THE 
 
 NEW BOOK 
 OF KINGS 
 
 BY 
 
 J. MORRISON DAVIDSON, 
 (Of the Middle Temple) 
 
 BARRISTER-AT-LAw, 
 
 Author of “ Eminent Radicals,’’ &c. 
 
 Fif I might give a short hint to an impartial writer, it would be to tell 
 m his fate. If he resolves to venture on the dangerous precipice of 
 ling unbiassed truth, let him proclaim war with mankind—neither to 
 fve nor to take quarter. If he tells the crimesof great men, they fall upon 
 with the iron hands of the law; if he tells them of virtues, when they 
 sve any, then the mob attacks him with slander. But if he regards truth, 
 - him expect martyrdom on both sides, and then he may go on fearless. 
 De Foe 
 
 one C Loge EN Cre, 
 
 LONDON : 
 HE MODERN PRESS, 13, PaTERNOSTER Row, E.C. 
 AND OF ALL BOOKSELLERS. 
 
PRACLARODSENATORI 
 
 JOSEPHO, COWEN, 
 JOSEPHI MAZZINI ET JOSEPHI GARIBALDI AMICO, 
 HUNC LIBELLUM 
 DEDICAVIT 
 
 TM. D: 
 
REMO?® STORAGE 
 QD 
 VI6 "40 
 
 ai me 
 
 The New Book of Kings. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 * If there be never so many fair branches of liberty planted on the root 
 of a private and selfish interest, they will not long prosper, but must, 
 within a little time, wither and degenerate into the nature of that whereinto 
 they are planted ; and hence indeed sprang the evil of that Government 
 which rose in and with the Norman Conquest. ... And as at first the 
 Conqueror did by violence and force deny that freedom to the people 
 which was their natural right and privilege, so he and his successors all 
 along lay as bars and impediments to the true national interests and 
 public good, in the very national councils and assemblies themselves, 
 which were constituted in such a manner as most served for the upholding 
 of the private interest of their families.’"—Siy Harry Vane. 
 
 N these sentences Sir Harry Vane, the noblest of English 
 men and Republicans, lays bare the tap-root of that thrice- 
 accursed tree of Oligarchy, whose baleful shadow has blighted 
 the lives of so many generations of his countrymen. His 
 pregnant words, penned more than two centuries ago, are 
 true now as then. ‘The cause”—the Republican cause— 
 the cause of the People against privilege—has yet to be won. 
 Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Plutocracy (the latest develop- 
 ment of ‘private and selfish interest’’) still, alas! find 
 England the happiest of happy hunting grounds. Sir Harry 
 wrote in the past tense, believing that the serpent of aristo- 
 cracy had been killed by the Revolution when in sooth it had 
 hardly been scotched. Oliver Cromwell by force and fraud 
 restored ‘‘ one-man government ” in his own person; and to 
 the monarch by the sword not unnaturally again succeeded 
 the monarch by divine right. The nation returned with 
 enthusiasm to its more ancient chains. 
 
 PAT OMG, EATS, 
 
 B 2 
 
4 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Shall it always be so? Shall it never cease to be the 
 reproach of Englishmen that they dearly love a lord ?—that 
 they prefer the status of subjects to that of citizens ?—that 
 they are incapable of rising to the full stature of freemen ? 
 Amid the saturnalia of the Restoration, Sir Harry Vane, 
 under the shadow of the scaffold, uttered this prophecy :— 
 ‘‘There hath been a battle fought with garments rolled in 
 blood, in which Thou, God, didst own thy servants, though 
 these nations have been thought unworthy any longer to 
 enjoy the fruits of that deliverance. Thou hast therefore another 
 day of decision to come.” | 
 
 Why does Sir Harry’s prophecy still await fulfilment? 
 When shall that other day of decision come—as come it 
 must? Why are Englishmen so tolerant of private and 
 selfish interests—so slow to base their institutions on the 
 only sure foundation—the absolute Sovereignty of the 
 People ? 
 
 The causes are multiple, but one stands out. The reaction 
 against the Protectorate of Cromwell was singularly severe, 
 leaving an indelible impression on the national mind, that 
 to escape from the frying-pan of hereditary monarchy into 
 the fire of military dictatorship is a highly questionable gain. 
 Hence, largely, the despicable spirit of compromise that has 
 animated the domestic policy of English statesmen ever 
 since. . 
 
 Still “the cause’ was not dead. In 1688 it would have 
 reasserted itself, to the sweeping away of all royal and aris- 
 tocratic ‘‘ bars and impediments,” but taught by experience, 
 the Aristocracy substituted cunning and deception for the 
 weapons of steel that had failed them so conspicuously on the 
 ‘fields of Naseby and Marston Moor. They had recourse to a 
 make-believe rosewater Revolution of their own, by which 
 they changed the dynasty, and, according to Mr. Bright, who 
 never spoke more truly, enthroned themselves. ‘Theso-called 
 ‘¢ Revolution Houses” took the place of the King. Once 
 firmly in the saddle, they effectually strangled freedom at 
 home by embarking the nation in the most criminal enter- 
 prises against liberty abroad. The French wars, which dried 
 up every source of income except rent, may be said -to have 
 been waged for the preservation of primogeniture and entail, 
 which Pitt—the Bottomless Pitt as some discriminating per- 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 5 
 
 son called him—and his accomplices apprehended might be> 
 unfavourably influenced by the immortal principles of ’89. 
 
 In time, the deluded people awoke to some sense of their 
 folly. They wrung from the governing caste the Reform 
 Bill of 1832, and it was not long before the People’s Charter, 
 that unique embodiment of democratic aspiration, was form- 
 ulated and demanded, not without menace. In the Charter, 
 the masses, with a correct instinct, recognised that they had 
 found a master-key that would unlock every door in the 
 mighty fortress of privilege. The Oligarchy were not less 
 discerning. They cast about for instruments with which to 
 crush so formidable an assault on their supremacy, and strange 
 to say, Richard Cobden and John Bright came forward as the 
 ‘‘saviours of society.” With the relatively small reform of 
 free trade in grain the great reform of parliamentary demo- 
 cratization was knocked on the head. A single end was 
 achieved to the sacrifice of the means to many not less impor- 
 tant ends. The small reform as usual killed the great one. 
 The Oligarchy was saved once more, and to-day its power is 
 unbroken. Mr. Bright, the tribune of the people, was able 
 to rise with enthusiasm to the middle-class idea of free trade ; 
 the national idea of the complete enfranchisement ofthe people 
 was less within the range of his sympathies. Had it been 
 otherwise—had he and Mr. Cobden, with truer political per- 
 spective, postponed the repeal of the Corn-laws to the 
 triumph of the Charter, how different the course of events! 
 
 Since then we have had the Reform Bill of 67. Generally 
 speaking, it extended the suffrage without materially increas- 
 ing the influence of the Commons in what is facetiously 
 called the Commons’ House of Parliament. Howbeit, are 
 we not indebted to it for the political existence of that virile 
 museum-closing, Ireland-coercing champion of Democracy, 
 Mr. Henry Broadhurst? With such a net result, what well- 
 instructed elector will have the hardihood to maintain that 
 our reform agitations have been altogether in vain? 
 
 Nevertheless, Vane's “other day of decision”’ has yet to 
 come, and be it ours to hasten its advent. As yet the signs 
 of the dawn are not such as he that runneth may read :— 
 
 “The days of the nations bear no trace 
 Of all the sunshine so far foretold ; 
 
 The cannon speaks in the teacher’s place—- 
 The age is weary with work and gold, 
 
6 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 And high hopes wither, and memories wane; 
 On hearths and altars the fires are dead; 
 But that brave faith hath not lived in vain— 
 
 And this is all that our watcher said.”’ 
 
 Has our Radical-Liberal or Liberal-Radical Ministry of alf 
 the talents and of all the virtues, with the Grand Old Man 
 at its head, inaugurated a democratic millennium? I trow 
 not. Open the Hansards of the present Parliament, and 
 you will hardly be able, with a microscope, to discover one 
 measure of real national benefit. Page after page testifies to. 
 the anxiety of the vaunted Liberal majority to arrest patriots on 
 suspicion ; to expel from the House by “ superior force”’ hon. 
 members trying really to represent their constituents; to 
 violate domicile by day and by night; to abolish trial by 
 jury; to expel aliens; to re-establish the Norman curfew; 
 to suppress freedom of the press and of the platform; to gag 
 Parliament; to appropriate national funds for the payment 
 of impossible rents; illegally to extrude a solitary confessing 
 infidel; to incarcerate a crazy German refugee; to fire 
 defenceless Alexandria in order to gratify Hebrew bond- 
 holders and rapacious officials; to give huge money grants. 
 and patents of nobility to the chief directors of the revolting 
 work ; to build royal yachts at shameless cost; to alienate 
 national land for an old song; and to collect for creditors 
 their bad debts through the agency of national officials ; these 
 are so far among the chief achievements of ‘‘ the most Liberal 
 Administration of the century.” 
 
 The career of the present Ministry ought to teach the 
 democrats of England several salutary lessons. Imprimis: 
 Put not your trust in princes, be they Grand Old Men or 
 Grand Young Men. When one says, ‘*Lo! here I have 
 found the political Messiah in the person of Mr. Gladstone ;” 
 er another, ‘‘Lo! there I have discovered him in the great 
 caucus-compeller of Birmingham ;” let the report be peremp- 
 torily discredited. There are no political Messiahs. Great 
 men, like strong liquors, should always be partaken of in 
 small quantities. The Greeks, who ostracised their mighty 
 ones, were not such fools as they have been accounted. The 
 Athenian elector who objected to Aristides because he was 
 so often called the Just, was animated by a correct instinct. 
 The reason is plain The best and the ablest of political 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 7 
 
 leaders are fallible ; and when they fall the cause which they 
 represent but too frequently falls with them by reason of the 
 blind idolatry of their devotees. Take, for example, the 
 most iniquitous war of modern times—the Egyptian. It 
 was blessed by upright Mr. Guinness Rogers, by upright Mr. 
 R. W. Dale, and by the Quakers, simply because it was 
 waged by the infallible Prime Minister. ‘They area happy 
 thing, great men and great officers,” Sir John Eliot told a 
 timid House, ‘if they be good, and one of the greatest bless- 
 ings of the land ; but power converted into evil is the greatest 
 curse that can befallit. The greater the delinquent the greater 
 the delict.” | 
 
 It is the firm grasp of well-defined principles of action that 
 _ can alone really serve individuals or communities in the long 
 run. Men who mistake a Pitt, a Peel, a Palmerston, or a 
 Gladstone for a principle are but in the infancy of political 
 thought. Whatever they may allege, they have not attained 
 to the stature of freemen. They are meet subjects for Per- 
 sonal Government. 
 
 Another lesson of the day, and that hardly of less moment 
 to democrats: there are not really two parties in the State. 
 There is but one great party, that of privilege, divided into 
 two factions, labelled Whig and Tory, or Liberal and Con- 
 servative. Both do much the same things in office. The 
 mimic warfare which they wage with each other no shrewd 
 observer takes seriously. Itis merely a pleasant game, of 
 which the stakes are the spoils of office and patronage. It is 
 only when the elector spectators show some symptoms of 
 doubting their sincerity that the combatants show a little 
 heat. An ‘organised hypocrisy” is but a mild description 
 of an English Government, whether Liberal or Conservative 
 fhe Liberal and the Conservative are the two thieves between 
 whom the People are evermore crucified. Your root-and- 
 branch Republican to-day ransacks the royal pantry for 
 subject-matter of censure; to-morrow, with Cabinet office 
 within his grasp, he publicly renounces the ‘“ scatter-brain 
 principles” of his hot academic youth, and hastens to Wind- 
 sor to beslobber the royal fist. Long live expediency! Long 
 live self-interest ! 
 
 Has, then, the whole race of political heroes, of which Sir 
 Harry Vane was the type, perished from off English soil ? 
 
8 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Has “that brave faith” of his which, without an eftort, 
 nerved him to face the scaffold and the block, really “ lived 
 in vain?” Is that ‘ other day of decision ’’’ never to come to 
 the long-suffering English people? It cannot be. Its ad- 
 vent is equally desirable and inevitable. 
 
 ‘Have ye chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, 
 
 Ere the Doom from his worn sandals shake the dust against our land? 
 
 Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ’tis truth alone is strong 
 
 And albeit she wander outcast, now I see around her throng 
 Troops of beautiful angels to enshield her from all wrong!”’ 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 DHE eB THICS OFS ROYALTY: 
 
 And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of 
 him a king. 
 
 And he said, ‘‘ This will be the manner of the King that shall reign over 
 you. He will take your sons, and appoint them for Himself, for His 
 chariots, and to be His horsemen; and some shall run before His chariots. 
 
 ‘‘And He will take the tenth of your seed and of your vineyards, and 
 give to His officers and to His servants. 
 
 ‘And He will take your men-servants, and your maid-servants, and 
 your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to His work.” 
 
 ‘And He will appoint him captains over thousands and captains over 
 fifties, and will set them to ear His ground and to reap His harvest, and to 
 make His instruments of war andl instruments of His chariots.’’ 
 
 ‘And He will take your daughters to be confectionaries and to be 
 cooks and to be bakers.” 
 
 “ And He will take your fields and your vineyards and your olive yards, 
 even the best of them, and give them to His servants.” 
 
 “« And ye shall cry out in that day because of your King which ye shall 
 have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.” 
 
 And all the people said unto Samuel, ‘‘ Pray for thy servants unto the 
 Lord thy God that we die not, for we have added unto our sins this evil— 
 to ask a king.”"—SAMUEL. 
 
 | eee partiality of the clergy, especially those of the Estab- 
 lished Church, for the above passage of Holy Writ is well 
 known to all churchgoers. These spiritual guides never tire 
 of reminding their flocks that monarchy is a sinful institution, 
 repugnant to the Divine Will,'and, as such, the inevitable 
 source of misery, oppression and dishonour, national and 
 individual. It is perhaps less generally known that the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, at the coronation of a new 
 monarch, invariably prefaces the ceremony by reading, for 
 his or her Majesty’s benefit, the whole of the 8th chapter of 
 ist Samuel with extraordinary emphasis. 
 
 Nonconformist pastors are not less faithful. In their 
 frequent encounters with latter-day sceptics, secularists, 
 
ro THE ETHICS OF ROYALTY. 
 
 positivists, and other infidels, whose acquaintance with © 
 Scripture is apt to be slender or at second hand, they are 
 wont to silence contradiction by forcibly appealing to our 
 existing social and political condition as the literal fulfilment 
 of this divine oracle. It may be difficult to show how the 
 whale swallowed Jonah, but it is not at all hard to prove that 
 cruel wars, intolerable taxation, scandalous sinecures, and 
 impoverishing land monopolies are the normal concomitants 
 of royalty. Ask those right hon. Republicans, Sir Charles 
 Dilke, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, Mr. Henry Fawcett if it is 
 not so. They know all about it, or at all events they once 
 did! 
 
 But, strange’ to say, with revelation and: reason, piety and 
 impiety arrayed against it, this deadly nightshade of 
 monarchy still continues to flourish in our midst, poisoning 
 the very life-blood of society. ‘‘The divinity that doth 
 hedge a king,’ of which Shakspere, the poet of feudalism, 
 wrote—the Swan of Avon’s politics seem to have been about 
 as bad as his poetry was good—is not unmindful even of 
 such contemptible specimens of royalty as the Guelphs, 
 regarding the first of whom a Caledonian bard asked with 
 amazement— 
 
 ‘‘ Wha the de’il do ye think we hae gotten for a king ? 
 
 But a wee, wee German lairdie! 
 
 And when they gaed to bring him hame 
 He was delvin’ in his kail yardie; 
 
 Sawin’ kail and layin’ leeks, 
 But the hose and but the breeks, 
 
 Then up his beggar duds he cleeks, 
 This wee, wee German lairdie.”’ 
 
