood at Bosworth field ; the Hercules of the twelve labours ; who overcame the Nemean lion in Edward IV; the Erymanthian boar in Richard III ; the Arcadian stag in John of Lincoln ; the Cretan bull in James of Scotland ; the mares of Diomedes in Martin Swart ; whose hydra had been the civil wars ; who had put down the Stymphalian birds by the agency of the Star Chamber ; had thwarted in Margaret of York the host of the Amazons; and found the three heads of Geryon in Maximilian, the archduke Philip, and the dowager of Burgundy; who had beaten Cacus in Perkin Warbeck, and Cerberus in three still more insignificant enemies, and by overcoming Max's opposition to the French alliance had lulled the dragon and made his way into the garden of the Hesperides. It is not every Hercules who answers so precisely to the archetype. And then think of him as the eligible parti of Europe ; the young pretender of fifty looking out for a wife ; think- ing of the queen of Naples as very practicable, and at all events worth very minute inquiries as to teeth and stay- laces ; or perhaps Margaret of Austria, who could make him XV.] MATRIMONIAL SPECULATIONS. 387 arbiter of the Netherlands, and possibly of Spain ; or Johanna of Castile, if she could have been consoled for the death of the archduke; or that delightful duchess of Angouleme, Louise of Savoy, the mother of Francis I, and destroyer of the Constable of Bourbon ; or last, but not least, Ka- tharine of Aragon, his own daughter-in-law, if the pope, whose conscience was elastic enough to dispense a mar- riage with a brother's wife, could so far stretch a point of infallibility as to connive at such a politic enormity. Well, the lady Margaret, poor thing, had four husbands, and Henry VIII had six wives ; matrimony was clearly a feature in the germinating policy of the Magians of the renaissance. And then, did ever English king receive, like Henry VII, three caps and swords from three successive popes, — from Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, and Julius II ? And last, but not least, Francis Bacon for a biographer! And yet we want something more ! But it is time to be serious. If it is fair to estimate the importance of a reign by the contrast which may be drawn between the two that precede and follow it, the reign of Henry VII should be regarded as one of the most important, and in some respects the most important reign in English History. But to argue thus would really be a mistake ; really much of the importance that does attach to it is not its own, but arises from the general character of the age in which it fell, the critical, transitional age, which would have been very much what it was whatever sort of king was on the throne of England. If the points which English History has thus in common with general European History during this period be left out of consideration, both the interest and the real significance of the actual events of the history of England fall into the background. Such interesl as it has becomes a dreary and commonplace interest; its dramatic action, if it can be c c 2 388 LACK OF HISTORIC INTEREST. [XV. said to have any, is extremely slow; there is little that calls for sympathy in men or institutions, and the pages of the annalist are dry and jejune to an exceptional degree. And what interest it has in the nature of personal incident is apart from the life of the nation. With the single exception of that part of the incident which concerns the conspiracies and pretensions of the Yorkist faction, which again derives its interest from the tragedy of the preceding reign, the pages of the annalist, where there are any, are so dull that we scarcely complain of their jejuneness. We have no temptation to follow the humdrum movements of the court as we trace the military itinerary of Edward I or the judicial itinerary of Henry II ; and it is by an effort that we have to remind ourselves what great things, irrespective of political events, were going on in England during these years ; how it was the period of the great activity of Caxton and his early fol- lowers, the period of the foundation or development of colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, of the renewal of old studies, of the friendship of Erasmus and More ; of discovery of a new world, and of unexampled development of com- mercial enterprise. It is curious how little notice is taken of these things in the contemporary annals ; they lie, for the most part, outside of the limited area that we are wont to take for constitutional history. But we do not doubt that an im- mense part of the life of the next age was wrapped up in these things. Certainly the invention of printing, not less than the agglomeration of the new factors of the European balance, was a starting-point of a new stage of History; and the freedoms and jealousies of commerce and conquest in the New World were factors in the new drama second only in importance to the accumulations of power and territory in Europe. But they are both of them events of a class which finds for contemporaries too much work to allow of much XV.] A BUSY AGE. 389 talk or many contemplative jottings. Few very busy men keep minute or accurate diaries ; few very busy ages possess very picturesque or very circumstantial chronicles. The early printers and the early discoverers left material enough for the next generation to dispute about, but did little in record of their own exploits. Many navigators lived and died and perished from memory before Columbus, and even the con- tinent which he discovered is not called by his name. The inventor of printing is still unknown, and we cannot tell when, or very distinctly where, even Caxton set up the first English press ; they were too busy. And yet more might be expected in the way of history. Caxton himself was a compiler of history; the old monas- teries, like Crowland, still contained men capable of writing annals, and of combining annals into chronicles, and of drawing out of chronicles the lessons of History. There is no a priori reason why the English history of the age should be sought in Bernard Andreas of Toulouse, or in Polydore Vergil of Urbino, or from tte relations of foreign ambassa- dors. We conclude that the really important things, in which the critical change was, were things that did not come easily into historical contemporaneous exposition. Perhaps too it was hardly safe to write history when the printing-press might diffuse it to distances that would be dangerous ; kings and courts would read, and woe to those who wrote what would not please them ; or perhaps the revival of ancient literature engrossed the minds of those who, without such employment, might have continued the roll of ancient scholars. It was not history alone, but theology and science also, that languished under the sudden revival of classical learning ; men lost themselves in the history of early Rome who might have told us something worth knowing about their own England ; or satisfied themselves with simple attempts to write fine Latin, not troubling themselves much as to whether 390 England's needs. [xv. they had anything to say; or with pronouncing eulogistic orations fit for kings and chancellors to read. But you will be thinking that is just what I am doing now; it is too obvious that a public statutory lecture is not a labour of love. It is clear, then, not from the distinct enunciations of the time, but from the lessons of preceding and following reigns, what England wanted, and what it got in Henry VII. England did not want to become territorially one, as France, Spain, and Germany, did before the new drama of politics began. England had long been territorially one; but it required constitutional and governmental consistency. It required an equability of the execution of law, the abolition of local partisanships, the abeyance of political questionings and controversies, thorough concentration in the hands of strong kings and able ministers. Such a king Henry VII was ; such a king Henry VIII was during the better part of his reign, and to some extent Elizabeth was a successor of the same kind ; strong in will, strong in wealth, strong in definite personal aims, but even stronger in the way in which their absolute power could be manipulated. It wanted too such things as, first, the vindication of a dynastic title to the throne by the victory of the king over the Yorkist party, by the union of family titles in his marriage, by the securing of every possible lawful guarantee to the succession, so that there might be no more Wars of the Roses ; and consequent upon this, the enriching of the crown to such an extent as to make the King almost, if not entirely, independent of taxa- tion for purposes of ordinary expenditure : or, secondly, the humiliation of the baronage by exhaustion, impoverishment, and reduction of numbers, leaving scarcely a trace of the divisions of party between the adherents of the two Roses, extinguishing the hereditary politics of the great houses and almost extinguishing the constitutional powers of the House XV.] CONSTITUTIONAL EXHAUSTION. 