GEORGE WASHINGTON AND OTHER AMERICAN ADDRESSES THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. Globe 8vo. 55. THE NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN. Extra Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. net THE MEANING OF HISTORY. Extra Crown Svo. 8s. 6d. net ANNALS OF AN OLD MANOR-HOUSE, SUTTON PLACE, GUILDFORD. New and abridged edition. Extra Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. TENNYSON, RUSKIN, MILL, AND OTHER LITERARY ESTIMATES. 8vo. 8s. 6d. net LIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. LIFE OF WILLIAM THE SILENT. Crown Svo. 2.s. 6d. BYZANTINE HISTORY IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. Rede Lecture, 1900. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED. Svo. Sewed, is. net LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND OTHER AMERICAN ADDRESSES BY FREDERIC HARRISON, M.A. HONORARY FELLOW OF WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESIDENT OF THE ENGLISH POSITIVIST COMMITTEE Hontfott MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1901 All riehts reserved Copyright, 1901, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Norwood Press J. S. Cusbing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. / am permitted to bucribe This Volume of Addresses give?i in the United States to His Excellency THE HON. JOSEPH H CHOATE Litt.D. American Ambassador in London NOTE The following Addresses were given in February and March, 1901, at various Societies and Universi- ties of the United States. The occasion of my visit was an invitation with which I was honoured by the Union League Club of Chicago to deliver the public Address in the Auditorium of that city, on the annual commemoration of the birthday of George Washing- ton. My thanks are due to the American Ambas- sador in London, who transmitted to me from his friends there this and similar invitations from various Universities, and who adds to his kindness by per- mitting me to inscribe his name on this volume. The first two addresses were in substance published in the annual Report of the celebration by the Union League Club of Chicago. The Lecture on the Writ- ings of King Alfred was published separately in May last. The other Addresses have not previously been printed. CONTENTS I. George Washington and the Republican Ideal II. Abraham Lincoln III. The Millenary of King Alfred IV. The Writings of King Alfred . V. The Dutch Republic . VI. Recent Biographies of Cromwell VII. Republicanism and Democracy VIII. Personal Reminiscences . IX. Municipal Government . X. The Nineteenth Century PAGE 3 3 1 4i 7i 105 141 165 191 219 237 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL George Washington and the Republi- can Ideal Address in the Auditorium, Chicago, February 22, 1901 We meet on a day which for more than a century- has been held sacred by the men of this vast Conti- nent — the day which ever increasing millions who speak our common tongue will celebrate for centuries to come, and hand down from generation to genera- tion as a national heirloom and trust. The colossal Republic of the West had a Founder around whose name gather memories more real and solid than those which enshrined the half-mythical founders of re- publics in antiquity ; whilst in valour, sagacity, and nobility of nature, George Washington was the peer of the most splendid heroes of the ancient or the modern world. The historian has too often to confess that the statesmen of modern times have seldom presented to us types of that romantic heroism, of the chivalry, the purity of soul, the sublime surrender of self, which we ascribe to a Leonidas, a Marcus Aurelius, a King Alfred, or a Godfrey de Bouillon. Too many of the chiefs who have made or saved a nation have been 3 4 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL stained by faithlessness, cunning, ambition, cruelty, and vice. It is consoling to think. — it gives us fresh hopes of humanity to know — that the latest in the roll of the creators of nations has a spotless record of honour as a man, as a soldier, as a statesman ; " Whatever record leap to light, He never shall be shamed — ' ' Whilst his memory is revered by the civilised world in Europe, it is nowhere held in such personal affec- tion as with the people whom he defeated and whose dominion he shook off; for all right-minded English- men now feel that his work was a real gain — albeit a bitter lesson — to our own nation; whilst his noble character and unsullied career as soldier, as statesman, as patriot, add new glory to our common race. George Washington is as much one of our great English heroes as Alfred the Great or Shakespeare is one of yours. The robust nature, the ancestral speech, are the common prerogatives of our blood. And as the wildest dreamer in Great Britain cannot conceive our two peoples being other than independent nations to-day, we have nothing but honour for the hero who achieved the happy and inevitable separation. I am well aware that since, on American soil, the memory of Washington has been celebrated for more than a century by tens of thousands of eloquent tongues, I ought now to pass to some more general theme, and not presume to add my mite to the vast monument which ages of impassioned oratory have GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 5 raised to perpetuate his name. The great historian of Athens said in one of his pregnant phrases : " Illus- trious men have the whole earth for their tomb." How true is it that the whole American Continent is the tomb of Washington ; for from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to Behring's Straits, every inch of soil bears witness to his life, and is made sacred by his immortal presence. In the most memorable of all memorial orations, the great Athenian chief said: " — no need for prolix panegyrics amongst men who know it all so well." And I feel that it is almost presumption in a visitor to speak to American citizens of the Founder of their Republic. But since you have done this honour to myself — and indeed to my country — in inviting an Englishman to speak to you of Washington, it seems to be fitting that I should tell you how he looks to English eyes, how deeply his memory is cherished in the old country of his ancestors — and of your ancestors. I shall say to you nothing that I should not say to my own countrymen — nothing indeed that I have not often said to my own countrymen. Twice before, in our own Hall in London, I have given addresses in the Centennial Commemoration of Washington that we held in recent years, and I will say now noth- ing which I did not say then. That name is so great and wide that there shall be no exclusive monopoly in it. It cannot be limited to his State of Virginia — it cannot be limited to the Old States of the Union — 6 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL it cannot be limited to America itself. It belongs to the Anglo-Saxon race. It belongs in fine to Human- ity at large. Nor am I about to insult a noble memory by idle panegyric or extravagant words. Of all great men in history George Washington is he whom it would be most unseemly to flatter or to canonise. He, who was the soul of scrupulous moderation and sterling veracity, should teach us to treat him in that same spirit of self-control and truth. As the English his- torian of the Georgian era has said : " It was the trans- parent integrity of the character of Washington " which enabled him, soldier as he was, to found a democratic republic with no shadow on it of military despotism. It is in the spirit of aiming at transparent integrity that I shall seek to speak of him. I shall not pre- sume to speak of him as he appears to American eyes. I will try to say what he seems to our English eyes. And perhaps the cool and independent judgment of those who cannot claim to be fellow-citizens of his, and who were once his enemies, may more accord with the unobtrusive genius of the great republican chief than that unbounded adulation in which for a hundred years he has been addressed and canonised here. The eminent historian of the Eighteenth Century whom I have quoted tells us this : — " Of all the great men in history he was the most invariably judicious, and there is scarcely a rash word or action or judg- ment recorded of him. No act of his public life can be traced GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL J to personal caprice, ambition, or resentment. In the despond- ency of long-continued failure, in the elation of sudden success, at times when his soldiers were deserting by hundreds, and when malignant plots were formed against his reputation, amid the constant quarrels, rivalries, and jealousies of his subordi- nates, in the dark hour of national ingratitude, and in the most universal and intoxicating flattery, he was always the same calm, wise, just, and single-minded man, pursuing the course which he believed to be right without fear or favour or fanati- cism ; equally free from the passions which spring from inter- est and from the passions that spring from imagination. He was in the highest sense of the word a gentleman and a man of honour, and he carried into public life the severest standard of private morals. There is scarcely another instance in his- tory of such a man having reached and maintained the highest position in the convulsions of civil war and of a great popular agitation." In England we are accustomed to draw parallels between the career — though not the character — of George Washington and that of our great Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and of the Founder of the Dutch Commonwealth, William the Silent, Prince of Orange. All three carried on in mature life a long and desperate struggle in a fierce civil war against the tyranny of a retrograde king. All three, after beating back the armies of the tyrant, were chosen by their people to be the first chiefs of a new Commonwealth. And all three showed an organising genius of the first order in welding into a nation the broken sections of the people whom they had saved from slavery by their arms. O GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL But the parallel between William the Silent and George Washington is peculiarly close. These two in a special sense created new nations. Their work subsists to-day after more than three centuries in the first case, and more than a century in the other case. The direct and immediate work of Cromwell was quickly undone. His indirect and permanent work has to be traced in a number of obscure and gradual effects. Oliver deeply modified the history of an old nation : he did not create a new nation. The analogies of William the Silent and Washington lie in this. Each was the soul of an obstinate contest to secure self-government against a foreign monarchy. Both were men of birth and wealth, conservative in spirit, old servants and soldiers of the foreign sov- ereign. Both had to face defeat, disappointment, jealousies, discord, treachery and panic. Both, when raised to supreme power, showed splendid public spirit and devotion to their cause, and genius as statesmen even higher than their ability in war. The people whom they led to freedom were not so unequal in number. But, whereas the nation which the Prince founded remains after three centuries no larger in area or in population than of old, the nation which Washington created is amongst the greatest on earth — with boundless possibilities of development. On the other hand, in a grand point of character, Washington will ever stand out in history as greater than William — greater than almost any statesman in supreme place in the whole record of the modern GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 9 world. His unshaken devotion to right, his perfect justice, his transparent truthfulness and lofty sense of honour, will ever place him above even the best of modern statesmen in virtue. That which sets him in a rank by himself among chiefs of state is the unfailing- honour and guileless candour of his whole public career, toward both home and foreign opponents. Compare the diplomacy or the policy of Washington with that of Frederic the Great, or Richelieu, or Peter the Great, or Louis XI, or Elizabeth of England, William of Orange, or Oliver Cromwell — we find Washington to be ever what the Greek philosopher dreamed of, but never found in the flesh — " The man who stood four- square, upright, without reproach." It makes one more hopeful of the future and less despondent of the present, to know that, even in these later ages, there has been found a chief such that, in a desperate rebellion and the birth-throes of a new commonwealth, with treachery, intrigue and mendacity around him, tempting him to meet craft with craft, violence and injustice with fraud — " the fierce light that beats upon " the seat of a President as it does on a monarch's throne, can reveal no falsehood, no baseness, no outrage, no crime. I quoted a couplet from Tennyson's grand ode on the burial of our Duke of Wellington; and I cannot help feeling how well many of these noble lines serve to describe Washington — some of them indeed more justly even than Wellington. Listen to these : — 10 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL '* O friends, our chief state-oracle is mute : The statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute, Whole in himself, a common good. Mourn for the man of amplest influence > Yet clearest of ambitious crime — Great in council and great in war, Foremost captain of his time, Rich in saving common-sense, And, as the greatest only are, In his simplicity, sublime — " Are not these words as true of Washington as of Wellington — nay, perhaps when applied to Washing- ton, less marked by exaggeration or pride ? We often think of Washington in connection with our own Oliver Cromwell. Both came of old and honourable English families, and it is odd that it was the protectorate of Oliver which drove the great- grandfather of Washington, a zealous royalist, to found a new family in Virginia. Both Washington and Cromwell were the eldest sons of the junior branch of ancient and wealthy landowners. Both had only elementary schooling. Both were summoned before they were of age to protect a family of orphans ; both were in close alliance with the gallant family of Fair- fax. Both were called after passing middle life to direct an obstinate civil war and then to govern and organise a broken and distracted nation. In this matter the task of Washington was in one sense greater than that of Cromwell. England at the close of the civil war was still an organic whole ; and in the army of the Ironsides it had an overwhelming GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL II and solid force of disciplined enthusiasts, such as the world has but rarely seen. Washington's task as a soldier had been to organise into an army a floating body of raw volunteers, each of whom thought him- self the equal of every other citizen whatsoever, and to wring from local and jealous committees the essential supplies and funds. His career as a statesman was of even grander order. In his eight years' tenure of supreme power in the new nation, he had a great and peculiar task in which he amply succeeded. He was called not merely to preside over a nation, to administer a government — but to make a nation — to create a government. He found nothing but the raw material of a nation and a government. He left these materials an organic body, able to live and grow. From the first, there appeared that antithesis between the central and the local interests which in my memory has plunged the United States into a tremendous conflict, and in other forms leaves problems yet for final solution. The conduct of Washington in this antinomy of ideas was a per- fect model of wisdom and self-control. He himself, as a man saturated with conservative and governing instincts, inclined to the principle of a strong central authority. At the same time he saw the deep bias of the American people toward a local patriotism, the development of the physical and social peculiarities of the vast American Continent, and the need for extreme moderation for the powers to be conferred on any central executive. 12 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL The consummate sagacity and dominant virtue of Washington united the two parties and saved the young commonwealth from a premature explosion of the struggle which began sixty years after his death. His second Presidency was more harassing and critical even than his first. But his power to ride the storm — to impress his spirit upon the nation — not by force, not by eloquence, not by logic, but by the apostolic power of a faultless character for rectitude, self-devotion and wisdom — this, I say, forms one of the great moral laws graven on the imperishable deca- logue of history, one of the consoling truths which cheer us in the task as we groan over those weary annals of the madness of nations and the ambition of statesmen. When the restlessness of factions sought to flourish the Stars and Stripes in the face of all comers, Washington upheld the banner he had formed as the emblem of neutrality, peace, consolidation, and financial probity. In making these ideas the mottoes of the commonwealth, George Washington founded the in- dissoluble union of an organic, industrial law-abiding nation, with a boundless power of expansion and a paradise of prosperity before it, and conferred on his fellow-citizens a service greater, nobler and more far- reaching than when he led them to victory against a foreign tyrant. And the close of such a career was in all things .worthy of its spotless record. To compel his fellow- citizens to suffer him to descend from what was a seat of power far above the throne of monarchs, to do GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 1 3 this in the maturity of his physical and mental powers, and solely as a great example to his successors, has given the world a new conception of moral dignity and republican simplicity. It was no case of a dicta- tor who, as the poet says, " stalked in savage grandeur home": — it was no Charles V seeking refuge in a convent from disease and disappointment. It was the one abdication of power in recorded history that was based on public duty and not on personal motive. And now the capital city of this vast republic bears his name ; and his home and burial place are become the place of pilgrimage to the civilised world ; so that he lies enshrined in the central pulse and brain of the nation he created, his spirit, we imagine, brood- ing over the council-boards of his successors : — " And so sepulchred in such pomp doth lie, That Kings for such a tomb would wish to die." The Roman historian left this famous phrase of one of his characters — felix opportunitate mortis. How much more true is this of George Washington if we paraphrase it to mean — blest in all the circumstances of his end ! This came by a quick and easy stroke as he approached three-score and ten at the height of his reputation and authority, with the prosperous future of his country assured. How few of the heroes and creators of nations lived to see even the first fruits of the work of their lives ! How few have passed through a career beset with temptations, perils, and 14 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL dilemmas, without once giving way to a single act of folly, one deed of injustice, meanness, or passion ! It is the unique privilege of Washington that he lived to see the crown of his work, and left it to his coun- try as a stainless record. It is a rare fortune when the hero can close his eyes with the confident hope that he has not lived in vain, with no crushing remorse that his memory will descend with a burden of offence to generations un- born. Heroes too often die in the midst of visible disaster, in agony, in humiliation — and if such great souls could ever lose hope, we might almost say in despair. Too often their dying eyes are darkened with gloom and gathering storms. These Christs of Humanity for the most part die upon their cross, unconscious of the future worth of their lives and of the distant issues which were destined to spring out of their sacrifice. We who to-day so crave after vis- ible success, who are so prone to measure every life by its practical result in the present, who scorn the labours which are not cheered by the shouts of the mob, with fame, with conquests, with gold, let us remember that the heroes to whom nations owe all they prize have seldom any crown of glory to dazzle their dying eyes, and too often lay down their weary heads beneath a crown of thorns. Too often they expire with the cruel cry within their hearts, if not upon their lips — Eli! Eli! lama sabacthani ! — My God ! My God ! why hast thou forsaken me? From this last agony of soul George Washington GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 1 5 was free, as he assuredly was free from any ground for remorse. But he could little have conceived that, within one hundred years, his people would have increased some twenty-fold, or that this great city would be standing on ground which was then an Indian wilderness. There is a profound moral in the life of George Washington and his place in the world's history. Here is a simple citizen, by birth a quiet country gentleman, who wins triumphant success in one of the most memorable of modern wars, and welds into a nation a scattered body of colonists, so that within a hundred years they are grown to be one of the biggest, richest, most progressive people that ever existed on this earth. He himself is an object of veneration to more than a hundred millions who are of his race and language — even though a third of them are of the people he repulsed — for all who speak our common tongue regard him as one of the noblest figures in the annals of their race. And yet, he is no Alexander or Caesar, no Charlemagne or Napoleon. He was no born soldier ; he made himself a warrior by dint of an indomitable nature. Nor was he a dictator, such an one as mankind bow down to as more than man. And yet, does history record any result of work so rapid, so colossal, so multifarious ? The grand endowment of Washington was charac- ter, not imagination ; judgment, not subtlety ; not brilliancy, but wisdom. The wisdom of Washington was the genius of common-sense, glorified into unerr- 1 6 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL ing truth of view. He had that true courage, physical and moral, that purity of soul, that cool judgment which is bred in the bone of the English-speaking race. But in Washington these qualities, not rare on either side of the Atlantic, were developed to a su- preme degree and were found in absolute perfection. He thus became the transfiguration of the stalwart, just, truthful, prudent citizen, having that essence of good sense which amounts to true genius, that perfec- tion of courage which is true heroism, that transparent unselfishness which seems to us the special mark of the saint. The American commonwealth was made by the halo of virtue, honour, and truthfulness which seemed to radiate from the very soul of its first President. May it long continue to guide the destinies of the republic ! It is character that makes heroes, more than any genius. It is character which creates nations, more than imagination. It is character round which nations rally when the stress comes on them, and con- fusion looms in their midst. It is character, unselfish- ness, honesty, and truth which in the long run rule the world and determine its destinies sooner or later. It may be often obscured, and may be long ere it is fully revealed. But the foremost apostle of this sacred gospel of noble character in these modern ages was the founder of the United States, who was indeed a star on high of the first magnitude in all that con- stitutes a grand and imposing nature. I pass on to say a few words on that republican GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 1 7 ideal, of which George Washington furnishes the eternal type. When I utter the phrase republican ideal there comes into my mind the memory of that wonderful picture of it in the noblest of all speeches as recorded by the greatest of all historians — the Funeral Oration of Pericles in Thucydides. " The republican government," he says, " is one that feels no jealousy or rivalry with the institutions of others. We have no wish to imitate them ; we prefer to be an example to them. It is true that our constitution is a democracy, for it is framed in the interest of all, not of any privileged class. Yet, whilst the law secures to all in their private claims equal justice without favour of persons, we still recognise the value of personal superiority, when a citizen is in any way distinguished by his attainments ; and he is raised to eminence in the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the prize of his merits. Nor again is poverty a bar with us, to hinder a citizen who can confer some service on the state. Public office is a career open to great capacity, however humble may be the station in which it is found. Public life is with our people absolutely free to all. In our private life we are not suspicious of each other, nor do we quarrel with a citizen who chooses to live his own life just as it pleases himself. But whilst ours is the land of perfect liberty to each citizen to live freely as it suits him, we are bound by loyalty to the common law which we reverence as the voice of the republic. We obey only the law which is ordained to protect every man from wrong doing. And we respect the unwritten law of public opinion which visits those who trans- gress the moral code with the reprobation of their fellow- citizens. 