 It is still her Majesty’s army, her Majesty’s navy, her 
 Majesty’s Ministers, nay, her Majesty’s Opposition—every- 
 body and everything her Majesty’s, except, as shrewd old 
 Cobbett observed, her Majesty’s debt, which is national. In 
 the pulpit her Majesty is solemnly prayed for; in the press 
 her great standing achievement of “driving out”’ is ad- 
 miringly recorded ; at the festive board she is loyally toasted; 
 while the Mint is ever busy stamping the current coin of the 
 realm with her image and superscription. 
 
 Why all this praying, recording, toasting, and stamping ? 
 We are all. it is to be feared, very great sinners; but why 
 
P 
 THE ETHICS OF ROYALTY. If 
 
 should royalty, for example, require such an exceptional 
 stretch of the Divine clemency? True, her Majesty’s imme- 
 diate predecessors on the throne have been persons of most 
 disreputable moral character; but did the unremitting ori- 
 sons offered up for them during their proper lives perceptibly 
 improye their conduct? Not in the least. Indeed, a more 
 startling illustration of the inefficacy of prayer could hardly 
 be had, and it is a wonder that in the late magazine con- 
 troversy on the subject none of the anti-prayer disputants 
 thought of using it. Can it therefore be that royalty is 
 prayed for in order to show that it is past praying for ? 
 
 Again, why should her Majesty’s health be made the 
 subject-matter of so much bibulous solicitude, so much post- 
 'prandial laudation? A thousand chances to one the post- 
 prandial orator knows nothing whatever of the real character 
 of the royal personage whose merits he extols. What is 
 Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba? He will know something 
 about Hecuba perchance when the memoirs of some ver- 
 acious courtier like Greville appear ; but not till then. With 
 respect to the present monarch the postprandial orator 
 generally discovers two, and only two, cardinal virtues—the 
 one personal, the other political—which fill his soul with the 
 profoundest admiration and thanksgiving. 
 
 Firstly, the Queen has led the life of a respectable matron. How 
 marvellous in a queen! But were somebody to rise and 
 compliment the orator on similar perfections in his (the 
 orator’s) wife, his sister, or his daughter, that erring some- 
 body would not improbably be rewarded by having the 
 handiest decanter thrown at his head. Is it, therefore, the 
 orator’s intention to show that hardly anything short of a 
 miracle can prevent queens from falling below the most ordi- 
 nary standard of female virtue? 
 
 Her Majesty’s other pre-eminent virtue, the political one, 
 is not less remarkable—she never interferes with the course of 
 government. Was ever such a qualification for office, or any 
 kind of human employment whatever, heard of before? Con- 
 ceive of a chimney-sweep who never swept a chimney, a 
 baker who never baked, a butcher who supplied no meat, a 
 shoemaker who made no shoes, or a head clerk who never 
 entered his office, being complimented for magnanimously 
 abstaining from the discharge of the duties of their respec- 
 
I2 THE ETHICS OF ROYALTY. 
 
 tive callings! Nay, more; conceive of a grateful nation 
 rewarding such abstention by a clear grant to the abstainer 
 and his or her relatives of a million sterling per annum, and 
 the marvel has grown a hundredfold ! 
 
 But our postprandial philosopher would probably demur to 
 a comparison so odious. Kings and queens, he would con- 
 tend, are not to be confounded with base mechanical butchers, 
 bakers, and candlestick makers. Admitted, but wherein lies 
 the distinction? Itis here. Butchers, bakers, and candle- 
 stick makers perform functions useful and indeed necessary 
 to society, whereas those of royalty are at best ornamental. 
 
 But he who drives fat oxen should, according to Ur. John- 
 son, himself be fat. Now the question arises, and with 
 reverence be it put, is Victoria Regina really even an orna- 
 mental figurehead? ‘Tastes, of course, will differ, but I 
 venture to affirm, without fear of rational contradiction, that 
 there are at least half a million of ladies in the land whose 
 native grace, dignity, and mental gifts would far surpass 
 those to which her Teutonic Majesty can lay claim—ladies, 
 many of them of independent means, willing to do the 
 national honours without garish splendour, and at their own 
 cost. 
 
 Moreover, has it not been laid down on the unimpeachable 
 authority of Mr. Oscar Wilde that true ornament is insepara- 
 ble from utility? Why, then, if the State must have a figure- 
 head, not apply at once to the Grand Old Man? Is he not. 
 ornamental? Is he not useful? Is it not ornamental to be 
 equally at home inthe jargon of bric-a-bvac, and the labyrinths 
 of Dante’s Inferno? Is it not useful to be able to fell an oak, 
 to coerce Ireland, and, after the burning of Alexandria, to 
 demonstrate that ‘‘ we have not been at war with anybody,” 
 and all this on strictly Liberal principles? 
 
 Again, are the simple hospitalities of the White House at 
 Washington less enjoyable than the tomfooleries of the Court 
 of St. James’s? Is President Arthur or President Grévy less 
 a gentleman than the Prince of Wales? Assuredly not. The 
 ornamental argument will not stand a moment’s analysis. 
 Royalty is really paid for its inaction, not because it is in its 
 nature ornamental and passive, but because an experience of 
 more than eight centuries has abundantly shown that it is 
 politically dangerous. 
 
THE ETHICS OF ROYALTY. I3 
 
 The danger from it now is not so much political as social. 
 
 It acts as a convenient screen behind which there is hardly 
 a job too gross to be hatched. It is the standing symbol of 
 that social injustice and inequality about the effects of which 
 in the East-end of London so much has recently been written. 
 There is a matchless irony in the composition of Sir Charles 
 Dilke’s Commission of Inquiry into the Housing of the Poor. 
 To set the Prince of Wales, the Marquis of Salisbury, and 
 other noble lords to investigate the causes of wretched 
 dwellings is more like appointing a committee of wolves 
 to account for a scarcity of lambs than anything I can 
 think of. 
 _ Why then so many canting prayers, so many sickening 
 _ eulogies of an institution so ridiculous, so noxious to the 
 people at large? Simply because the nation is not self- 
 governed. England is ruled by a close oligarchy governing 
 in its own interests, and to that oligarchy royalty is anything 
 but useless. 
 
 The people interested in royalty may be roughly divided 
 into two great classes. They are either knaves or fools— 
 persons moved by self-interest or superstition, or, it may be, 
 by a cunning compound of both. Political superstition, like 
 religious superstition, is merely belief without evidence. The 
 privileged ring, and those who-are struggling to enter it, 
 compose the former class, which is made up of courtiers, 
 sinecurists, pensioners, peers, parvenus, landlords who neither 
 toil nor spin, self-seeking clergymen, venal writers, lawyers, 
 army and navy officers, snobs, e¢ hoc genus omne. 
 
 This motley crew have one characteristic in common. 
 They are all dishonestly bent on living luxuriously, and 
 without toil, at the cost of the industrious portion of the 
 community. To them the Crown is a pillar of cloud by day 
 and a pillar of fire by night. Let them be but deprived of its 
 protection, and they would be like sheep without a shepherd. 
 They would be taken in detail, stripped of their borrowed 
 plumes, and relieved of their booty. They magnify royalty 
 and prostrate themselves before it, not because they believe 
 in it—they are too near it not to know how great an im- 
 posture it is—but because it effectually dazzles and stupefies 
 the industrious classes—the fools—whose sore toil allows 
 them neither time for reflection nor opportunity for study. 
 
14 _ ‘THE ETHICS OF ROYALTY. 
 
 Like Hamlet’s “ groundlings,” they are adjudged “ capable 
 of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.” 
 
 Howbeit, the groundlings at times make a noise that is not © 
 at all to the taste of royalty and the parasitic creatures that 
 cluster around it. Poor Blowitz of the Times, and his con- 
 geners of the press, have hardly yet recovered from the 
 tempest of hisses by which the unmannerly groundlings of 
 Paris drove the Spanish King out of the great Republican 
 city. It was a new experience for monarchs and Monarchists, 
 which cannot fail to do them a world of good. The signifi- 
 cance of the incident may be measured by the childish horror 
 of the organs of the privileged classes here and on the Con- 
 tinent. 
 
 In happy England the people are in no danger of falling 
 into the anti-monarchical enormities of the Parisians. They 
 know their station better, have better manners, and better 
 political teachers—Radical teachers, too—to point out to 
 them the path they ought to pursue. Listen to that right 
 honourable Radical, Anthony John Mundella, on the vote in 
 supply, to pay the cost of the Prince of Wales’s mischievous 
 jaunt to India :—‘‘ As long as we had a monarchy we should 
 be ashamed to have a cotton- velvet or tinfoil sort of mon- 
 archy; he did not believe in a cheap, shabby, Brummagem 
 monarchy, and he always would give his vote loyally and in 
 consistency with those opinions, which he believed to be the 
 opinions of his constituents.’’ There spoke a true friend of 
 the people! What more praiseworthy than. to record one’s 
 vote in consistency with the opinions of one’s constituents! 
 No Brummagem monarchies for the opulent operatives of 
 Sheffield! Against such claptrap the gods themselves might 
 contend in vain. The fact is, the public mind has been so 
 long saturated with delusive, constitutional cant, distorted 
 history, and treacherous political compromises, that the 
 boldest investigator may well despair of evolving order out 
 of the chaos. 
 
 To begin with, ‘‘ our glorious constitution,” of which con- 
 stitutional authors predicate so many excellences, never had 
 any existence, except in the imagination of the writers. In 
 the United States the meanest citizen can challenge the 
 validity of an Act of Congress in a court of justice, and if it 
 
THE ETHICS OF ROYALTY. 15 
 
 is held to be repugnant to the Constitution of the Republic— 
 a document which most American schoolboys know by heart 
 —it becomes a dead letter in spite of President, Senate, and 
 House of Representatives. What is called the British Constit- 
 ution, on the other hand, consists of an intricate tangle of 
 successive checks and limitations imposed on the despotic 
 feudal authority set up by Norman William at the Conquest. 
 They are all so contrived that they can be suspended on the 
 slightest provocation. In Ireland, at this moment, Earl 
 Spencer, the representative of royalty, 1s clothed with powers 
 which the Czar of Russia might almost envy. Our liberties, 
 such as they are, depend not on a constitution, but on a‘form 
 of government which a powerful Minister may twist into 
 pretty much any shape he pleases. The armour of ancient 
 despotism can be brought out from the store-room at any 
 moment. It needs no refurbishing. So trueit is that ‘the 
 price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” especially in oligarchic 
 England. 
 
 Three elements enter into the composition of English Gov- 
 ernment :(1.)the Monarchical; (2.)the Aristocratic; and(3.) the 
 Republican, represented respectively by Queen, Lords, and 
 Commons. At the bar of history and reason, Monarchy and 
 Aristocracy have long stood condemned. Their crimes in 
 the past have been enormous, and to-day they exist only for 
 themselves, which can be permitted to no man or body of 
 men in this universe of God. The hereditary principle, or 
 rather want of principle, is followed in flagrant violation of a 
 well-observed law of nature. Wise men seldom have wise 
 sons, good men often have bad sons, while men of intellect 
 frequently beget intellectualimbeciles. Mental or moral gifts 
 in excess antagonize the reproductive energies. Who would 
 dream of making a man Lord Chief Justice of England or 
 Astronomer-Royal on the ground of paternal tenure of office? 
 Certainly no one in his senses. 
 
 Why, then, leave legislation to possible, nay, probable, 
 fools or knaves? Is it a light matter that the welfare of 
 millions should be perilled on such a hazard? No! a thou- 
 sand times no! As has been said, kings, and aristocrats 
 have been tried at the bar of history and reason, and found 
 ‘guilty. They await but the inevitable arrival of the execu- 
 tioner—the People. Then will have come that ‘other day 
 
16 THE ETHICS OF ROYALTY. 
 
 of decision”’ which good Sir Harry Vane, with the eye of faith, 
 prevised under the shadow of the scaffold :— 
 
 ‘‘O, thou that sea-walls sever 
 
 From lands unwalled by seas! 
 Wilt thou endure for ever, 
 
 O Milton's England, these? 
 Thou that wast his Republic, 
 Wilt thou clasp their knees? 
 These royalties rust-eaten, 
 These worm-corroded lies, 
 
 That keep thy head storm-beaten 
 And sun-like strength of eyes 
 From the open air and heaven 
 Of intercepted skies.’’ 
 
 ———— 
 
17 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 NORMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 William came over the sea, 
 With bloody sword came he, 
 Cold heart and bloody hand 
 Now rule the English land. 
 SNORRO’S SAGA. 
 
 i? realise in some degree the manifold calamities that 
 royalty has heaped on the English people it is not necessary 
 to go beyond the period of the Norman Conquest. The fatal 
 year of Hastings, 1066, will ever remain the blackest in our 
 annals. In that year sixty thousand of the greatest ruffians 
 that could be collected not merely in Normandy, but in all 
 Europe, crossed the Channel, and by sheer brute force 
 possessed themselves of the land. They succeeded in 
 garotting the entire English people, and to this day their 
 descendants, or rather their pretended descendants, on the 
 throne, in the peerage, and in the magistracy, keep a tight 
 grip on the nation’s throat. Conquests there have been 
 before and since in the world’s history, but never one with 
 results so widely, so enduringly disastrous. The policy of the 
 Norman robber is illustrated to-day not less by the misery 
 and degradation of the Irish peasant, the Indian ryot, and 
 the Egyptian fellah, than by the squalor of the East-end of 
 London and the ruin of agricultural England. 
 
 WILLIAM THE NorMAN (1066—108 7.) 
 
 The leader of the freebooters, variously known as William 
 the Bastard, William the Conqueror, and William the Great, 
 was the son of a tanner’s daughter and a Norman duke 
 styled, for sufficient reasons, Robert the Devil. Duke Robert 
 and his predecessors had established in their Neustrian con- 
 quest a system of government. which William applied to 
 England with sundry amplifications and refinements of his 
 
 ri 
 
 ~~ 
 
18 NORMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 own. To him we are indebted for the feudal svstem and the 
 game laws in all their rigour. 
 
 William de Jumiége, a Norman writer, gives us to under- 
 stand that these boons were not always appreciated, even in © 
 Normandy, by the peasants and other unprivileged persons,who 
 ought to have known better. They were unreasonable enough 
 on one occasion to rebel, and the gentle Norman commander 
 who corrected them, according to William de Jumiége, ‘ cut 
 off his prisoners’ hands and feet, and sent them back in that 
 helpless state to their comrades, to check them from 
 such practices, and to be a warning to them not to expose 
 themselves to something worse. And when the peasants 
 received this lesson they returned to their proper places at 
 the plough.” Comment is unnecessary. 
 
 William’s claim to be King of England was without legal or 
 moral justification. The office had always been, and is now, 
 simply one of trust, conferred by the representatives of the 
 nation for the people’s good, and not for the monarch’s private 
 advantage. However irregular at times may have been the 
 practice, there is nothing more certain than that there resides 
 in parliament plenary power to depose and to elect kings 
 and queens as it has a mind. It is a right rooted in reason, 
 and the practice of ten centuries. When the Long Parlia- 
 ment formally abolished royalty it resolved that ‘the office 
 of king in this nation is unnecessary, burthensome, and 
 dangerous.’”’ For one or all of these reasons the végime of 
 the House of Brunswick might similarly be terminated to- 
 morrow. 
 
 The Saxon Witanagemot never hesitated to deal sharply 
 with perverse kings. thelwald, of Northumbria was de- 
 posed in 765; Alcred in 774; Sigeberht of Wessex in 7553 
 fEthelbred IT. in 1013, and Harthacnut in 1037. 
 