39 1 of Lords. The concentration of power in the hands of a royal council of nominees was another result of the abject condition of the smaller and southern nobles. Even the greatest magnates were content to serve in the council as ministers and advisers, rather than to act up to their position constitutionally as members of a great estate in parliament. Or, thirdly, the humiliation of proper ecclesiastical inde- pendence, which resulted from the isolation of Church power in the face of the throne. The papacy, which might have lent strength to the clerical estate, was itself weak, and changing its front, becoming more of an Italian power and less of an ecumenical arbitrator and influence, just at the moment when in England the clergy alone remained united enough to withstand the royal will. The clerical estate did not at first feel what was happening to it ; for Henry VII had no quarrel with it, and possibly had no design of secularising the powers that should have been, first of all, moral and spiritual : he chose his ministers from churchmen, and made bishops of his ministers ; until the bishops forgot that they were anything but ministers ; sadly to the de- pression of religion, and sadly to the depression of learning, as the revival showed when it threw the learning of the country into the party of innovation, notwithstanding the influence of such men as Morton, More, Warham, Colet, and even Wolsey. The Church was sitting at the foot of a dynasty which ere long was to kick it over and to trample on it. And fourthly, there was the people, weary of dynastic parties and politics, and set on a new pursuit of money- making, loving peace and hating taxation, and willing to endure anything from kings who would so far humour them: not altogether content, but discontented in a way that showed that heart and treasure went together : for, true as some of the charges of financial chicanery against Henry VII are^ 392 DIVISION OF THE REIGN. [XV. they owe their real practical weight to the fact that the people who groaned under them were rapidly growing in acquisitive power and economic wisdom ; they knew they had something worth conserving. Thus England, with her once turbulent baronage depressed and silent, her Church kept subservient by the bestowal of political influence to the loss of religious power, her people in good-humour so long as they were not overtaxed, was, under kings with determinate views, rich and ambitious, collected enough and manageable enough to enter as an efficient actor into the international drama. If she wanted leaders, guides, dictators in the coming struggle, she found them in the race which Henry VII founded and impressed with a strong will, a strong policy, and a strong energetic activity that gave her unmistakeably her place in modern history. It would be very difficult, more difficult than in the case of a reign which has a plot, or a dramatic complexity or unity, to attempt a chronological account of the development of any principle or principles in this reign. I have said it is naturally divided into two great sections ; and those two are subdivided in their turn. I am afraid that, having spent all my generalisations in the preamble, I must in the remainder of this and the following lecture descend to the level of tabular computations, pedigrees, acts of parliament, and treaties. But we will hope for the best. As I am not aware that there is anything in the statute under which I am lecturing which makes it incum- bent on me to offer on these occasions a substantive original contribution to history, I shall not apologise for taking my hearers over well-known and well-trodden ground. The first point, of course, that occurs to us in a survey of the reign is the nature of Henry VII's title to the throne. On this no little controversy has been raised, and yet very trenchant opinions are given. We are not uncommonly XV.] QUESTION OF TITLE. 393 told that Henry VII had not in his own person a shadow of hereditary right ; that is a view not uncommonly taken in the schools; it is concise, and not bard to remember. But it is not exactly true. The whole question of the title of the house of Lancaster is a matter of dispute ; and the title of the house of York has always, curiously enough, been a point on which extreme legitimists and extreme advocates of popular right have agreed. Edward IV was heir-general of Edward III, therefore he pleases the legitimists ; he came to the throne by a revolution, therefore he satisfies their extreme opponents. From a legal point of view it is different ; Henry VI was the heir, in the male line of succes- sion, of Edward III, and also, by descent from Henry IV, was heir-male of a new purchaser under a new and par- liamentary title. Henry VII's title was of course very debateable. With relation to Edward III, he was not heir- general, for that place belonged to the daughters of Edward IV: nor was he heir in the male line of succession, because the line was broken in the person of his mother. With relation to John of Gaunt, accepting the legitimation of the Beauforts by king, pope, and parliament, he was heir- general ; whilst with reference to Henry IV, he can hardly be said to have been heir by collateral descent or heir at all. But a question arises, on what analogy does the royal suc- cession proceed. If on the analogy of a private estate, then Henry VII, as the nearest kinsman to Henry VI on the side of the purchaser Henry IV, had a claim to succeed : that claim was barred, it is said, by reason of the half-blood; and to that the answer is given that the doctrine of the half-blood does not affect the royal succession. If, on the other hand, we take for analogy the descent of peerages limited to heirs male, there can be no question that the Earl of Warwick was the right heir through the line of York, irrespective of the line of Clarence ; but Warwick's claim and that of all the 394 SETTLEMENT OF THE SUCCESSION. [XV. line of York was crossed by attainder : so also was the claim of Lancaster. Well, all this argument serves not to prove that Henry VII had a hereditary claim, but to explain what he meant when he said he had. And, although not very important, it is as well to try to understand it. In truth, the law of royal succession, except where it has been settled by parlia- ment, has never been very certain. Mary I and Elizabeth were akin by the half-blood only to Edward VI, yet they claimed hereditary right : disputable perhaps in itself, that position was strengthened by Henry VIII's will and acts of settlement. But Edward VI's will was set aside, and, although conflicting opinions did conflict, the crown de- scended in the natural and legal order to James I. There can, I think, be no doubt that Henry VII was legitimately Duke of Lancaster, if we suppose that such a title could pass through a female, notwithstanding the half-blood. It is quite possible to maintain that he was king of England by hereditary right. Anyhow, he said he was. In his first address to the collected parliament, Nov. 9, 1485, he declared that he had come to the crown by just title of inheritance, and by the true judgment of God in giving him the victory over his enemy: the parliament accepted the fact, and passed a statute, in avoiding all ambiguities and questionings, ordaining, establishing, and enacting that the inheritance of the crowns of England and France, and so on, be, rest and remain, in the person of our now sovereign lord and in the heirs of his body. You may think that this was enough, but the pope clenched the matter in a bull of March 27, i486, declaring that Henry was king not only by the right of war, and by the notorious and undoubted nearest title of succession, but also by the choice and vote of all the prelates, peers, magnates, nobles, and of the whole realm of England, and XV.] THE TWO MOTHERS. 