1 8 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL " Nor do we forget to provide relaxations after the urgent labour of our lives. We hold regular festivals and solemn thanksgivings on the appointed days throughout the year. In our homes our mode of life is cheerful so that we banish all sense of gloom. The vastness of our republic affords us all the fruits and resources of the entire earth, of which all the goods that it affords flow freely in to us, and we enjoy the products of other lands as easily as those of our own land. Our state is open to the world and is the resort of men from other countries. We welcome the foreigner who comes to us, and leave him free to inspect all we have to show him and to profit by all that we can teach him. We rely not on cunning devices and secret intrigues, but we trust our own right arms, our own stout hearts. We are not ground down by a conscription, which makes every citizen a compulsory soldier ; yet, when the call of our country comes, we can show a front as brave as any, and we prove to them that the volunteer citizen in arms is at least the match of the con- script who is forced to pass his youth in the barrack. " As men, we love all things that are beautiful, yet our taste is for the simple and plain. We delight in mental culture, but it does not make us the weaker in action. Wealth we use for practical ends of a real kind, not to boast of or to display to the world. It is no disgrace to a citizen to avow that he is a poor man ; the true disgrace is to be too idle to earn his own living. Our citizens do not neglect the affairs of the republic, because they are absorbed in the affairs of their own household and fortune. And those who are occupied with their private business find time to take a very active part in politics. It is our way that the citizen who is utterly indifferent to public affairs is looked on as a drone. It is not for every citizen to take the lead in dictating a GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 1 9 policy; but he is bound to be a sound judge of the policy submitted to his acceptance. We count the true mischief in public policy to lie, not in effective discussion of the platforms before the nation, but rather in adopting a policy without that knowledge of the facts which serious discussion would impart. The gift of our people is to be able to look all round a problem before we take it up in action, and then to act when reflection has done its work. Whereas we know there are people who rush into difficulties with the heedless- ness of ignorance, and then, when they begin to understand all it means, entirely lose heart. " To sum it all up together, we may boast that our com- monwealth is the school of the civilised world. Each citizen of our republic is endowed with the power in his own person of adapting himself to the most varied form of activity and life with consummate versatility and ease. This is no pass- ing and idle word, but truth and fact ; the proof of which lies in the splendid position which our republic now holds in the world to-day. There is a latent strength within us, which ever rises above even all that our neighbours expect that we can show. The enemies whom we overcome on the battle-field submit to be defeated by a power so great ; and those who have to bear our empire admit that their master is worthy to bear rule. Of this there are ample witnesses, in those mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this age and ages to come. It needs no rhetoric to prove it. Every land and every sea bears witness to our energy and our valour, and on every soil we have planted eternal memorials of the good we can do to our friends and the harm we could inflict upon our foes." Such is the type of the republic painted by the great statesman of Athens at the zenith of her glory. 20 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL How far it is reproduced — how far it can be repro- duced in our age, it is not for me to say. There are some features in the picture which are essential ele- ments of the true republic. The essence of a republic is a state where power is reserved not to privilege but to merit, where it is exercised in the sole interest of the community, and never in the interest of any class or order. In the true republic all authority is a trust committed by the commonwealth to those who are held capable of using it best in the common service of all. Nothing hereditary can remain in it. Birth can- not create any privilege, any priority in honour, power, or right of any kind. And as in the true republic there is no privilege for birth, so neither is there any privilege for wealth. The service of the state, even in its highest post, must be freely open to every citizen, whatever his birth, his breeding, or his means, provided only he be capable to fill it. There is no title to any public office but personal worthiness alone ; there is no lawful object of public activity, but the common interest of the community at large. There are three tests of the true republic — (i) that power rests on fitness to rule ; (2) that its sole object is the public good; (3) that it is maintained by public opinion, and not by force. That is to say, public office — all office from the highest to the least — is a public trust — I mean a moral trust, not a syndicate — and it is not private property. It must rest on consent, not on fear, and not on right or privilege. This is not the same thing as an absolute democracy, GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 21 or an absolute equality. Every citizen has an equal claim to serve the state, but every citizen is not equally able to serve it. And if all did actually serve it at once, the state would be very ill served. The true republic needs the best. By best, it means the worthiest, apart from birth or wealth. And the best must be acknowledged as such by common consent. It must be allowed that in ancient and modern times this ideal republic has hardly ever been reached, or only for rare and occasional moments. In the Roman republic we know how strong was the hold of privilege, how arrogant were the claims of birth, how desperate the struggles of patrician and plebeian, of the nobles and the proletariat. Indeed, the titles of personal merit to public office were often recognised better in the empire of the Antonines and the Con- stantines than in the republic of the Catos and the Pompeys. At Athens, the republic oscillated too often between weak aristocrats and unscrupulous demagogues. And both Athens and Rome were poisoned by the institu- tion of slavery and a vast population of slaves, whom the free minority regarded as their chattels and prop- erty. Both states were really narrow aristocracies of free men within unlimited despotisms of serfs. The mediaeval republics, in the same way, rested largely on force ; and in no small degree on privilege and birth. The United Provinces of Holland were mainly a plutocracy, until they passed into an heredi- tary monarchy. In France, the first republic of the 22 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL Convention and the Consulate was mainly based on force. Neither in the first nor in the second republic was merit peculiarly honoured. And the third republic has been shaken to its foundations by birth, wealth, and privileged corporations. Europe, alas ! never has given the world, does not give it now, the ex- ample of a true and typical republic. We must look to the great republic of the West for a closer approach to the true republican ideal. There indeed we have the principal conditions adequately and permanently recognised. Office — supreme office — is absolutely open to every citizen, whatever his birth, or fortune, or social standing. And this in a degree which has never been accomplished in ancient or modern republics. The whole forces of the re- public, again, are devoted to the public benefit of the community as a whole ; not to the interests of any order or class of citizens — at least this has been the case since the final extinction of slavery ; and, we ought to say, it is at any rate the avowed purpose of the majority. And as to the third condition, you will be ready to say that never did any government rest so entirely on consent ; for no government that this world ever yet saw was based upon the free suffrages of twelve millions of independent electors. I may be asked why did I qualify this statement as to the United States ; who can doubt that it is the absolute and perfect type of the true ideal republic ? It is not for a foreign visitor to criticise the house of his hosts ; but to the philosophers of Europe there GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 23 are spots even upon the sun of the American common- wealth. If it be true that the offices of the state, from the highest to the lowest, are open to every American citizen, is it clear that they are always filled by the worthiest men that the American continent has reared ? If birth and wealth confer no title to power, is it cer- tain that they do not sometimes act as a positive bar to merit ? If it be true that the laws and forces of the commonwealth are in principle entirely devoted to the good of all, is it certain that they are not at times captured in the interest of minorities, classes, or corpo- rations ? At least, so American authorities of high reputation are believed publicly to maintain. And when we come to the third condition, that the govern- ment rests entirely on consent and to no degree on force, it is reported in Europe that this must be quali- fied somewhat in matters of colour and race. I hope, before I return, I may be convinced that the report is untrue. But in any case, if consent and not force be the rule in the United States, there are now, we hear, some eight or ten millions outside these states, whom the republic governs, but has no intention of admitting to vote. All these questions are problems in the social eco- nomy of states of which thinking men in Europe are anxiously watching the solution. We wait to see how a vast democratic electorate can be educated always to choose its foremost citizens in every ser- vice, even though the foremost be the least conspicu- ous and the least ambitious. We want to see how 24 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL the state is going to deal with those gigantic corpora- tions, which have taken the place of the feudal barons and royal favourites of modern Europe. And lastly, we wait to see how government of the people, by the people and through the people, will be reconciled with the government of all these millions, whose consent is never going to be asked at all. When we turn in thought to the ideal republic we must have in our mind's eye the highest possible standard. And, with ideal standards before us, no actual republic that men have created can be judged to have reached perfection — no ! neither the Athens of Pericles, nor the United States of President McKinley, with all the points of likeness between them that certainly exist. A republican myself from my youth upwards, I am one who holds that the essence of republic is more bound up with good government than it is with the active share in government by all citizens alike. The interests of all equally are more important than the rights of any section or any individual. Pericles was right when he proudly boasted that their citizens could " recognise the value of personal superiority," for Pericles led the Athenians far more than followed them. Unless the wise man leads and the simple follow his lead, the ideal republic suffers, for its power is not awarded to the most fit. If the blind lead those who see, both the blind and those who see fall into the ditch. I am, I say, by principle and by conviction, a re- publican, because the republic is the inevitable and GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 25 final form of human society — the normal type of intelligent citizenship. It must dominate the future, for the future society must be an industrial society. Whatever else is doubtful, it is certain that the de- velopment of industrial life will be the key-note of the generations to come. Now industry is, of its nature, essentially republican ; its life is the free cooperation of intelligent masses of men working with good-will to the common interest. Industrial life must ultimately eliminate every remnant of privilege, of caste, of monopoly, of prerogative ; for the more highly organ- ised industry becomes, the more perfectly it demands the intelligent and free cooperation of workers. Slavery dies out before the sight of free industry. Military or feudal types of society, with caste, privi- lege, idleness, mastery blazoned on their mediaeval heraldry, may struggle for their ancient rank, but in- dustry will slay them in the end. An industrial world — and the world of the future grows more and more an industrial world — is a republican world. And a republican world is one in which the state belongs to all, exists for all, and lives by the help and good-will of all. I began to-day with George Washington ; and I come back to George Washington at the end. I trust that the American people will evermore look back to Washington as the type of the republican chief. To look back to Washington for guidance and inspiration is to look forward to the future, for it is to fix the eye on the ideal, on the model, which 26 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL neither you nor any people on this earth have ever yet perfectly attained. During the Presidencies of Wash- ington, this republic was indeed guided by its most capable citizen ; not by force, not by submission, but by persuasion and conviction in a way that has hardly ever occurred in the history of mankind, if it were not in the days of Trajan, King Alfred, and William the Silent. If there is any point in his career to be regretted, it is that he did not consent to remain in his great office, so long as his own powers lasted. Per- sonally I believe in republican government ; I believe in Presidential rather than parliamentary government ; and I believe in retention of office by choice of the citizens so long as capacity to serve them remains. If Washington's Presidencies give the type of gov- ernment by the most capable, assuredly they give the type of government by consent of the citizens. Never before or since has authority been wielded by man over his fellow-men with more absolute unanimity of the common desire. He anticipated the great social reformation accomplished in this commonwealth some sixty years after his death, when he freed his own estate by will from the curse of negro slavery. No man that ever bore power over his fellow-citizens shrank with a more scrupulous, more religious horror from the thought of ruling by force instead of by free choice — no man was more truly the republican to the very marrow of his bones, and was less the despot or the master. May the spirit of George Washington, the just, the free, the far-sighted patriot, inspire the GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 1~] people of this commonwealth in all their problems of government ; guide them in all the tasks they under- take to wise and prosperous ends ; enable them to crown his work when in the words of our English historian, " he founded a democratic republic with no shadow on it of military despotism." ABRAHAM LINCOLN Abraham Lincoln Address at the Banquet, Union League Club, Chicago, Febru- ary 22, 1901 Mr. President and gentlemen of the Union League Club : I feel myself overwhelmed by the kindness of the reception which I have received and by the hos- pitality which this great institution has been good enough to afford to me. Although I am now enter- ing upon the close of my life, it is the first time that I have had the opportunity of crossing the Atlantic and seeing with my own eyes the great republic which I have watched with great interest and affection, I may say, for the last fifty years of my life. I have many American friends ; I have received many invitations to visit them in this country ; I have never been able to accept those invitations, but when, last autumn, I had the great honour of being invited by the president of the Union League Club to speak on this memorable day, the birthday of Washington, and that invitation was conveyed to me by the highly popular and respected representative of the American nation in England, Mr. Choate, I felt, sir, that that invitation was that which our politicians speak of, when they are called by the sovereign of our country at 31 32 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Windsor Castle, as a royal command. I felt, sir, as if I had received a command to speak, with however humble a voice, to the American people, to represent the sympathy and regard that our nation feels for the American republic and its infinite destinies in the future, and above all, to tell them of the admiration, of the profound homage with which the founder of the American republic is looked upon by all rational people of Great Britain to-day. I well knew that it was from no thought of merit of my own that I had been honoured by this invitation, but, having received it and having had the advantage of listening to the words of our great orators, Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, whom I well remember, whom I have often heard speak with so bold a spirit during the great struggle that was endured by this nation in my own youth — I felt that I was bound to come forward to-day and say all that in my heart I have felt of their people and of their great founder. This city of Chicago appeals to me in a very especial manner above all the other cities of the United States, for the personal reason that I believe that I am my- self, at this moment, older than the city of Chicago ; because I am told in the histories that at my birth it was a village of but one hundred inhabitants, and when I was a young man, taking my degree in col- lege, it was a very small town, hardly known on the other side of the Atlantic. But I come now and I see that it is undoubtedly the second city in the Union. Its history is one of the most remarkable facts in the ABRAHAM LINCOLN 33 material development of the nineteenth century ; its wealth, its power, its population portend almost an infinite development in the future. I have now been able to see with my own eyes and through the instru- mentality of the many friends here about me, the cul- ture, intellectual development, and patriotic spirit which this city has already developed. I was deeply interested this morning in seeing that remarkable gathering when the young people of this great city were brought together to have instilled into their minds ideas of true patriotic spirit and the sense of devotion to their duties in order to become worthy citizens of this republic. Now I should be very sorry if it were thought that what I have been saying of Washington to-day was in any sense addressed for the moment or to meet the audience to which I had the honour of speaking. On the contrary, I well know that the spirit of Washington, his courage, his patri- otic interest to the people of his country, have been carried on in later years by his successors in that great office, and I may recall, perhaps, my own interest as a young man many years ago during the great struggle in which this nation was concerned, the thrill of sym- pathy, the sense of shock which we received when we heard of the death of that great successor of Washing- ton, whose portrait, I see, adorns the rooms of this club. I was present upon the occasion of the an- nouncement of the death of that great President of the republic. We called a meeting in the largest available hall in London, which was draped in black for the 34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN occasion, and our foremost politicians came forward and spoke of the admiration with which they had re- garded his career, and of the profound sympathy that they felt for the tremendous struggle with which this nation was engaged. I may say Abraham Lincoln was always to me, in my youth, the type of the repub- lican chief, and I looked upon him as indeed a worthy successor of the founder of the republic himself. I should like to recall a few remarks that I made in a little volume which, I dare say, very few people ever read, and of which I don't suppose there is a single copy in existence, except the one in my posses- sion. If I venture to inflict upon you a few com- ments of mine, it is only for this purpose, to convince you that during that great struggle, which is now very nearly forty years ago, there were many of us who followed every incident of that immense crisis with all the feelings that animated you whom I see before me, or perhaps, as most of you have evidently the advan- tage of me in years, which animated your fathers and the previous generation. I don't know how many of you actually took part in that heroic struggle, but to us it came home precisely as if we were engaged in it from day to day ourselves. And the end of the Presi- dent in that great crisis was to us as deeply affecting as it was to any one of you or to your fathers. It is now nearly forty years ago since I published in England the following remarks : — "... The great struggle which has for ever decided the cause of slavery of man to man, is, beyond all question, the ABRAHAM LINCOLN 35 most critical which the world has seen since the great revolu- tionary outburst. If ever there was a question which was to test political capacity and honesty it was this. A true states- man, here if ever, was bound to forecast truly the issue, and to judge faithfully the cause at stake. We know now, it is beyond dispute, that the cause which won was certain to win in the end, that its reserve force was absolutely without limit, that its triumph was one of the turning-points in modern civ- ilisation. It was morally certain to succeed, and it did suc- ceed with an overwhelming and mighty success. From first to last both might and right went all one way. The people of England went wholly that way. The official classes went wholly some other way. " One of the great key-notes of England's future is simply this — what will be her relations with that great republic ? If the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race are to form two phases of one political movement, their welfare and that of the world will be signally promoted. If their courses are marred by jealousies or contests, both will be fatally retarded. Real confidence and sympathy extended to that people in the hour of their trial would have forged an eternal bond between us. To discredit and distrust them, then, was to sow deep the seeds of antipathy. Yet, although a union in feeling was of importance so great, although so little would have secured it, the governing classes of England wantonly did all they could to foment a breach. "A great political judgment fell upon a race of men, our own brothers ; the inveterate social malady they inherited came to a crisis. We watched it gather with exultation and insult. There fell on them the most terrible necessity which can befall men, the necessity of sacrificing the flower of their citizens in civil war, of tearing up their civil and social system by the 36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN roots, of transforming the most peaceful type of society into the most military. We magnified and shouted over every disaster; we covered them with insult; we filled the world with ominous forebodings and unjust accusations. There came on them one awful hour when the powers of evil seemed almost too strong ; when any but a most heroic race would have sunk under the blows of their traitorous kindred. We chose that moment to give actual succour to their enemy, and stabbed them in the back with a wound which stung their pride even more than it crippled their strength. They dis- played the most splendid examples of energy and fortitude which the modern world has seen, with which the defence of Greece against Asia, and of France against Europe, alone can be compared in the whole annals of mankind. They devel- oped almost ideal civic virtues and gifts ; generosity, faith, firmness; sympathy the most affecting, resources the most exhaustless, ingenuity the most magical. They brought forth the most beautiful and heroic character who in recent times has ever led a nation, the only blameless type of the statesman since the days of Washington. Under him they created the purest model of government which has yet been seen on the earth — a whole nation throbbing into one great heart and brain, one great heart and brain giving unity and life to a whole nation. The hour of their success came; unchequered in the completeness of its triumph, unsullied by any act of vengeance, hallowed by a great martyrdom." Mr. President, I have only ventured to refer to those words of mine in order that I may assure you and the members of this Club that I have been deeply interested in the fortunes of the great American repub- lic ever since I was a youth fresh from school and col- ABRAHAM LINCOLN 37 lege. I have felt throughout the whole of my life the same sympathy with the destinies of this great nation, and I shall carry back to my own people the assurance of the friendliness and kindness with which they always receive an English guest, and also the sense that in all things intellectual, moral, and spiritual the two peoples are indissolubly united in thought and in idea, whilst in things practical and in the political sphere they hope to preserve for ever a thoroughly good understanding and a common fellowship, working their own national conceptions out in independent lines. THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED d. 901 The Millenary of King Alfred (d. 901) Address at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Within a few months, in the present year, the various peoples in both hemispheres and on either side of the Equator who speak our English tongue, will unite in commemorating the thousandth anniver- sary of the death of King Alfred — the purest, noblest, most venerable hero of which their race can boast. There are few other names in the records of human civilisation, the memory of which has been so per- manent, so unbroken, so definite, and at the same time so certain. And there is certainly no other character in history whose image remains to this day perfectly heroic, faultless, majestic, and saintly in all relations of public or of private life. History, especially the remorseless criticism of mod- ern scholarship, has torn the halo from many a famous hero, and has exposed the fraud or superstition which built up so many of our cherished legends and anec- dotes. But if it has cleared the memory of Alfred from some pleasing and some trivial myths, which were solemnly believed by our fathers, it has really made the historic Alfred a more heroic and impressive figure than the legendary figure of our boyhood. The true Alfred is even greater than the poetic Alfred. 