 Since the Conquest, Parliament in 1327 deposed Edward 
 II. (the first King of England, curiously enough, whose reign 
 had been made to date from the day following his predeces- 
 sor’s death, instead of from the ceremony of election and 
 coronation) ; Richard II. in 1399, and James II. in 1688. In 
 the case of Charles I., Parliament went a step further. It 
 not merely took away ‘the crown, but the head of the wearer 
 also. Yea, ‘© And what king’s majesty,” asks the immortal 
 champion of English freedom, John Milton, ‘sitting on an 
 
NORMAN ROYALTY. 19 
 
 exalted throne, ever shone so brightly as that of the people o 
 England then did, when, shaking off that old superstition 
 which had prevailed a long time, they gave judgment on the 
 king himself, or rather on an enemy that had been their king, 
 caught, as it were, in a net by his own laws, and scrupled 
 ‘not to inflict on him, being guilty, the same punishment 
 which he would have inflicted on any other?” ... ‘ This,” 
 he continues, ‘‘is the God who uses to throw down proud 
 and unruly kings, and utterly to extirpate them and their 
 family. By his manifest impulse being set at work to re- 
 cover our almost lost liberty, we went on in no obscure but 
 an illustrious passage, pointed out and made plain to us by 
 God Himself.” We could put up with a hereditary line of 
 Miltons; but they, alas ! do not, like kings, run in families. 
 
 Generally, it is true, but not always, the National Council 
 elected the monarch from a particular family. Cnut, the 
 Dane, and Harold, the gallant but unfortunate English prince 
 who fell at Hastings, had no blood relationship to the house 
 of Cerdic. Harold, whose notions of Government seem 
 singularly modern and enlightened, when William modestly 
 demanded that England south of the Humber should be 
 given up to him and his robber horde, proudly replied, “ My 
 royalty comes to me from my people, and, without my people’s 
 consent, I cannot lay it down.” Indeed, it was not till the 
 house of York, themselves usurpers, came on the scene that 
 any serious attempt was made to treat England as if it were 
 a private estate transmissible by primogeniture. To substitute 
 the idea of territorial possession for that of personal and 
 fiduciary office was the mischievous work of the lawyers, who 
 are ever prone to fall into false analogies. Parliament, how- 
 ever, did not fail to reassert its old supremacy. As it had 
 done in the case of the Fourth Henry, so it did in that of 
 the Seventh. It set up a new royal stock, excluding the 
 whole house of York. 
 
 To the Yorkist pretention of indefeasible hereditary right 
 the Stuarts sought to add the still more preposterous claim of 
 divine right. Bad gospel came to the aid of worselaw. The 
 Convention Parliament treated both without ceremony. For 
 two months, from the 23rd of December to the 13th of 
 February (1688-9), the monarchy wasin abeyance. William 
 -and Mary, the dutiful nephew and daughter of the exiled 
 
 a Cizs 
 
20 NORMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 James II., were then invested with regal power; and finally, 
 in 1700, the succession was settled on Sophia of Hanover, 
 granddaughter of James I., and the heirs of her body being 
 Protestants, to the exclusion not merely of the direct line but - 
 of the elder children of Sophia’s mother, Elizabeth. 
 
 The title of the present royal family to the throne is there- 
 fore a Parliamentary title, pure and simple, and what Parlia- 
 ment has bestowed it is clearly competent for Parliament to 
 withdraw. All through the centuries royalty has been an 
 unalleviated curse to the English people. It can no more 
 change its essential character than can an Ethiopian his skin 
 or a leopard his spots. A really Liberal Parliament, instead 
 of manacling Ireland and garotting Egypt, would busy itself 
 with the repeal of the Act of Settlement. The intellect and 
 conscience of mankind are alike sick of kings and queens, 
 limited and unlimited, small and great. ‘ Unnecessary, 
 burdensome, and dangerous,” should be written with an iron 
 pen on every crown in Europe. . 
 
 It is the boast of every snob in England that his ancestors 
 ‘came over with the Conqueror.” Well, ancestors, like 
 other people, may be judged by the company they kept. Let 
 us see, then, what manner of manthis Conqueror was. Was 
 he a benefactor of his species ? Contemporary history is not 
 silent with regard to his achievements. Take this as a 
 sample:—The men of Northumbria were not partial to his 
 kingship, and this is how, according to his unscrupulous 
 panegyrist, Odericus Vitalis, he dealt with the region between 
 Humber and Tyne: ‘“‘ He (the Conqueror) extended his posts 
 over a space of one hundred miles; he smote most of the 
 inhabitants with the edge of the avenging sword; he de- © 
 stroyed the hiding-places of the others; he laid waste their 
 lands; he burned their houses with all that was therein. 
 Nowhere else did William act with such cruelty, and in this 
 instance he shamefully gave way. to evil passions. While he 
 scorned to rule his own wrath, he cut off the guilty and the 
 innocent with equal severity. For, excited by anger, he bade 
 the crops, and the herds, and the household stuff, and every 
 description of food to be gathered in heaps and to be set 
 light to and utterly destroyed altogether—so that all sus- 
 tenance for man and beast should be at once wasted through- 
 out all the region beyond the Humber. Hence there raged 
 
NORMAN ROYALTY. 21 
 
 grievous want far and wide throughout England. Such a 
 misery of famine involved the people that there perished of 
 Christian human beings of either sex and of every age one > 
 Kundred thousand.” Truly a charming gentleman this to 
 " accompany in any enterprise ! 
 
 But William could not always find convenient bodies of 
 human beings to slaughter. There were unhappy intervals 
 in his life when he was obliged to content himself with shed- 
 ding the blood of the lower animals. ‘* He made many deer 
 parks,” says the Saxon Chronicle, ‘“‘and he established laws 
 so that whosoever killed a hart, or a hind, or a boar should 
 be blinded ; for William loved the high game as if he had 
 been their father.” 
 
 These fatherly instincts induced him to lay waste an 
 immense area between Winchester and the sea. This tract, 
 subsequently known as the New Forest, embraced sixty 
 parishes, with their churches and villages. These were 
 burned to the ground and the inhabitants left homeless. ‘So 
 stern was he,” says the Chronicle, ‘‘ that no man durst gainsay 
 his will, Rich men bemoaned and poor men shuddered ; 
 but he recked not the hatred of them all.” 
 
 Howbeit, one good man there was who could not be in- 
 duced to profit by William’s villanies—the Monk Guitand. 
 This faithful priest was summoned from Normandy to receive 
 an English bishopric. He came, saw, and not merely de- 
 clined the preferment, but asssigned reasons for conduct so 
 unusual in an ecclesiastic. He was sick, he said, and per- 
 plexed with many doubts, sorrows, and frailties; but were 
 he ten times fitter to guide others, he would never share in 
 the spoils of blood. ‘When he thought of the crimes by 
 which England had been won, he trembled to touch it, with 
 all its wealth, as though it glowed with the fire of hell.” 
 
 While engaged in the congenial task of burning the town 
 of Mantes, William received a fatal injury, and died at 
 Rouen, September 8th, 1087. No sooner was the breath out 
 of his body than bishops, barons, physicians, courtiers fled in 
 horror. The rabble burst into the apartment, stripped it of 
 everything, leaving the monster’s carcase naked on the floor. 
 Of his sons, the eldest, Robert, was, at the time, in arms 
 against him; the other two hurried off to secure their share 
 of the spoil. 
 
PHP. NORMAN ROYALTY, 
 
 It was left to a simple Norman knight, ‘‘for the honour of 
 God and the Norman name,” to secure sepulture for the — 
 tyrant’s bones. He conveyed them to the Abbey Church at 
 Caen, and had a grave dug for their reception between the 
 choir and the altar. But even then a serious difficulty oc- 
 cured. The Bishop of Evreux had performed the obsequies, 
 and the coffin was about to be lowered into the tomb, when 
 there stood forward from the throng Oscelin Fitz- Arthur, 
 and said, ‘“‘ The ground on which you stand was the site of 
 my father’s house. The man who lies dead before you, and 
 for whom you bid us pray, took my father’s land from him 
 by force and by wrong, and here, by abuse of his ducal 
 power, he built this church. I claim back the land; and I 
 forbid, in the name of God, that the robber should be covered | 
 with ground that is mine, and that he should have a burial- 
 place in my heritage.’’ The truth of Fitz-Arthur’s assertion 
 was notorious, and the assembled prelates had to guarantee 
 him ample compensation before the grave was permitted to 
 close over the remains of the Conqueror of England, who 
 had barbarously ordered the body of King Harold to be 
 buried on the beach, like a felon’s, below watermark. 
 
 By the time of William’s death, all England, with insig- 
 nificant exceptions, had been clutched by his cut-throat 
 followers, while the royal revenue, which in Edward the 
 Confessor’s time stood at £40,000 per annum, had, accord- 
 ing to Giraldus Cambrensis, reached the extraordinary sum 
 of £1,061 10s. 14d. per day! 
 
 The population of England at the time of the Conquest is 
 set down with proximate accuracy at about two million souls. 
 During the reigns of the Conqueror and his sons, what 
 through the sword, famine, and exile, it was reduced probably 
 by one-third, and not till the time of Charles II. was it found 
 to have more than doubled itself; so frightful was the curse 
 inflicted on the unhappy country by the swarm of thieves 
 morn whom royalty and aristocracy are proud to claim 
 
 escent. | 
 
 Wiuiam Rurus (1087—1I100.) 
 William the Conqueror was succeeded by his son, William 
 
 Rufus—a greater villain even than his father, if his more 
 limited opportunities are taken into account. His profligacy 
 
NORMAN ROYALTY. 23 
 
 was scandalous in an age by no means squeamish. He 
 broke into convents, regardless of the vows of the fair re- 
 
 ycluses, and men talked privately’ of even worse enormities. 
 He was a meaner robber than his father. On one occasion 
 he took money from a Jew whose son had turned Christian, 
 undertaking to bring the young man back to Judaism. He 
 did not succeed, but he kept half the fee for hisroyal advocacy. 
 Fifty Saxons accused of poaching had successfully passed 
 the ordeal of fire. Rufus punished them, nevertheless, de- 
 claring that God was an unjust judge. : 
 
 His courtiers were a band of thieves and robbers. In the 
 houses where they were quartered during royal progresses 
 they insulted the ladies, and frequently burned before the 
 owner’s door such articles as they could neither conveniently 
 carry off nor sell. ‘‘ Never day dawned,” says the Chronicle, 
 ‘‘but he (Rufus) rose a worse man than he had lain down; 
 never sun set but he lay down a worse man than he had 
 risen.’ 
 
 One morning, fresh from a heavy debauch, he went out to 
 hunt in the New Forest, and was some time afterwards found 
 by certain poor charcoal-burners with the arrow of a hunter 
 or an assassin (most probably the latter) in his breast. His 
 younger brother Henry was in the Forest at the time, and 
 may have known something about the transaction. At all 
 events, he showed much alacrity in laying claim to the 
 Crown. It was noted asa judgment of Heaven that Richard, 
 William the Conqueror’s second son, as well as a nephew of 
 William Rufus, likewise came to violent ends in the New 
 Forest. 
 
 Henry I. (1100—1135.) 
 
 Henry I., with better mental gifts than his brother, was a 
 miracle of treachery, vindictiveness, and avarice. His praise 
 of a man was a sure sign that he intended toruin him. An 
 old favourite boasted that he could build as magnificent a 
 monastery as the king. Henry had him harassed by in-. 
 iquitous law-suits till he died of a broken heart. Duc de la 
 Barre-en-Ouche, a literary knight, satirized him in a song. 
 Henry had him seized and blinded, and the poor man dashed 
 
 ‘his‘brains out in despair. He was not even Henry’s vassal. 
 Juliana de Breteuil, the king’s natural daughter, objecting to 
 
24 NORMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 having her two children’s eyes put out, was ordered by her 
 amiable parent to be dragged through.a frozen moat. When 
 
 the last great sea-king, Magnus, was slain in Ireland he left. . 
 
 in custody of a citizen of Lincoln an immense hoard of 
 20,00olbs. in silver. Henry promptly threw the banker into 
 a dungeon and appropriated the treasure. On the death of 
 Gilbert, Bishop of London, Henry seized his effects. The 
 holy man’s silver and gold were carried to the king’s ex- 
 chequer in the episcopal boots. 
 
 The general pillage—taxation it could not be called—was 
 passing belief. ‘Those who had nothing to give,” says the 
 faithful chronicler, ‘‘ were driven from their humble dwellings, 
 or, the doors being torn off their hinges, were left open to be 
 plundered; or their miserable chattels being taken away, 
 they were reduced to the extreme of poverty or in other way 
 afflicted and tormented; while against those who were 
 thought to possess something certain, new and imaginary 
 offences were alleged ; when not daring to defend themselves 
 in a plea against the king, they were stripped of their property 
 and plunged into misery.” 
 
 His Saxon subjects he treated with undisguised contempt ; 
 while his only son, William, who, before his father’s demise, 
 providentially perished in the wreck of the White ship, had 
 repeatedly threatened that when he came to the throne he 
 would yoke them like beasts to the plough. A gluttonous 
 feast of lampreys terminated Henry’s career, but his death 
 brought no redress to the miserable people. 
 
 STEPHEN (II135—I154.) 
 
 Stephen, nephew of the late king and grandson of the 
 Conqueror, in defiance of his solemn oath of allegiance to 
 Maud, Henry’s daughter—kings’ are like dicers’ oaths—at 
 once sought the kingly office, to which he was elected by the 
 aldermen and Common Council of London! All the horrors 
 of a disputed succession ensued—disputed successions and 
 regencies are among the advantages of the monarchical 
 system of government on which the admirers of royalty 
 seldom enlarge. From end to end, the land was filled with 
 rapine. Stephen was a mere swashbuckler; while Maud 
 was an imperious, unfeeling woman, who could inspire no 
 attachment. The perfection of human anarchy was attained. 
 Everywhere frowning castles, built by forced labour, arose; 
 
NORMAN ROYALTY. 25 
 
 their lords were undisguised bandits, who hauled men and 
 women into their foul dens to rob them of their all. ‘‘ Some,” 
 say the Chronicles, ‘‘they hanged up by the feet and 
 smothered with foul smoke; others they hanged by the 
 * thumbs or the head, while fire was put to their feet; about 
 _ the heads of others they knotted cords and bound them so 
 that they went into the brain. Some were cast into pits 
 where there were adders, snakes, and toads, and died there. 
 Many of the castles had in them a ‘loathy and grim,’ which 
 was a drag for the neck, such as hardly two or three men 
 could lift. This was thus applied: being fastened to a beam, 
 the sharp iron was placed round the man’s neck, so that he 
 could neither sit, nor lie, nor sleep, but must bear all this 
 iron. Many thousands they wore out with hunger. To till 
 the ground was to plough the sea. If two or three men were 
 seen riding up to a town, all the inhabitants fled, taking them 
 for plunderers. And this lasted, growing worse and worse, 
 throughout Stephen’s reign. Men said openly that Christ 
 and his saints had gone to sleep.” 
 
 It is the unspeakable misfortune of Englishmen that the 
 true history of their monarchy has never yet been written by 
 a competent hand. The Humes, Freemans, Froudes, 
 Macaulays and Greens are scholars and polished writers, but 
 the ‘‘ root of the matter isnotinthem.” They are respecters 
 of persons, party advocates or word-painters, removed, it 
 may be through no fault of their own, from all living contact 
 and sympathy with the people. Comte’s dictum, ‘ The 
 working class is not, properly speaking, a class at all, but 
 constitutes the body of society ; from it proceeds the various 
 special classes which we regard as organs necessary to that 
 body ”—is the true key to universal history, and they com- 
 prehend it not. Royalty, aristocracy, and plutocracy are 
 not organs necessary to the body of society. They are but 
 excrescences. They exist only for reprobation and extinction. 
 “ By their fruits ye shall know them;” but by their fruits, 
 alas! they have never been made known by historians to the 
 people of England. Royalty and aristocracy have been 
 treated by nearly all English annalists as if they were the 
 body of society, for whom the workers live, move, and have 
 their being. Wanted—a competent English Historian. 
 None but Republicans and Democrats need ‘apply. 
 