395 by ordinance, decree, and statute of the three estates of the realm called the parliament, for this purpose publicly and generally held. Perhaps the good old man swore a little too hard; the accumulation of reasons may show that Innocent VIII had some misgiving. Trebly certain, however, as all this was, by a scale of verdicts rising from the king's own assertion, to the par- liament, to the pope, and to the judgment of the Almighty, the king would make assurance doubly sure by marrying the equally undoubted heiress of the rival line. He was espoused to Elizabeth of York on the 18th of January, i486. He had not waited for her to be crowned with him ; he himself had been crowned on the 30th of October : and he was in no great hurry to admit her to a share of his dignity. She was not crowned until the 25th of November, 1487, and a great deal had happened in the meantime. I am not sure that the marriage was a very happy one. A priori, there was no reason why it should, although 1 believe it is certain that husband and wife were faithful. But Elizabeth was a silly woman, and Henry was not a sympathetic man. It was said she would have married her uncle, and certainly her marriage with Henry was a marriage of convenience. Their family politics must have been very much opposed ; that is if we suppose them to have had any family affections at all, which is rather a strong effort to suppose in the case of kings and queens in the fifteenth century. But it is still more certain that they both had mothers alive, and there would be, according to all analogies, no love lost. Henry was an affectionate and obedient son to a pious and noble mother : Elizabeth had a mother who had not much sense or discretion, and was con- stantly in disgrace. The lady Margaret was strict and stately, and a woman of great experience, of many husbands and good advisers : the queen dowager may have learned, in the romantic seclusion to which her son-in-law consigned 396 ROOTS OF BITTERNESS. [XV. her, some lessons that would counteract the influences of the court in which she had reigned during her false, fair husband's lifetime, and she may have profited by the sweet uses of adversity; but she inherited the characteristic features of her mother Jacquetta, and her own early career was one of vanity and foolish ambition. Anyhow, the lady Margaret had the upper hand ; she kept her son straight and the court fairly pure, both during his wife's life and after her death, when the discipline was so close that poor Katharine of Aragon had to write home to her father that she could not get a mouthful of meat in Lent. The history of the first half of the reign is the story of the struggle with which this trebly attested title to the throne was maintained ; a bloody story, it is true, but, take it all in all, scarcely to be compared with what goes before and follows. The struggle is not altogether dynastic; it is not in all its details a contest of competitors ; and, in fact, each of the in- cidents in it has a shade of its own, common as the colouring seems at a distance. There were dynastic rivalries, there were personal intrigues and party blood-feuds that made use of the dynastic rivalries to secure their victory or revenge, and there were administrative difficulties emerging in discontents, which had little to do with either dynastic or hereditary struggles, but lent aid to both and borrowed pretext from both. It is hardly necessary for me perhaps to recall to your minds what roots of dynastic bitterness still subsisted : but for the sake of clearness I will enumerate them. There was the Dowager Margaret of Burgundy, ready to say or do or believe anything for the sake of revenge ; there was the son of Clarence, a prisoner in the king's hands ; there were the De la Poles, the five sons of John, Duke of Suffolk, by Elizabeth of York, the eldest of whom had been recognised by Richard III as his presumptive heir; and there was the XV.] DYNASTIC RISINGS. 397 doubt that hung over the death of Edward V and his brother Richard. It is curious to trace the intertwining of these really incompatible and inconsistent interests, and yet the only conclusion at which we can fairly arrive is the utterly desperate and unprincipled character of the Yorkist in- trigues. The first rising is perhaps the most desperate ; in April i486 the Viscount Lovel, and Humfrey and Thomas Stafford, rose in Worcestershire ; the king, as Bacon tells us, thought it a mere rag of Bosworth : although at one time it seemed to be becoming formidable, it collapsed before the king's offer of pardon. Lovel escaped to the Duchess Margaret, Humfrey Stafford was executed, and Thomas was pardoned. Whether the original motive of the rising was the despair of the attainted leaders, or an intrigue of the as yet unreconciled Yorkist remnant, it is, by the agency of Lord Lovel, linked on with the second rising, that of 1487, in the name of Lambert Simnel. The idea of dethroning the new king by setting up as claimant a person, who pretended to be another person, who was well known to be a prisoner in the king's hands, is not only desperate but unprincipled, and, if I can say it without offence, not only unprincipled and desperate, but Irish. Lambert Simnel, a boy of twelve years old, the son of an organ-maker at Oxford, educated by a clever priest named Symonds, a name still known here, was presented to the world as Edward Earl of Warwick ; was received in Ireland in February 1487, crowned at Dublin in May, brought to England in June, and taken prisoner at Stoke near Newark on the 1 6th of that month. In this most extravagant im- posture the Yorkist remnant was thoroughly implicated: the Duchess Margaret was represented by Martin Swart and his men ; the Earl of Lincoln, the cousin of Warwick, was slain fighting for Simnel ; the Lord Lovel, ' the dog' minister of Richard, disappeared on the field, and Henry's suspicions 398 PERKIN WARBECK. [XV were so strongly excited against his mother-in-law that he had to send her to a nunnery, and her son Lord Dorset to the Tower. The third rising, that in Yorkshire in 1489, was not directly connected with the dynastic quarrel, but was provoked by the taxation voted in the preceding parliament : Egremont, however, the leader of the rioters who killed the Earl of Northumberland at Thirsk, was a Yorkist partisan, and found a refuge in his exile with the intransigent Duchess of Burgundy. After this we get on for three years without overt trouble. The year 1492 is marked by another York- shire battle, that of Acworth, between the Earl of Surrey and certain rebels, whose occasion of rising is not known ; and it would therefore be of little use to argue whether or no it was connected with the imminent conspiracy for Perkin Warbeck, or a result of local discontent of which there may have been other cases not recorded at all. Next comes the grand episode or tragedy of Perkin, which covers seven years of disturbance, and connects the Yorkist intrigues with the social discontents in a way more striking than any of the previous outbursts. I will only just indicate the dates and points of contact. Perkin, whose prompters, wiser than Lambert Simnel's, identified him with a claimant who could be more easily counterfeited, is said to have been educated by the Duchess Margaret to appear as her nephew Richard of York ; as such he lands at Cork probably in 149 1, certainly by February 1492. According to Bacon, he himself was not at first quite sure who he was, a sort of doubt that has affected the minds of his adherents ever since ; but, if there was any hesitation on his part, it must have been assumed for the purpose of ascertaining under what title he would be most likely to make a good start. After having exhibited himself for some time in Ireland and France without much affecting the political feeling of England, he returned to Flanders in August 1493, and his supporters for a while XV.] PERKIN WARBECK. 