41 42 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED And whatever records have " leaped to light," as our poet has it, and whatever tales have been flung aside in the process of research, no weakness, no crime, no error, no falsehood, no cruelty have ever been revealed in his career. It is true that the scale of the achievements of such mighty men of old as Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Charlemagne, is immeasurably greater, and their per- manent influence on human history as a whole has been infinitely wider, as their tradition is older and more diffused amongst the nations to-day. But their influence is to be traced in so many undefined and indirect results that it can with difficulty be grasped in a manner quite definite, with the same intensity, national and racial, as that of Alfred. And undoubt- edly no one of these immortal founders of kingdoms and of eras, nor can any other historic founder of a nation, compare with our Alfred in beauty of soul and in variety of genius and grace. We are quite justified also in speaking of the his- tory of Alfred as conspicuously certain and clear. An immense amount of controversy has been carried on in England, America, and Germany as to certain details of Alfred's life — the exact dates of his death and even of his birth are disputed, the extent of his learning, the age at which he learned to read and to understand Latin, a variety of characteristic anecdotes, and some personal peculiarities and feats. It is true that doubts continue as to the authenticity and gen- uineness of our principal authority, the Life by THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 43 Asser, which, at best, is mixed with interpolations, misconceptions, and errors. And doubts exist as to Alfred's being in any sense the author of some books attributed to him, and as to what degree he is the author of books in which he certainly had a hand. But all these things are more or less superficial and practically unimportant. The date of Alfred's death might be of great significance if certain events occurred at this time, or if certain men or movements ought or ought not to be treated as contemporary with him. But inasmuch as we know almost nothing of any real mark as taking place in any of the years 899, 900, or 901, it becomes a mere arithmetical or paleographical problem to which of the three we attribute the death. Absolutely nothing can turn on it, any more than whether he died on the 24th or the 26th of October. Historians have long agreed that 901 was the date of Alfred's death, — how, where, and why he died at fifty-two they knew not. The whole controversy turns on such questions as whether the scribe in a manu- script of the Saxon Chronicle put the date 901 exactly in the right line of his margin, and at what day of what month the West Saxons at that time ordinarily counted the commencement of the year. After study- ing a great deal of warm controversy on the subject, I incline to the view that the year 900 is the more likely to be correct. But the matter is to me too much like the solution of a chess problem ; and I rather regret to see so much ingenuity exhausted on the point. It would be far more to the purpose if 44 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED they could tell us whether Alfred was six feet high, or if his eyes were blue or dark. None of these things have we any means of knowing ; and it is a pity to draw off the attention of the public from the grand and certain facts of Alfred's career. Since the Christian world continues to commemorate the birth of Christ at a date which has long been known to be historically inaccurate, the Commemoration Com- mittee wisely resolved to adhere to the recognised and popular date. I confess that I feel little interest in solving these petty problems of detail — all the more that I very much doubt if they ever can be finally settled. For myself, after no little reading and hesitation, I incline to believe that the Life of Asser is substantially genuine, and is accurate in the main ; though it is certainly corrupt, defaced by palpable forgeries, and some original errors. I incline to believe that the pretty story of the boy Alfred learning to read has foundation in fact, though the circumstances and his own age at the time present hopeless inconsistencies and confusion. It is quite possible that the legend about the cakes may have had some basis of truth, but we can say no more. It may have come from a popular ballad, as probably came the story of the harper in the Danes' camp. The story of S. Neot, and the school at Oxford, are known to be pure inventions of later ages. The name of the King has certainly been given to some books which he did not write. And some of his deeds are demonstrably im- THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 45 possible ; and others which are possible, seem to have been unknown to his own age. But, when all deductions are made and all doubtful tales are rejected, enough remains to give us a com- plete picture of the man himself and unimpeachable evidence of his essential achievements. There is the record of the Chronicle during Alfred's life, as trust- worthy as the commentaries of Caesar and probably dictated by the King himself. There is the general picture of character to be extracted from Asser, his friend and companion. We have undoubted writings by Alfred himself — the Pastoral Care with its preface, the Orosius with its insertions, and above all the Boethius with its abundant original matter — so largely an autobiography or the personal meditations of the King himself. Lastly, we have the immense body of Saxon and English annals and poems testifying to a persistent tradition, if not to positive facts. Out of all these sources we get a perfectly definite and thoroughly consistent picture of a nature of singular beauty and power ; of a career as warrior, statesman, churchman, and lawgiver of incalculable importance to the existence and formation of the nation he in- spired and ruled. The principal deeds of Alfred as king are quite as certain as those of Charlemagne, or William the Conqueror, or Edward I. And we know the inner spirit of Alfred far better than we shall ever know theirs. This is the age of minute historical research and we ought to be on our guard never to become its dupes 46 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED or its slaves. Of course absolute truth and the most scrupulous accuracy of fact are quite indispensable ; and deliberate neglect of either must be the final con- demnation of anyone found guilty thereof. Every historian must desire to have over his labours the epitaph that the late Bishop Creighton is said to have composed for himself — "he tried to write true his- tory." But the extraordinary zeal with which paleo- graphy is pursued and the infinite sub-divisions of this curious learning have caused historical problems to be treated too much in sectional and mechanical modes, which make us too prone to trust our general judgment to mere technical experts. We have seen the dangers of giving too much weight in a criminal trial to the expert graphologist, or professor of " chei- romancy," who is positive that a line of handwriting is the work of one particular person, or the expert in painting who knows how much of a picture is genuine and how much is spurious. A famous judge was wont to say that witnesses in a patent case might be divided into three classes — (1) liars, (2) d — d liars, and (3) " experts " — to which someone added a fourth class consisting of one too famous professional witness. What I mean is, that due attention should be paid to the opinion of qualified experts in handwriting, paleography, style, dialect, and so forth, especially when they agree, which they rarely do. But many other considerations have to be taken into account, on which few " experts " are at all expert. One scholar says — Homer never speaks of writing. Ergo, the THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 47 Iliad and the Odyssey were preserved solely by oral tradition. Then comes a learned archaeologist who finds some marks which he cannot decipher, and which he believes to be much earlier than Homer. Ergo, he says, Homer's poems were written by the poet. The bone of a Cave-bear is found with some rude figures on it : this proves man, they say, to have been an artist twenty thousand years ago. A copy of the Saxon Chronicle is said to have the date in its margin the eighth of an inch too high. Ergo, Alfred died in 899 and not in 901. I express no opinion on any- thing of these discoveries. I am far from undervalu- ing them, and feel that they merit close attention. But I say — Not too fast ; there are many other things to consider ; there are hardly ten men acces- sible whose opinion on these points is conclusive ; and there are a dozen modes in which the fact now ob- served may be explained without our accepting the momentous conclusions that are claimed. A mere expert, like fire, is a good servant, but a bad master. I deal with these points because some persons have suggested as objection to the Millenary Commemora- tion this year, that it is more probable that Alfred died in 899, or in 900, and not in 901. Again it has been suggested that Alfred was born not in 849, as all the ordinary histories tell us, but in 842, which would make him seven years older. This would make things easier all round. It would be far more reasonable if Ethelwulf sent his son, then aged thir- teen, to Rome, instead of sending a child of four on so 48 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED long and difficult a journey. And he might very- well have won the beautiful book and learned to read at the age of twelve with his own mother Osburga, who might then have been living. In that case Alfred would have been thirty when he began to reign, in- stead of twenty-two, and would have been fifty-eight, or even fifty-nine, at his death, which makes more conceivable the enormous amount of his life's work. But against this stands the distinct statement of the Chronicle and also of Asser in his Life, the authority for both of which must have been Alfred himself, that he began to reign at the age of twenty-two. Now, I refer to these points, still in dispute by the experts, simply to show that the matters which are doubtful about Alfred are not matters which affect our estimate of Alfred's character or Alfred's achievements. There are people who will object to anything and give all kinds of trivial reasons. A very great personage, who is a statesman as well as an historian, says that Alfred "is a myth." He might as well say St. Paul " is a myth," because he does not believe in the tradi- tion of his foot marks in the Mamertine Prison in Rome or of the — Domine, Quo Vadis ? — in thefuori le Mura anecdote. There are many things as to St. Paul, of which we are not certain, and some stories which we know to be fictions. And so, there are some things about Alfred of which we are not cer- tain, and some things which we know to be fiction. But St. Paul and Alfred both wrote some authentic and genuine pieces in which their whole souls are THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 49 shown. Both had intimate companions who cer- tainly recorded the essential facts of their lives. And, though we are not quite certain in which of three years Alfred died, nor of what he died, nor where, or what was his exact age at death, we do know for cer- tain how vast was the work of his life in the history of his country, and we do know what the real Alfred was .as hero, statesman, and saint. Again, there are people who grumble about any millenary, and others who sneer at the word itself. Well ! millenary is quite as natural and correct a term as centenary — and of centenaries we hear more than enough. In the nature of things, there will be very few millenaries possible. The mere fact that the memory of a great thinker or statesman keeps bright for a thousand years is a striking phenomenon which we ought to emphasise with all our power. It is the death always, not the birth, we should commemorate. What had happened in the world when Alfred saw the light ? It was a time of confusion, trouble, and despair. What happened when Alfred died, was this. The purest spirit that ever spoke our mother tongue lay in its last rest. England was saved from barbar- ism and from heathendom. The civilisation of Eng- land began in earnest — and for a thousand years it has grown larger and grander. Let us turn to the things of which we are certain and wherein Alfred's greatness is clear as the sun at noon. He was a mighty soldier — a hero — with consummate genius for war. An historian who has 50 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED written an excellent History of the Art of War for the Middle Ages, has treated Alfred as warrior, and made clear all the essential points, though many details of his tactics still remain obscure. Alfred's youth was passed in the midst of the death-struggle of Saxons and Angles with the Danes and Vikings. For two generations they had been cutting England to pieces, and whilst he was a boy, they had begun to fix them- selves in fortified camps along the coast. The Saxons had no forts, no fleet, no regular armies, and but few soldiers wearing defensive armour and trained to war. The Vikings had all these. They were pirates, adven- turers, conquerors, with a genius for enterprise and desultory fighting, splendid seamen, trained warriors of undaunted courage and resource. And they had now learned the use of horses, more as mounted infantry than regular cavalry. In fact they were much like the Boers under de Wet ; and the Saxons were like the British at Majuba or Stormberg. England and the Continent, what we now call France, Belgium, and Holland, were equally at the mercy of these terrible invaders. And the period from Alfred's birth to his thirtieth year was the darkest time of all for Christian Europe. The heirs of Charles the Great, the heirs of our Egbert, were alike defeated in turn — London, Winchester, Paris, and Tours were sacked and destroyed. Then York was stormed, the Northumbrian kings slain and their kingdom blotted out. Then the Mercian kingdom was attacked, and the East Anglian king slaughtered. Alfred was twenty- THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 5 1 two when the "grand army" of the Vikings descended upon Wessex, seized Reading, and entrenched them- selves along the Thames. They were carrying all before them, when Alfred and his brother Ethelred, then king of Wessex, came up with them at Ashdown, in the "Vale of the White Horse." We have prime accounts of the battle : how Alfred would not wait for the king who remained to hear mass, but charged up hill " as furious as a wild boar " — how the battle raged till nightfall — how the heathen were smitten hip and thigh — how their king, five earls, and thousands of pagans were slain, and the enemy routed and chased for two days. This grand victory is always ascribed to Alfred's personal valour and leadership. He was but twenty-two. But this glorious victory did not save Wessex. In a few weeks the Danes rallied, defeated Ethelred again and again, and finally killed him, when Alfred became King at twenty-two. He was now in the thick of war, driven back from Berkshire into Wiltshire, with inces- sant battles, not unfrequent victories in the field, fol- lowed by disastrous retreats, as his worn forces grew smaller and more exhausted. In that year, says the veracious Chronicle, dictated perhaps by Alfred him- self, nine general battles were fought against the army south of Thames, besides frequent raids, and nine earls and one king of the Vikings were slain. But, after this mutual slaughter, both sides were exhausted ; and Alfred obtained a truce for Wessex perhaps by a judicious subsidy. It was nothing but a 52 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED truce, as he well knew, but it gave him invaluable time to recruit. His eye of genius perceived that he must stop this endless flow from the north, and deprive the invaders of their command of the sea, which had given them the advantage of mobility. Alfred built galleys and long ships, and brought in Danes and Norsemen from across the Channel to teach his people seamanship. He now began to win naval victories, and protect his own southern coasts, on which one hundred and twenty galleys of the Vikings were wrecked after an engage- ment with Alfred's formidable fleet. But whilst the King was in the far west, where he overcame the Danes at Exeter, a new body from the northeast burst into Wessex and planted themselves in Wiltshire. The Saxons were panic-stricken, and many fled over seas, whilst Alfred, with his body-guard, took refuge in the marshes of the Parret and entrenched himself, as in early days the Danes used to do, at Athelney in Som- ersetshire. Issuing from his stronghold, the King massed the levies of Somerset, Wilts, and Hampshire, and in the decisive battle of Eddington he overthrew the Danes with great slaughter, and drove them to their base at Chippenham. Here they were besieged and surrendered at discretion. Guthrum and thirty of his chiefs consented to be baptized. He took the name of Athelstan : they swore fealty to Alfred, and consented to withdraw to East Anglia and settle down in Norfolk and Suffolk. This Treaty of Wedmore in 878 was the foundation of Alfred's new settlement of England. It was a momentous date: the civilisation, THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 53 compound races, unity, and peace of our island all take their origin from this settlement, which was as states- manlike in conception as it was magnanimous in spirit. Alfred was now twenty-nine, and he had been King just seven years. He was already the darling of his people and the founder of our nation. He had now learned all the tactics of the Vikings, and he could beat them at their own manoeuvres. He now possessed sea power, and could meet them before they reached our shores ; and he used the years of peace to organise a navy far superior to theirs. Resisting the strong temptation to exterminate the heathen invaders whom he had beaten in a dozen fights, he induced them to make peace on advantageous terms, to become Chris- tian, to settle down on the land and take to fixed and civilised life instead of piracy and war, and he con- sented to their retaining the east and east centre of the kingdom north of Thames, out of which, indeed, they had driven Mercians and Anglians. Guthrum's East Anglia became a Christian " buffer-state " between the Vikings and Wessex ; and it has proved the nucleus of one of the stoutest and most important races in the complex history of Great Britain. Alfred now set to work with all the energy of his soul, and the insight of consummate genius to take care that the new and settled Danish race should not be disturbed or perverted by fresh heathen invaders. He laboured to develop his fleet, taking command of his ships in person, and he devised a new type of cruiser, — " long ships nigh twice as long as those 54 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED of the Danes, with sixty oars or more, steadier and swifter, as well as higher out of the water, on a design of his own, quite unlike that of Frisians or Danes." In one summer with his new warships he destroyed more than twenty Viking ships along the southern coast. But he saw the need for fortresses on land as well as for a navy at sea. He built a system of strong places, fencing in the towns and raising stockades at spots in the country. He rebuilt London by restor- ing the old Roman walls and filling it with a new colony of warlike settlers. It thus formed a post north of Thames which commanded the approach to Essex and East Anglia, as Calais in the fifteenth cen- tury commanded the entrance into France. Alfred had many wars in the last twenty years of his reign, but their whole character and strategy is altered. The invaders are continually stopped and dispersed at sea; they never capture any important town ; they are never able to post themselves firmly and occupy a district. They are in the true sense (not in the British official sense) " marauders " ; and they are driven backwards and forwards from Thames to the Exe, from Chester to Essex before the eagle swoop of the unwearied and invincible King. Alfred's most brilliant campaign, fought all across England, is diffi- cult indeed to explain, by reason of its rapid changes and great area. It was that which ended in 896, in the forty-seventh year of his life and the twenty-fifth of his reign. Along with his system of fortifications, Alfred re- THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 55 organised the militia of the kingdom, dividing it into a stationary or garrison part, and a mobilised and cam- paigning part. It was a rude anticipation of the feu- dal system of defensive war. At his accession the gallant Saxons had been a mere crowd of half-armed countrymen. In ten or fifteen years of war and of military organisation, Alfred had created the nucleus of a regular army, with adequate fortified bases, and something like a knighthood or chivalry, a rudimen- tary feudal militia. With this, in the later part of his reign, his campaigns are a series of decisive blows, his battles are crushing defeats of the enemy, and his command of the field is triumphant at every point. One of his most brilliant feats was capturing without ships a Danish fleet which had pushed up the river Lea. He barred the river, defended its banks with stockades, and forced the Vikings to escape by land, leaving behind them their ships. Since the capture of British ships by French cavalry on the ice in the great war, there has seldom been so singular an exploit. In fact during the later life of the King the Norsemen hardly ventured to trouble our island. They turned aside to Flanders, Normandy, and the coasts of the Continent. " For the last four years of his life," says Professor Oman, " Alfred was undisturbed save by trifling raids of small squadrons, which he brushed off with ease