26 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 
 
 God said, I am tired of kings, 
 I suffer them no more; 
 
 Up to mine ear the morning 
 Brings the outrage of the poor. 
 
 My angel, his name is Freedom, 
 Choose him to be your king ; 
 He shall cut pathways east and west 
 And fend you with his wing. 
 EMERSON. 
 
 Seat the lives of the kings and queens of England of the 
 
 meretricious glamour of historic, or rather histrionic, art, 
 and what remaias to be recorded is one long weary catalogue of 
 luman folly, depravity, and crime. No wonder our historians 
 give play to their imaginations. If they did not permit 
 themselves that indulgence, they must needs abandon their 
 task in disgust. They would find themselves in a position 
 somewhat similar to that of the criminal who was allowed to 
 choose between the galleys and a searching study of the 
 works of Guiccardini. The convict elected to peruse 
 Guiccardini, but soon discovered his mistake, and went cheer- 
 fully to the galleys. 
 
 Henry II. (1154-1189). 
 
 Henry II., the son of Matilda, was the first of 
 the Plantagenets who misgoverned England with all their 
 might for more than three hundred years—from 1154 to 1485. 
 His one aim in life was to render the monarchy absolute, and 
 except from the Church he encountered but little opposition. 
 In Stephen’s time ** Christ and His saints had gone to sleep,” 
 and during Henry’s reign they can scarcely be said to have 
 waked.up. If he did not expressly order the brutal murder 
 of Thomas a Becket, which sent a thrill of horror through 
 Christendom, his words were, to say the least, highly am- 
 
PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 27 
 
 biguous. His notions of religion were peculiar and original. 
 hen he did penance at a Becket’s shrine, it was from no 
 _ sentiment of remorse, but. because he hoped to cajole the 
 saint to use his influence to get him (Henry) out of certain 
 troubles that then beset him. 
 
 For the sake of her large possessions in France, he married 
 a notorious courtesan and divorcée. His own infidelities were 
 unbounded. Among his mistresses was the fair Rosamond 
 Clifford, of Woodstock labyrinth fame, whom the virtuous 
 Queen Eleanor is said to have compelled to drink poison by 
 holding a dagger to her throat. 
 
 Irishmen in particular have reason to execrate the memory 
 of this king. To him they owe the beginning of their long- 
 protracted national agony. The occasion was befitting. 
 One Irish chief or prince had made off with another chief’s 
 wife, and being brought to book for his misconduct by the 
 over-King of Ireland, he posted off to do homage to Henry 
 for his possessions. But years before this auspicious event 
 Henry had concluded that Ireland ‘‘was commodious to 
 him,” and that it was desirable ‘‘to enlarge the bounds of 
 the Church, to restrain the progress of vices, to correct the 
 manners of the people, to plant virtue among them, and to 
 increase the Christian religion !”” The Pope had seen matters 
 in the same light all the more clearly that Peter’s pence was 
 an uncertain quantity so far as Ireland was concerned. The 
 result had been an annexational Papal bull in Henry’s 
 favour. 
 
 His last years were not cheerfully spent. Huis sons, Henry, 
 Richard, and John all rose in arms against him. Eventually 
 he was thoroughly beaten, and driven in headlong flight from 
 his birthplace, Le Mans. As he beheld the flames of the 
 city ascend, he bitterly cursed God. His end was not 
 edifying. His last words were, ‘‘ Woe is me! Shame be | 
 upon me, a conquered king, and may God’s curse be upon 
 the children who have stretched me here!”’ So much for the 
 conqueror of Ireland. 
 
 Ricuarp I. (1189—1199). 
 
 _ Henry was succeeded by his dutiful son Richard I. 
 This man was called Lion Heart, by reason of his habits of 
 violence and brawling; while his fellow-crusader, Philip of 
 
25 PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 
 
 France, was known as the Lamb, his manners being courteous 
 and conciliatory. Richard was a mere atrocious blood- 
 shedder, and nothing else. He had plenty of that animal . 
 courage which is still to be had in such abundance at the 
 rate of eighteenpence a-day. He was neither statesman nor 
 general. In both these respects he was greatly inferior to 
 the infidel Saladin. He put up every office in the State for 
 sale, in order to raise money for his mad expedition to the 
 Holy Land. His subsequent ransom cost the nation some 
 £300,000—an immense sum forsuch a worthless bravo. 
 
 He appropriately met his death in a petty brawl before 
 the Castle of Chaluz, whose owner had acquired some 
 treasure-trove which Richard coveted. Prowling round the 
 walls with a mercenary band, he was hit by an archer, whose 
 father and two brothers he had killed. On his death-bed 
 Richard is said to have pardoned his slayer; but in point of 
 fact he was flayed alive, while the rest of the garrison were 
 hanged to aman. Sir Walter Scott, and others who have 
 converted this merciless and purposeless scourge of humanity 
 into a hero, have truly much to account for. He himself 
 formed a much more reasonable judgment when, speaking 
 comprehensively of his house, he said, ‘‘ We came of the 
 devil, and we shall go to the devil.” 
 
 JoHN (1199—1216.) 
 
 Richard was succeeded by his brother John, whose charac- 
 ter is summed up in one terrible sentence of contemporary 
 hate: ‘‘ Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence 
 of John.” He was an incomparable scoundrel, a compound 
 of all the royal vices—cruelty, lust, avarice, faithlessness, 
 ingratitude, blood-guiltiness. To make sure of the crown he 
 murdered his nephew Arthur in cold blood, and threw his 
 body into the Seine. To retain the crown he became the 
 vassal and tributary of the Pope. To his father and to his 
 brother he was the most shameless of traitors. His Court 
 was a brothel. Of right and wrong he recked nothing. Yet 
 this right royal ruffian, who “ wearied God,” signed Magna 
 Charta, the foundation stone of such liberties'as Englishmen 
 possess, 
 
 It is the severest possible condemnation of royalty to say 
 that the worst kings are always practically the best. Not 
 
PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 29 
 
 that King John meant any good to the English people—far 
 from it. The very thought of the Charter made him furious. 
 He flung himself on the ground, gnawing sticks and straw 
 like a wild beast. He got his over-lord, the Pope, to dis- 
 allow every concession, and proceeded with mercenary 
 troops from the Continent, to burn, slay, and harry the 
 country from endto end. But the great avenger, death, was 
 at hand. Gluttony or poison killed him, and Englishmen 
 rejoiced and were exceeding glad. 
 
 Henry III. (1216—1272.) 
 
 John was succeeded by his son, Henry III., a mere boy. 
 He turned out an imbecile, a despicable braggart, and a 
 tyrant to the full limit of his capacity. He could neither 
 manage a horse nor order a battalion. Men called him 
 cor ceveum vegis, or royal waxen heart. Yet he was a true son 
 of John. In the songs of the day he is ‘the bitter king,” 
 ‘the enemy of the whole realm, of the Church, and of God.” 
 His Court lived at free quarters wherever it moved. The 
 royal retainers robbed in all directions withimpunity. One- 
 sixth of the revenue was bestowed on foreign favourites. 
 The Battenbergs, Weimars, and Leiningens are no new 
 inflictions. Magna Charta was wholly disregarded. 
 
 But a new spirit of liberty had begun to animate the 
 breasts of Englishmen. A deliverer was at hand. Simon 
 de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, threw down the gauntlet to 
 the royal power. A man of stainless honour anda born 
 soldier, Earl Simon was yet greater as a statesman. He was 
 the father of representative government. Having defeated 
 Henry and his son Edward, he summoned to parliament in 
 1265 not merely knights of shires, but burgesses of ‘ com- 
 munes.”’ In physics the discavery of the law of gravitation 
 was all-important; in politics the discovery of the true law of 
 popular representation was not lessso. It had escaped the 
 subtlest philosophers of Greece and Rome, and Greek and 
 Roman democracy had made shipwreck in consequence. 
 Little mattered it that the founder of the House of Communes 
 perished in battle within a few months of his imperishable 
 achievement. He was before his time. 
 
 . The victor of Evesham, Edward, ‘the greatest of the 
 Plantagenets,”’ as he has been called, showed the quality of 
 
30 PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 
 
 wis royal greatness by causing Earl Simon’s body to be 
 shamefully mutilated. His head and hands were presented 
 to a second Herodias, Maud, wife of Roger de Mortimer. 
 But the patriot’s work neither Edward nor any of his suc- 
 cessors, whether Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, or Guelph, 
 could undo. Not a civilised people in the world but has 
 taken its cue from Earl Simon. Eventhe unhappy Egyptians 
 we have seen making a promising attempt with their Chamber 
 of Notables—an attempt, alas! to be stamped out in blood 
 and flame by the Grand Old Man and his Cabinet of all the 
 talents and all the virtues. Need we chide the Henrys and 
 Edwards with such malefactors in our midst ? 
 
 Epwarp I. (1272—1307.) 
 
 Edward I. succeeded his father, ‘‘ the bitter king.” 
 
 ‘The greatest of the Plantagenets’’ may be regarded as 
 great beside such colossal criminals as John and Richard III. 
 In no other sense was he great. Compare him with any. 
 real benefactor of mankind, and he at once becomes a moral 
 pigmy. Kings and queens to shine at all must be judged by 
 the lowest standard of moral excellence—that is to say by 
 the royal standard. Ina royal personage the mere absence 
 of a marked vice becomes an astonishing virtue. What sur- 
 prises us with regard to princes is not that they are good, 
 but that everything considered, they are not a great, deal 
 worse. 
 
 When the Prince of Wales’s mischievous trip to India was 
 being planned, Mr. Bright announced that H.R.H. was 
 *‘sood natured.” What more reasonable therefore than 
 saddle the taxpayer with the cost of the jaunt? Had we not 
 every reason to expect that a prince would be as surly asa 
 bear? For reasons about equally cogent Edward I. has 
 been styled the English Justinian. He was indeed a lawyer 
 in the sense that, when he wished to rob his neighbours in 
 Scotland, Wales, or France of what belonged to them, he 
 generally prefaced his attacks by legal quibbles of which an 
 Old Bailey lawyer might be ashamed. He tried his utmost 
 to set aside the provisions of the Great Charter, and when he 
 found the barons too strong for him he shed some crocodile 
 tearsin Westminster Hall, and abandoned the attempt. 
 
 By royal decree he made the Jews give up usury on pain 
 
PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 31 
 
 of death, and in London alone two hundred and eighty of 
 them were hanged. The position of the chosen race in 
 England has greatly improved since then. But recently the 
 Lfberal Administration sent to Egypt a powerful fleet and army 
 -to extort exorbitant interest on their behalf. On the whole, 
 Edward's method was more commendable. Better far hang 
 a few Goschens, Rothschilds, and Oppenheims than burn 
 Alexandria and slaughter thousands of inoffensive fellaheen 
 at Tel-el-Kebir, or of gallant Arabs at El Teb. 
 
 It was the one great ambition of Edward’s life to impose 
 the Norman yoke on the whole British islands. To effect 
 this object he drained England of men and money, while 
 inflicting on Scotland and Wales untold miseries. Of the 
 two last native princes of Wales, Llewellyn and David, he 
 caused the head of the former to be stuck on the Tower, 
 crowned with ivy the latter he commanded jto be drawn, 
 hanged, disembowelled, and quartered. They had _ been 
 guilty of the enormity of standing up for the independence of 
 the ancient Cymric race. 
 
 But it was in Scotland that Edward’s policy of craft and 
 violence met with a check, the consequences of which can 
 hardly be exaggerated. He had little difficulty in cajoling 
 and intimidating the Scottish nobles (the most unpatriotic in 
 Europe) into submission to his yoke; and when that was 
 accomplished, according to feudal ideas and precedents, all 
 should have been achieved. But what was Edward’s rage 
 and astonishment very speedily to find himself face to face 
 with a rising of the Scottish people, a phenomenon absolutely 
 new in feudal Europe! They were summoned to arms by a 
 simple country gentleman, Sir William Wallace, without 
 aristocratic connections of any kind. 
 
 This extraordinary man was the forerunner of the Kosci- 
 uskos, Capodistrias, and Garibaldis of later times. He was 
 the first soldier in Europe who fought, not for a dynasty, but 
 for a nation. He brushed aside all the technicalities of the 
 feudal law, and boldly assumed in the face of the world the 
 title of Guardian of the Realm of Scotland. He showed how 
 burghers and peasants, with spears in their hands, might 
 overthrow the iron-clad knighthood of Christendom, hitherto 
 considered invincible. He was the first to form the British 
 infantry square, and despite feudalism he introduced the 
 
32 PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 
 
 conscription. His motto was ‘God armeth the Patriot.” 
 In Wallace modern democracy found its first great leader. 
 
 After repeated successes against overwhelming odds in the 
 field, aggravated tenfold by the abominable treachery of the 
 Scottish nobles in the council, he was defeated by Edward in 
 a desperate battle at Falkirk, and ultimately betrayed to “the 
 greatest of the Plantagenets”’ for gold. He was hurried to 
 London, tried at Westminster, and drawn, hanged, disem- 
 bowelled while yet alive, and quartered at Smithfield. It was 
 not pretended that he had ever sworn allegiance to Edward. 
 His great crime was that he had fought for the honour and 
 independence of Scotland ‘after her feudal lords had igno- 
 miniously succumbed. He was judicially murdered. 
 
 But like Simon de Montfort, his work was done. His 
 example had made the Scots, the poorest and most uncivil- 
 ised people in Europe, a nation of stalwart freemen, hence- 
 forth resolute never to unite with their powerful neighbour 
 except on terms of perfect equality. Had it been otherwise, 
 England would have had not one Ireland, but two on her 
 hands to day. Englishmen, quite as much as Scotsmen, have 
 reason to bless the memory of the Scottish hero. The 
 burghers of Flanders and the herdsmen of Switzerland were 
 not slow to learn the lesson he had taught. No matter that 
 his head, crowned in mockery with laurel, was stuck with 
 that of his eldest brother, Sir John Wallace, on London 
 bridge, feudal ruffianism in mail had received its death-blow 
 in Europe. How puny the greatest achievement of ‘the 
 greatest of the Plantagenets ” with such a result! 
 
 *“ But bleeding and bound though her Wallace wight 
 
 For his long-loved country die, 
 
 Yet the bugle ne’er sang to a braver knight 
 
 Than Wallace of Elderslie ; 
 
 And the day of his glory shall ne’er depart, 
 
 His head unentombed shall with glory be balmed, 
 From the blood-streaming altar his spirit shall start, 
 Though the raven hath fed on his mouldering heart, 
 
 Yet a nobler was never embalmed,” 
 
, CHAPTER V. 
 VIG bp LAN AGE NET ROYARTY 
 
 “Princes are gods; oh, do not then 
 Rake in their graves to prove them men.” 
 
 Epwarp II. (1307—1317.) 
 
 $f HpRE greatest of the Plantagenets,” Edward I.—his 
 
 greatest achievements were to kill, and, like a savage 
 to mutilate the bodies of his two immortal contemporaries, 
 Earl Simon de Montfort and Sir William Wallace—was suc- 
 ceeded by his son, Edward II., the smallest of the Plantagenets. 
 After vigour imbecility, after senility infancy, such are among 
 the frequent sequences of hereditary rule. 
 
 It is doubtful if even elective presidents are necessary to 
 the welfare of a state; but compare, for example, the remark- 
 able series of statesmen from Washington to Arthur who 
 have presided over the destinies of the great republic of the 
 West with the contemporary sovereigns of England from mad 
 and bad George III. to Queen Victoria, whom the late Earl 
 of Beaconsfield, in a moment of after-dinner veracity, pro- 
 nounced ‘* physically and morally incapable of government,” 
 and what a contrast! A Washington, an Adams,a Jackson, 
 a Lincoln, or a Garfield were worth the whole spawn of 
 English kings and queens from the Conquest to the present 
 day. Nor is the condemnation of royalty merely comparative. 
 It is positive and essential. Edward I. wasa strong king, 
 and Edward II. a weak one, but the more hurtful to the 
 realm was Edward péve. 
 