399 had to content themselves with intrigue. So thoroughly, however, was the scheme worked, that in 1494 the Yorkist lords in England sent over Sir Robert Clifford to ascertain the truth of the story that was put in Perkins mouth ; and Clifford, after having familiarised himself with the conditions of the party at home, was brought over to the king's side, turned against his employers, and gave up their names to the government. Several of these were of the old Yorkist con- nexion, and were executed in the autumn of 1494; tne greatest victim, however, was Sir William Stanley the chamberlain, brother of the lady Margaret's husband the Earl of Derby, and one of the most able of the adherents who had placed Henry of Richmond on the throne. He had, from some idea apparently that his own services were ill requited, entangled himself in the plot, and, although he must have been undeceived as to the identity of the impostor, was not therefore spared ; he perished in February 1495. The increasing severity of the king's proceedings, and the success of his counter intrigues, thus warned the rest of the plotters that no time must be lost. In July of this year Perkin attempted a landing at Sandwich ; this failing, he went again to Ireland, and then to Scotland, where he obtained full recognition and a noble wife. Henry was now pursuing the course which Edward IV had adopted with regard to himself in his boyhood, and endeavouring to obtain by diplomatic agencies the expulsion of the claimant from the territories of the neighbour princes. Early in 1496 he concluded a treaty with Burgundy, which forbade the enter- tainment of Perkin there; and in 1497, on the approach of a peace with Scotland, he negotiated for his surrender. The king of Scots, who in November 1496 had made a raid into the north in his behalf, was still prepared to support him and refused to betray him ; but he thought it best to be rid of him : sent him to Ireland in July, and, after another 400 PERKIN WARBECK. [XV. invasion and defeat, concluded in September a truce for seven years, with which any overt support of the Pretender would have been incompatible. Before the truce was actually signed Perkin's career was over. In its last act the plot connects itself with the social discontent. In the January parliament a new subsidy had been voted, and this, when it came to be collected, provoked a rising in Cornwall. The men of Cornwall rose under the local hero Flammock, who, declaring the law on his side, and insisting on delivering a petition to the king, started them for London. Picking up as their leader a disaffected nobleman, Lord Audley, on the way, they pushed on to Blackheath, where they were defeated with great loss on the 22nd of June. The king's severity was somewhat arbitrary, but the effect was to quicken Perkin's movements and to point to the part of England where he was most likely to win support. He landed near Penzance in September, pushed to Taunton where he was put to flight, took sanctuary at Beaulieu, and on the 5th of October was surrendered to the king. Henry was inclined to spare him, possibly having some doubt as to his real identity; he was however imprisoned, and his escape in June 1498, his recapture, and further involvement in the plot which was made an excuse for implicating the Earl of Warwick, ended in the execution of the two in November 1499: a cruelty for which other motives and other influences, besides the sense of actual danger, are probably accountable. After the extinction of these two, the false and the true competitors, the king had only the De la Poles to doubt about. The eldest of these, Edmund, who after his brother's death at Stoke had been the head of the branch, and who after his father's death in 1491 had been allowed to surrender his estate of Duke and subside into Earl of Suffolk, quitted England with his brother Richard, in August 1501. What XV.] EDMUND DE LA POLE. 401 intelligence they may have had of the means by which Ferdinand the Catholic was likely to insure the succession of his son-in-law Arthur ; or whether Edmund, who had been fairly well treated by the king, but had taken offence at a humiliation which he had, so far as it was real, brought upon himself, acted on mere impulse and carried his bro'iher with him, we cannot decide ; — they fled together to their aunt Margaret and constituted the dynastic bugbear for the rest of the reign. It was not the first escapade. Edmund had been indicted for murder in 1498; he had been pardoned, but notwithstanding had run away to Flanders. He had, however, then returned, apologised, and been received into favour. Just before the celebration of the marriage of Arthur he made this second flight ; on the invitation of Maximilian, who was engaged in one of his unaccountable intrigues, he went from Flanders and joined him in Tyrol ; the emperor offering to put him at the head of a large force to secure his rights, but really playing him as a card in his diplomatic game with Henry and Ferdinand. In 1502 he was planning an invasion of England to start from Denmark, and was im- plicated in the attempt on Guisnes which brought Sir James Tyrrell to the block. The same year Henry, by promising Maximilian 10,000 marks for his war against the Turks, prevailed on him to expel the English malcontents, whilst Ferdinand and Isabella as well as Lewis XII joined in urging the proscription. Edmund fled then to the Count Palatine, and in 1504, venturing into Guelders, was taken prisoner by the duke. The same year he was attainted with fifty-two of his adherents. The next year the duke gave him up to the Archduke Philip, under whose care he made some very brave show of claims against Henry VII for the estates and dignities of his father. Unfortunately for him, when the archduke, in 1506, was forced by the weather to land in England, Henry made a point with him that Edmund should Dd 403 EXTINCTION OF THE YORKISTS. be surrendered. Philip, who like his father was quite equal to playing a game of the sort that Henry loved, was on this occasion at the mercy of his host. He promised to surrender the prisoner on the strict understanding that his life should be spared. He was surrendered and his life was spared, so long as Henry VII lived. He came to the Tower in March, 1506. In 1513 he was beheaded by Henry VIII. According to Lord Herbert, Henry VII had left it in charge to his son that, alihough he had sworn not to execute him, his successor should and would be wise to do it. Whether or no this is true, Henry VIII's cruelty was no doubt stimulated by finding Richard De la Pole, the younger brother, fighting in the army of France against him. Richard continued to be a thorn in the side of England — the White Rose of York as he was called — until in 1525 he was killed fighting for Francis I at Pavia. Margaret of Burgundy lived until 1503, but her power and wealth as well as her zeal had diminished, and after the failure of Perkin she had been almost innocuous. This finishes the dynastic complications of the reign of Henry VII. In the next lecture I shall devote myself chiefly to the con- stitutional points of importance in connexion with domestic and foreign history. XVI. THE REIGN OP HENRY VH. (April 25, 1883.) IN the first of these two public statutory lectures, I opened my subject with some vain remarks on the want of at- tractiveness which may be said to characterise the personal and political history of Henry VII : and then, having divided the reign into two portions, nearly coinciding with the change of century, I very briefly marked the series of dynastic quarrels, struggles, and disturbances, the interest of which belongs mainly to the first half of the reign. There remains to us some investigation of the constitutional and diplomatic history of a period which falls between two great constitutional periods, and lays the foundation of a great diplomatic, political, and commercial fabric ; or rather I should say opens a great diplomatic, political, and com- mercial period, which constitutes modern history in its general acceptation. With regard to the constitutional history proper, nearly the same line may be drawn as in the other case, for, as only one parliament was called between the year 1497 and the end of the reign, the greatest part of what little constitutional history there is belongs to the earlier half. It cannot how- ever be said that, with the exception of two or three very distinct pieces of legislation, and a very distinct purpose of raising and storing money, there is much constitutional material to deal with. There is a great poverty of record. The Rolls of the Parliaments tell us scarcely anything more than the dates of opening, the subject of the chancellor's i) d 2 404 MINISTERS OF HENRY VII. [XVI. address, the name of the Speaker, and the titles of the Acts passed, including the subsidies. There are no details of deliberation, or discussions on petitions. There are no Journals of either House ; there is nothing in the shape of writs or returns to indicate the composition of the House of Commons ; and little, if indeed anything, to show how the composition of the House of Lords was able to influence legislation or administration. Not that we are entirely in the dark as to these matters : we know from the character of the Acts