by means of the new fleet of ' great ships ' which he had built. The work of defence was done : Wessex was saved, and with Wessex the 56 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED English nationality. In a few years the King's gallant son, Edward the Elder, was to take the offensive against the old enemy, and to repay on the Danelagh all the evils that England had suffered during the miserable years of the ninth century. That such triumphs lay within his power was absolutely and entirely the work of his great father, who had turned defeat into victory, brought order out of chaos, and left the torn and riven kingdom that he had inherited transformed into the best organised and most powerful state in Western Europe." Is Alfred " a myth " now, I ask. It is true that some of the details of these campaigns are doubtful ; not a few are obscure to explain. But the whole of the points which I have briefly summarised are cer- tain and clear. They may dispute which Merton is meant, what Eddington now is, and why Alfred was beaten so soon after the battle of Ashdown. But all these things are unimportant. The essential facts are plain ; they are certain. And they are enough to raise Alfred as warrior to the same level as Henry V, or Cromwell, or Marlborough, — aye, almost as sea- man to the level of Blake and Nelson, for he grasped the idea of sea power and realised its decisive effects. And they raise him as statesman and founder of nations to the level of the Conqueror, and Edward I, or the Protector. They recast our nation. Alfred was its original creator. Turn to his achievements as king. When he came to the throne at twenty-two, having seen the death of his father and his three brothers within thirteen years, THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 57 it was the darkest hour of the West Saxons. North- umbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and parts of Wessex had been desolated ; the abbeys sacked ; schools, churches, homesteads in ruins. Northern, Central, and Eastern England was in possession of the Danes, and Wessex lay at their mercy ; " the people submitted to them, save King Alfred, — he with a little band withdrew into the woods and swamps." It was the gravest crisis to which England ever was exposed, for conquest by the ferocious pagans would have meant the postponement of British civilisation for ages. Once established in our island, the Danes would have been the scourge of Northern Europe. From this supreme disaster Alfred — and he alone — saved England, preserved Europe. No sooner had he settled Guthrum and his host at East Anglia, which secured the incorporation of a Norseman race with the Saxon and with England, than Alfred set to work to restore his desolated land. His treasury was empty, his towns were in ruins, civil government was paralysed. He built churches, ab- beys, schools ; he repeopled waste districts. He re- organised justice, making the judges the ministers of the sovereign, and subject to his final appeal. As legislator he recast and fused the Saxon, Anglian, and Kentish laws or "dooms," so that unity of civil law stimulated the fusion of central, eastern, and southern Anglo-Saxons. His system of laws, of which we have authentic records, which a learned German, Dr. Lieber- mann, has now edited with scholarly precision, is a 58 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED model of wise, cautious, and broad legal reform. He is full of anxiety not to make abrupt innovation, to impose nothing strange or unwelcome, and to enact no command which could not be maintained by public opinion. The restoration of London was a stroke of profound statecraft. By it he blocked the raids of the Norse- men up the Thames, by which they had been wont to penetrate into Surrey, Middlesex, and Berkshire. By it he obtained an impregnable fortress, north of Thames, by which he could control East Anglia. How little could he foresee what London was to become a thou- sand years after his time. Perhaps he might have doubted if he was wise, could he now return to earth to see all that this huge agglomeration of buildings has become. But the restoration of the ancient city, which the Roman historian describes as " especially famous for the crowd of its merchants and their wares " — the city which in Alfred's day counted nearly a thousand years of continuous life, but which had lain desolate for thirty-five years since its destruc- tion by the Norsemen about the time of Alfred's birth — the city which now counts nearly two thou- sand years of existence, and is now the vastest accumu- lation of men that has ever been recorded in authentic history — the restoration of London, I say, destined to be the barrier of the Danes and the gateway into Mercia, and finally the emporium of the world, was the master-stroke of a great far-seeing genius. He showed himself in the rest of his policy the THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 59 same far-sighted and organising creator of a new nation. The Christianised Danes of East Anglia soon learned to look with admiration and awe on his power. Alfred in the second half of his reign ruled over a compact state reaching from the Channel up into Southwestern England as far as Lancashire, with fortresses along the Thames, along the rivers of the west, and up to Chester on the north. English Mercia which he created and which was so admirably ruled by his able daughter Ethelfleda and her hus- band, Ethelred, formed a new buffer-state between the Danes of the Danelagh in East Anglia and the Britons of Cornwall and Wales. Alfred made no attempt formally to annex either Cornwall, or Wales, or East Anglia, or Northumbria. But his paramount influence over all was felt, and they recognised the supreme influence of the organic, civilised, progressive kingdom of Wessex. Alfred created for his descend- ants a united England not by conquest, not by fraud — but by wisdom, justice, and moral greatness. But the genius and serene humanity of Alfred was not content with our little island. He was European, Catholic, imperial, in the highest and purest meaning of these words. In truth, he recognised that the petty island of which he was the predominant chief needed to be sustained and vivified by the larger and more ancient culture of Southern Europe and even of the East. He who had been a boy at Rome, hallowed by the hand of the great Pope Leo IV, he who had crossed Europe twice, and had been at the Court of 60 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED the Frank king, the great grand-daughter of Charle- magne becoming his step-mother, used every means to connect our island with the culture of the Continent. He brought over learned men from France and Ger- many ; he sent constant missions and tribute to Rome ; he sent bold navigators to the North Cape and the Baltic; he was in communication with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and the better opinion is that he sent a mission to the Christian churches in India. East and West were filled with a profound impression of the lofty and religious enthusiasm of the West-Saxon king — the new Charlemagne of Britain who dreamed of an intellectual commerce between the ancient world and the new world, between the East and the West. This was to be a true imperialist — to found a world-wide empire of sympathy, knowledge, and ideas — not one of bloodshed, domination, and ruin. Alfred's energy and culture seem to have been of that general and encyclopaedic kind which marks only the greatest and rarest of mankind. War, hunt- ing, poetry, music, literature, architecture, mechanics, geography, law, prayer, and ceremonial seem alike to have employed his interests. He built churches, courts, schools, monasteries for men and for women ; he designed ships, lamps to read by, and machines to record the time. Only the other day at Oxford I had in my hand the very copy of the Pastoral Care which he sent to Worcester Cathedral, for he tells us he had one sent to each diocese in his kingdom ; and I handled that curious and perfect remnant of his per- THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 6 1 sonal effects — the Jewel, which, with enamel work and delicate gold filigree, bears the inscription — Al- fred had me worked. The precise form of his build- ings we know not. It is doubtful if a single stone of his actual construction remains, at least not any that is visible to-day. But the traditions, anecdotes, and things ascribed to the King, even if we can trust few particulars of them, exactly testify to the general belief in his extraordinary range of interest. Alfred lived in an age of very few books, of most meagre learning and of rudimentary simplicity of life — an age when a man of consummate genius and of inexhaustible energy could master almost everything of value that was to be known, and almost everything essential that had to be made or done. I doubt if recorded history tells of any men who in range of interest and variety of power were quite the equals of Alfred, unless it be Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Charles the Great, and perhaps Bonaparte. And if Julius, Alexander, and Bonaparte greatly surpassed Alfred in scientific ac- quirements, they were immeasurably inferior to him in grace of nature and beauty of soul. And if the mighty Charles towered above Alfred in force and in breadth of space, he could not compare with the West- Saxon saint in exquisite purity or in spiritual eleva- tion. Alfred, it is truly said, was the only perfect man of action in the annals of mankind. It is in his own writings that we know the true Alfred best. Julius and Bonaparte have left us memoirs of themselves more ample than Alfred's ; but neither 62 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED of them open to us their own souls with such candour and truth. The authentic writings of our King are ample to shew us how he looked on the world, on his duty, on his aspirations, and on his Creator. No man has left us his thoughts with such entire openness of heart, if it be not St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Marcus Aurelius, or King David. The so-called Boetbius of Alfred, one third of which are his own original meditations, is as beautiful in expression as it is noble in thought. It is certain that these are the genuine words of the royal saint. And neither ancient moralist nor scriptural homily has ever exceeded them in dignity and elevation. Listen to these words : — " Power is never a good thing save its possessor be good ; for when power is beneficent, this is due to the man who wields it. Therefore it is that a man never by his authority attains to virtue and excellence, but by reason of his virtue and excellence he attains to authority and power. No man is better for his power, but for his skill he is good, if he is good, and for his skill he is worthy of power, if he is worthy of it. Study Wisdom then, and when ye have learned it, contemn it not, for I tell you that by its means ye may with- out fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it. Ye need not take thought for power nor endeavour after it ; for if ye are only wise and good, it will follow you, even though ye seek it not. Tell me now, O Mind, what is the height of thy desire in wealth and power ? Is it not this present life and the perishable wealth that we before spoke of? O ye foolish men, do ye know what riches are, and power, and worldly weal ? They are your lords and rulers, not ye theirs." THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 63 This is how the King understands his own royal office. He says : — " O Philosophy, thou knowest that I never greatly delighted in the possession of earthly power, nor longed for this author- ity, but I desired instruments and materials to carry out the work I was set to do, which was that I should virtuously and fittingly administer the authority committed to me. Now, no man, as thou knowest, can get full play for his natural gifts, nor conduct and administer government, unless he hath fit tools, and the raw material to work upon. By material I mean that which is necessary to the exercise of natural powers ; thus a king's raw material and instruments of rule are a well-peopled land, and he must have men of prayer, men of war, and men of work. As thou knowest, without these tools no king may display his special talent. ... I have desired material for the exercise of government that my talents and my power might not be forgotten, for every good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if Wisdom be not in them. Without Wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill. To sum up all, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me my memory in good works." That memory in good works of the Saxon hero has now lasted a thousand years after his death ; and is more definite, more inspiring, more sacred to us to-day than it has ever been in the ten centuries through which it has survived. Shall we, the hundred millions on both sides of the Atlantic who speak the tongue 64 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED that Alfred spoke, who are of the same blood and kindred, suffer to fade away the memory of one who was the noblest type of our race and traditions. In this age of Progress and of never-ending pursuit of new things, new men, new ideas, we feel ever more and more in the bottom of our minds, the need to base these on just traditions of the Past. Ours is the age of Progress; but it is also the age of History, and of due commemoration of all that in the Past has been surest, purest, and best. Ours is an age of Hero-worship in the true and wise sense of the term, the reverent honour of our real teachers, founders, and chiefs. To a nation the quality of its Ideals are every- thing — the Ideals are more vital to a people than they are to a man ; for he has personal and individual models before him from his youth. By Ideals I mean that which a people admires and seeks to imitate, to reproduce, to follow. The intellectual, spiritual, scientific heroes of our nation and race receive, as it is, abundant honour and consideration. The Shakespeares and Miltons, the Newtons and the Darwins, the Gregorys and the Ber- nards are amply remembered. But the kings, warriors, and statesmen too often bring divisions of nation, creed, and school of opinion. The Richelieus and the Cromwells, the Fredericks and the Bonapartes, even the Turgots and the Washingtons have left some memories of strife and defeat behind them. There is hardly in all modern history a name which does not rouse some embers of passion in one or other quarter THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 65 of those who suffered at the hand of the soldier or the ruler. The name of Alfred can awaken no mem- ory but one of gratitude and affection. It is bound up with no struggle of Protestant against Catholic, or of Celt against Saxon, of people against king, of reformer against reactionist, of rich against poor, of weak against the strong. His memory is one record of unsullied beneficence, of piety without super- stition, of valour without cruelty, of government with- out oppression. Without hyperbole, without boasting, we may say that it is the most ancient, the most continuous, the most definite memory in all Christian history. If that of the Catholic church and of its founders and chiefs is more ancient and also more extended, it is the memory of an institution and its influence and effects are less locally defined. If the memory of Charlemagne is grander and more diffused, the se- quence of his authority is more broken and dispersed. But the unbroken effect of Alfred's life and work can be traced with precision over a thousand years, and for another thousand years, we may predict, it will continue to flourish and enlarge. How vast is this antiquity of tradition compared with anything in modern history. It is but two years ago that the great Republic of the West celebrated the first centenary of their immortal founder's death — George Washington. The French Republic celebrated its first centenary just twelve years ago. The king- dom of Italy is forty years old. The German Empire 66 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED is thirty years old ; and it has just been celebrating the second centenary of the kingdom of Prussia in 1701. The second centenary! Why! Alfred, at his birth, had a royal descent from kings of the West- Saxons of nearly four centuries ; and we now count ten centuries more since his death. The blood of Alfred has descended from generation to generation in thirty-three degrees down to King Edward the Seventh, who can trace his ancestry and his throne in a long succession of nearly fourteen centuries up to the first Saxon conquerors of our island. I set as little store as Alfred himself by mere antiquity of birth — (high birth is of the mind, he says, not of the flesh) — nor do I rate extravagantly mere effluxion of time. But the historic imagination confers a halo on exalted virtue and genius when it finds it charged with tre- mendous responsibilities and tasks, when it is mellowed by the veil of a venerable antiquity of age. The thousandth year of such a memory ought not to pass without a commemoration worthy of such a name. Of the walls which he raised, the halls wherein he dwelt, the churches and the towers that he built, it is difficult to-day to trace more than a few stones. His tomb even was twice removed, and at last was laid in a new abbey some distance from the spot where his people laid it. We have sought sorrowing the place where our hero was laid. In the last cen- tury the very spot where his coffin was placed could have been identified. But rather more than a hundred years ago the very foundations of Hyde Abbey were THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 67 removed. And to-day no man can tell us where the dust of the noblest of Englishmen was scattered. I have searched the spot in vain, though I believe that the very acre of ground in which that sacred dust still rests can still with certainty be traced. But Win- chester, the home and capital of the hero-king of Wessex, will not forget him. And in a few months the grandest colossal statue in our country will be set up hard by the foundation of his castle and his church ; and it will bear witness for ages to come that English- men have not yet forgotten the founder of their national greatness and the noblest soul that England ever bore. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED d. 901 The Writings of King Alfred (Died 901) Address given at Harvard College, Mass., March, 1901 In the great days of antique culture, when the citizen of Athens, coming from the Academus or the Stoa, found himself in the Museum of Alexandria, or in the schools of Syracuse, Magna Grascia, Asia Minor, or Tyre, he felt that he was still in his own country, both intellectually and morally, whatever might be the state or nation to which he had trav- elled. He and his guests spoke but one language, shared the same civilisation, and had in common the same immortal literature. And now, a son of Oxford or Cambridge in the old island feels himself at home, amongst his own people and fellow-students, when he is welcomed at Harvard of the new continent. We all have but one language, the tongue now spoken by 130,000,000 of civilised men ; and we have the same literature, the noblest literature of the modern world. And so, when I was honoured with the invitation to address you, I be- thought me I would speak to you of the rise of that literature which is our common heritage, which more than race, or institutions, or manners and habits, makes us all one — which is far the richest, the most con- b 71 7 2 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED tinuous, the most virile evolution of human genius in the records of Christendom. I call to mind also that this year is the millenary or thousandth anniversary of the death, in 901, of Alfred the West Saxon King, 1 who is undoubtedly the founder of a regular prose literature, as of so many other English institutions and ways. Could there be a fitter theme for an English man of letters in an American seat of learning ? There was nothing in- sular about Alfred ; he was not British ; he was not feudal ; his memory is not stained by any crime done in the struggles of nation, politics, or religion. He lived ages before " Great Britain " was invented, mainly, I believe, in order to humour our Scotch brother-citizens ; ages before Protestantism divided Christendom ; ages before kingship ceased to be useful and republics began to be normal. Alfred was never King of England : he lived and died King of the West Saxons, the ances- tral head of a Saxon clan. He and his people were just as much your ancestors as they were mine, for all we can say is, that the 130,000,000 who speak our Anglo-Saxon tongue have all a fairly equal claim to look on him as the heroic leader of our remote fore- fathers. 2 1 The year 901 is accepted by historians as the date of Alfred's death. Recent research by competent paleographers has made it more probable that he died in 899 or 900. See articles and letters in the English Historical Review, Athenaum, etc. The Millenary Commemoration Committee decided not to enter on the debated prob- lem, but to adhere to the date generally recognised when the committee was formed. 2 A large representative committee, of which the King is patron, was formed in 1898 to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of Alfred's death. A grand colos- THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 7J But I wish now to speak of Alfred not as our father in blood, or in nation, but as the real father of native prose, that common inheritance of us all, which, after a thousand years of fertility, has lost none of its vigour, its purity, and its wealth. The thousandth anniver- sary of his death has aroused new attention to his work, and has produced some important books to which I will direct your notice. Of Alfred the man, the warrior, the statesman, the hero, the saint, I will not now speak. In each of these characters he was perfect, — the purest, grandest, most heroic soul that ever sprang from our race. It is only of Alfred the writer of books, the creator of Saxon prose, that I wish to speak. He was indeed one of those rare rulers of men who trust to the book as much as to the sword, who value the school more than the court, who believe in no force but the force of thought and of truth. In that noble and pathetic preface to his Pastoral Care, Alfred himself has told us how and why he carried through the restoration of learning in his church and people. When the first long struggle with the Danes was over, he found his kingdom desolate, and ignorance universal. There was not one, he says, on this side of Humber who could understand their mass-book or put a letter from Latin into Eng- sal statue by Mr. Hamo Thorneycroft, R. A., is now being raised at Winchester, where he lived and died, by British and American subscribers. The Hon. Secretary of the English committee is Mr. Alfred Bowker, Mayor of Winchester. The Hon. Treasurer is Lord Avebury, of Robarts, Lubbock & Co., Lombard Street, London. 74 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED lish. He groaned to think how learning had flourished before the great invasion. He wondered how the good and wise men of old had omitted to translate their Latin books into English, so that the people might read them and hear them read. He supposes they could not believe that learning would die down so utterly. And so the great King set himself to work with all the fire of one who was both hero and genius to the twofold task, first, to restore learning and found a national education, and secondly to put the great books of the world into the mother-tongue of his people. For the first, he gathered round him scholars from all parts, without distinction of country or race, Welsh, Celts, Mercians, Flemings, Westphalians, as well as men of Wessex and Kent. The second task he undertook himself. Having mastered Latin late in manhood after strenuous toil, he became the first of translators, and in so doing he founded a prose literature. As a boy, Alfred had shown his zest for study. He had been taken to Rome and to the Court of the Frank King. 1 But from the age of eighteen he was occupied for twenty years with desperate wars and the reorganisation of his kingdom. It was not until he had been king sixteen years, and was thirty- eight years old, that he found himself free for literary work. That he did all this, as he tells us with stately 1 I incline to think that when Ethelwulf sent the boy to Rome at the age of four, Alfred remained there for perhaps over two years till his father brought him back ; and, though he did not learn to read, his childish mind was filled with what he there heard of antiquity and of the Christian world. The fact that his name appears in charters when he was five does not convince me. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 75 pathos, " in the various and manifold worldly cares that oft troubled him both in mind and in body," is to me one of the most mysterious tales of intellectual passion in the history of human thought. It places him in the rare rank of those warriors and rulers who, amidst all the battle of their lives, have left the world imperishable works of their own composition, such as did David, Julius Caesar, and Marcus Aurelius. 1 The works of Alfred are numerous, important, and admirably chosen. 2 His Handbook — a sort of antho- logy or golden treasury of fine thoughts which he col- lected whilst Asser was reading to him and teaching him to translate — has utterly perished, though Will- iam of Malmesbury, two centuries later, used and cited it. Ah ! how many libraries of volumes would we will- ingly lose to-day if time would give up to us from its Lethean maw that well-thumbed book, " about the size of a Psalter," that the holy king was wont to keep in his bosom : the book wherein from day to day he noted down in English some great thought that had im- pressed him in his studies. 1 See Pauli. Life of Alfred the Great, 1 851, translated by B. Thorpe, Bonn's Ecclesiastical Library, 1857, with text and translation of the Orosius ; also the Jubilee Edition of Alfred's Works, 185 2- 1853. The latest account of Alfred's career as king, warrior, lawgiver, scholar, and author is to be found in the volume published by the Alfred Commemoration Committee. Alfred the Great (Adam and Charles Black), London, 1899. 8vo. 2 For the writings of King Alfred, consult the work just referred to and the essays therein of the Bishop of Bristol, and Rev. Professor Earle ; also see Mr. Stopford Brooke's English Literature to the Norman Conquest. Macmillan & Co., I 898. 8vo. Chapter xiv, and R. P. Wiilker's Grundriss sur Geschichte der Angelsdcbsiscben Lit- teratur. y6 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED After his personal Handbook of thoughts came Al- fred's Laws, 1 which we possess intact in several ver- sions. This book for literary purposes is interesting only by its preface, evidently dictated by the King him- self. Here we have in a sentence that spirit of order, of simplicity, of modesty, of self-control, of respect for public opinion, of reverence for the past time, and of solemn consideration of the times to come, which stamps the whole career of Alfred as ruler. " I, Alfred the King, gathered these laws together and ordered many to be written which our forefathers held, such as I approved ; and many which I approved not I rejected, and had other ordinances enacted with the counsel of my Witan ; for I dared not venture to set much of my own upon the Statuteibook, for I knew not what might be approved by those who should come after us. But such ordinances as I found, either in the time of my kinsman Ina, or of OfFa, King of the Mercians, or of Ethelberht, who first received baptism in England — such as seemed to me rightest I have collected here, and the rest I have let drop. I, then, Alfred, King of the West Saxons, showed these laws to all my Witan, and they then said that they all approved of them as proper to be holden." There spoke the soul of the true conservative, moder- ate, and far-seeing chief of a free people, a creator of states, such as were Solon and Servius in antiquity ; such as were, in later days, some adored chief of a free people, a William the Silent, or a George Washington. The books of which Alfred is certainly and strictly 1 Dr. Felix Liebermann's Gesefze der Angehacbsen, 1898, etc. 4-to. The latest critical edition of the Saxon laws j also see the essay, in the joint volume, by Professor Sir Frederick Pollock. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 77 the author are five in number ; all translations or adap- tations from the Latin, and all typical works of standard authority. They were evidently selected with a broad and discerning judgment. Alfred's mind was essen- tially historic and cosmopolitan. So he began with the standard text-book of general history, the work of St. Augustine's disciple and colleague, Orosius, of the fifth century. Alfred again was preeminently the patriot — the parens patriae. And accordingly he chose the History of the Church in England^ or rather the Christian history of the Anglo-Saxon federation, by the Venerable Bede, to give his people the annals of their own ancestors. Alfred again felt a prime need of restoring the church in knowledge and in zeal. And so he translated the famous Pastoral Care of Gregory the Great — the accepted manual for training to the priestly office. A second work of Pope Greg- ory which he translated was the Dialogues, a collection of popular tales. Lastly, came the translation, para- phrase, or recasting of Boethius's Consolation of Phi- losophy — far the most original and important of all Alfred's writings. He thus provided (i) a history of the world, (2) a history of his own country, (3) a text- book of education of the priesthood, (4) a people's story book, (5) moral and religious meditations. I will speak of each of these, but principally of the last, the BoethiuSy which, by its originality and its beauty, gives us far the truest insight into the inner faith and the literary genius of the King. There were some other works in which his impulse 78 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED is seen, but where his actual hand is not certainly to be proved. First and foremost comes the Saxon Chronicle? the most authentic and important record of its youth which any modern nation possesses. Dur- ing the active life of Alfred this yearly record of events is undoubtedly of contemporaneous authorship ; and for the most important years of Alfred's reign it is very full and keenly interesting. The evidence is conclusive that the King gave the most powerful stimulus to the compilation of the record, and thus was the founder of a systematic history of our country ; for we may truly say that no error of the least importance has ever been proven against the Chronicle, which is properly regarded as the touchstone of historic veracity to which all other annals are submitted. It is to my judgment clear that the history of the wars with the Danes as told in the Chronicle was prepared under the personal direction of the chief himself, if it was not actually dictated by his lips. The King is said to have begun a translation of the Psalms of David, which was cut short by his death ; but of these we have no known copy. The Soliloquies of St. Augustine 3 is of his age, and has been imputed to his authorship. I incline to the belief that the preface is his own work, and that he superintended, if he did not execute, the translation. The same may 1 Saxon Chronicle. Text of all manuscripts and translation by B. Thorpe. Rolls Series, 18 61. 2 Soliloquies of St. Augustine. Text in The Shrine, by Rev. T. Oswald Cockayne, 1 8 64-1 8 70. 8vo. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 79 be the truth of the Book of Martyrs} Lastly, there is the King's Testament, which, though highly interest- ing, is hardly a literary composition. No one accepts the authenticity of the Proverbs of Alfred, composed some centuries later, nor do we attribute to him the translation of the Fables of Aisop, nor the treatise on Falconry. But these and some other works that are ascribed to him testify to the belief of ages long after his death that his literary activity was of wide range and of permanent value. After studying the arguments of the Anglo-Saxon scholars about the order of time in the composition of these works, I incline to the view of Mr. Stopford Brooke in his History of English Literature to the Norman Conquest, 1898. He makes the order this, — the Pastoral Care, the Bede, the Orosius, and lastly the Boethius. This, at least, is the order I shall adopt ; and it certainly lends itself best to the literary estimate. Most authorities put the Boethius earlier. But we must not rely too exclusively on paleography and dia- lectic variations in this matter. Paleographists and the dialect experts wage incessantly their own civil wars, and I am not always ready to swear fealty to the victor or the survivor of the hour. 2 A consen- sus of paleographists and experts in dialect is conclu- sive, or conclusive as far as it goes. But until we know all the circumstances under which a given manuscript was written, I am not prepared to surrender my own 1 Book of Martyrs. Text in The Shrine. 2 Wiilker (op. cit. ) g4ves a table of these differences amongst the editors. SO THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED common sense. There is a historical and a literary flair in these things, which ought not to be lightly distrusted, unless contradicted by indisputable written proof. We have no reason to suppose that Alfred wrote much, or even at all, with his own hand. Most great men of action dictate, and do not hold the pen. And the fact that a given manuscript has traces of a Mercian or a Northumbrian dialect is no sufficient proof that it could not be Alfred's work, unless we can prove that no Mercian, no Northumbrian, ever copied a book which Alfred had dictated, composed, or directed to be written. The naif and pathetic preface to the Pastoral Care 1 of Pope Gregory the Great is unquestionably the King's own work, and is a touching revelation of his intense love for his native land and his passion to give his people a higher education. I cannot read that simple outpouring of soul by the great reformer without seeing the confession that it was a most urgent task, and his own first attempt at translating ; and thus I judge it to come next after his Handbook and his Laws. It was natural that a great and systematic restorer of learning should begin with the training of those who were to teach. And thus Alfred's first great literary work was the translation of the standard manual for the education of the clergy and of other scholars. He would often meditate, he says, what wise men, what happy times there were of old in 1 Cum Pastoralis. Text and translation, edited by H. Sweet. Early English Text Society, 1 8 71. 8vo. For the preface, see Stopford Brooke, op. cit., p. 24. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 8 1 England, how kings preserved peace, morality, and order at home, and enlarged their borders without, how foreigners came to the land in search of wisdom and instruction. Now, he groans out, all is changed, and in these days of war and distress hardly a man could read a Latin book. And yet, he adds, what punishments would come upon us if we neither loved wisdom nor suffered other men to obtain it: we should love the name only of Christian, and very few of the virtues. Then he goes on to speak of the ravages and burnings of the Danes, how the few books left were in Latin, and how few Englishmen could read that tongue. "Therefore," he says, "it seems better to me to translate some books, which are most needful for all men to know, into the language which we can all understand. And this I would have you do, if we can preserve peace, to set all the youth now in Eng- land of free men, whose circumstances enable them to devote themselves to it, to learn as long as they are not old enough for other occupations, until they are well able to read English writing." Here was a scheme of primary education for the people, education which was not made effective in our country until my own lifetime. And then he goes on to the higher education, ordaining that " those be afterwards taught more in the Latin language who are to continue learn- ing and be promoted to a higher rank." Next, he tells us how he began "among other various and manifold troubles of this kingdom to translate into English the book which is called in Latin Pastoralis, 82 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED and in English Shepherd's Book, sometimes word for word, and sometimes according to the sense, as I had learnt it from Plegmund, my Archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and Grimbold, my mass-priest, and John, my mass-priest. And when I had learnt it, as I could best understand it, and as I could most clearly interpret it, I translated it into English; and I will send a copy to every bishopric in my kingdom." Here, then, is a great ruler, more than a thousand years ago, when the area and population of his own country were far below those of a state of the Union, when their very existence was at stake, and they were surrounded by ferocious invaders, who designs a scheme for primary and superior education, and restores the church and the schools. Here is the man who began, and certainly had he been longer lived and enjoyed peace, might have carried through, the translation of the Bible, seven centuries before it was actually accom- plished. There is a most fascinating relic connected with this very work. The Bodleian Library at Oxford pos- sesses the very copy which the King sent to Worces- ter. It is inscribed ©eos Boc Sceal To Wiogara Ceastre, i.e. This book shall (go) to Worcester} I saw it when I was last in Oxford. And when I took in my own hands the very copy of his toil which Al- fred a thousand years ago sent with his greeting to his Bishop at Worcester, which he solemnly commanded in the name of God no man should remove from the Minster ; when I held in my hand in the Ashmolean 1 Bodleian Library. Manuscripts. Hatton, 20. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 83 Museum 1 the very jewel which the King had made for himself (perhaps to bear upon his sceptre) inscribed, — Mlfred had me worked^ — I felt something of that thrill which men of old felt when they kissed a frag- ment of the true cross, or which the Romans felt when they saluted the Sibylline books. If to-day we fall short in the power of mystical imagination, our saner relic- worship is founded upon history, scholarship, and jeal- ous searching into the minutest footprints of the past. Of the Dialogues of Gregory, we need say little, for the translation as yet exists only in three manuscripts. But I follow the view of Professor Earle, that the book is the King's work, as the characteristic preface most obviously is. 2 " I, Alfred," it runs, " by the grace of God, dignified with the honour of royalty, have under- stood and have often heard from reading holy books that we to whom God hath given so much eminence of worldly distinction, have peculiar need at times to humble and subdue our minds to the divine and spir- itual law, in the midst of this earthly anxiety : " . . . " that I may now and then contemplate the heavenly things in the midst of these earthly troubles." In the Pastoral Care the King carefully followed the text of the Latin, neither adding nor omitting any- thing in a revered book of such authority by the spir- itual founder of Saxon Christianity. And in a first essay he proceeded with scrupulous attention to his 1 Now deposited in the Taylor Museum, Oxford, and described in a new work by Professor Earle — The Alfred Jeioel, an Historical Essay. 190 1. Clarendon Press. Cr. 8vo. 2 Professor Earle' s essay in joint volume, p. 198. 84 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED original. As he advanced in scholarship and literary skill, he became much more free, until in the Boethius he uses the Latin almost as a text for his own medita- tions. In the translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical His- tory? Alfred omits many sections, of which he gives a list ; but he adds nothing, although there were many points as to the history of Wessex wherein he might have corrected and supplemented Bede's meagre state- ments. The translation keeps fairly well to the origi- nal, but it has no special literary value. The next translation of the King was the History of the World by Orosius, 2 which St. Augustine suggested as a com- panion to his own argument, in the City of God, that the wars and desolation of the Roman world were not caused by the spread of the Gospel. It was the only book known in the Middle Ages as a universal his- tory, and it was as such that Alfred put it forth. But, as his object was essentially to educate, he adds full explanations of matters which Saxons would not easily follow, and his very elaborate additions on geography, the topography of the German peoples, the account of the Baltic and Scandinavia by the Norseman, Ohthere, have a freshness, a distinctness, and precision which pe- culiarly stamp the organising and eager grasp of a born explorer, who believed with the Prophet — " many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." 1 Baeda's Ecclesiastical History. Text and modern English, by T. Miller (E. E. Text Society), 1890-1898. 2 Orosius. Text and Latin by H. Sweet (E. E. Text Society), and also by Thorpe, in Pauli's Life, translated. See Note I, p. 75. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 85 We come now to Alfred's Boethius, far the most important work of his pen. It is almost an original treatise, so great are the variations, additions to, and omissions from the Latin text. Whole chapters are dropped by the translator, and page after page of new thoughts are inserted. Some idea of the extent of this paraphrasing may be got, when we find the first twelve pages of the Latin compressed into two of Alfred's, and nearly the whole of the last book of the Latin, occupying fifteen octavo pages, dropped altogether, and new matter of the King's, filling nine pages, in- serted. Alfred took the Meditations of Boethius as a standard text-book of moral and religious thought, and he uses it as the basis of his own musings upon man, the world, and God. Alfred intends his book to be for the edification of his own people. And, ac- cordingly, he drops most of the classical philosophy ; expands and explains the mythological and poetic allu- sions ; and changes the Platonic theism of Boethius into Biblical and Christian divinity. The transforma- tion is astonishing. As we read the Latin we find it difficult to understand why a book so abstract, and in places so metaphysical and technical, held the world of European culture for a thousand years down to the age of Shakespeare. But, when we turn to Alfred's piece, we are in the world of those poignant searchings of heart which pervade the Psalms of David, the Imi- tation of Christ, and the devotional books of Jeremy Taylor. The millenary commemoration of the King has 86 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED drawn fresh attention both to Boethius and to Alfred's translation, and we may say that it is only in recent years that we have had adequate studies of both. Dr. Hodgkin's Italy and her Invaders and Mr. Stewart's excellent volume on Boethius 1 have collected in con- venient form almost everything that is known about the Roman philosopher. And quite lately Mr. Sedge- field, of Melbourne and Cambridge universities, has published two books on Alfred's version : the first, a critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon text from the manuscript with a Glossary, the second a version in modern English prose, and an alliterative version of the metres. 2 Both the text and the modern rendering by Mr. Sedgefield are an immense improvement both in accuracy, scholarship, and elegance on the earlier edi- tions whether of the old or the new versions. And it is only now, by Mr. Sedgefield's aid, and with the essays by the Bishop of Bristol and Professor Earle in the recent volume Alfred the Great, 1899, edited by the Hon. Secretary of the Millenary Commemora- tion Committee, and with Mr. Stopford Brooke's excellent chapter in his book already cited, that the real power of Alfred's work can be fully understood by the general reader. This is not the occasion to enlarge on the story of 1 Italy and her Invaders, by Dr. T. Hodgkin, second edition, 1896. Vol. Ill, chap. xii. Oxford University Press. Boethius. An essay by Hugh Fraser Stewart, 1 89 1. 8vo. 2 King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius de Consolatione Philosopbia, by Walter J. Sedgefield, Oxford University Press, 1899, and King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius, done into Modern English, by the same. Oxford University Press, 1900. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 87 Boethius himself, or the strange fortune of his famous book. Dr. Hodgkin has given good reason to think that his political career was not one of such perfect loyalty and wisdom. And, if Alfred's introduction and zealous defence of him contains, as is probable, the church tradition about his life and death, Theodoric might fairly regard him as an enemy and a traitor. The King tells us that Boethius cast about within himself how he might wrest the sovereignty from the unrighteous King of the Goths, and that he sent word privily to the Caesar at Constantinople to help the Romans back to their Christian faith and their old laws. If Theodoric had grounds to believe that Boethius was really taking part in a conspiracy to urge the Eastern emperor to do what, in the next generation, Justinian did when he destroyed the Gothic kingdom in Italy, he would naturally treat the great Roman chief of the senate as a conspirator. It is not so im- probable that the story, which Alfred may have heard at Rome itself not more than three hundred years after the fall of the Gothic kingdom, and which he treats as ample justification of Boethius, was the true story, or, if greatly exaggerated, still having a substantial basis in fact. If so, Theodoric did not suddenly be- come a ferocious tyrant ; and St. Severinus, as Boe- thius was called in the church, lost his life and liberty in an abortive and very dangerous clerical conspiracy to destroy the Goths and restore Italy to the Greek empire. But the special point to which I wish to call your 88 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED attention is the literary beauty of Alfred's own work. I estimate that about one-quarter of the whole book is original matter and not translation. There are seldom two consecutive pages in which new matter does not occur ; and there are nine consecutive pages, in Mr. Sedgefield's editions both of the Saxon and the modern English, which are Alfred's original, so that we are well able to judge both matter and form of the King's work. Indeed, the Consolations of Alfred differ from that of Boethius as much as the Confessions of St. Augustine differ from the ethical Treatises of Seneca. The Consolation of Philosophy seems to have had a curious attraction for translators in many languages. Mr. Stewart (in his sixth chapter) has given an inter- esting account of a great many of these, both English and foreign. The list of them fills many pages in the British Museum Catalogue. Mr. Sedgefield gives a long account of English translations in prose and verse, beginning with Chaucer, just five hundred years after Alfred, and continuing down to that of H. R. James in 1897. In all, Mr. Sedgefield gives speci- mens of no less than fourteen versions, from Chaucer to the present day, of which five are in prose. The most interesting of these versions are the two in prose : one by Chaucer at the end of the fourteenth century, one by our Queen Elizabeth at the end of the sixteenth cen- tury. We have thus ample opportunity for comparing the work of Alfred with that of other translators in the course of no less than five centuries. And I cannot withhold my own deliberate conviction that, as THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 89 prose literature, the version of Alfred, in its simplicity, dignity, and power, is a finer type than any of the successors. This is truly wonderful when we remember that the first translation is that of our great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. But poets do not always write fine prose ; and in the fourteenth century English prose was in a conglomerate and formless state. I will illustrate this by one or two instances, setting Alfred's prose beside that of Chaucer. Of course, to make myself intelligible, I shall transliterate Alfred's Anglo-Saxon into current English, using Mr. Sedgefield's admirable version. But this version is not really a translation. It follows the words of Alfred punctiliously, often changing nothing or little in the order, and removing little but the terminals and archaic forms of the words. This is transliteration, but not translation. I need not go into the question whether Alfred's Anglo-Saxon is English. He calls it English, and in spite of differ- ences of construction, syntax, grammar, and vocables, it is the basis of English : perhaps two-thirds of it closely akin to some English dialects as spoken within a few centuries ago. The fact that the ordinary Eng- lish reader cannot read a line of it, is not conclusive. He cannot read a line of Layamon's Brut or the Ancren Riwle, 1 both about a century and a half after the Con- quest ; nor indeed could he read a paragraph written phonetically in pure Scottish or Yorkshire dialect. 