 ‘The disease of royalty is the lust of arbitrary power. In 
 pursuit of this unhallowed object, Edward I. bequeathed to 
 his son a damnosa hereditas—a legacy of wrong-doing—which 
 the latter was, fortunately for mankind, unable to take up. 
 -On the ever-memorable field of Bannockburn it was not 
 Bruce,that conquered Edward the Second; it was the spirit 
 
 / 
 
34 MORE PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 
 
 of Wallace and the principle of free nationalities that tri- 
 umphed over Edward I. and the outrage of conquest. What 
 Scotland achieved in 1314, Ireland, under altered conditions, - 
 is attempting in 1884. Better late than never. 
 
 Never was there a more unlucky prince than Edward II. 
 The terror which his warlike father had inspired was at an 
 end after Bannockburn. He became anobject of contempt 
 to his subjects. He had favourites—favouritism is a prime 
 vice of royalty—and his barons hanged them. Occasionally, 
 but not often, he was able to hang a stray baron by way of 
 set-off. At last his queen, Isabella, took a trip to Paris, 
 where she openly cohabited with a malcontent nobleman, 
 Mortimer. The virtuous couple eventually got together an 
 armed force, invaded England, took the king prisoner, had 
 him dethroned with every mark of indignity, and committed 
 to a dungeon. Among other offences, he was charged with 
 _ disregard of good advice! | 
 
 His treatment by his custodians was shameful. They 
 amused the rabble by placing a crown of straw on his head, 
 and hailing him with a “ Fare forth, sir king!” His end was 
 terrible to relate. It was contrived by his wife, her paramour 
 Mortimer, and the Bishop of Hereford. He was thrown on 
 a bed, held down by a table, while a red-hot plumber’s iron 
 was thrust through a horn into his intestines, so as to leave 
 no marks of external violence. But his agonized shrieks 
 aroused the whole castle, and a participant in the crime sub- 
 sequently told the dreadful story. ‘The divinity’ which 
 Shakespeare says ‘‘ doth hedge a king’’ was clearly not on 
 duty at Berkeley Castle that night. The pious Bishop of 
 Hereford would doubtless have explained that the only 
 effectual way to get rid of an obnoxious hereditary ruler is to 
 murder him—another testimony to the superiority of the 
 monarchical system of government. 
 
 Epwarp III. (1327—1377). 
 
 Edward II. was succeeded by his son, Edward III.,a lad 
 of fourteen, and who so fit to rule in the boy-king’s name as 
 the murderers of his father—his mother, Isabella, and Mor- 
 timer? In time, however, Edward was able to seclude the 
 
 one and execute the other, and then devote himself energeti- 
 cally to the pastime of kings and the ruin of nations—war. 
 
MORE PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. ; 35 
 
 His life was spent in fighting and pillaging Scotland and 
 France. His quarrel with both countries, particularly the 
 latter, was absolutely unjust. He claimed the crown of 
 France, though notoriously cut off from the succession by the 
 ‘Salic law. He and his son, the Black Prince, won many battles 
 —nay, surprising victories; but neither Neville’s Cross, Sluys, 
 Cressy, nor Poictiers secured England a single permanent 
 advantage. Thousands on thousands of lives he sacrificed 
 in the pursuit of a phantom. Whoever wishes to realise the 
 the wickedness and absurdity of military ambition should — 
 study this reign. He succeeded in throwing France and 
 Scotland into complete chaos, while England was taxed 
 almost to the limit of endurance at a time when the Black 
 Death had carried off from a third to a half of the entire 
 population. He was a merciless marauder, without a single 
 petceptible notion of statesmanship, and the Black Prince 
 
 was, if possible, worse. 
 
 Among the achievements of the latter was to reseat on the 
 
 throne of Castile the double-dyed murderer, Pedro the Cruel. 
 
 - In a single expedition in the South of France this Black 
 Prince, this darling of romance, at the head of his “ Free 
 Companies,” burned to the ground five hundredtowns and 
 villages. On one occasion he caused three thousand men, 
 women, and children to be massacred in cold blood in the 
 town of Limoges. Lucky it was for England that she es- 
 caped the rule of such a miscreant. 
 
 In his old age the victor of Cressy—all his victories come 
 to nought—became the slave of an impudent courtesan, 
 _ Alice Perrers. She countermanded royal decrees, and dic- 
 tated to the judges on the bench. When the king lay dying 
 she waited till his eyes were glazing, then stripped the rings 
 from his fingers and decamped. The other attendants 
 imitated so good an example, and like Marmion, the king was 
 left, but for a single poor priest, ‘‘ alone to die.” 
 
 RicuarD II. (1377—1399). 
 
 Edward III. was succeeded by his grandson, Richard I1., 
 a boy of eleven. MRichard, as he grew up, disappointed 
 everyone. He was another Edward II. In the beginning 
 of his reign took place the famous peasant revolt led hy 
 Wat Tyler—a movement which well deserves, and may re- 
 
36 MORE PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 
 
 ceive in another connection, some measure of attention. The 
 young king in the presence of danger promised much; out of 
 danger he was, of course, prompt to revoke his plighted royal » 
 
 word. But to do him justice he was better than his landlord 
 parliament, whom he asked if they would consent to enfran- 
 chise the serfs. ‘*Consent,” they replied, ‘“‘we have never 
 given, and never will give, were we all to die in one day.” 
 There spoke the Salisburys, Chaplins, and Lowthers of the 
 fourteenth century ! 
 
 Richard’s besetting sins were favouritism and extravagance. 
 Ofone young minister, De Vere, whom he made Duke of Ireland, 
 it was said, ‘he has seen nothing, he has learned nothing, 
 and never been in a battle.” This efficient administrator was. 
 popularly known as ‘the doll.” In the royal kitchen it was 
 complained there were no fewer than 300 servants, while 
 10,000 retainers had been known to sit down to dinner. 
 What would the baronial grumblers have said of Queen 
 Victoria, who, with a well-paid household of 1,000 servants, 
 great and small, never feasts anybody but a few pauper Ger- 
 man relatives? Doubtless she would have shared the fate of 
 Richard. 
 
 Richard had a cousin, Henry of Lancaster, whom he had, 
 with more or less reason, banished from England. Henry 
 was a dark, scheming man, who could bide his time. He 
 waited till Richard went on a visit to Ireland, from which he 
 returned only to find Henry master of thekingdom. Hewas 
 seized, mounted on a wretched nag, and led from town to 
 town amid the jeers of the unfeeling multitude. Hewas then 
 formally dethroned, and committed to a dungeon, Henry 
 being elected king in his stead. The rest followed as a 
 matter of course. To prevent the possibility of a restoration, 
 he was secretly put to death, but by what means 1s unknown. 
 Henry was not the man to bungle a murder after the Isabella. 
 Mortimer fashion. 
 
 Henry IV.—(1399-1413). 
 
 Henry IV. ascended the throne a perjured man. At Don- 
 caster he had solemnly sworn that he had no designs on the 
 crown whatever; but perjury and murder are-no disqualifi- 
 cations for the kingly office. He had the effrontery to lay 
 claim to the royal title on the ground of descent as well as. 
 
MORE PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. , 37 
 
 election, and circulated an idle genealogical story about his 
 mother to make good the point. It availed nothing. He 
 had planted the dragons’ teeth, which grew up as the White 
 and Red Roses. ! 
 
 To strengthen his dynasty and to appease his conscience, 
 he was the first to take to the burning of heretics. Of his 
 own motion he passed a statute ‘‘ De Hzretico Comburendo,”’ 
 under which William Sautré, parish priest of Lynn, was the 
 first, but by no means the last, to suffer. 
 
 Rebellion followed rebellion, conspiracy, conspiracy.’ 
 Several attempts were made to poison him. Sharp irons wére 
 cunningly placed in his bed: at other times his hose and 
 night shirt were smeared with venom. The constant dread 
 of assassination which broke down the iron nerves of Oliver | 
 Cromwell was too much for Henry. He died the miserable 
 victim of anxiety, epilepsy, and leprosy. 
 
 Henry V.—(1413-1422). 
 
 He was succeeded by his son, Henry V., Shakspere’s 
 riotous Prince Hal. What we know of him for certain is in 
 singular contrast with the Shaksperian delineation. He 
 stands out in history simply as a stern religious bigot and 
 merciless soldier, carrying on unscrupulous wars abroad to 
 divert the minds of his subjects from the defectiveness of his 
 dynastic title. 
 
 While Prince of Wales he superintended the burning of a 
 poor heretic, John Badby. He attempted to convert the 
 half-burnt sufferer without success, and then piously recom- 
 mitted him to the flames. Badby shocked him by main- 
 taining that the bread in the sacrament was not the body of 
 Christ. 
 
 His treatment of Sir John Oldcastle, the original of Sir 
 John Falstaff, though Shakspetre found it convenient to deny 
 it, was even more shameful. Sir John, afterwards Lord 
 Cobham, was a man of the highest character, a brave and 
 skilful commander, and a personal friend of the king, from 
 whom he had the misfortune to differ in religious opinion. 
 Sir John held, with Wycliffe, that the Pope was anti-Christ, 
 and that the bread in the sacrament was bread, whatever 
 else it might be. The king argued with his friend, and failing 
 to convince him, handed him over without remorse to the 
 
38 MORE PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 
 
 tender mercies of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Oldcastle 
 was condemned to be burnt alive. Heescaped, but four years. . 
 later he was recaptured and executed on the old charge. | 
 
 Henry’s claim tc the crown of France was even less de- 
 fensible than that set up by Edward III., and the war which 
 he waged was, if possible, conducted with greater cruelty and 
 less magnanimity than were exercised by the Black Prince, 
 When a city capitulated, he seized the available goods, put 
 the richer citizens to ransom, expelled all who would not 
 become English, and hanged a selection of its bravest de- 
 fenders. : 
 
 His successes at Agincourt and elsewhere were equally 
 astonishing and fruitless. He sowed the wind, and his son 
 reaped the whirlwind. He was as pious as the late larnented 
 Mr. Peace of sainted memory, and made about an equally 
 edifying end. 
 
 Henry VI.—(1422-1471). 
 
 Henry V. was succeeded by his son, Henry VI., a child 
 eleven months old. During his minority all the advantages. 
 of a monarchical regency were powerlully illustrated. He 
 grew up a perfect imbecile. From time to time he lost his 
 reason altogether. The war in France continued, but in 
 time the tide turned against the English invaders. 
 
 At last appeared on the scene that unique figure in history, 
 Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Her achievements require 
 no recital. She saved France at the cost of her own heroic 
 life. She fell into the hands of the English, by whom she 
 was treated with incredible brutality. Though a mere girl of 
 twenty, she was placed in an iron cage, and so bound with 
 iron chains by neck, waist, feet, and hands that she could not 
 move. She became ill, and the Earl of Warwick sent 
 physicians to her with this royal injunction, ‘‘ The king 
 would not have her by any means die a natural death. He 
 has bought her dear, and is desirous that she should die by 
 justice, and be burned. Visit her therefore and cure her.” 
 The pure-souled girl met her dreadful doom as became the 
 liberator of her country. The king’s secretary, who saw her — 
 end, wrote with prophetic foresight. ‘‘ We are all lost. A 
 holy person has been burnt, but her soul is in the hands of 
 
 God,” 
 
MORE PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 39 
 
 In this wretched reign the nation, for the second time, 
 tasted to the full all the horrors of a disputed succession. 
 Cofstitutional writers insist that the hereditary principle 
 gives stability to governments. Nothing could be further 
 from the truth. Dynastic wars have from the first deluged the 
 world in blood. Norare they over. The last terrible death- 
 grapple between France and Germany was, in reality, a 
 dynastic war. It was caused by Hohenzollern succession 
 intrigues in Spain, and the need of military prestige to give 
 the son of Eugenie a chance of the imperial inheritance. 
 How two civilised peoples could ever have permitted them- 
 selves to rend each other over such issues is inexplicable, 
 except on the hypothesis that men in the mass may go mad 
 exactly as individuals at times go mad. 
 
 If I were King of France, or, what’s better, Pope of Rome, 
 I'd have no fighting men abroad nor weeping maids at home; 
 
 All the world should be at peace; let kings assert their right, 
 And those that make the quarrels be the only men to fight, 
 
 In the Wars of the Roses the old Norman aristocracy took 
 sides—York v. Lancaster—to a man, and, like the swine in 
 the Gospel, rushed headlong down a steep place into the sea, 
 where, happily, they nearly all perished. Of ‘our old 
 nobility ’’ who ‘‘ came over at the Conquest” hardly a dozen 
 specimens were left alive. The struggle lasted for thirty 
 years from the first battle of St. Alban’s 1455, to Bosworth 
 Field, 1485. 
 
 Epwarp IV. (1461—1483). 
 
 Edward IV. of York, who succeeded eventually in conquer- 
 ing Lancastrian Henry VI. and having him secretly murdered 
 in the approved kingly fashion, had a better hereditary title 
 than his victim, and perhaps he was not a worse king. But 
 Philip de Comines, an excellent observer, remarks of him :—- 
 “‘ He indulged himself in a larger share of ease and pleasure 
 than any prince in his time.” He surrounded himself with 
 courtesans, epicures, parasites, and buffoons. Sir Thomas 
 More observes :—‘‘ He” (Edward) ‘used to say that he had 
 three concubines who excelled in three distinct properties. 
 One was the merriest, another the wiliest, the third the 
 holiest harlot in his kingdom.” The merriest was the unfor- 
 tunate Jane Shore. 
 
40 MORE PLANTAGENET ROYALTY. 
 
 Epwarp V. AND Ricuarp III. (1483—1485). 
 
 Edward IV. was succeeded by his son, Edward V.,a ladof . 
 
 twelve. He reigned for nearly three months—a long time, 
 considering the character ofhis amiable uncle, Richard, Duke 
 of Gloucester, the Protector of the realm. It has been said 
 that it is possible to paint the devil himself in colours too 
 dark; but no one has yet been able to find pigments black 
 enough to suit the moral lineaments of Richard III. Com- 
 pared with him, even King John becomes respectable, and 
 Nero has to look to his laurels. He accused his own mother 
 of marital infidelity, and got his two nephews, the elder being 
 the king, first bastardized and then suffocated in the Tower. 
 The murdered lads’ sister, his niece, Elizabeth, he proposed 
 to marry, and the young lady, with the correct moral instinct 
 of royal persons, was eager for the match. He beheaded 
 everyone who stood in his way, generally without trial. Yet 
 he appears to have been a man -of considerable ability—a 
 sort of ‘‘ greatest of the Plantagenets”’ in his way. He was 
 a patron of Caxton. 
 
 But such stupendous villany, though it might appal for a 
 time, could not endure. The worst of the Plantagenets was 
 also the last. On Bosworth field Richard encountered the 
 Duke of Richmond, the head of the revived Lancastrian 
 party, and shrieking wildly, ‘‘ Treason! treason!” fell like 
 Macbeth, fighting with desperate valour. Treason to Richard, 
 or indeed to any of his hateful race, were indeed a paradox. 
 «We came of the devil,” said Richard I., “and we shall go 
 to the devil.” And he said well. 
 
 Yet true it is and of verity, that in our national and public 
 schools the ingenuous youth of England are to-day taught to 
 reverence rather than to execrate the memory of this detest- 
 able line of reprobates. We are but beginning to recognise 
 that kings are not gods, but by the very law oftheir existence 
 the worst specimens of men. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 TUDOR ROYALTY. 
 
 * How much of all that human hearts endure, 
 Kings and their laws can cause, but cannot cure.” 
 