passed, and from the nature of the political measures of the reign, what sort of influences must have been at work : but we have no documentary details, nothing of personal or sensational import. The ministerial changes of the reign are not in themselves important : the chancellorship, after having been held for a few months by Bishop Alcock, early in i486 devolves upon Archbishop Morton, who is the minister of the reign : he retains the great seal as long as he lives, and during the rest of the reign it is held only by Dene and Warham, succes- sively archbishops of Canterbury. The treasury in the same way sees few alterations ; whilst Alcock is chancellor, Sir Reginald Bray is treasurer ; under Morton, Lord Dynham ; and from 1500 to 1509 Thomas Howard, who, as Earl of Surrey and Duke of Norfolk, remains at the head of finance during his life and leaves the position to his son, who holds it until 1546. The tenure of these great offices by prelates and magnates of this sort, of course, implies that a great deal of the busi- ness of the country was conducted by means of subordinate officials; it also means that the king and his council took such direct part in it, that the nominal ministers had a some- what diminished responsibility ; and it probably means further, under Henry VII at least, that the king dealt directly with the subordinate officials without much concert XVI.] THE PEERAGE. 405 with his nominal ministers. This is especially the case as the reign proceeds ; during the first half Archbishop Morton, who was both a distinguished lawyer and, in popular opinion, a too active financier, really did ministerial work. After his death the king seems to have employed men like Empson and Dudley for measures which men like Archbishop Warham and the Earl of Surrey could certainly not have approved, but which they were helpless to prevent, and perhaps without courage to remonstrate about. There is not then much to be said about ministerial history. The next point to note is the composition of the House of Lords. We are open to some risk of exaggeration in relation to this, because of the slaughters and proscriptions connected with the Wars of the Roses. But, great as were the effects of those quarrels on the personality of the baronage, the effect was far greater on the political status and influence- of the peerage. It was attenuated in power and prestige rather than in numbers. Even the bloodshed and attainder fall within a narrow circle ; generation after generation perishes out of a few great houses; the majority continue in succes- sion and either escape ruin or soon recover. It is as well to be particular as to this, because it has a real bearing on the character of the Tudor despotism or dictatorship; and we are liable to be misled both by striking catastrophes and by untested generalisations. If we compare the last parlia- ment of Edward IV with the first of Henry VII, we find a great difference on the face of it: in 1483 there are forty-five lords summoned to parliament; in 1485 there are only twenty-nine. But for this diminution the recent change of dynasty is only very partially the cause : only six peers are attainted as yet, three of whom, the late King Richard, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Lord Ferrers, had fallen at Bosworth field ; and a fourth was Surrey, the son of the Duke of Norfolk. Of the other missing lords, some had 406 THE PEERAGE. [XVI. perished under Richard's own tyranny, some two or three were now represented by minors, and about half-a-dozen seem to have had their summons suspended during either the whole reign or a great part of it. Of these suspended peers, who all reappear either in the later parliaments or in the first parliament of Henry VIII, the chief are the Ogle, Dacre, and Scrope lords, who rule in the north country, and whose absence, which is not necessarily to be accounted for on political grounds, is a point that has not been satisfactorily investigated. In this way, however, not by proscription or execution, the list is diminished. In the later parliaments not only do many of these suspended peerages revive, the empty places being filled by the restoration of the heirs of Richard's victims, but even the attainders of 1485 are cancelled ; the Howards return to favour and power in 1489, Ferrers in 1487, Zouch in 1495 ; Lovel perishes, the viscount himself who fell at Stoke leaving only coheiresses. A proof of what I have been saying is seen also in the fact that during the whole reign only five new peerages were created ; one of these, the earldom of Bath, held by a foreigner, does not seem to have entitled its possessor to a summons ; another is an Irish earldom, Ormond ; the other three are Daubeny, Cheney, and Burgh. Yet notwithstand- ing this economy and the later attainders of the reign, the subsequent parliaments contain a lay peerage of forty mem- bers, which is not below the average of the century and was not increased materially until Henry VIII brought up the number of lay lords to that of the spiritual lords, before he finally reduced the latter to half their tale by getting rid of the abbots. This point, like that of the composition of the House of Commons, on which we have no information, would be more important if we knew anything of the parliamentary history. As we do not, and find that the king in that august assembly XVI.] THE PARLIAMENTS. 407 had things very much as he pleased, we conclude, as we have other reasons for concluding, either that the assembled estates were cowed into complaisance, or else that they were too busy about other matters to care for the excitement of a quarrelsome debate. There were seven parliaments during the reign of twenty- four years ; and of these seven, one had three sessions and another two; six of them fall before the close of 1497, and before the end of Archbishop Morton's life. I think that, if we had nothing else to judge by, we should infer from this, that so long as Morton was minister the king retained the Lancastrian idea of ruling mainly through parliaments; whilst, during the nine years that followed the archbishop's death, he reigned chiefly through councils and held but one parliament. Morton was indeed a thorough Lancastrian, though not of the type of Archbishop Arundel. He had been the mainstay of the party in evil times, and the leader of intrigue under Edward IV and Richard III ; but the old political game of Lancaster had long been played out, and, although Morton probably retained the attachment to forms which marked it to the last, he, either as a politician or as overborne by the king, was not in his financial administra- tion faithful to the constitutional principle. This matter touches, however, a point of character in which master and minister alike suffer. Henry VII is constantly accused of avarice, and Morton to the popular mind is best known as the inventor of the fork, Morton's fork, the dilemma by which he proved the necessity of the benevolences, to the great dissatisfaction of the payers : if you spend much you have plenty; if you spend little you must have saved ; out of your plenty, or out of your savings, you must pay. I do not know that I am concerned to defend Morton, who was certainly not an avaricious man himself, and who, if he incurs a part of his master's shame, incurs it as a too faithful 408 henry's ECONOMY. [XVI. servant; but it is worth while speculating on Henry's own character for avarice. He was a man who had a fair intelli- gence and a fair knowledge of history: he had been very poor himself, and he had learned that poverty and want of economic governance had ruined the great house to which Henry V had imparted so much glory. He knew, from the first, that he must save in order to get on at all ; and when he had begun to save, and when, by the forfeitures of the early years, he had managed to save to some purpose, not only did the love of money increase as the money itself accumulated, but he found it pleasant to rule without having to ask parliament for money; and finally found it pleasant, through Empson and Dudley, both to rule and to gather money without the trouble of parliament. However that may have been, the seven parliaments each had a subsidy or a budget ; and the financial history is capable of a brief summary. In the first parliament Henry succeeded in obtaining a revenue for life ; Bishop Alcock had made a moving speech on the text, ' Good luck have thou with thine honour, ride on ;' in which he adduced the fable of the belly and members, the properties of