1 Specimens of Early English, by Morris & Skeat Oxford University Press. 90 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED I shall not enter on the question whether Alfred is the founder of English prose. Alfred certainly wrote or dictated a fine, organic, rhythmical prose in the mother-tongue used by himself and his people in the southwest and centre of England. Three-fourths of the words in that tongue survive in some altered form in English speech and its dialectic varieties. Whether it be the same language as English, depends on what we mean by that phrase. Grammar, syntax, pronunci- ation, have changed. The words mostly remain under modern disguises. I am not satisfied by the trenchant decision of Professor Marsh [Origin and History of the English Language). I prefer the views of Skeat, Morris, Earle, Green, and Stopford Brooke. I do not say as they do, that Alfred founded English prose. But in any case, he founded a prose in the language which is the basis of English. I now give parallel passages from Alfred and from Chaucer. I take first Alfred's rendering of the fifth metre of Boethius's first book : the grand hymn — O stelliferi conditor orbis. Alfred's prose version is this, using always Mr. Sedgefield : — " O thou Creator of heaven and earth, that rulest on the eternal throne, Thou that makest the heavens to turn in swift course, and the stars to obey Thee, and the sun with his shin- ing beams to quench the darkness of black night : — (I omit four lines) Thou that givest short hours to the days of winter, and longer ones to those of summer, Thou that in harvest-tide with the strong North-east wind spoilest the trees of their leaves, and again in lenten-tide givest them fresh ones with THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 91 the soft south-west winds, lo ! all creatures do Thy will, and keep the ordinances of Thy commandments, save man only ; he setteth Thee at naught." (Sedgefield, p. 5.) Now here we have rhythm, force, dignity, and purity of phrase. This is fine literary prose — as Mr. Stewart well says, " his prose is informed with intensity and fire, and possesses all the vigour and swing of verse." Or, as Professor Earle says, it has " a very genuine elevation without strain or effort." It is true that in Mr. Sedgefield's English the order of words and the terminations are varied ; but the original has to my ear the same fine roll : — Eala thu scippend heofenes and eorthan, thu the on tha ecan setle ricsast, thu the on hroedum foerelde thone heofon ymbhweorfest, and tha tunglu thu gedest the rsume gehy I now turn to Chaucer's 3 prose version of the same passage, modernising the orthography : — " O thou maker of the wheel that beareth the stars, which that art fastened to thy perdurable chair, and turnest the heaven with a ravishing sway, and constrainest the stars to suffer thy law; so that the moon sometime shining with her full horns, meeting with all the beams of the sun, her brother, hideth the stars that be less ; and sometime, when the moon, pale with her dark horns, approacheth the sun, loseth her lights : . . . Thou restrainest the day by shorter dwelling, n the time of cold winter that maketh the leaves to fall. 1 Sedgefield's Anglo-Saxon text, p. 10. 2 The Complete Works of Chaucer, by W. W. Skeat, D.C.L. Seven volumes. 8vo. Oxford University Press, 1 894-1 897, Vol. II, p. 16. 92 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED Thou dividest the swift tides of the night, when the hot summer is come. Thy might attempereth the variant seasons of the year ; so that Zephyrus, the debonair wind, bringeth again in the first summer season the leaves that the wind hight Boreas hath reft away in autumn, that is to say, in the last end of summer. There is nothing unbound from his old law, nor forsakes the work of his proper estate. O thou governour governing all things by certain end, why refusest thou only to govern the works of men by due manner." Let us turn to the version of Queen Elizabeth, made exactly two centuries later : — *« O framer of starry circle who leaning to the lasting groundstone With whirling blast heavens turnest and Law compellst the skies to bear, Now that with full horn, meeting all her brother's flames the lesser stars the moon dims Now dark and pale her horn." 1 But I cannot inflict on you any more of her Majesty's doggrel. She should have sent for Spenser or Shake- speare to help her, if she was bent on poetry. Here is a specimen of the Queen's prose : — " This, when with continual woe I had burst out, seeing her with mild countenance nothing moved by my moans : ' When thee,' quoth she, ' sad and wailing I saw, straight a wretch and exile I knew thee, but how far off thy banishment was, but that thou toldest, I knew not.' " What a rigmarole in Queen's English ! A question 1 Elizabeth's Boetbius (E. E. Text Society, 1899). Manuscripts Record Office, Domestic Elizabeth, 289. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 93 may be asked — how can it be that the Saxon of Alfred in the ninth century can bear any comparison with the English of Chaucer in the fourteenth century, much less with the prose in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Hooker in the sixteenth century? The answer I think is this. The old English of Alfred was a very simple, perfectly pure, and unmixed dialect of the great Gothic family of languages, of the Low- German class. It is homogeneous, with a limited vocabulary, using case endings like Latin, and not many prepositions. It was an easy instrument to wield, and a man of genius, nurtured in the poetry of centuries could at once become master of it. In the age of Chaucer, English had become much in- creased in its vocabulary ; thousands of French and Latin words were being assimilated or tried; the struc- tural form had been changed ; and English prose was in a chaotic state, a state of solution. Chaucer's prose is immeasurably inferior to his verse. He did make a verse rendering of the fifth metre of Book II — Felix nimium ■prior aetas 1 which makes us long that he had translated Boethius's whole work into poetry, not into prose. Prose, as every one knows, is a plant of much slower growth than poetry. I am prepared to say it is more difficult, and in its highest flights a gift far more rare. And even in the age of Elizabeth, seven hundred years after Alfred, English prose was 1 Given by Skeat in his Chaucer, Vol. I, p. 380. Slightly modernised it runs : — " A blissful life, a peaceful and a sweet, Ledden the peoples in a former age — " 94 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED only becoming perfectly organic in the hands of Hooker and Bacon. But my purpose was not to make comparisons, but to direct attention to the dignity and beauty of Alfred's own thoughts. And for that end I will take a few passages which are Alfred's own, not translations from Boethius. Here is a bit from his introduction : — " But cruel King Theodoric heard of these designs, and straightway commanded that Boethius be thrust into a dun- geon and kept locked therein. Now, when this good man fell into so great straits, he waxed sore of mind, by so much the more that he had once known happier days. In the prison he could find no comfort ; falling down, grovelling on his face, he lay sorrowing on the floor, in deep despair, and began to weep over himself, and to sing : and this was his song." (S. p. 2.) What simple, pure, and rhythmical English, as formed and lucid as the English of Bunyan or of Defoe ! Another bit of Alfred's own, and what is so rare with him, a simile. Philosophy says : — " When I rise aloft with these my servants (i.e. true wis- dom and various skill) we look down upon the storms of this world, even as the eagle does when he soars in stormy weather above the clouds where no winds can harm him." (S. p. 2.) Alfred is never more himself than when musing on his royal office : — " Power is never a good thing, save its possessor be good, for, when power is beneficent, this is due to the man who wields it. Ye need not take thought for power nor endeavour THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 95 after it, for if ye are only wise and good it will follow you, even though ye seek it not." (S. p. 35.) What a magnificent Te Deum is this ! " One Creator there is without any doubt, and He is the ruler of heaven and earth and of all creatures, visible and in- visible, even God Almighty. Him serve all things that serve, they that know Him and they that know Him not, they that know they are serving Him and they that know it not. He hath established unchanging habits and natures and likewise natural concord among all His creatures, even as He hath willed, and for as long as He hath willed; and they shall remain for ever." (S. p. 50.) Hear how the head of the royal house of Cerdic, after some four centuries of kingly descent, speaks of nobil- ity of birth : — "Lo! all men had the like beginning, coming from one father and one mother, and they are still brought forth alike. Why then do ye men pride yourselves above others without cause for your high birth, seeing ye can find no man but is high-born, and all men are of like birth, if ye will but bethink you of their beginning and their Creator ? True high birth is of the mind, not of the flesh ; and every man that is given over to vices forsaketh his Creator, and his origin, and his birth, and loseth rank till he fall to low estate." (S. p. 75.) Alfred takes small count of evil rulers. He says : — " We see them seated on high seats ; bright with many kinds of raiment, decked with belts and golden-hilted swords and war dress of many kinds. . . . But if thou wert to strip ofF his robes from such an one, and take away his company of retainers, then thou wouldst see that he is no more than any g6 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED one of the courtiers who minister to him, if it be not some one of even lower degree." (S. p. 128.) When we reach the grand prose hymn with which the book closes, I can find nothing more nobly ex- pressed in the thousand years of English literature of which Alfred is the John the Baptist. " To God all is present, both that which was before and that which is now, yea, and that which shall be after us ; all is present to Him. His abundance never waxeth, nor doth it ever wane. He never calleth aught to mind, for He hath forgotten naught. He looketh for naught, pondereth naught, for He knoweth all. He seeketh nothing, for He hath lost nothing. He pursueth no creature, for none may flee from him; nor doth He dread aught, for none is more mighty than He, none is like unto Him. He is ever giving, yet He never waneth in aught. He is ever Almighty, for He ever willeth good and never evil. He needeth nothing. He is ever watching, never sleeping. He is ever equally beneficent. He is ever eternal, for the time never was when He was not, nor ever shall be. . . . Pray for what is right and needful for you, for He will not deny you. Hate evil, and flee from it. Love virtue and follow it. Whatsoever ye do is ever done before the Eternal and Almighty God ; He seeth it all, and all He judges and will requite." (S. p. 174.) I do not pretend to be a judge of sacred poetry ; but I almost doubt if Dante, or A Kempis, or Milton have poured forth any psalm more truly in a devout spirit. I hold it to be in the way of pure and nervous English as fine as any similar outpouring in our language. THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 97 I do not touch on the difficult points in the Alfred manuscripts. These technicalities I leave to the ex- perts. But I think the " experts " have been too posi- tive in rejecting pieces on some very slight suggestion in orthography and dialect. From the literary point of view, I see no reason to deny the authenticity of the simple Proem., and still less of the noble Prayer which ends the Consolations. Both are to my mind instinct with the mother-wit, primeval simplicity, and God- fearing soul of the purest of kings, and the most spiritual of warriors and statesmen. Nor need we discuss at length the vexed problem of the authenticity of the alliterative verses translating the poetry of Boethius, which are appended to the Cotton (Otho A. vi) manuscript. This has been treated mainly as a question of paleography and dialect ; and the experts are divided and doubtful. I see no reason to doubt the conclusion of Mr. Stopford Brooke and of Mr. Sedgefield, that no good ground has yet been given to doubt that Alfred wrote the verse as well as the prose. The Proem, which I hold to be Alfred's dictation, distinctly says that after he had " turned the book from Latin into English prose he wrought it up once more into verse." The verse is not alto- gether poetry ; it cannot compare with Beowulf and Caedmon. But to my ear it has the ring of Alfred's manly and native voice. I will go on to say that even as verse these pieces do not seem to me quite so poor. Alfred, like many of us who love poetry, cannot compose poetry. And 9 8 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED we do know some enthusiasts who persist in writing verses, when they know (or ought to know) that they cannot compose poetry. Alfred's verses seem to me the kind of lines that a great prose-writer, one who loved and studied poetry, but was not a born poet, might indite to occupy his hours of meditation. I confess I think there is a good ring in these lines : — Over Jove's mountain Gorged with glory, In fight with foemen. Fluttered on the staff. All Italy over came many a Goth greedy to wrestle The banner flashing Freely the heroes were eager to roam. The wielders of bucklers, Even to Jove's mount Where in mid sea-streams That mighty island, bearing onward far on to ocean Sicily lieth, far famed of lands." (S. p. 178.) Here is the metrical alliterative version of the grand prayer — O stelliferi conditor Orbis — of which we have just had the prose version: — " O Thou Creator of bright constellations, Of heaven and of earth ; Thou on thy high-seat Reignest eternal — All swiftly rollest The lights of heaven Thou the round heaven Thou by thy holy might causest to hear Thee." (S. p. 182.) I will not say that this is poetry ; but it is, I think, as good as Sternhold and Hopkins's Psalms of David. Here is a bit which has a touch of imagination in it — not entirely that of Boethius. The verse is more vivid : — THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 99 " Feather- wings have I fleeter than a bird's With which I may fly far from the earth Over the high roof of the heaven above us ; But oh ! that I might thy mind furnish, Thy inmost wit, with these my wings, Until thou mightest on this world of mortals, On all that there liveth look down from on high." (S. p. 222.) Before I close, I will remind you of the judgment passed on Alfred's books by the accomplished histo- rian of English literature — Mr. Stopford Brooke. " He was," he says, " the creator and then the father of English prose literature." His books "were the origin of English prose." The personal element, as he adds, stands forth clear in all his literary work. Mr. Stopford Brooke does not, I hold, quite do justice to Alfred's literary power as a translator when he says he had no creative power. Was not the translation of the Bible into English, yea, into German, perhaps into Latin also, a literary masterpiece, even though the translators inserted no new ideas of their own, or rather did not do so of malice aforethought ? A great translation is a masterpiece ; and two at least of Alfred's books are masterpieces in translation. But Mr. Stop- ford Brooke does full justice to Alfred's style as a writer. And to create the style of a new literature, to found the prose style of a nation, is a supreme literary triumph. Whether Alfred founded English prose style, is a question of the meaning of the phrase. Alfred, King of various tribes, then dwelling in England, com- posed in the vernacular a regular prose style not matched IOO THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED by any prose in England until the translators of the Psalms and Job, and in quiet force, simplicity, and purity not surpassed until the age of Addison. We all know the often quoted, often misquoted phrase of Buffon, — le style est rhomme meme. Of no one could this be said more truly — I venture to say so truly — as of Alfred. The whole range of ancient and modern literature contains nothing more genuine, more natural, more pellucid. He is not composing a book to be studied, admired, or criticised. He is bar- ing his whole soul to us. He speaks as one on his knees, in the silence of his own chamber, in the pres- ence of his God, who is pouring forth his inmost thoughts, hopes, and sorrows to the all-seeing eye, which knoweth the secrets of every heart, from whom nothing is hidden or unknown. And as he opens to us his own soul, as freely as he would bare it to his Maker, we look down into one of the purest, truest, bravest hearts that ever beat within a human frame. And by virtue of his noble simplicity of nature, this warrior, this ruler, this hero achieved a literary feat ; for he created a prose style five centuries before Chaucer, seven centuries before Shakespeare or Bacon, eight centuries before Addison or Defoe, and the full mastery of simple English prose. This in itself is a fact pecul- iarly rare in the history of any literature, where prose comes so much later than poetry. It can only be ex- plained by remembering that the language which Alfred spoke and wrote was not exactly early English, nor middle English, much less that highly composite and THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED IOI tessellated mosaic we call the latest and contemporary English. It was but the bony skeleton of our Eng- lish, what the Palatine mount of Romulus was to im- perial Rome, what Wessex was to the present empire of the King. But it was the bones of our common tongue ; it was the bones with the marrow in them, ready to be clothed in flesh and equipped with sinews and nerves. But this simple and unsophisticated tongue the genius of our Saxon hero so used and moulded that he founded a prose style, and taught the English race to trust to their own mother-tongue from the first ; to be proud of it, to cultivate it, to record in it the deeds of their ancestors, and to hand it on as a national possession to their children. To this it is due (as Professor Earle so truly says) that " we alone of all European nations have a fine vernacular literature in the ninth and tenth and eleventh centuries," so that neither the French immigration, nor any other immi- gration has ever been able to swamp our English lan- guage. And when I say We y I do not mean Britons. I mean You of the Western Continent as much as us in the British islands. Alfred was as much your teacher, your ancestor, your hero, as he was ours. He spoke that tongue, he founded that literature, which is imperishable on both sides of the Atlantic, which is one of the chief glories of the human race, which the three corners of the world shall never be able to swamp by any immigration of any foreign speech — whilst we who are set to guard our common tongue, in the words of our great poet, to ourselves do rest but true. THE DUTCH REPUBLIC The Dutch Republic Address at Columbia College, New York, March, 1901 Since the close of the Middle Ages four great peo- ples have succeeded in winning their freedom from civil and religious oppression, and have founded powerful and independent republics at the cost of their blood and a stormy revolution. These four were the people of Holland in the close of the six- teenth century, the people of England in the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, and the people of the United States and of France in the second half of the eighteenth century. The revolutions of the Dutch and the Americans were primarily directed against foreign oppression ; those of England and France were purely national uprisings which themselves ended in international oppression. All four revolu- tionary struggles, though separated by two centuries in time and by two hemispheres in space, had an inti- mate filiation of ideas with each other. All four, in different degrees, were at once both spiritual and po- litical in aim, both intellectual and material in origin ; and all four, in varying ways, tended to found a new conception of the social commonwealth. 105 106 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC I am now to speak of the Dutch Republic — the movement which, of all these four, was the earliest nearly by a century, founded a commonwealth that had far the longest duration ; it was the movement which, of all the four, called forth the most magnifi- cent display of heroism and endurance, which was victorious over the most terrific odds, which was (of the European movements, at any rate) the one least stained by anarchy, crimes, and horrors ; a revolution which was organised by one of the purest heroes in modern history. Of all the chiefs who in the latter ages have led a free people against their oppressors we can count only Cromwell and Washington as worthy to rank in genius and in nobleness with William the Silent, Prince of Orange. Not only was the struggle of the people of the Netherlands far the earliest, but it was also the most desperate and the most prolonged. Its first and most terrible bout was continued for some forty-two years from 1567 to 1609, and after an interval of twelve years it was again renewed from 1621 to 1648 — hav- ing been, with intervals, a war to the knife for more than eighty years. It was waged by a small and divided people against the most powerful monarch in Christendom, who hurled on them the most warlike soldiery in Europe, led by some of the most famous captains in modern history, and directed by some of the subtlest politicians of an age of experienced and sagacious statesmen. The petty province, hardly larger than a great English county, and not so popu- THE DUTCH REPUBLIC IO7 lous, was for three generations assailed by all that war, famine, pillage, fire, torture, persecution, and inunda- tion could do. It was deluged in turn with blood and with the salt sea — ruined first by exactions, then by confiscation, waste, destruction, and conflagration. And yet, after forty years of frightful suffering and heroic endurance in which old and young, men, women, and children, took equal share, the Dutch Republicans broke the power of Spain and swept her from their seas ; and, after the second war of the seventeenth century, the States, by the Treaty of Munster (1648), humbled Spain in the dust, and were recognised as one of the greatest, richest, most aspiring Powers in Europe. There is an often-quoted passage in a fine book — Voltaire's Essai sur les Mceurs — which is so brilliant and yet so truthful a summary of this great struggle, that I shall venture to quote it once more. He says : — " When we study the rise of the Dutch Republic, a state once hardly known, but one that in a brief space rose to a great height, we are struck by the fact that it was formed without design, and contrary to all that could have been expected. The revolution was begun by large and wealthy provinces of the mainland — Brabant, Flanders, and Hainault, — yet they did not shake off the tyrant. But a small corner of land, itself almost drowned by the sea, which subsisted only by its herring fishery, rose to be a formidable Power, held its own against Philip II, despoiled his successors of almost all their possessions in the East Indies — and ended by becoming their patrons and protectors." 