 “a es the last of the Plantagenets, Richard III., succeeded the 
 
 first of the Tudors, Henry VII., the victor of Bosworth 
 Field. He was the grandson of Owen Tudor, an insignificant 
 ‘Welsh squire in the service of the widow of Henry V. Owen 
 married this lady, or she him, and was sent to Newgate for 
 his presumption ; yet his descendants came nearer to establish 
 an absolute despotism in England than any of their pre- 
 decessors on the throne, 
 
 The Plantagenets, in their long struggle with the barons, 
 had been reluctantly constrained to concede many popular 
 rights. While the royal and aristocratic thieves were 
 quarrelling, honest Englishmen had succeeded in getting 
 some portion of what was their own, But no sooner had the 
 old nobility met their doom in the Wars of the Roses and 
 the hands of royalty were untied, than a determined and 
 systematic effort was made to uproot every national liberty. 
 The old Norman barons regarded themselves as the peers of 
 the king. They owed their elevation to their swords. The 
 new nobility, on the other hand, were the mere creatures of 
 the king, made by his parchments. Their obsequiousness to 
 his will in the Upper House affected the House of Commons 
 so disastrously that parliament, under the Tudors, became 
 little more than a court for registering royal decrees. Under 
 the Plantagenet végime the kings had to commit their own 
 _ murders, extortions, and illegalities, and stand to the conse- 
 quences. The Tudors were more fortunate. They made 
 parliament and the judges of the land sanction all their 
 crimes, and bear the odium. So completely has Mr. Froude, 
 
42 TUDOR ROYALTY. 
 
 the leading authority for this period of our history, misunder- 
 stood the spirit of the age, that he persistently represents. 
 Henry VIII.—a more execrable and capricious tyrant never 
 breathed—as a high-souled Christian gentleman who had 
 the misfortune to suffer from a plethora of wives deserving 
 the halter ! 
 
 From the time of Henry VII. to the Long Parliament the 
 rack and other dreadful instruments for the torture of political 
 prisoners were in constant use. Torture was introduced by 
 royal warrant in 1468, and went on till 1640 without check, 
 in flagrant defiance of the common law of the land. In 
 countries where the Roman law prevailed torture was in 
 regulated use. In England there was no rule but the caprice 
 of the king. ‘The rack,’ says Selden, ‘‘is nowhere used as. 
 in England. In other countries it is used in judicature when 
 there is semiplena probatio, or half-proof against aman. Then 
 to see if they can make it full, they rack him if he will not 
 confess. But here in England they take a man and rack 
 him—I don’t know why nor where—not in time of judicature, 
 but when somebody bids.” 
 
 The Tudor and Stuart kings rank as torturers with Nabis. 
 and Phalaris. So exquisite were the torments they invented 
 that their victims, generally innocent, were wont“ to wish 
 and kneel in vain to die.”? Scores of royal torture warrants 
 of the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, Elizabeth, James I., and 
 Charles I. have happily, or unhappily, come down to us to ~ 
 illustrate the history of the monarchy of which Englishmen 
 are so proud. 
 
 For nearly two hundred years there was scarcely a State 
 trial that was not a judicial murder. To be accused of dis- 
 loyalty was to be condemned. There are two, and perhaps 
 only two, exceptions to this rule, one of them being that of 
 Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, in the reign of Queen Mary. 
 But the erring jury in that case got a lesson they were not 
 likely to forget. Four of them repented of their verdict and 
 were discharged, while five, more contumacious, lay in gaol 
 for eight months, and were fined £200 a-piece, say, £2,400 
 in present currency. 
 
 The accused, altogether contrary to law, was seldom or 
 never brought face to face with his accusers. The judges. 
 acted more frequently as public, or rather, royal, prosecutors 
 
TUDOR ROYALTY. 43 
 
 than as impartial arbiters. Take the case of brave and 
 accomplished Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter, Jloguitur,. 
 ‘Good my lords, let my accuser comc face to face. Were: 
 the case but a small copyhold you would have witnesses or 
 ‘good proof to lead the jury to a verdict, and I am here for 
 my life.” Popham, Chief Justice: ‘‘There must not such 
 a gap be opened for the destruction of the king as would be ~ 
 ifwe should grant this; you plead hard for yourself, but the 
 laws plead as hard for the king.” Evenin the time of James 
 IJ., it was declared from the judicial bench that ‘the laws 
 were the king’s laws, that the king might dispense with his. 
 laws in case of necessity, and that the king was the judge of. 
 that necessity.” When the Duke of Norfolk asked for the 
 aid of counsel, being, as he said, ‘brought to fight without 
 a weapon,” Chief Justice Dyer replied, ‘All our books forbid’ 
 allowing counsel in point of treason.” 
 
 The Tudors and Stuarts not merely set themselves above 
 the law, but they employed armies of spies to incriminate 
 unwary persons who might express disapprobation of their 
 conduct or even be suspiciously silent regarding it. In the 
 
 reign of James I (1614), Peachman, an aged clergyman, was 
 
 accused of treason, and the virtuous Lord Bacon was one of 
 the commissioners who examined him “before torture, in 
 torture, between torture, and after torture.” The old man,,. 
 it was alleged, had in his possession a sermon, which he had. 
 neither preached nor published, disrespectful to the British 
 Solomon ! : 
 
 Another and still more effectual method of crushing dis- 
 affection was to proceed by Bill of Attainder in parliament. 
 Against this weapon it was absolutely useless to contend.. 
 Under the Tudors the Commons were no longer the repre-. 
 sentatives of the people. They were the slaves of the king.. 
 The rack had cowed them to such a degree that they behaved. 
 more like spaniels than men. 
 
 The Crown made new boroughs and revived old ones—an. 
 entirely usurped function—and took care so to manipulate: 
 the electorates that the return of its own nominees was 
 assured. Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth made or revived 
 no fewer than sixty-three boroughs returning one hundred. 
 and twenty-three royal nominees, while James I. and Charles. 
 I. were hardly less active in divesting parliament of what- 
 
A4 TUDOR ROYALTY. 
 
 ever representative character it possessed. The key to the 
 entire policy of the Tudors and Stuarts is their fixed deter- 
 mination to reduce the English people to slavery more 
 degrading than that of Turks or Muscovites. When parlia- 
 ment took the life of Charles I., it acted, if not with policy, 
 with unquestionable logic, for Charles most certainly would 
 have taken the life of parliament if he could. 
 
 Some historians have professed to see in Henry VII. a 
 ruler of exceptional talent and virtue, but the evidence of 
 ‘such characteristics is singularly defective. Ifto be morose 
 and suspicious, and passionately addicted to money making 
 and match-making, is to be a statesman then he wasa states- 
 man. Parliament voted him a large supply to enable him to 
 conquer France. He landed with a great army; but the 
 French king, knowing Henry’s weakness, offered him a large 
 sum and a pension to desist. Henry joyfully agreed to the 
 terms, thus succeeding, as was pungently observed, in making 
 profit out of his subjects for the war, and out of his enemies 
 for the peace. 
 
 To increase his hoard he employed two unscrupulous 
 lawyers, Empson and Dudley, to prey on his defenceless 
 people. Their methods of extortion were so successful that 
 the royal treasure soon amounted to £1,800,000, a sum at 
 least twelve times more valuable than now. His annual 
 income was £14,000, or, say, £168,000 current value, but out 
 of that sum he contrived not only to maintain the royal house- 
 hold but to pay his body-guard, and play the host to foreign 
 ambassadors. Is there not here, at all events, a lesson for 
 the hermit of Balmoral and Osborne? 
 
 The whole reign was filled with plots, treasons, impost- 
 ures, and executions. Sir William Stantey, the Lord Chan- 
 ellor, to whom more than any other man he owed the Crown 
 he caused to be put to death because, in a private convers- 
 ation, Sir William had said that he would not bear arms 
 against Perkin Warbeck if he were satisfied that Warbeck 
 was really the son of King Edward. 
 
 A still more infamous act was the execution of the young 
 Earl of Warwick, the last of the Plantagenets. This prince 
 had been kept in close confinement from his infancy, and had 
 sunk into such a state of fatuity that,. according to the 
 chronicler, he ‘could not discern a goose from a capon.” 
 
TUDOR ROYALTY. 4.5 
 
 He tried to escape from the Tower, and for that presumption 
 
 his head was forfeited. As an additional reason for the 
 
 crime, Henry pleaded the unwillingness of Ferdinand of 
 
 Aragon to give his ill-starred daughter Catherine, in marri- 
 
 _ age to Prince Arthur of England while a Plantagenet prince 
 remained alive. : 
 
 His thorough baseness was still more clearly exhibited in 
 his treatment of the Earl of Suffolk, nephew of Edward IV. 
 Suffolk, who had displeased the tyrant, took refuge in the 
 Low Countries. The ruler of that region, the Archduke 
 Philip, being driven into Weymouth by a tempest, was com- 
 pelled, as the price of his own liberty, to give up Suffolk, 
 whose life it was however stipulated should be spared. Henry 
 kept his word, but enjoined on his successor to put him to 
 death, a congenial task, which, needless to say, Henry VIII. 
 performed with true filial devotion. Henry, who was a very 
 pious man, had evidently in this matter profited by the politic 
 instructions given to Solomon by David with respect to the — 
 sons of Zeruiah. He died in the odour of sanctity. 
 
 Henry VIII. (1509—1547.) 
 
 Henry VII. was succeeded by his son Henry VIII., the 
 offspring of the union between the White and Red Roses. 
 The late Earl of Beaconsfield, it is said, once cynically re- 
 marked of Mr. Gladstone that he had not a single redeeming 
 vice. Well, if vice redeems a man, Henry VIII. were 
 certainly one of the most completely redeemed men that ever 
 lived. Assuredly no more detestable tyrant ever breathed. 
 His horrible cruelties proceeded from the profound depravity 
 of his own heart. They were without excuse of any kind. 
 They fell indifferently on friend and foe, noble and ignoble,. 
 “saint and sinner, Catholic and Protestant, wife and child. 
 Lust, gluttony, vanity, pride, rapacity, blood-thirstiness, all 
 strove for mastery in the breast of the first Defender of the 
 Faith. That such a monster of iniquity should have been 
 permitted to die a natural death must ever strike the historian 
 with astonishment. 
 
 He is the true Blue Beard of English story. Long before: 
 his divorce from Queen Catherine was broached, his amours. 
 were notorious. Elizabeth Tailbois and Mary Boleyn, Anne 
 
46 TUDOR ROYALTY. 
 
 Boleyn’s eldest sister, had both ministered to his passions 
 ‘before he cast his eyes on hissecond queen. By the former he 
 hada son, Henry Fitzroy, whom he made Earl of Notting- - 
 ham, Duke of Richmond, Admiral of England, Warden of © 
 the Scottish Marches, and Lieutenant of Ireland. He would 
 probably have named Fitzroy his successor, but the youth 
 died before attaining his majority. To gratify his desire for 
 Anne he divorced the faithful Catherine, repudiated the 
 Papacy, doomed Wolsey, the magnificent cardinal, to de- 
 struction, and renounced many of the religious tenets for the 
 defence of which in his anti-Lutheran treatise he had been 
 dubbed by the Pope Defender of the Faith. 
 
 His charges of infidelity against Queen Anne, for which 
 she and four alleged paramours, her brother being one, 
 suffered shameful deaths, were almost certainly fabrications. 
 ‘On the day of Queen Anne’s execution he dressed in white to 
 ‘celebrate an occasion so joyful. On the day following he 
 married Lady Jane Seymour. Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, 
 he was careful to bastardise, just as he had previously bas- 
 tardised Catherine’s daughter, Mary. He subsequently 
 changed his mind, and made it high treason to question the 
 
 legitimacy of either. 
 
 ' Luckily for Jane Seymour’s neck, she died in child-bed, 
 and his minister, Thomas Cromwell Earl of Essex, unfortun- 
 ately for himself, had the temerity to provide for Henry 
 another wife, Anne of Cleves. From the first he disliked her, 
 ‘called her ‘‘a great Flanders mare,’’ and soon contrived to 
 divorce her and behead the unfortunate minister who had so 
 far mistaken the royal appetite. 
 
 Then came Catherine Howard’s turn. She pleased the 
 tyrant for a time, but ante-nuptial irregularities were dis- 
 covered, and both she and nine other persons were con- 
 demned to death by act of attainder. It was made high 
 treason for any woman to marry the royal libertine with any 
 unacknowledged sins on her conscience. People dared to 
 smile at this absurd and brutal decree, and said the king must 
 henceforth look about for a widow. 
 
 His sixth matrimonial venture was, in fact, the widow of 
 Lord Latimer, Catherine Parr. She was a woman of tact, - 
 but on one occasion her neck was in the greatest jeopardy. 
 By this time Henry was infallible head of the Church, and to 
 
TUDOR ROYALTY. 47 
 
 dispute any doctrine which he chose to entertain was heresy, 
 punishable by death. The queen ventured to express some 
 slight dissent from one of the royal beliefs. The consequence 
 *was that her impeachment and arrest were immediately re- 
 solved on. But Catherine, meanwhile learning her danger, 
 dexterously managed to convince Henry that when she had 
 presumed to differ from him it was merely to give the in- 
 fallible head of the Church the pleasure of refuting her. The 
 result was that when the chancellor presented himself to 
 convey her to the Tower he was told to begone for a knave, - 
 fool, and beast. 
 
 As a Church reformer, Henry suppressed no fewer than 
 645 monasteries, go colleges, 2,374 chantries and free chapels, 
 110 hospitals, with revenues amounting to nearly two millions 
 per annum. He took care to share the plunder with his 
 courtiers and others, so as to give the strength and cohesion 
 of self-interest to the party of spoliation. 
 
 But Henry’s most notable achievements were in his novel — 
 character of Supreme Pontiff of England, of infallible umpire 
 in the province of faith and morals. The Bloody Statute, 
 very properly so called, ordained that whoever should deny 
 transubstantiation by voice or pen; affirm communion in 
 both kinds; question priestly celibacy, the obligation of vows. 
 of chastity or the efficacy of private masses and auricular 
 confession, should be burned alive. 
 
 The result of this unprecedented measure was that Pro- 
 testants and Catholics were dragged to the stake on the same 
 hurdles—the Protestants because they believed less than the 
 king, and the Catholics because they believed more. An 
 acute foreigner then in England observed: ‘‘ Those who are 
 against the Pope are burned, and those who are for him are 
 hanged.” While Bainham and Bilney were burned for Anti-- 
 Popery, the illustrious Sir Thomas More and the venerable 
 Bishop Fisher were beheaded for denying the king’s 
 supremacy. 
 
 And thus the wheat and the tares were skilfully separated 
 by this royal bishop of souls, the reformer of the Church of 
 England! So delighted was Parliament with these and — 
 similar proofs of the royal wisdom and moderation, that they 
 
 -voluntarily bestowed on Henry’s proclamations the force of 
 law! He thus absorbed in his own person all the functions 
 
48 TUDOR ROYALTY. 
 
 of king, pope, and Parliament, after the fashion of the Roman 
 emperors, who figured not merely as. imperators, but as 
 consuls, pretors, cuvule ediles, and masters of the horse, all 
 in one. 
 
 Henry varied his ecclesiastical and matrimonial murders 
 by frequent political homicides. Among the more heinous in 
 the last category was the execution of the Countess of 
 Salisbury, because she had the misfortune to be the mother 
 of his enemy Cardinal Pole, and that of the young and 
 accomplished Earl of Surrey, because he had presumed 
 to quarter the arms of Edward the Confessor on his 
 escutcheon. 
 
 In his later years this second Herod was so corpulent that 
 he was unable to walk up or down stairs, and machinery had 
 to be employed to move him. He was afflicted with ulcers, 
 which so maddened him that no one approached him without 
 terror. At last the great avenger, death, laid his hand on 
 the monster, and men breathed freely once more. His reign 
 is an everlasting disgrace to the English name. 
 