bees, Isidore on the virtues of royalty, S. Ambrose in the Hexaemeron, and Ovid on the Golden Age ; with the usual application. After the approval of the Speaker, the king addressed the Commons with a declaration of his title and promises of good government: and they responded with a liberal vote of tunnage, poundage, and the custom on leather for life; apportioning £14,000 to the household, £10,000 odd to Calais, and £2105 igs. nd. to the wardrobe ; there was likewise an act of resumption. In the session of 1487 Morton preached on 'Cease to do evil, learn to do well:' a wonderful sermon in four heads, subdivided each into three arguments, illustrated from Cicero and other gentile philosophers, the moral of which was the XVI.] TAXATION UNDER HENRY VII. 4O9 vote of two tenths and fifteenths, and a poll-tax upon aliens, payable at the next Easter. In 1489 the text was ' The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous;' the sermon a miracle of subdivision : the demand a lump sum of £100,000. To meet this, by a curious departure from the rule which is always supposed to have been long established, the Lords, by themselves, grant a tenth of their income from land ; the Commons, with the advice and consent of the Lords, offer to raise £75,000 by a tenth on lands not belonging to the lords, and twenty-pence on every ten marks of goods. This must have been seen to be a dangerous experiment. An attempt to collect the tax caused the outbreak at Thirsk, in which the Earl of Northumberland was slain ; the sums col- lected from the Commons only reached the amount of £27,000, and in the third session early in 1490 the grant of a tenth and fifteenth was substituted for the balance. The object of the budget was the maintenance of the army, which was being raised for the defence of Brittany against France, a design which culminates and terminates in the expedition to Boulogne in October, 1492. Before this expedition took place another parliament in the autumn of 1491 and January of 1492 was asked for a vote. Morton chose his text from Jeremiah, and his illustrations from Sallust on the war with Jugurtha; the bill was two entire tenths and fifteenths, and a third if the king himself should go to the war. He did go to the war and made peace. And this carried him on to 1495. I should say here that the parliamentary grants were each year supplemented by ecclesiastical grants made in the Con- vocations of the two provinces, and generally consisting of one entire tenth from each ; the tenth of the Southern pro- vince was about £10,000 and that of York about £3,000, I think. In 1489, when the estates, as we have just seen, proposed separate grants, the share of the Canterbury clergy 41 PARLIAMENTS AND TAXES. [XVI. was fixed at £25,000, about the same sum as that offered by the House of Lords; but it finally took the form of two entire tenths. Well, the grants of 1491, which extended over a year, proved insufficient for the king's needs, and he had recourse to the exaction of a benevolence; indeed the commissions for the benevolence were issued before the parliament sat, and are supposed to have been authorised by a Great Council which sat in the June previous. This must have been a very liberal contribution, if the subscriptions of the country bore any proportion to the sum raised in London, which was £9682 17J. 4 4 J 7- Bacon, Roger, 356, 360. Bagdad, khalifate of, 216. Bagratidae, the, 182. Baker, Thomas, 7. Balance of power, 258, 382. Baldwin, archbishop, 138, 15 1, 165, 168. Baldwin of Boulogne, 183. Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem, 136. Balliol, John, 251. Bancroft, archbishop, 376. Bangorian controversy, 379. Bartholomew, bishop, 154, 168. Basel, Council of, 354. Bath, earldom of, 406. Bavaria, the House of, 246. Beaufort, cardinal, 173, 213. Beckct, archbishop, 90, 135, 138, 140, 143-145, 147. l b°> 154, 159, 164, 165, 169, 175, 177, 210, 345, 348. Bede, 9, 172, 340. Beeke, Dr. H., 438. Benedict of Peterborough, 138, 143, 170- Benedict of S. Maur, 177. Benefit of clergy limited, 365, 414. ' Benevolences,' 411. Berengaria, queen, 185. Bernard, S., 152, 159. Bernard Andreas of Toulouse, 389. Berytus, 196, 174 st/., 200 sij. Bigelow, Mr. M., 435. Bishoprics, new, under Henry VIII, 30?, 330- Blackfriars, parliament at, 30S. Blackstone, sir W., 414, 417. Blount, Bessie, 282, 292. Boase, C. W., 429. Boccaccio, 218, 224. Bohemond III, 184. Bohemond IV, 203, 205. Bohemond V, 199. Bohemond VI, 205. Boleyn, Anne, 282, 292, 295, 299, 309, 3i8, 3 2 o, 325 sqq. Bologna, University of, 158, 160, .163, 344, 347, 367- Boniface of Savoy, archbishop, 35°, 353- Boniface, S., 340. Boniface VIII, pope, 214, 217, 247, 353- Bosworth Field, battle of, 386, 397, 4°5, 4!3- Boucicault, marshal, 228. Boulogne, expedition to (1492), 409, 414, 418. Bourges, Pragmatic Sanction ot, 354- Boutaric, E., 74. Bracton, 349, 350. Brady, Dr., 76. Bray, sir Reginald, 440. Breakspere, Nicolas, 143, 151. Brewer, J. S., 64, 432. Brittany and Henry VII, 409, 417. Britton, 350. Brown, Master Thomas, 138, 153 sqq., 169. Browne, C, applies for leave to proceed as Bachelor and Doctor of the Canon Law at Oxford (1715), 379. Brunner, Dr., 71, 434. Brunswick, House of, in relation to literature, 4. Bryce, prof, 11, 43. Budinger, Dr., 434. Burchard of Worms, 341. Burgundy, treaty of Henry VII with, 399, 418. Burrows, prof. M., 11, 34, 58, 429. Burton, Robert, 176. Csesarea, 203. Calais, garrison of (1504^, 416. Cambridge, Bp. More's MSS. pre- sented to, 4. begins the study of Modern History, 6. Civil and Canon Law at, 65 sq. degree of LL.D. at, 366, 378. INDEX. 445 Camden, W., 6. Campegio, cardinal, 292. Camville, Richard, 174. Canons of 1604, 386. Canterbury Letters, the, 147 sq. Canterbury under Henry II, 167. Capgrave, 220. Caraman, the grand, 232. Cardon, Signor, 434. Carlyle's Frederick the Great, etc., 68, 93, 105, 133, 432. Catharine Howard, 330. Catholicate, the Armenian, 182. Cawdrey's case, 373, 376 sq., 329- Caxt on, William, 388, 389. Celestine III, pope, 191. Chancellors, lay and clerical, 375. Chancery, Court of, 368 sq. Chaplains, domestic, of noblemen, 164 sq. Chapuys' dispatches, 312, 320, 3 2 7- Charles I, king of England, 126, 375. 377- Charles II, 377. Charles IV, emperor, 222, 241. Charles V, 261, 269, 333, 342, 385. 4"-. Charles VI, king of France, 226, 228. Charles VII, 259. Charles VIII, 282, 383, 386, 418 sq. Charles of Anjou, 205 sqq., 214, 334- Charlotte of Bourbon, queen, 229. Charlotte of Lusignan, queen of Cyprus, 233; marries Lewis, Count of Geneva, ib. Chester, colonel J, L., 79. Chichester under Henry II, 167. Chronique cTOutremer, 177, 188, sqq. Civil and Canon Law, 345 sqq., 366 sqq. Clement V, pope, 354. Clement VI, 226. Clement VII, 318. Clementines, the, 354. Clifford, sir Robert, 399. Cobden on Thucydides, alluded to, 98, 122. Coke, sir E., 312, 346, 351, 373, 376, 377> 381- Colet, John, 391. Columbanus, 340. Columbus, 389. Committees of the House of Com- mons, 372. Comneni, the, 253. Compostella, 146. Confirmation of Charters, 206. Conge d'eslire, 375. Constantine, legislation of, 338. Constantine Monomachus, 1S2. Constantius, king of Armenia, 217, 226. Constitution, the English, medieval growth of the, 255. Constitutions of Clarendon, 348. Convocation under Henry VII, 409 sq. ; under Henry VIII, 318 sqq., 366; silenced under the House of Hanover, 380. Cornaro, Caterina, 233 sq. Cosack, Dr., 43. Coulanges, Fustel de, 74. Court of High Commission, 371 W; 11*1 sq- Court of Requests, 371. Coxe, archdeacon, 69. Cramer, Dr., 8. Cranmer, archbishop, 281, 282, 286, 295, 299, 325 sq., 369. Creighton, prof. M., 433. Crimean War, the, 6f>, 120, 273. Crofts, sir Herbert, 374. Cromwell, Oliver, 126, 378. Cromwell, Thomas, 281, 282, 285, 286, 294 sqq. ; 311, 314^?. ; 319, 324 sq. ; 329 sq., 333, 3O6. Crowland Abbey, 170, 389. Crusades, their character and results, 180, 253 sqq., 259 ; turn of the tide which had led them on, 204 ; their last days, 207 sqq. Cyprus, the Latin kingdom of, 184 sqq. ; Church of, 187, 191 ; conquered by the Turks (,1570), 234- 44^ INDEX. Damietta, 219. 'Dark Ages,' the, 92. David, Master (canon of S. Paul's), 160. Decretals, the, 352, 357 ; forged, 266, 341. Decretum, the, 344, 34 6 > 35°- 352. Degrees in Canon Law, abolished by T. Cromwell, 366 ; cf. 370. ' De heretico comburendo,' the writ, 377. De la Poles, the, 383, 396, 400 sqq. Dene, archbishop, 404. Derby, earl of, 399. Despensers, the, 412. Dialogus de Scaccario, 153, 173, 175- Dicey, prof. A. V., 43. Dionysius Exiguus, 339, 340": Dissolution of Monasteries, 297- 298, 309. 