108 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC This eloquent passage is a truthful picture of the great struggle which lasted with the interval I have stated for more than eighty years. I might occupy an evening in attempting to give you the history of any single one of these eighty years, and not one of them is wanting in thrilling interest. But my subject is simply the Rise of the Dutch Republic ; and I shall understand by that the period comprised in Motley's work of this title which covers the twenty years or so from the beginning of the movement until the murder of the Prince of Orange in 1584. And I need hardly say that I can attempt to give you not the events of these crowded twenty years, but the main conclusions and problems. My subject, in fact, centres round the later life of " Father William," the founder of Dutch freedom and Dutch Protestantism. To make my remarks intelligible, I will begin by a very brief outline of the principal events in the five and twenty years from 1559 to 1584. In 1506, Charles V of Spain, afterward the Emperor, succeeded to the inheritance of his ancestors, the Dukes of Burgundy — of all his vast possessions in the old and new world, the most thriving and industrious part. His famous abdication at Brussels in 1555 made his son, Philip II, King of Spain and Duke of Brabant, though of course not emperor as the empire was elective. For some four years Philip remained in the Provinces, carrying on a successful war with France, and vainly striving to crush the free burghers of the Low Countries into Spanish servitude and Catholic THE DUTCH REPUBLIC IO9 orthodoxy. Recognising his impotence, the sanguin- ary bigot withdrew to Spain to superintend auto-da-fes, furiously inveighing against the stubbornness of the Netherlands, and the machinations of their leader, the Prince of Orange. He was secretly planning a terrific vengeance and wholesale persecution. After six years of veiled rebellion by the Flemings and irresolute oppression by the King's viceroys, Philip resolved to carry out the decrees of the Council of Trent, by all the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, and shortly afterward armed insurrection begins. The monster Alva, one of the most consummate soldiers of his age, and a tyrant only second in ferocity and craft to Philip himself, was sent to the Provinces with a magnificent army of twenty thousand men, — Spanish, Italian and German. William withdraws before the storm into his ancestral countship of Nassau ; Egmont and Horn are seized and executed ; the Blood-Tri- bunal was set up ; and a reign of terror by stake, axe, torture, fire and sword was established. For six years this raged unchecked. Eighteen thousand persons were put to death for religion ; and twice or thrice that number were destroyed in battle, in sieges, or in gen- eral massacres. The armies of Alva and Alexander of Parma swept away the untrained burghers of Flanders and Holland, or the mutinous mercenaries whom the Nassaus hired in Germany. The patriot armies were massacred like sheep, city after city was stormed, and no sooner stormed but sacked with every form of ferocity, greed, and lust, and the whole population put to the 110 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC sword. Still they would not submit, and a new turn was given to the struggle by the Dutch of the Northern Provinces taking to the sea — " Water- Beggars," as they chose to call themselves. They seized Briel, Flushing, and other ports in the low tide-swept islands commanding the great rivers as they pour into the German Ocean. Louis of Nassau attacked the Span- iards in the South and in the end the Dutch asserted their hold on the provinces we now call Holland. Alva was succeeded by Requesens, Don John of Austria, and Alexander of Parma, the last, the ablest soldier of them all. More defeats of the patriots followed, more cities were sacked and burnt, more provinces were desolated, and tens of thousands were massacred in cold blood. All three brothers of Will- iam fell in the field ; he was left alone of all the nobles of the country in arms. But slowly and steadily by sheer force of suffering and stubborn resistance, the Northern Provinces which we now call Holland won their virtual independence — in the grand words of the Roman poet: — "per damna, per caedes, ab ipso ducit opes animumque ferro." Though defeated in every battle in the open field, the heroism of the defenders of Alkmaar, Haarlem, and Leyden equalled, if it did not surpass, the martial prowess of the Spanish veterans. For a moment the whole seventeen provinces — we may call them roughly Holland and Belgium — were united. But this THE DUTCH REPUBLIC III hollow union lasted but a few months, and about 1577, after some ten or eleven years of struggle the Northern Dutch Provinces were separated from the Southern Belgian Provinces, and accepted William as their chief. Steadily the vast power and military resources of Spain recovered the Belgic Catholic population which the House of Hapsburg retained until the end of the last century. And as steadily the Dutch Prov- inces of the North grew in strength, wealth, and patriotic energy. The union of Utrecht united the seven Batavian Provinces in 1579, just twenty years after the withdrawal of Philip, twenty years of frightful suffering and heroic struggle. The Prince of Orange was wisely, firmly, and impartially cementing this Commonwealth into a hardy and rising State, when to the horror of his own countrymen, and to the eternal shame of all bigots and tyrants, he was foully murdered by one of the paid assassins commissioned by the king of Spain. This tremendous struggle of more than eighty years never would have been possible but for the foresight, wisdom, and tenacity of William the Silent who may be truly said to have founded a nation, even more than Alfred created the English nation, as Washington created the United States. The struggle was carried on for more than sixty years after his death ; but, had it not been for the desperate efforts he directed for the first twenty years before, there would have been no struggle at all. Philip would have annihilated the feeble resistance of the Netherlands, divided by race, 112 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC religion, and local jealousies, and without leaders, resources, or any definite policy. William of Nassau and his family supplied leaders, a consistent policy, vast resources in money, and wide relations with Ger- many, France, and England. The Netherlands owed their salvation from a bloody tyranny to the heroic House of Nassau — and in a peculiar sense to the genius and indomitable will of the head of that house, William, Prince of Orange. He had been trained from boyhood by Charles V, the Emperor, who regarded him as his adopted son, and the future mainstay of his own successor, Philip II. So soon as the Prince fully understood the nature and designs of the new king of Spain, he quietly but reso- lutely set himself to checkmate them. For six years, as general minister and counsellor of the Spanish gov- ernment in the Netherlands, the Prince carried on a politic but outwardly loyal opposition to the tyrant's project of stamping out the new religion which, from North Germany, Geneva, and England, was making rapid progress, and of suppressing any show of local independence or right of taxation and representation. The efforts of William the Silent — who ought rather to be called William the politic, the persuasive, the affable — carried on the same work as did Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell in the early days of the contest with Charles I. And for some years he and his friends were entirely successful. And but for the fanatical violence of the Calvinists and their revolutionary out- breaks — and if Philip had been simply Duke of Bra- THE DUTCH REPUBLIC I 1 3 bant and Count of Holland, residing in Netherlands, and maintained by Flemish arms alone — there can be no doubt that William's scheme of founding a consti- tutional monarchy would have been crowned with an early and ample success. Two things brought it to failure. The first was the furious temper of the Calvinist fanatics, and the fact that Philip was king of Spain, the most powerful monarch in Christendom, in command of boundless resources and the most brilliant soldiery known to modern history. The outbreak at Antwerp wrecking the noble cathedral, and the frenzy which carried simi- lar outrages upon the religion of the State and of the majority, roused the Spanish nation, its king and the soldiers and nobles throughout his vast dominions to a passionate thirst for vengeance, which the Church excited to a white heat. Philip organised a magnifi- cent army of some twenty thousand veteran troops, Spanish, Italian, and German, whom he despatched to Brussels to crush Protestantism and local liberty under the terrible Alva, one of the most pitiless and unscru- pulous monsters of that age of perfidy and blood. Before this overwhelming power the Prince withdrew to his native Germany. He withdrew but only to organise a desperate resistance. For seventeen years he carried on the fight with the most marvellous energy, resource, and stubborn- ness — almost always defeated in the open field, pour- ing out the wealth of himself and his family like 114 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC water, seeing one combination after another break up under the terror inspired by the Spanish arms, seeing one ally after another desert him, one foreign poten- tate after another play him false, and one brother after another slaughtered in fight. History presents hardly any other spectacle of dogged determination under incessant failure and defeat, and such versatility of resource in devising new plans after every failure and in organising fresh forces as each in succession was crushed or wiped out. The marvellous ingenuity of these efforts was equalled only by the inexhaustible industry with which they were pursued. Some twenty or thirty volumes of very close print now reveal to us the endless schemes that for twenty years the Prince projected or matured. A mass of this correspondence exists in Mss. signed by William, or addressed to him. He seems to have spent hours almost daily in dictating despatches and secret instructions on every conceiv- able point. He had agents all over Germany, where his brothers and relations were powerful counts and officials, in France, all over the Netherlands, in Eng- land, even in Rome, and in the palaces of Philip, whose secret despatches were copied in his cabinet and sent off to the Prince. He held in his hand for twenty years the threads of numberless negotiations, plots, intrigues in many countries ; he was constantly organ- ising new levies, fresh campaigns, or local risings. And from hour to hour he had to decide a mass of details as to war, administration, diplomacy, religion, local disputes and suspicions. THE DUTCH REPUBLIC I 1 5 It is in vain that we ask from William the Silent — I prefer to call him William the Politic — that native veracity of soul, that absolute transparency and recti- tude of purpose which is so singularly rare in states- men — which we find in Alfred, in St. Louis, in George Washington — but perhaps in no other man in supreme rule. Though William never sank to the chicanery and mendacity of such men as Louis XI, or Queen Elizabeth, or Mazarin, he was dark, secret, and double-tongued even as at times were Richelieu, Cromwell, Frederick, and Bismarck. He was no spotless hero, no knight of romance, no mirror of purity and truth. He was brought up in the worst school of the worst age of Machiavellian craft; and, though infinitely superior to the political schemers of his age, he is no model of honour himself. His true greatness was in his essential singleness of purpose, — his unselfish devotion to a people which was in no sense his own by birth, — in his resolute rejection of dignity, power, or any kind of personal gain, in his abhorrence of persecution and intoler- ance, and above all in his sublime constancy to the cause to which he dedicated his life, his whole earthly possessions, his peace, his family, and his good name, and the unconquerable courage by which he held to his purpose in spite of incessant defeat, and never for an instant gave way to despair, though racked with disease, deserted by all, and baffled a thousand times in the long struggle by what looked to all men an overwhelming power. Il6 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC This heroic struggle of the Dutch to assert freedom of conscience and national independence, notwithstand- ing its narrow field, and, from a European point of view, its petty scale, exercised a decisive influence over the whole course of modern history. It was the first example in modern Europe of a small and poor coun- try throwing off the weight of a foreign oppression and founding a free commonwealth on an enduring basis. Two centuries later its moral influence across the Atlantic, where a part of the American people were then of Dutch origin, is too obvious to be enlarged upon. But long before that, Holland had been the refuge of the oppressed, the home of freedom of thought, of Biblical religion, and of republican ideals. Its great service was to have instituted the duty of Toleration — in the spirit so nobly begun by William the Silent, and carried on by Barneveldt and De Witt, and Grotius. The relations of the Presby- terians of our own land with the Presbyterians of Holland were long and close ; and many a victim of Stuart, Bourbon, and Papal tyranny found an asylum in the free republic. During the political and relig- ious persecutions that for a century followed the Revocation of the edicts of Nantes by Louis XIV, the French Protestants and Reformers found a refuge in Holland. Descartes and Bayle lived and worked in Holland ; and most of the unorthodox books which preceded the French Revolution profess on their title page to be published in Amsterdam. Thus, if the Dutch Republic was not politically associated THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 11 J with the Republic in France, from which it was sepa- rated in time by two centuries, so directly as it was associated with the Commonwealth in England and the Independence of the United States, its intellectual and moral influence as a type of freedom of conscience was very marked and decisive. The Dutch Republic is not only the earliest example in modern Europe of the establishment of a free commonwealth, — we may put aside some petty cantons in mountain strongholds of mediaeval origin, — but it has had the longest duration. The free gov- ernment of Holland founded by William the Silent has now endured, we may say, for upwards of three centuries. It is true that his descendants for long periods held the hereditary office of Stadtholders ; it is true that the Government of the United Provinces was not seldom arbitrary and oppressive. It is true that Holland has been now for eighty-eight years formally a kingdom. But it is still a free national government as completely as our own. Holland, for the 317 years since the murder of William of Orange, has been in the main a free, independent, and thriving State : and the charming young Queen, now in her twenty-first year, still rules the land created and saved by her great ancestor. The struggle carried on by the people of Holland against all the might of Spain was for at least twenty years one of the most wonderful recorded in history. It may almost be compared to the defence of Greece against the myriads of Xerxes the great king. Philip II I I 8 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC was absolute master of all Spain, of the Milanese, of Naples and Sicily, not to speak of his boundless pos- sessions in the Indies from which streamed in for him incredible treasures in merchandise and gold. For the greater part of the struggle he held in stern subjection the great cities and rich provinces of Belgium. His Spanish infantry, his Italian cavalry and engineers were accounted the finest in the world. His footmen carried muskets, an arm till then almost unknown in Northern Europe. His generals and officers of every rank were consummate soldiers ; in strategy, in tactics, in the melee, alike unsurpassed. Such captains as Alva, Don John of Austria, and Alexander of Parma were men of world-wide experience and true genius for war. Such an army as Alva led across Europe from Italy to Brussels on his terrible mission was an army per- fect in every respect even from the point of view of modern war, — exact in discipline, duly proportioned in each arm, amply equipped, provided with officers of highest skill, and inspired by the grand munition of all armies, unbounded confidence in themselves and their leaders. In spite of their ferocious conduct in the storm and their horrible duties as executioners, it is impossible not to be struck with wonder at the heroism of the Spanish infantry, at the impetuous valour of captains like Don Frederic, Vitelli, or Mondragon, who marched his men at night for miles through sea-water up to their shoulders, and then captured a fortress as they emerged from the sea. It is impossible not to admire THE DUTCH REPUBLIC II9 the genius of Alexander Farnese, who in an hour and a half, with a few squadrons of cavalry and without loss, annihilated a brave army of twenty thousand men. Spain supplied the tyrant with dauntless war- riors ; Italy supplied him with consummate tacticians, administrators, and engineers; Germany and the Rhine- land supplied him with willing mercenaries and soldiers of fortune; the Indies supplied him with inexhaustible gold, and Rome supplied him with the confiscations of heretics and the blessing of Heaven. See the vast strength of the Spanish tyranny ! Philip had not been three years on the throne of his father when he succeeded in humbling the whole power of France under her warlike King Henry II, by the brilliant victories of St. Quentin and Gravelines. A few years later his heroic half-brother, Don John, destroyed the magnificent navy of the Turks at Le- panto. And toward the close of his long reign he threatened England with the Armada — from which imminent peril we were saved by the skill of our sea- dogs and by a portentous tempest. That a despot of such vast resources, such splendid armies and mighty fleets, who seemed to his contemporaries, at least for some twenty years, to overshadow Europe and domi- nate the Western Continent, should have been defied, baffled, outmanoeuvred, and eventually beaten by a poor and petty province, half of it salt marsh, inhab- ited by an unwarlike race of fishermen, and having no cities but a dozen or so of small towns, — this is a standing marvel of history. The only solution of the 120 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC dilemma is the invincible power of courage, tenacity, a profound belief in a great cause, and the strength that lies in a man who is at once a hero and a genius. The siege of Haarlem, which for seven months re- sisted a splendid army of Alva's, equal in number almost to the whole population of the town, is one of the great sieges in all history. Alva led against it thirty thousand of his veterans ; the garrison was never more than a few thousand, with some hundreds of fighting women, regularly armed under the command of a widow lady of rank and good reputation. Twelve thousand of the Spaniards had fallen, after discharging ten thousand cannon shots upon the town, when starvation compelled the surrender. The whole gar- rison was butchered, and Philip thanked God and the Pope. The siege of Alkmaar was quite as heroic and hap- pily more successful, for Alva wrote to Philip, " I am resolved not to leave a single creature alive ; the knife shall be put to every throat." His gentleness at Haarlem, he said, had led to no good result ! At the first day's assault a thousand choice Spanish troops died in the trenches ; men, women, and children of the besieged fighting on the ramparts with desperate fury. Under the orders of Orange the dykes were cut, and after nearly two months the besiegers with- drew in despair. But the crowning triumph of all was the memorable defence of Leyden. That is indeed a story to stir the blood. Leyden is a town on the old Rhine, between THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 121 The Hague and Haarlem, one of the most ancient in Europe. Its memorable siege lasted, with a short interval, for a whole year, when it finally overcame the whole power of Philip. It was invested with sixty-two redoubts manned by some ten thousand troops under tried captains of Spain. The defenders were only the civilian burghers and a few irregular soldiers, behind imperfect and ancient walls. Their one chance was in William of Orange who was pre- paring a force to relieve them, and who adjured them to hold out for three months, which they swore to do. " As long as there is a living man left in the country," they said, " we will fight for our liberty and our reli- gion." The city being by June strictly invested, the whole population was placed on a food allowance. Sorties and fierce combats took place daily. But the only chance of relief lay with the Prince of Orange who was entrenched near Delft, some twenty miles to the south, and was organising a fleet of small ships and barges. All prospect of meeting the Spanish armies on land was extinct. Louis and Henry of Nassau, brothers of the Prince, had but recently been defeated and killed in a great battle, with many of their friends and four thousand men, and the last chance of fighting the Spaniards in the open had been swept away. But the Prince, who had now lost three brothers in the struggle, would not despair. He tried another arm of defence — a new engine of war. To understand this wonderful siege — wherein an inland city was succoured by seamen in a fleet, and a 122 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC powerful army in a vast entrenched camp was driven off by discharging on them the sea from the German Ocean, we must have in our minds a picture of the spot. The whole country for fifty miles round is a huge plain, redeemed from the sea by centuries of labour, and lying many feet below the level of high tide, protected by vast dykes along the coast, and an intricate network of minor dykes inland, the whole intersected with thousands of canals and smaller chan- nels, with sluices, gates, and dams innumerable. In this teeming plain rose, a few feet above the meadows, orchards, and woods, the graceful old city of Leyden, with a ruined tower on an artificial mound, by tradition said to date from the Romans or from our Saxon Hen- gist. The city was itself interlaced with canals — these were covered with hundreds of bridges of stone — and was protected by a range of ancient walls having huge gates and some antiquated towers and bastions. The tremendous scheme of defence devised by the Prince, with the full assent of the city and the States, was to open- the dykes that kept back the sea, flood the land for leagues, and across the drowned meadows, vil- lages, and harvests, to send in to the doomed city the flotilla that he was organising with arms and food. It was the desperate resort of desperate men ; for it meant the ruin of their homes and their lands for a genera- tion. But they chose this — or death — rather than the Inquisition of Spain. On the third of August the Prince in person super- intended the cutting of sixteen dykes, and, waiting for THE DUTCH REPUBLIC I 23 the flood to rise, he had two hundred vessels laden with provisions. The waters rose slowly ; and toward the end of the month the people of Leyden sent word that they were near to dying of hunger. " They had held out," they said, " for two months with food, according to promise, and then for another month, without food, but flesh and blood could stand it little more." The Prince replied that the dykes were cut and he was coming. But he was suddenly prostrated with fever, and lay in bed at Rotterdam in danger of death, very feeble, and almost speechless, but still dic- tating orders and sending messengers right and left. By September Admiral Boisot, his chief officer at sea, came out of Zeeland with three hundred veteran sea-dogs, — wild, fierce men, half pirates, who were sworn neither to give nor to ask for quarter, — with inscriptions in their caps, " Better be for the Turk than for the Pope." With his fierce Zeelanders and some twenty-five hundred veteran seamen in large barges rowed with oars, and charged with cannon, arms, and provisions, Boisot pressed on across the flooded plain to within five miles of Leyden. There he was stopped by a huge barrier of dykes, whilst the Spanish army, three times as strong as his own, blocked the road between the dyke and the invested city. By the Prince's order the seamen assaulted and carried the dyke in a brilliant night attack, and at once, before the eyes of the enemy, cut a channel through the obstacle. Through it the little fleet poured, but only to find a second dyke, still a foot above the water, and guarded 124 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC by Spaniards. This, too, Boisot carried — but even then he found himself barred by overwhelming num- bers of the enemy. A strong east wind kept back the waters of the ocean and reduced the flood, so that the flotilla was aground. But gradually the besieging army was driven to narrower limits, and the villages round occupied and burnt by the seamen so as to give no shelter to the invaders. Orange rose from his sick-bed, inspired the patriot army to fresh efforts, and ordered the cutting of the last dyke. The city was at its last gasp. All they knew of relief they had to guess from the roar of can- non and the blazing of villages in the distant country. Food had disappeared. Dogs, cats, and vermin were thought to be luxuries, starving creatures scrambled for offal and refuse in the gutters. Infants dropped dead from the dry breasts of their mothers, whole families were found lying dead in a house, for the plague appeared, and from six thousand to eight thou- sand died of it out of a population of fifty thousand. Still, men and women exhorted each other to endure — to resist the Spaniard and his priests — a fate more horrible than plague or famine. Some