 Epwarp VI. (1547—1553-) 
 
 Henry VIII. was succeeded by his only son, Edward VI., 
 a minor nine years of age. He died in his sixteenth year, 
 not without the suspicion of foul play. The Duke of 
 Northumberland had persuaded him to will the crown to 
 Lady Jane Grey, the duke’s daughter-in-law. Thereupon, 
 to cure him of an illness, his physicians were dismissed, and 
 an ignorant woman undertook to restore him to health. Her 
 potions killed him in less than no time. | 
 
 Like nearly all princes who die young, innumerable virtues 
 were ascribed to him. How far he deserved them is anofher 
 matter. But let him have the benefitofthe doubt. ‘‘ Whom 
 the gods love die young.” Especially is this true of kings, 
 who almost necessarily become more depraved the older they 
 become. ‘It is the hand of little employment that hath the 
 daintier sense,”’ as Hamlet observed of grave-making. 
 
 The story that he humanely refused to sign the death- 
 warrant of the heretic Joan of Kent, when Cranmer urged 
 him to do so, like so many other good deeds of kings, is now 
 known to be apocryphal. 
 
TUDOR ROYALTY. 49 
 
 Mary (1553—1559-) 
 
 To Edward VI. succeeded his sister, Mary the Bloody. 
 Her story is without complexity. She is the sullen, relent- 
 leSs, malignant bigot of English history—the religious perse- 
 _ cutor pay excellence—the female Torquemada. Almost as a 
 matter of course she put to death Lady Jane Grey and her 
 husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, who had aspired to the 
 throne. That was a mere preface to her great undertaking, 
 the extirpation of the Protestant heresy from her dominions. 
 
 She settled down to her work with a vigour worthy of her 
 father, the Defender of the Faith. In the Marian persecution 
 it is computed that no fewer than two hundred and seventy- 
 seven persons perished at the stake, to say nothing of other 
 forms of persecution. Five bishops were burnt, twenty-one 
 clergymen, eight lay gentlemen, eighty-four tradesmen, one 
 hundred husbandmen, fifty-five women, and four children 
 Among those who met their fate with heroic constancy were 
 Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester; Ridley, Bishop of London ; 
 and Latimer, Bishop of Worcester; while even Cranmer 
 atoned for previous inconstancy by a courageous end. His 
 heart was found among the ashes, unscathed by the flames: 
 ‘Be of good cheer!” cried Latimer to Ridley at the stake. 
 “We shall this day kindle such a torch in England as, I 
 trust in God, shall never be extinguished!” Mary literally 
 burnt the Pope out of the kingdom, in spite of the scholarly 
 Legate Pole, who vainly urged on the vindictive woman 
 milder and more Christian measures. After a reign of little 
 more than five years she died childless, in an agony of grief 
 and frenzied distraction, amid execrations all but universal. 
 The cardinal legate died the same day; and “a voice in the 
 night,” in our courtly Laureate’s drama of ‘‘ Queen Mary,” 
 thus forcibly bids them adieu :— 
 
 ‘* God curse her and her legate! Gardiner burns 
 Already, but to pay them full in kind, 
 The hottest hold in all the devil’s den 
 Were but a sort of winter! Sir, in Guernsey 
 I watched a woman burn; and in her agony 
 The mother came upon her—a child was born— 
 And, sir, they hurled it back into the fire, 
 That, being but baptized in fire, the babe 
 Might be in fire for ever. Ah, good neighbour ! 
 
 There should be something firier than fire 
 To yield them their deserts ! "’ 
 
50 TUDOR ROYALTY. 
 
 ELIZABETH (1559—1603). 
 
 To the Bloody Mary succeeded the ‘Virgin Queen,’ - 
 Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn. Asa matter of fact, 
 Elizabeth was hardly less bloody than her sister. She was — 
 beyond a doubt the most shameless dissimulator and liar of 
 her own or almost any age. The very fact that she laid 
 claim to purity of life is about the best proof that she was 
 as even charitable observers were compelled to believe, a 
 woman of the most abandoned morals. Her Court Warring- 
 ton describes as a place ‘‘where there was no love but that 
 of the lusty god of gallantry, Asmodeus,” where, according 
 to Faunt, ‘‘all enormities reigned in the highest degree.” 
 Dudley, the husband of the hapless Amy Rabeace the most 
 callous libertine of the day, the queen openly fondled before 
 the whole Court, calling him her ‘‘sweet Robin.” His bed- 
 room was placed next to her own. She indulged habitually 
 in the coarsest jests, and swore like a trooper. Hatton, 
 Raleigh, Oxford, Blunt, Simier, Anjou, were all reputed 
 among the number of her lovers. 
 
 Her hatreds, like her loves, were not speculative merely. 
 They tookinstant shape. She collared Hatton, spat on Sir 
 Mathew Arundel, and boxed the ears of the earl marshal. 
 
 Her vanity was unbounded. When she died her wardrobe 
 was found to consist of nearly 3,000 dresses, all in the most 
 approved ‘girl of the period” style. She was dissatisfied 
 with certain portraits of herself, which she imagined con- 
 veyed an inadequate impression of her charms. She accord- 
 ingly announced that an authorized portrait would be taken, 
 which alone it should be lawful to reproduce. In point of 
 fact, though it was almost high treason not to praise her 
 charms, she was anything buta beauty. Her eyes were 
 small, her lips thin, her teeth black, her nose hooked, and 
 her hair red ; yet when Hatton told her that ‘‘ to see her was 
 heaven, the lack of her was hell,” she regarded him asa 
 discriminating person. When she made a progress the 
 people en voute were expected to fall down on their knees, 
 and they did so. The genuflexions which she exacted from 
 all were Oriental rather than English. Her train, which 
 was of ridiculous length, was borne by a marchioness. 
 
 Her greed was insatiable. While dropping a tear on 
 
TUDOR ROYALTY. 51 
 
 *¢ Sweet Robin’s’’ grave she was careful to cause his goods to 
 be sold by auction for the payment of certain debts to her- 
 self. The faithful Walsingham, who spent his life and 
 fosytune in her service, she allowed to die a beggar. 
 
 Secretary Davison, who screened the infamous part she 
 played in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, she com- 
 mitted to the Tower (where he died), and robbed him of 
 £10,000. 
 
 While the nation was in ecstacies over the defeat of the 
 Armada, the Queen was grumbling at the:cost of the great 
 deliverance, and making profit out of the spoilt provisions of 
 the fleet. 
 
 She was, perhaps, the only soul in England who 
 regarded the Massacre of St. Bartholomew with as much in- 
 difference as if it had occurred in the planet Mars. Her 
 sister Mary declared on her death-bed that if her bosom were 
 opened, the word ‘Calais’? would be found written on her 
 heart. If Elizabeth’s body had been opened, her heart 
 might have been sought for 1n vain. 
 
 Her cruelties, unlike those of her sister Mary, had not even 
 the poor excuse of religious bigotry. It is doubtful if she. 
 had any personal faith. The life she led was Pagan, not 
 Christian. ‘‘ Her majesty counts much on fortune,’’ wrote 
 Walsingham; ‘‘I wish she would trust more in Almighty 
 God.” When she persecuted, it was simply to enforce her 
 own supremacy as head of the Church. What the Church 
 taught she cared not. Within twenty years it is calculated 
 that no fewer than two hundred Catholic priests were put to 
 death, while a still greater number perished in the pestilential 
 gaols into which they were cast. Cuthbert Mayne meta 
 traitor’s doom chiefly because there was found in his pos- 
 session a copy of a papal bull or jubilee which he alleged he 
 had bought at a shop out of mere curiosity. Nelson and 
 Sherwood gave unsatisfactory answers, even under the rack, 
 and were, after an interview with the queen, drawn, hanged, 
 and quartered. Campian, the eloquent Jesuit was four times 
 -racked, and eventually suffered at Tyburn, along with 
 Shirwin, Briant, and other distinguished Seminarists. It 
 was these shameful severities that at last stirred the sluggish 
 hostility of Spain, and brought the Armada into English 
 waters. Yet the threatened danger was as loyally faced by 
 
 | E2 
 
52 TUDOR ROYALTY. 
 
 Catholics as Protestants—Howard, of Effingham, a Catholic, 
 actually commanding the English fleet. 
 
 But it was not Catholics alone that suffered. Two Ana-- 
 baptists, Peters and Turwert, were committed tothe flames, 
 the queen “calling to mind that she was head of the Church, 
 and that it was her duty to extirpate error, and that heretics 
 ought to be cut off from the flock of Christ, that they may 
 not corrupt others.’”’ Thacker and Copping, Brownists, 
 perished in like manner, because, by objecting to the Book | 
 of Common Prayer, they were held constructively to have 
 questioned the royal supremacy. The gaols swarmed with 
 
 ‘‘recusants.” Indeed it is on the whole hard to say why 
 Queen Mary should have a monopoly of the epithet 
 ‘* bloody.” 
 
 Elizabeth has been credited by most historians with pro- 
 found political sagacity ; but the fact is, she had no settled 
 policy of any kind. Her chief weapons were sickening dis- 
 simulation and ceaseless intrigue; and when she died 
 everyone was glad to be rid of her and her crooked ways. 
 
 Her last days were terrible to behold. She refused to 
 go to bed by reason of what she enigmatically said she saw 
 there. She kept beside her a drawn sword, which, like 
 Hamlet, she from time to time thrust through the arras. She 
 died as she had lived, a cruel, self-willed, heartless woman, 
 possessed of few, if any, of the good qualities which the lying 
 'egends called history have ascribed to her. 
 
“ 
 
 33 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 STUART ROYALTY. 
 
 Three or four wenches where I stood cried, ‘‘ Alas, good soul!” and 
 forgave him with all their hearts ; if Caesar had stabbed their mothers they 
 would have done no less. Casca in Fulius Cesar.” 
 
 James I. (1603-1625). 
 
 AMES I., son of Mary, Queen of Scots, great grandson of 
 J Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. succeeded Elizabeth, 
 the last of the Tudors. 
 
 ‘‘ The Stuarts,” it has been said, ‘‘ might be pardoned their 
 bad hearts for their worse brains ;” but that is only a partial 
 excuse for their wickedness. Their folly was no doubt great, 
 but their natural depravity was very much greater. The 
 British Solomon in particular was a choice specimen of every 
 royal vice. Two years before James’s decease, Count Tilliéres, 
 the French ambassador, thus wrote of ‘‘the wisest fool in 
 Christendom :”—‘* The king will have no man about him of 
 condition, intellect, or judgment, but little people who defer 
 to him in everything, who praise his vices as others praise 
 virtues, and who calumniate all men of honour and virtue. 
 He hates such mortally, thinking that they defame and dis- 
 praise him; he would fain avoid the sight of them because he 
 thinks their countenances reproach him for his abominable 
 and scandalous life.” ‘At Newmarket,” Tilliéres adds, ‘‘ he 
 (the king) leads a life to which past and present times present 
 no parallel.” ‘Unhappy people,” he continues ‘“‘to have 
 such a king, who seeketh nothing but to impoverish them to 
 - enrich his favourites, and who careth not what cometh after 
 his death.” 
 
 Even Tilliéres, who was by no means squeamish, declines 
 to record some of the unnatural crimes in which James I. is 
 known to have indulged, and they cannot even be hinted at in 
 
54 ~ Stuart Royatry. — 
 
 these pages. The debauchery of the Court was worse than 
 pagan. Secret murders were perpetrated, and the murderers, . 
 as in the case of the Earl and Countess of Somerset, con- 
 tinued to enjoy the royal favour. Mrs. Turner, who was exe- 
 
 cuted vice that worthy couple for the murder of Sir Thomas 
 Overbury, wondered that the earth did not open to swallow 
 
 up so wicked a place. It is by no means improbable that James 
 
 himself was an accomplice in the crime. Of his Court it has. 
 been truly recorded: ‘“‘ Impiety the most cynical, debauchery 
 
 the most unveiled, public and unpunished homicide, private 
 murders by what was called magic, by poison, by hired assas- 
 
 sins, crimes natural, unnatural and preternatural were the 
 
 common characteristics.” James held that he was absolutely 
 above the law: consequently he was not accountable to any 
 earthly tribunal. 
 
 In a work on “The True Law of Free Monarchy,” he 
 had laid it down that ‘‘although a good king will frame his 
 actions, to be according to law, yet he is not bound thereto, 
 but of his own will and example-giving to his subjects.” 
 By a free monarchy James simply meant a state in which 
 the people were to have no freedom whatever, and it was the 
 logical application of this theory that brought his son’s head 
 to the block. ‘‘Asit is atheism and blasphemy,” he said, 
 *¢to dispute what God can do, soit is a presumption and a 
 high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or 
 to say that a king cannot do this or that.” 
 
 By his favourite maxim, ‘“‘ No bishop, no king,” he meant 
 that episcopal succession and hereditary regal succession were 
 the only true foundations of Church and State—a doctrine 
 received by the prelates with the greatest acceptance. They 
 declared, at the celebrated Hampton Court Conference with 
 the Puritan divines that this notable discovery of the British 
 Solomon had been directly inspired by the Holy Ghost! The 
 University of Oxford, not to be distanced in loyalty, decreed 
 that ‘‘it wasin no case lawful for subjects to make use of 
 force against their princes, or to appear offensively or defen- 
 sively against them.” Queen Elizabeth did a good deal to 
 “tune the pulpits;” but James went much farther. He laid 
 it down that kings might ‘“‘ make what liked them law and 
 gospel.” 
 
 In pursuance of this comprehensive claim, he dismissed 
 
Stuart Royatty. 55 
 
 Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, because he refused to ad- 
 minister the law illegally. He peremptorily ordered parlia- 
 ment to abstain from the discussion of certain ‘‘ mysteries” 
 of kingcraft beyond their province ; and when hon. members 
 said their say, notwithstanding, he sent for the journals of the 
 House, and tore out the record of the proceedings with his 
 own hand. ‘I will govern,” he said, ‘‘ according to the com- 
 mon weal, but not according to the common will.” By 
 ‘“kingcraft ? James simply meant comprehensive lying. 
 
 Even in the time of Nero, if a State prisoner died before 
 conviction, his family did not suffer loss of the dead man’s 
 -goods. But James improved on this unsatisfactory state of 
 things. He caused corpses to be produced in court and con- 
 victed in order to secure escheat of estates to the Crown. 
 
 If he could not reach those who had offended him in one 
 way, he did it in another. A half-crazed Scotsman—Thomas 
 Ross—stuck a silly lampoon on his countrymen on the door 
 ofa college in Oxford. Jamescould not get him adequately pun- 
 ished in England, so he sent him to his Privy Councilin Edin- 
 burgh, who, to please their master, first caused the offender’s 
 right hand to be struck off, and then his head. 
 
 Yet at this critical moment, when the royal terror daunted 
 all but the bravest spirits, the seeds of liberty were being 
 silently sown. Hereditary kingcraft and episcopal priest- 
 craft could not be imposed without challenge on a people 
 politically convinced that taxation imposed without the con- 
 sent of parliament is illegal; on a people with an open Bible 
 teaching them that royalty was originally granted by the 
 Almighty under a solemn protest and warning; on Christian 
 men daily reading in their New Testaments, ‘‘ The princes of 
 the Gentiles bear dominion over them, and their great ones 
 exercise authority upon them, but among you it shall not be 
 so. He that would be the greatest among you let him be the 
 leasf, let him be the servant of all.” Among a really 
 Christian people it is not too much to say that a king could 
 not possiby exist. It is noteworthy that when Christ had 
 occasion to allude to King Herod he described him, not as 
 His Gracious Majesty, but as ‘“ that fox.” 
 
 Even in James I.’s time the storm-clouds of revolution were 
 visibly gathering. In his parliaments of 16:4 and 1621 the 
 Pyms, Eliots, and Wentworths—that matchless race of 
 
56 STuART Royatty. 
 
 heroes—beganto make their appearance in the House. But as 
 usual, the sins of the father were visited, not on the father, | 
 James I., but on the son, Charles I. James died in bed, 
 and Charles laid his head on the block. 
 
 Cuarces I. (1625-1649.) 
 