3 2 8 sq. Doctors' Commons, 372> 380. Doctors of Civil Law, legislation of 1545 with regard to, 367, 37 2 > 3/8. ' Domesday, the New, 52. Dorset, lord, 398. Dover and its Chronicle, 166. Draco Normannicus, 77, 169, 174. Drake's Eboracum, 72. Dugdale, sir W., 9. Dummler, prof., 70. Duns Scotus, 242. Dunstan, 91, 341, 344. Durham under Henry II, 171 sq. Dynham, lord, 404. Earle, prof. J., 91. Eccard, J. G., 4. Edward I, king of England, 58, 136, 173. 188, 205 sq., 210, 212-216, 219, 240, 242, 293, 320, 388, 417. Edward II, 214, 216, 251, 363. Edward III, 173, 218, 222, 229, 362, 393,4*7- Edward IV, 386, 393, 399, 405. Edward V, 397. Edward VI, 268, 309, 368 sqq., 394- Egbert of York, 340. Egremont heads a riot at Thirsk, 398. Eleanor, queen of Castile, 141. Eleanor of Aragon, queen of Peter I of Cyprus, 225. Eleanor, queen of Henry II, 139, 204. Elizabeth, queen of Edward IV, 235, 34 6 , 34 8 - Elizabeth, queen of England, 234, 307, 390, 394 ; her ecclesiasti- cal policy, 268, 370 sqq., 380, 394- Elizabeth of York, 395, 417. Elton, C. I., 434. Ely, chronicle of, 1 70. Empire, the, in the Middle Ages, 245- Empson and Dudley, 285, 405, 408, 412,423. Encomium Emmae, 77* Episcopate, the, under Edward VI, 368 sqq., 375 sq. Erasmus, 298, 388, 421. Etaples, peace of, 418 sq. Executions for religious causes in England, 377. Exeter under Henry II, 168. Extravagants, the, 350 sqq. Eystein, archbishop, 143 sq. Faculties of the Canon and Civil Laws at the Universities, 356. Fairfax, sir T., 378. Famagosta, 185, 188, 191 sqq., 193, 215, 221, 224, 225, 228, 229, 231, 233. Fantosme, Jordan, 177. Fell, bishop, 6. Female education, a suggestion for, circa 1303, 213. Ferdinand and Isabella, 383, 3S6, 401, 420, 421. Ferrers, lord, 405. Feudal polity in Cyprus, 187 sqq. Fisher, bishop, 296, 316, 326. Fitz-Neal, Richard, 38. INDEX. 447 Fitz-Stephen, William, 169, 175. Flammock heads a rising in Corn- wall, 400. Fleta, 350. Flodden, battle of, 280. Foliot, Gilbert, 137, 147, 160, 168. Foliot, Robert, 165, 169. Fortescue, sir John, 205. Fountains Abbey, 143. Fox, bishop Richard, 285. France, historical activity in, 73. Francis, duke of Brittany, 418. Francis I, king of France, 261, 325, 333. 4° 2 - Frederick I, Barbarossa, 143. Frederick II, emperor, 188, 190, 198, 199 sqq., 241. Frederick III, 243, 383, 385. Frederick the Great, 265. Freeman, prof. E. A., 64, 66, 128, 135, 153,433, 439- French Revolution, the, 272. Froissart, 221. Froude, J. A., 64, 135, 333- Fulk the Good, quoted, 136. Fulman, W., 6. Fyffe, C. A., 433. Gairdner, J., 433. Gaisford, dean, 9. Gale, T., 6. Game Law, an early, 415. Gardiner, bishop Stephen, 281 sq., 286, 300, 325. Gardiner, Samuel R., 64, 433. Gamier of Pont S. Maxence, 177. Gaveston, Piers, 383. Genealogical study, its importance, 56. Genoa and Venice, their rupture and its effects, 203, 207 sq., 213, 220, 225, 230 sq. decline of, 228. Geoffrey of Brittany, 141. George I, king of England, his reign and character, 2 sqq. George II, 5. George III, 5, 377. George IV, 5, 281. George V, king of Hanover, 5. Gerard la Pucelle, 165. Germany, medieval, 245, 252. Gervase of Canterbury, 167. of Chichester, 167. of Tilbury, 140, 166, 169, 173. Gesta Regis Hcnrici, 169. ,, „ Jiicardi, 177. „ „ Stephani, 174. Gibson, bishop, 6, 379. Gilbert of la Porree, 159. Giraldus Cambrensis, 77, 138, 160, 162, 165, 169, 175. Giustiniani, 289. Glanville, Gilbert, 165, 167. Glanville, Ranulf, 166, 169, 173, 348 sqq. Gneist, Dr., 434. Godfrey of Bouillon, 192, 254. Golden Bull, the, 241. Gorham case, the, 3S0. Gratian, 344, 345, 346, 352. Great S. Bernard, a glimpse of the, 147. Green, J. R., 64, 66, 430 sq. Gregory IX, pope, 352, 353. Gregory XI, 226. Grey of Codnor, John lord, 223. Grim, Edward, 167. Grimm's collection of Wcisthiimer, 72. Grosscteste, bishop, 136, 351. Guest, Dr. E., 432. Gustavus Adolphus, 264. Guy of Lusignan, 186, 191, 195, 199, 204. Guy of Lusignan, king of Armenia, 226. Ilallam as a historian, 125. on the Statute for Proclamation of Fines, 414. Hampton Court Conference, 375. I Ianse Towns, German Scholars and history of the, 72. Hapsburg, the 1 louse of, 261 sqq. Hardy, sir T. Duffus, 432. Hare, sir Nicolas (Speaker), 312 sq., 33 •• Ilayton I, king of Armenia, 215 sqq. Ilayton II, 217. 44« INDEX. Hayton, the Monk, author of Flower of the Histories of the East, 216. Hearne, Thomas, 7, 9. Heeren and Uckert, 69. Helena, queen of John III of Cyprus, 232 sq. Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I, 124. Henry I, king of Cyprus, 199- 203. Henry II, 207-209, 214 sq. Henry I, king of England, 136, 173,412. Henry II, his descent, character, literary culture, &c., 136 sqq. ; diplomatic activity, 143, 146, 24°, 347> 388. Henry III, 204, 213, 240, 250, 353, 563. Henry IV, 228, 393, 419. Henry V, 213, 408. Henry VI, 173, 386, 393. Henry VII, 260, 285, 28S, 290, 3°4. 309. 383-4 2 4- the Hercules of the twelve labours, 386. his courtships, 386 sq. his title to the throne, 392 sqq. his marriage, 395. dynastic complications, 396- 402. constitutional history, 402-417. scanty materials for history of, 4°3- . his ministers, 404. House of Lords in his reign, 405. new creations, 406. his avarice, 407. his parliaments, 408 sqq. his savings, 411. legislation of his reign, 412 sqq. his foreign policy, 417-421. his character, 371, 422-424. Henry VIII, 235, 260, 261, 277. 334- 39°. 4 02 » 4 o6 > 4 22 - military events of his reign, 279. his character, 280 sqq. his person and abilities, 283 sq. his ministers and council, 285- 287. his finance, 287-291. the divorce, 291-293. supreme head, 293, 365, 371. ecclesiastical measures, 294- 298. defender of the faith, 298 sq. ecclesiastical policy, 398-301. taxation, 301 sq. legislation, &c, 302-304. political executions. 304. practically abolishes Canon Law, 365 sq. his parliaments and their con- stitution, convocation, &c, 308 sqq. his dealing with the two Houses, 3!3-3 T 5- the ' Long Parliament ' of 1529- 1536, 3 T 5-328. later Parliaments, 328 sqq. general view, 332-334, 390. Henry II, king of France, 262. Henry IV, 263, 333. Henry VI, emperor, 183, iSS, 196, 199. Henry de Jacea, 160. Henry of Beaumont, 149. Henry of Blois, bishop of Win- chester, 165, 167, 345 sq. Henry of Huntingdon, 1 74. Henry of Lancaster, 212, 220. Henry Plantagenet, son of Henry II, 140. Henry the Lion, 4, 144 sq. Herbert, archbishop of Compsa, 153. Herbert of Bosham, 164, 167. Herbert of Cherbury, lord, 333, 402. Hildebrand, pope, 344. Historic Monuments, preservation of, 56. Historical MSS. Commission, 56, Historical Review, a, suggested, 61. History, ancient and modern, com- pared, 1 5 sqq. Hodgkin, Thomas, 433. INDEX. 449 Hody, H., 379. Hohenstaufen, the, 144, 20S, 245, 252. Holcot, R., 360. Holland, prof. T. E., 40, 75. Honorius III, pope, 191. Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, 64. Hooker, Richard, 373, 375. Hospitallers, the, 195 si/., 203, 207 sqq., 223. Hoveden, Roger of, 169. Hubner, Dr., 70. Hugeson (legate), 172. Hugh, S., of Lincoln, 138, 166, 170. Hugh I, king of Cyprus, 192, 197. Hugh II, 203. Hugh III (the Great), 190, 202, 203 sqq. Hugh IV, 215, 218, 220. Hugh de Puiset, 156, 171. Hugh of Lusignan, 220. Hugh of Nonant, 165. Hussey, prof. R., 9. Ilussey, sir J., 314. Ibelin, the House of, and its members, 190, 192, 195, 197- 201, 205, 230. Ingulfs History of Croivland Abbey, a forgery and its results, 52. Innocent III, pope, 157, 247. Innocent IV, 201. Innocent VIII, 387, 395. Intercursus magnzis, 420. ,, mains, 420. Investitures, the struggle of the, 252. Ireland, poem on the conquest of, 177. Trnerius, 344. Isaac Comnenus, 184, 187, 195. Isabella of Anjou, 197, 199. Italy, opportunities for historical research in, 75 sqq. Ivo, bishop of Chartres, 341, 344. Jaffe, Ph., 70. James I, king of Cyprus, 227 sq. James II, 233. James III, 233. James I, king of England, 374— 377- 394- James II, 379. James I, king of Scotland, 419. James III, 419. James IV, 386, 399, 411, 419. Jaines V, 280, 356. Jayne, F. J., 428. Jerusalem, kingdom of, 188, 202, 205, 234. Jocelin, bishop of Salisbury, 165. Johanna, queen of Castile, 387. Johanna, queen of Sicily, 141, 145, 185, 226. John, king of Castile, 226. John I, king of Cyprus, 207. John II (Janus), 228 sq., 232. John III, 232. John, king of England, 139, 141, 250. John, king of France, 222 sq. John XXII, pope, 218, 248, 353, 357- John of Ayton, 353 sq., 378. John of Gaunt, 220, 393. John of Hexham, 152, 171. John of Lusignan, 226. John of Oxford, 145, 168. John of Poictiers, 149 sq. John of Portugal, 233. John of Salisbury, 77, 138, 147— 152, 157 sq., 165, 166-168, 174. J 7 6 . 