of the faint- hearted ones did reproach the heroic burgomaster for his obstinacy, and placed a famished corpse against his door, as a mute witness to his cruelty. " Here is my sword," said he, " take it, kill me, divide me up, and eat my flesh — but no surrender whilst I live." At the end of September a dove flew into the city with a message from Boisot ; but the wind remained THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 1 25 east, and the waters began to abate. But on the first of October a tremendous gale began from the south- west, forcing the sea over the plains, filling the canals, and carrying the fleet forward. Boisot was now right up to the entrenched vvorks and the forts of the Span- ish. Terrific day and night combats ensued, the sea rising steadily, the ships gaining ground, and the enemy sullenly retreating. On the night of the sec- ond of October, a combined assault on the Spanish lines was made by Boisot in his ships and by the men of Leyden in sortie. Caught between two fires, in the confusion of a pitch dark night, in the flood and roar of tempest, and stunned by the crash of a long section of the city wall that fell in the darkness, panic seized the enemy, and the Spanish general drew off the rem- nant of his splendid army, to such unflooded cause- ways and eminences as he could find : " beaten," wrote the proud Spaniard, " not by the enemy but by the sea!" This time Philip did not thank God — let us hope he did nothing worse. On the morning of the third of October, a day ever memorable in the annals of Holland, — in the annals of heroism and patriotism, — Boisot swept into the city with his vessels, and the famished populations swarmed along the quays, the seamen throwing them bread as they rowed up the canals. The Admiral and his men, wild Zeelanders and all, burghers, women, and chil- dren, poured into the great church and offered up thanksgiving and sang a hymn. A message was sent to the Prince, which reached him, at Delft, also in 126 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC church. He had it read to the congregation after the sermon, — should we all of us have had patience to sit out that sermon, with news of life and death to our people in the minister's hand? — but the Dutch are a patient and long-suffering race ! The Prince set out to Leyden where he was received with enthusiasm. " It will cost Philip half his kingdom to make an end of us," he had said, and he had kept his word. He offered, in the name of the States, that as a reward for the sufferings and gallantry of the city, they might choose a remission of taxation or the foundation of a University, and the tradition is that Leyden chose the seat of learning, and rejected the filthy lucre. Should we to-day be capable of so noble a devotion to learn- ing ? But I believe the tradition to be mythical, and that Leyden was duly rewarded by a remission of taxes and also honoured by a seat of learning. Cer- tain it is that the illustrious University of Leyden, the school of so many great teachers, of Grotius, Bcerhaave, and a crowd of men of science, of law, of theology, and of medicine, down to our day, was founded on this occasion, and is thus associated with the memorable siege — one of the most splendid triumphs of freedom and of constancy in the roll of history. This tale of slaughter, ferocity, and heroism is only an incident in this long struggle. There were scores of sieges hardly less terrible, less gallant, though none of them so triumphant for the patriots. Whole prov- inces were desolated with fire and sword, pillage and THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 1 27 flooding ; armies were painfully mustered and equipped by William and his family, friends, and colleagues at the sacrifice of their entire fortunes, only to be swept into the rivers or hacked to pieces in a few hours by the matchless chivalry of Spain. Yet by sheer power to suffer and to endure, slowly the Northern sea- washed districts and the towns therein, which stood on piles a few feet above the waters around, won a pre- carious independence, began to form a solid confeder- acy, nay, rose into flourishing lands and even wealthy cities. How was it done? What was the secret? " 'Tis dogged as does it ! " — says an old navvy in a famous story. " Dogged " — it was — and also the magical resources of the sea by those who love the sea and know how to use the sea ! The Southern, Catho- lic, Belgian Provinces and cities after incessant turmoil and bloodshed fell back into the grasp of Spain — step by step the Northern, Protestant, Dutch Prov- inces and cities asserted their liberty under their " Father William." Let us try to picture to ourselves this " Father William," and see what manner of man he was. If anyone were to imagine him to be a dark, inscrutable, fanatical Puritan, — a. sort of Calvinist Richelieu — a Protestant variety of Philip II, — he would indeed go wrong. William the Silent, the chief of the Dutch national revolution, the head of the Calvinistic Re- formers of Holland, was neither taciturn by habit, nor a Dutchman by birth, nor a revolutionist in policy, nor an advanced reformer in religion. He was a 128 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC most eloquent speaker, a delightful conversationalist, a brilliant man of the world, an accomplished linguist. He was by birth a Count of the Empire, a Nassauer, a German, of pure High German descent for long generations both by his father and his mother. Though Prince of Orange, which is on the Rhone in southeastern France, he never saw Orange in his life, and had little more to do with it than our Prince of Wales has to do with his own titular principality. William, Count of Nassau, got nothing out of Orange, except the barren honour of " Prince," and the degrad- ing privilege of being addressed by Philip II as "my cousin." His princedom, his vast estates in the Low Countries, and his connection with Holland, he owed to accident in early youth. They came to him when a boy of eleven, in the lifetime of his own parents, under the will of his cousin Rene, of that elder branch of the Nassau house, settled in the Netherlands. From his boyhood William was thus all his life a sovereign prince ; he was by instinct a real conserva- tive, a moderate, a coalitionist — never a revolutionist. By policy he was an opportunist, always prone to take half a loaf, to get the best terms to be had at the time, to make the most workable compromise in each case. His precocious apprenticeship in high matters of state and his wonderful insight into the nature of men he acquired by the favour of that consummate diplomatist, the Emperor Charles V, who made the young Prince of eleven his page, gave him the best THE DUTCH REPUBLIC I 29 education of the age, and kept him, almost as an adopted son, about his own person, even calling him to his side in his Cabinet whilst discussing affairs of moment. For nine years the young Prince was thus trained by one of the greatest masters of statecraft in an age of profound and ambitious politicians. At the age of eighteen, William was given in marriage by the Emperor to Anne of Egmont, one of the greatest heiresses of the Netherlands ; and their joint posses- sions made them one of the wealthiest young couples in Northern Europe. The young soldier was shortly made a colonel and sent off to fight the French. He rose in the service ; and at the age of twenty-two, the Emperor, himself one of the first soldiers of his age, made the young hero commander-in-chief of an army of twenty thousand men. For some ten years the Prince continued to serve the Emperor, his son Philip II, and their successive viceroys in military and civil offices of the first rank. He took part in the successful wars against France that opened Philip's reign, though he does not appear to have done more than prove himself a consummate organiser of difficult campaigns, and a most wary and provident commander. It was when leaning on the shoulder of his beloved Prince, that the broken Emperor, in his theatrical scene of abdication, came into the Hall of Nobles to abdicate his crown into the hands of his own son, Philip. The dying sovereign leaned on the two Princes, his adopted and his natural son, those two who were destined to wage a deadly I3O THE DUTCH REPUBLIC war against each other for nearly thirty years. For some years the Prince and his young bride kept royal state, as having a household renowned throughout Europe for its splendid hospitality, its brilliant refine- ment, and its magnificent courtesy. The Prince, wrote a bitter Catholic, has the most winning manners, the sweetest temper, the most persuasive tongue in the world. He leads all the court at his own will, and fascinates all he approaches, both high and low. He undertook at his own cost splendid embassies ; he entertained all royal guests from foreign countries; he raised and maintained whole regiments in the field at his own charges, until even his vast revenues became encumbered with debt. Down to the age of thirty, William of Orange was in fact a grandee, of the Span- ish Crown, a magnificent Prince in four countries which are now France, Germany, Belgium, and Hol- land — and till then he was a devoted and indeed a loyal servant of the kings of Spain. But he soon had a rude awakening from this pros- perous pageantry. From the first day he had seen deep into the black heart of Philip, and though he felt in duty bound to serve him as a sovereign in the field and in council, he held him in deep aversion and distrust. Orange had a principal hand in the negotiations for the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis by which Philip so humbled his rival of France, and he was sent to Paris as a State hostage along with the Duke of Alva, the Prince's future foe, and Count Eg- mont, Alva's future victim. There, riding one day THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 131 in a hunting expedition, alone beside the French king, Henry II, supposing the Prince to be deep in all the counsels of Philip, revealed to him the horrid plot concocted between Alva and the French court to com- bine to crush out the Reformation by all the rigour of the Inquisition, Philip to use his Spanish troops in the Netherlands. The Prince of Orange — he was still only twenty-six — never moved a muscle, but full of horror as he was, suffered the King to talk on. " I was deeply moved with pity," he wrote twenty years later, " for all the worthy people who were thus devoted to slaughter, and for the country to which I owed so much, wherein they designed to introduce an Inquisition more cruel than that of Spain. From that hour I resolved with my whole soul to drive the Spanish vermin from the land." He hastened to get leave of absence, returned to Brussels, saw some of his friends and warned them of what was to come. It was this incident which gained the title of " the Silent One" for a man who was one of the most eloquent talkers and one of the most affable companions of his age. We know how the Prince looked at this time. There exists a fine portrait of him painted exactly at this age — a replica of which his descendant, the Ger- man Emperor, has recently presented to his own cousin, the young Queen of the Netherlands. The Prince is in full armour resting his left hand firmly on his helmet, with powerful features, an open brow, auburn hair, large piercing eyes, a very firm, strong 132 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC jaw, a mouth closely set, and a massive chin. The whole aspect is one of intense penetration, firmness of purpose, and even then of deep melancholy. It is pathetic to contrast this picture of his resplendent youth with the portraits of his last years when, an old man at fifty-one, he was bald, worn with wrinkles and furrowed with disease and anguish. The mouth seems locked with iron, and the deep eyes are those of a man at bay fighting fiercely for life. In religion, as in all things, the Prince was an opportunist, willing, in an age of a wild chaos of be- liefs and the clash of sects, to accept the best working compromise in outward communion, whilst quietly holding his own beliefs and insisting on respect for those of others. He was a man of deeply religious feeling, and sincere natural piety, sprung of a religious family, who himself brought up his own family in practical godliness. But he seems never to have held to any dogmatic creed whatever. And in an age when creeds were all flung together into a melting pot, and when each sect in turn was doing deeds and uttering maledictions that dishonoured all their pro- fessions, William's own religious adhesions were sin- gularly varied. He was born and baptized a Lutheran, his father and his mother being convinced Protestants. When adopted by Charles V at the age of eleven, he was brought up a Catholic, and he remained in con- formity with the Catholic Church down to the age of thirty-four and his withdrawal into Germany. Then he was for a time in practical communion with the THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 1 33 Lutherans ; and finally, when he became chief of the Northern States, and Stadtholder of Holland he lived and he died a Calvinist. Throughout his life he had a loathing for the perse- cuting temper of Catholicism ; Lutheranism seemed to him always to have too much of the aristocratic and political spirit ; and he deeply distrusted the fanatical zealotry of Dutch Calvinism. He was always striving to create a modus vivendi between bitter partisans. As a great Catholic official, he laboured to protect the Reformers ; as Lutheran, he laboured to induce them to help the Calvinists ; as a Calvinist chief himself, he vehemently resisted their unchristian passion against all outside their own sect. William's whole life, from the day when he listened in horror to the infernal plot of the two kings until the day when he gasped out his last words, " My God, have pity on my soul and this poor people ! " his whole life was a plea for toler- ation — mutual forbearance — Christian unity. William had four wives, by whom he had thirteen children. His first wife, Anne of Egmont, was a Catholic, and she died young before the great struggle began. His second wife, Anne of Saxony, a Lutheran and daughter of the great Lutheran duke, was a violent Protestant, the Prince remaining Catholic, and baptizing her children in that Church. As she plunged into vice and crime he repudiated her. She was divorced, tried and condemned by law, and died mad in prison. His third wife, whom he married whilst the second was alive but divorced, was a Bour- 134 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC bon princess, an ex-abbess, a convert to Protestantism, and a refugee. It was a marriage that filled the French Court and the Catholic world with horror, a desperately imprudent step on the Prince's part. His fourth wife, Louise de Coligny, daughter of the heroic Admiral, had seen her father and her husband assassi- nated in the Saint Bartholomew, and was destined to see her second husband also assassinated before her eyes by the same ruthless enemies. The Prince was an eminently domestic man, almost excessively uxorious, a second father to his widowed mother, affectionate to his wives, loving to his chil- dren, and the soul of kindness and courtesy to all within his household. Of the thirteen children, but three sons grew up to manhood. The eldest was kidnapped into Spain by Philip and died without issue. The second, Maurice, nobly carried on for forty years and completed the work of his father. The third son, Frederick Henry, was born in the year of his father's death, and ultimately succeeded Maurice, as Prince of Orange. It is curious to note how many famous rulers, soldiers, and royal persons have traced their descent to William of Orange. The Princes of Orange first, the elective or hereditary rulers of Holland from his day until ours, during more than three centuries — then of course the second great Prince of Orange, William III of Holland and King of England. Through daughters come the royal family of Prussia, Frederick the Great, and the reign- ing Emperor, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, and THE DUTCH REPUBLIC J 35 of course all our Hanoverian royal family, then the Orleans princes, many of the Italian princes, not to speak of Prince Rupert, Marshal Turenne, Alexandra, Queen of England, and the royal family of Denmark and the Czar of Russia. The ancestors of William of Nassau were illustrious for four or five centuries at his birth. But his descendants, in the three centuries since his death, have been even more profusely scat- tered upon the thrones or around the thrones of Europe. Such was the man who for twenty years withstood the machinations, the armies, the assassins of Philip II — never despairing, never relaxing his vigilance, never driven into crime himself. He countermined the conspiracies of Spain by his own foresight and his system of spies ; after every defeat he raised up a new army ; driven out of one stronghold, he raised up another ; after every act of treachery and disunion, he set himself indefatigably to piece together a fresh com- bination. His knowledge of men, his insight into all the windings of the subtlest human heart was intuitive ; his patience, his equanimity, his urbanity were never shaken for an instant. In the long struggle the Prince was deeply changed within and without from the chivalrous grandee of his youth. His enormous revenues had all been confis- cated by the tyrant or sunk in war. But one brother survived; and he and the rest of the family had ruined themselves in the cause. Father William, the idol of his own Hollanders, looked and lived like the simplest I36 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC of his people. A fine courtier of Elizabeth, who saw him at Delft in these latter days, said he wore a thread- bare old gown that a poor student would have been ashamed of, and through it could be seen for waistcoat a rough bargee's jersey, and his company was that of the citizens of that beery town. No external sign of his degree could be seen, but on conversing with him, the dainty courtier remarks, " there was an outward passage of inward greatness." It would have been strange if there had not been something to mark the greatest man of his century. His later life was one of endless toil and hardship and often of real penury. When Louise de Coligny came to be married from France, where she had known the most brilliant Court in Europe, the Prince of Orange sent to bring his bride an open country cart, in which she had to sit on a hard board and was cruelly jolted. The States assigned to him a small sequestered convent, and there he kept a simple and almost open house, absorbed in work, and accessible to all. The spot still stands unchanged. It is now a national memorial and museum, and was the scene of the last tragedy. The monster Philip, finding all his efforts to crush the Prince in vain, issued, in 1580, by the advice of Cardinal Granvelle, his ban whereby he declared Orange the enemy of the human race — offered a reward of twenty thousand golden crowns for his head, and promised his assassin full pardon, and a patent of nobility for himself and his family. From that hour William was hunted by murderers. One, Jaureguy, THE DUTCH REPUBLIC J 37 succeeded in sending a bullet through his cheek and palate, severing an artery in the neck. His life was saved by a miracle, but his third wife died of the shock. William's only care was to call out to spare the assassin, and from his sick-bed he saved the accom- plices from torture. We know of some five or six conspiracies, and doubtless there were as many more we do not know of. William, like Elizabeth of Eng- land, lived for four years surrounded by assassins ; but, alas ! he had no Burleigh, no Walsingham to protect him. The end — the inevitable end — came at last. Will- iam was at table with his family and a friend or two in the Hall of the Prinzenhof at Delft, the old con- vent. He passed out to his cabinet, and in the dark corner of the staircase lay concealed a small fanatic who shot him through the chest point blank. The Prince sank into the arms of his family, gasping out the words I have cited before, " God help this poor people ! " It was July, 1584. He still was but fifty-one — in the prime of his powers. The old Prinzenhof, a convent of the fifteenth cen- tury, is now a relic of Dutch patriotism — a place of pilgrimage to their people and all who love the cause of liberty and conscience. The hall where the hero lay dying is now filled with portraits, arms, views, engravings, tapestries, chairs, and tables of the period, and memorials that record the great struggle. They profess to have kept the hole in the wall where the fatal bullet struck. That murderous shot filled with I38 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC triumph and exultation the whole Papal, Jesuit, tyran- nic world, and struck indignation and dismay into the patriots, and all friends of the Protestant and national cause. It struck them with dismay, but not with despair. The people of Holland and Maurice of Nas- sau, his son, took up the gage, and for thirty years more successfully carried on the fight. It was but a year or two ago since I was standing in the dark pas- sage where the bloody deed was done. And then I stood in the ancient church beside the noble tomb of Father William, and his long line of descendants, chiefs of Holland, with his motto, " I will maintain piety and justice." I felt how deeply the three centuries that have passed have taught us all that civilisation owes to the founders of the Dutch nation, and to their great hero, whose name and fame will last, I believe and trust, for thrice three centuries to come. RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL Recent Biographies of Cromwell A Lecture given at Princeton University The tercentenary of Cromwell's birth, which oc- curred in April, 1899, aroused fresh interest in the life of the great Protector, and saw the official acceptance of his memory as one of the national glories of Eng- land. Lord Rosebery, in an address worthy of him- self and of the occasion, rehearsed all that our country owes to the heroic chief of our Civil War, and set up at Westminster Hall the fine bronze statue of Crom- well, which as Prime Minister he had called on Parlia- ment to vote. This is one of the most impressive monuments in London ; and it is a curious illustra- tion how " the whirligig of time brings in his re- venges," that the effigy of the republican general is finally set up, after so long a struggle, beside the Palace of Westminster ; almost at the portal of the Parliament House, which he once closed and so often opened ; hard by the Hall where he was installed as Protector ; and a few yards from the tomb in which he was laid by the nation and from which he was torn by an infamous king. The commemoration also very naturally gave rise to a number of new lives and memoirs of Oliver, both 141 142 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL English and foreign ; which, though they may have established nothing new, may be said to have finally settled the true place of Cromwell in the history of England. We have had no less than three works from Mr. Gardiner, whose whole life has been devoted to the history of this age. Mr. Firth, who has worked on the same period for many years, published last year his Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in Eng- land. Then Mr. John Morley, in the same year, pub- lished his most fascinating and suggestive estimate of this ever memorable time. Dr. Horton and Sir Rich- ard Tangye had both published volumes of unqualified eulogy from the point of view of modern Protestant- ism. And in America we have had the elaborate history Cromwell and His Times by Samuel Harden Church, and the spirited study by Theodore Roose- velt, Vice-President of the United States. These various estimates differ no doubt somewhat in degree, and they differ much more in literary merit and in independent research. But they all, from vari- ous points of view, come to the same result. They all reject or ignore the pure Carlylean gospel of the su- preme Cromwell — an almost superhuman and quite infallible being, whom to doubt was blasphemy and whom to thwart was sin. And they all agree in regard- ing Cromwell, whatever his defects and his errors, as a statesman of profound genius and of noble character. Some of these writers are more severe on his faults and his failures, some are more ready to blame his contem- poraries and to expatiate on his difficulties. But in the RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 1 43 main they make his services and his merits far out- weigh his failures and his shortcomings. The tercen- tenary commemoration which saw him installed again at Westminster Hall in bronze, has seen him definitely enthroned in English literature with a chorus of honour —