34 6 * 3 6 o- John the Faster, 339. Johnson, John, 380. Jordan of Chichester, 167. Joseph (of Exeter), author of the Antiocheis, 77, 168, 173. Journals of the Lords and Com- mons, 31 1. Julius II, pope, 387. Justinian, 339, 345, 346, 349, 351, 35 6 j o7 I - Maximilian, emperor, 241, 261, 3 OI > 337. 3 8 3» 385 S( l; 4 11 . 41S-421. Mazzeriis, Philip de, 221, 224. Melrose Abbey, 171. Merlin, Prophecies of, 77. Migne's Patrologia, 73. Molesworth's History of the Period of Parliamentary Reform, 66. Monasteries, historical activity in, under Henry II, 170 sqq. Montfort, Simon de, 90, 136, 250. JMonumenta Germanics Historica, 5,32. More, sir T., 281 sqq., 291, 294, 296, 3 I 2-3i6, 317, 3 2 5, 3 88 > 391, 414, 416, 421. Morton, archbishop, 364, 391, 404,407 ; his 'fork,' 407-411, 414, 421. Mosheim, J. L. von, 4. Mountjoy, lord, 331. Moyle, sir T. (Speaker), 289, 312, 33 !• Mullinger (J. B.). his University of Cambridge, 356. Municipal and local history neg- lected in England, 72. Muratori, 4. Naples, the queen of, and Henry VII, 386, 421. Napoleon I, 272. Nares, Dr., 7, 437. Nationality, the idea of, 270 sqq. Neill, bishop, 376. Neopln tus de C 'alamitatibus Cypri, IS | 186. Netherlands, revolt of the, 262, 270. Nicea, council of, 33S. Nicephorus Phocas, 184. Nicholson, bishop, 6. Nicopolis, battle of, .'.', 1 Nicosia, 185-188, 191, 192, 197, 200, 201, 212, 215, 220, 228, 229, 232. Church of S. Nicolas, 212. Nigel of Canterbury, 166, 167. Nonjurors, the, 380. Norfolk, dukes of {temp. Henry VII and VIII;, 282, 285, 286, 299, 317, 320, 322, 329, 404, 405. Norman Conquest, the, 90, 248, 249. its effects on ecclesiastical system of England, HZ sqq. Norman-French of Westminster, 355- Normans and English, amalga- mation of, 149. North-country lords, Ogle, Dacre, and Scrope, do not appear in the earlier parliaments of Henry VII, 406. Northumberland, John Dudley duke of, 368. earl of, killed at Thirsk, 398, 409. Norway and Sweden, kings of, send embassies to Henry II, 143- Nowell, T., 437. Ockham, 360. Odo, prior of Canterbury, 167. Oissim, king of Armenia, 217. Order of the knights of S. Thomas of Acre, 209-212, 236. Ormond, earl of, 406. Otho, constitutions of, 353. Othobon, constitutions of, 353. Owen, S., 49, 429, 434. Oxford, civil and canon law at, 35"- drops the canon law degree, 366. study of history at, from the Re- formation to George I, dsq. under Henry II, 62. ungracious reception of George the First's benefaction at, 6. Oxford Historical Socictv. the, 43o. 45» INDEX. Painted chamber, 30. Paleologi, 232. Palmer, archbishop Richard, 1 54. Palmer, archdeacon E., 429. Pandects, the, 344, 350. Papacy, the, of the Middle Ages, 246 sqq. Paper, effects of the use of, instead of parchment, 384. Paris, archdeacon of Rochester, 153, 167. Paris, University of, 158, 159, 172. Parker, archbishop, 6, 373, 378. Parliaments of Henry VIII, anec- dotes of, 331. Paston Letters, Mr. Gairdner's edition of, 63, 421. Pasture land and tillage, 414. Patrick, S., 341. Pauli, Reinhold, 70, 77, 432. Pavia, 347. Pearson, prof. C. H., 133. Pearson, R., claims to be admitted Doctor of Civil and Canon Law at Cambridge (1669), 379- Peckham, archbishop, 350, 353. Penitentials, the, 339, 342. Percy, Henry lord, 220. Percy, sir Henry (Hotspur), 228. Pertz, Dr., 32, 77, 166. Peter I, king of Cyprus, 194, 221-225, 230. Peter II, 225, 227. Peter de Helie, 159. Peter des Roches, bishop of Win- chester, 210. Peter of Blois, 137, 138, 14°. H^, 148, 157, 164, 165, 168-170, 173, 175- Peterborough under Henry II, 170. Petrarch, 224, 234. Pheasants, date of their introduc- tion, 415. Philip II, king of Spain, 263. Philip IV, king of the French (the Fair), 208, 251, 3S3. Philip VI, 251. Philip, archduke, 3X6, 401, 421. Philip Augustus, 250 sq. Philip of Antioch,king of Armenia, 215. Philip the Chancellor, 224. Philippa, Queen of Edward III, 222. Philosophy, scholastic, its aim, 242. Picot, G., 74. Pilgrimage of Grace, the, 290, 328. Pisa and England, 230. Plague in Cyprus, 219, 229. Plantagenet kings, long-suffering of, 244. Plumpton Letters, the, 421. Pocock's Burnet and Records of the Reformation, 64. Poland, partition of, 24, 271 sq. Powell, F. York, 434. Pr?emunientes clause, the, 329. Praemunire, statute of, 288, 291- 293. 3i6, 318-319, 324, 327, 354, 363 sq- Prerogative Court, 372. Printing, effects of the invention of, 384, 388 sq. Prizes, historical, at Oxford, 41- 44. Proclamation Act, 329, 331. Provisions of Oxford, 204. Proxies in the House of Lords, 310 sq. Prynne, W., 9, 346, 351, 387. Puritans, the, and the Court of High Commission, 373 sqq. Ralph de Diceto, 140, 144, 150, 159, 161, 168, 176, 209. Ralph de Serris, 150, 165. Ramsey, chronicle of, 170. Ranke, Leopold von, his place in historical literature, &c, 64, 65, 7°- Raymund of Pennafort, 352. Recognition of Henry VIII, as supreme head, 31S-320. Record Commission, the, 14. Reformatio Legum, the, 370. Reformation, the, 262, 265-269, 291-301, 318 sqq., 365 sqq, Reginald of Chatillon, 1X4. INDEX. 453 Reginald the Lombard, 165, 168. Remittal of Loans Bill (1529), 315- Renaissance, the, 383. Rene of Anjou, 205. Research, endowment of, ifisq. S. Augustine on the advocates of, 131. Revue Historique, the, 74. Rhodes, knight of, 218^., 221, 225,229, 232, 235. Rich, sir Richard (Speaker), 312 sq. Richard, canon of S. Paul's, 168. Richard I, king of England, 139 sqq., 154, 184-189, 195. his Latin biographer, 77, 175. Richard II, 226, 227, 251, 417. Richard III, 173, 386, 396, 405, 4°7. 4 I 3- Richard l'Eveque, 158. Richard of Bury, 360. Richard of Cornwall, 202, 212. Richard of Devizes, 168. Richard of Hexham, 171. Richard of Ilchester, 145, 147, 167. Richmond, Henry Fitz-Roy, duke of, 292. Right or rights, the idea of, in the Middle Ages, 240. Robert of Gloucester, uncle of Henry II, 137. Robert of Melun, 158, 159. Robert of Salesby,' 152. Robert of Toulouse, 221. Robertus Pullus, 151 sq., 159, 161, 167. Robinson, J., bishop of Bristol, 5 sq. Rochester under Henry II, 167. Rochford, lord, 318, 320, 322, 324. Roger, bishop of Salisbury, 165. Roger, Niger, 168. Roger of Hovedcn, 138, 143, 160, 169, 171, 173. Roger ot Pont l'Eveque, 150. Rogers, J. E. Thorold, 64, 433. Rolls Scries, the, 13, 31, 433. Rome, medieval, vast importance of, 76. Roos of Hamlake, John lord, 227. Thomas lord, 227. William lord, 220. Roses, Wars of the, 251. Rotrou, archbishop, 140, 149. Rous, John, of Warwick, 414. Rupin of the Mountains, 183. S. Alban's, 170. Saladin, 183, 185, 190, 195 sq. Salian Law, the, 72. Salisbury under Henry II, 168. Sanuto, Marino, 186, 203, 206, 214. Sardinia, kings of, 235. Satalia, sack of, 221. Savile, sir H., 6. Savoy, Lewis of, and his House, 229, 233, 234. Schanz, Dr., 434. Schmid's edition of the Anglo- Saxon Laws, 70. Scott (sir W.), Ivanhoe and The Talisman, 53, 105, 132. Seebohm, F., 434. Selden, J., 6, 346, 351, 378, 381. Seljuks, the, 182. Sembat (historian), 216. Sembat, king of Armenia, 214, 217. Seneca, study of, in the twelfth century, 176. ' Sentences,' the, 366. Sforza Pallavicino, 229. Sharrock, Dr., 378. Sheppard, T., 375. Shirley, Dr., 12, 27. Sickel, Dr., 70, 434. Simeon of Durham, 172. Simnel, Lambert, 397 •>' 39 1 , 4°4> 4 11 - Warwick, Edward earl of, 383, 393, 397, 4°°- Warwick, Thomas de Beauchamp earl of, takes prisoner a son of the king of Lithuania, 223. Wattenbach, W., 79. Waynflete, bishop, 357. Welfs, the, 144, 252. Westphalia, the Peace of, 268. Whistonian controversy, 379. Wilkins, D., 380. William, king of Sicily, 141, 154, 157- William I, king of England, 191, 344- William II, 412. William of Champagne, arch- bishop, 151. William of Conches, 158. William of Malmesbury, 171, 433- William of Newburgh, 143, 1 71. William of S. Mere l'Eglise, 158. William of Soissons, 159. William of Tyre, 136. William of Valence, 351. William sub-prior of Canterbury, 167. Winchelsey, archbishop, 350. W r olsey, cardinal, 269, 278 sqq., 285 sq., 289 sqq., 297, 302, 308, 311, 313 sqq., 332, 391, 421. Wood, Antony, 356, 378. Wriothesley, chancellor, 281, 285. Wydville, Edward, 418. Yonge (Miss), Chaplet of Pearls, and Dove in the Eagle's Nest, York in the twelfth century, 1 70 sq. York, Richard duke of, 397, 398. Zouch, lord, 406. 1 in (Elatmtron $tess, ©xfotfcu A SELECTION OF BOOKS PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY BY HENRY FROWDE, AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, AMEN CORNER, LONDON. ALSO TO BE HAD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS DEPOSITORY, OXFORD. 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