 Charles I., who succeeded James I., was not a very com- 
 plex character. He had an inherited thirst for absolute rule, 
 a fatal attachment to favourites, and no man or party could rely 
 for a moment on that ‘‘ royal word” of his to which he inveri- 
 ably appealed when he contemplated some act of unusual 
 perfidy. Oliver Cromwell was perhaps not very far wrong — 
 when he pronounced Charles ‘‘ the hardest-hearted man on 
 earth,” but he certainly was greatly at fault when he likewise 
 credited him with “great parts and great understanding.” 
 ‘‘ Insincerity,” says the impartial Hallam, was ‘‘a fault that 
 appeared in all parts of his life, from which no one who has 
 paid the subject any attention will pretend to exculpate him.” 
 This it was even more than his tyranny that sealed his doom. 
 It was the impossibility of binding Charles by any compact 
 that nerved the Commons to put him to death. Yet in the 
 unhallowed arts of dissimulation he was a mere child com- 
 pared with the matchless Oliver himself. 
 
 As for the tyranny of the king, it was neither greater nor 
 less than that of his immediate predecessors, James and 
 Elizabeth. He merely walked diligently in their footsteps 
 over ground which their royal hoofs had helped to render 
 impassable. 
 
 Hardly was he seated on the throne, when the memorable 
 strife between king and parliament began. The House, led 
 by Sir John Eliot, impeached the royal favourite, Buckingham, 
 one of the most incompetent, reckless, and insolent of his 
 tribe. ‘I must let you know,” wrote Charles to the Com- 
 mons, ‘‘ that I will not allow any of my servants to be ques- 
 tioned among you, much less such as are of eminent place 
 and near me.” And summoning the members to Whitehall, 
 he told them—‘ Remember that parliaments are altogether 
 in my power for their calling, sitting, and dissolution; and 
 therefore, as I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to 
 continue or not to be.” ‘This the Commons were very careful 
 to remember when the Long Parliament met, ‘They effectu- 
 
STuaRT Royatty. 57 
 
 ally provided against the exercise of a power so arbitrary and 
 dangerous; yet even now the Prime Minister can of his own 
 whim or for party purposes turn the Representatives of the 
 People out of doors at anymoment. Our rulers would utterly 
 belie themselves if they did not preserve some relict of every 
 State abuse. 
 
 Eliot’s impeachment of Buckingham was concieved in a 
 strain such as no Tudor or Stuart had ever listened to. 
 ‘« Through the power of State and justice he has dared ever 
 to strike at his own ends. What have been his actions, 
 what he is like, you know. By him came all our evils, in 
 him we find the causes, and on him must be the remedies! 
 Peveat qui perdeve cuncta festinat. Oppvimatur ne omnes opprimat |” 
 (Let him perish who isin haste to ruin everything. Let him 
 be crushed lest he crush everyone.) Eliot and Sir Dudley 
 Digges were at once hurried to the Tower, while the House 
 was speedily dissolved for its insubordination.  Illegality 
 followed illegality. But benevolences, forced loans, and 
 ship-money were enforced to little purpose. The people 
 sullenly resisted. 
 
 In another parliament the famous Petition of Right was 
 wrung from the king, and Buckingham fell by the hand of the 
 assassin Felton. Felton regarded himself as a public bene- 
 factor, and rich and poor drank to hishealth. The parliament 
 of 1629 was dissolved like its predecessors, but not before it 
 had declared ‘a capital enemy of kingdom and common- 
 wealth ” any minister who should advise the levy of subsidies 
 without consent of parliament, and ‘‘a betrayer of the liberty 
 of England and an enemy of the same”’ whoever should 
 voluntarily comply with such illegal demands. 
 
 The king’s third parliament was as unbending as the others. 
 It was dismissed, and the king resolved to govern ‘‘ by such 
 other means as God had put into his hands.’’ For eleven 
 years Charles, Laud, and Strafford had it pretty much their 
 own way. Sir John Eliot, the brave, the learned, the eloquent 
 died in the Tower. Chambers, a patriotic London alderman, 
 for complaining that Englishmen were worse off than Turks, 
 was heavily fined, and died like Eliot in durance. To-day, 
 alas! his civic successors suffer chiefly from excess of turtle 
 and conger eel. The Petition of Right was treated as if no 
 royal assent had been given to it. The apostate Strafford 
 
58 STuarRT Royatty. 
 
 had undertaken ‘to vindicate the monarchy for ever from 
 the conditions and restraints of subjects.” 
 
 But the darkest hour was before the dawn. An unexpected 
 light burst from the North. Presbyterian Scotland rose in 
 arms aS one man to resist Episcopal innovations which 
 Charles had forced on that country at the instigation of 
 Laud. James I., from a bitter personal experience, had ad- 
 monished that narrow-minded ecclesiastic that “‘ he knew not 
 the stomach of that people.” The Scots were over the 
 border before the king could organise any adequate resist- 
 ance, and their decisive action changed the whole aspect of 
 affairs, 
 
 In 1640 the Long Parliament was convoked. and the whole 
 fabric of royal tyranny, column by column, and buttress by 
 buttress, fell to the ground. Strafford and Laud went to the 
 block. The king’s outrageous attempt to arrest the Five 
 Members in the House itself was.the immediate precursor of 
 the civil war. On the field of Naseby the royalist forces were 
 irretrievably shattered. 
 
 Fast, fast the gallants ride 
 
 In some safe nook to hide 
 
 Their coward heads pre-destined 
 To rot on Temple Bar: 
 
 And he—he turns and flies, 
 Shame to those cruel eyes 
 
 That bore to look on torture, 
 But dared not look on war. 
 
 The war ended in the complete overthrow of the Royalists, 
 the execution of the king, and the eventual usurpation of the 
 supreme power by Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Bonaparte 
 of the English Revolution. 
 
 About the justice of the king’s sentence there can be no 
 rational dispute. He had violated the fundamental laws of 
 the State and involved the nation in torrents of blood. The 
 Commissioners who tried him were men of the highest 
 probity, and of their president, Bradshaw, the worst that 
 Whitlocke could say was that he was “a stout man and 
 learned in the law—no friend of monarchy.” Charles de- 
 clined to acknowledge the authority of the Court on the 
 ground that the English monarchy, being hereditary, he him- © 
 self was the fountain of all law. Bradshaw overruled the 
 objection, asserting that kingship, on the contrary, is an 
 
STuaRT Royatry. 55 
 
 elective trust, and that the people are the source ofall rights. 
 In a previous chapter the reader may remember this questiom 
 was examined and solved as Bradshaw solved it. 
 
 But all things that are lawful are not expedient. There 
 are numerous ‘‘wenches” in society, as Casca said, always. 
 ready tocry, ‘‘ Alas, poor soul!’ when a high-placed criminal 
 meets his deserts—aye, even ‘‘ if he had stabbed their mothers,” 
 and out of consideration for these weak vessels, it can hardly 
 be doubted that exile or imprisonment would have been a. 
 more politic penalty than death. What was to be dreaded 
 wasa monarchical reaction, and that, at all events, the execu- 
 tion of the king did not prevent. It is noteworthy that the 
 illustrious trio, Vane, Blakeand Sidney regarded the execution 
 as a grave political blunder. 
 
 Oliver Cromwell’s account of the ground of js action in. 
 the matter, as afterwards narrated by his confidant, Lord 
 Broghill, is worth relating :— 
 
 ‘The reason of an inclination to come to terms with him (Charles) was, 
 we found the Scots and Presbyterians began to be more powerful than we- 
 (Cromwell and the Independent Army Officers) and were strenuously endea- 
 vouring to strike up an agreement with the king and leave us in the lurch; 
 wherefore we thought to prevent them by offering more reasonable condi- 
 tions. (At this juncture, there is every reason to believe, Cromwell would 
 have been content with the earldom of Essex and the post of generalissimo.) 
 But while we were busied with these thoughts, there came a letter to us from: 
 one of our spies, who was of the king’s bedchamber, acquainting us that. 
 our final doom was decreed that day, What it was he could not tell; but 
 a letter was gone to the queen with the contents of it, which letter was 
 sewed up in the skirt of a saddle, and the bearer of it would come, with 
 the saddle upon his head, about ten o’clock the following night, to the 
 Blue Boar Inn in Holborn, where he was to take horse for Dover. The: 
 messenger knew nothing of the letter in the saddle, but someone in Dover 
 did. We were then at Windsor, and immediately upon the receipt of the 
 letter from our spy, Ireton and I resolved to take a trusty fellow with us, 
 and in troopers’ habits to go to the inn, which we accordingly did, and set 
 our man at the gate of the inn to watch. The gate was shut but the 
 wicket was open, and our man stood to give us notice when anyone came 
 with a saddle on his head. Ireton and I sat in a box near the wicket, and 
 called for a can of beer and then another, drinking in that disguise till ten 
 o'clock, when our sentinel gave us notice that the man with the saddle was. 
 come, upon which we immediately rose, and when the man was leading 
 out his horse saddled we came up to him with our swords drawn, and told 
 him we were to search all who went in and out there, but as he looked 
 like an honest fellow we would only search his saddle, which we did, and: 
 ' found the letter we looked for. On opening it we read the contents, in: 
 which the king acquainted the queen that he was now courted by both the- 
 
60 STUART RovALtTy. 
 
 factions, the Scots and Presbyterians, and the Army ; that which of them 
 ‘bid fairest for him should have him; that he thought he could close 
 sooner with the Scots than the other. Upon which we speeded to Wind- 
 sor, and finding we were not like to have any tolerable terms from the 
 king, we immediately resolved to ruin him.” 
 
 But though Oliver’s resolution to despatch the king was 
 there and then taken, he professed to be undecided almost to 
 the last. It was his invariable policy to appear to be led by 
 those he was misleading. 
 
 At a later date honest General Ludlow made the following 
 -curlous notes at a conference convened by Cromwell, in West- 
 minster, between the so-called ‘‘ Grandees of the House and 
 the Army’ and the ‘*Commonwealth’s men,” or Repub- 
 licans, of whom Ludlow was one :— 
 
 ‘‘ The Grandees, of whom Lieutenant-General Cromwell was the head, 
 kept themselves in the clouds, and would not declare their judgments 
 -either for a monarchical, aristocratical, or democratical government, main- 
 taining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us, according 
 as Providence should direct. ‘The Commonwealth men declared that 
 monarchy was neither good in itself nor for us; that it was not desirable 
 in itself from the 8th chapter and 8th verse of the First Book of Samuel, 
 where the rejection of the judges and the choice of a king was charged up- 
 -on the Israelites by God himself as a rejection of Him, and from divers 
 more texts of Scripture to the same effect. And that it was in no 
 way conducive to the interest of the nation, was endeavoured to be proved 
 by the infinite mischiefs and oppressions we had suffered under it; that 
 indeed our ancestors had permitted themselves to be governed by a single 
 ‘person, but with this proviso that he should govern according to the 
 -direction of the law which he always bound himself by oath to perform; 
 that the king had broken his oath and thereby dissolved our allegiance. 
 Notwithstanding what was said, Lieutenant-General Cromwell—not for 
 want of conviction, but in hopes of making a better bargain with another 
 party—professed himself unresolved; and having learned what he could of 
 the principles and intentions of those present at the conference, took up a 
 cushion and flung it at my head and then ran down the stairs; but I over- 
 took him with another, which made him hasten down faster than he desired. 
 The next day, passing by mein the House, he told me he was convinced 
 -of the desirableness of what was proposed, but not of the feasibleness cf it, 
 thereby I suppose, designing to encourage me to hope that he was inclined 
 to join with us, though unwilling to publish his opinion, lest the Grandees 
 should be informed of it, to whom I presume he professed himself of 
 -another opinion." 
 
 eS 
 
65 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 
 
 “And what king’s majesty, sitting on an exalted throne, ever shone so 
 brightly as that of the people of England then did, when, shaking off that 
 old superstition which had prevailed a long time, they gave judgment on 
 the king himself, or rather on an enemy that had been their king, caught, 
 as it were, in a net by his own laws, and scrupled not to inflict on him, 
 being guilty, the same punishment which he would have inflicted on any 
 omer ¢',, . ‘* This is the God who uses to throw down proud and 
 unruly kings, and utterly to extirpate them and their family. By his. 
 manifest impulse being set at work to recover our almost lost liberty, we 
 went on in no obscure but an illustrious passage, pointed out and made 
 plain to us by God Himself.”’ MILTON. 
 
 Tue Repustic (1649—1653). 
 
 To the Monarchy succeeded the Republic, or Common- 
 wealth. It lasted for four years and three months—down to 
 2oth April, 1653, the date of the Cromwellian coup d'état. 
 Short as the period is, it is the grandest in English annals, 
 and the most pregnant with political instruction. On 4th 
 January, 1649, the House resolved: ‘“‘ That the People are, 
 under God, the original of all just power ; that the Commons 
 of England in Parliament assembled being chosen by, and 
 representing the People, have the supreme power in this 
 nation; that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the 
 Commons in Parliament assembled hath the force of law, and 
 all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although 
 the consent and concurrence of King or House of Peers be 
 not had thereto.” The Monarchy was formally abolished, it 
 being voted that ‘* The office of a King in this nation is unne- 
 cessary, burthensome, and dangerous.’ The Peers were 
 voted simply ‘‘useless and dangerous.”’ The Act constituting 
 England a Republic, set forth ‘that the People of Engiand 
 ' and of all the dominions and territories thereunto belonging 
 ‘are, and shall be, and are hereby constituted, made, estab- 
 
62 REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 
 
 lished, and confirmed to be a Commonwealth and Free State, 
 and shall henceforward be governed as a Commonwealth and 
 Tree State by the Supreme Authority of the People—the 
 Representatives of the People in Parliament—and by such 
 as they shall appoint and constitute Officers and Ministers 
 for the good of the People, and that without any King or 
 House of Lords.” | 
 
 Later in the same year the following affirmation of allegi- 
 ance was formulated: ‘I do declare and promise that I will 
 be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England without 
 a King or House of Lords.’ —a formula which would suit 
 Mr. Bradlaugh exactly. The Great Seal was ordered to 
 be broken by a workman in face of the House, and a new 
 one substituted—“‘ The Great Seal of England, 1648.” On 
 the one side was a map of England and Ireland, on the other 
 the House of Commons in session, with the legend, “In the 
 first year of freedom, by God’s blessing restored, 1648.’’ The 
 device was by Sir Henry Martin, the wittiest man in the 
 House, and the staunchest of Republicans. 
 
 The executive functions of the House were vested in a 
 Council of State, consisting of forty-one members, quorum 
 nine. At first the President of this Republican Cabinet was 
 elected at each sitting, Bradshaw and Cromwell being fre- 
 quent occupants of the chair. Eventually the honour of 
 Premiership was monthly. Their instructions were ) to 
 command and settle the militia of England and Ireland; (2) 
 to appoint and dispose of magazines and stores: (3) to set 
 forth such a navy as they should think fit; and (4) to sic and 
 execute the powers given them for a year. John Milton was 
 appointed the Secretary for Foreign Tongues to this remark- 
 able council at a salary of £300 per annum. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone and other Prime Ministers have talked many 
 senseless constitutional common-places on the dangers 
 and inconveniences of large Cabinets, but the achievements 
 of this illustrious Council by sea and land, in peace and war, 
 have had no parallel in English history. In point of adminis- 
 trative efficiency the present Gladstonian Ministry of all the 
 talents were but as pigmies compared with these giants. The 
 members did not require to post off to Balmoral or Osborne 
 to procure a useless royal signature in those times. They 
 were simply members of an Executive Committee of the 
 
REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 63 
 
 House, responsible to no other authority, and liable to removal 
 by vote at the end of their annual term of office. Is there not 
 here a lesson in governmental simplicity for constitution- 
 builders to profit by? Complexity is as objectionable in 
 politics asin mechanics. The simpler the political organism 
 the better. The boasted balance of powers in the British 
 Constitution merely produces rotatory motion. Progress is 
 rendered next to impossible. 
 
 Three faults, and only three have ever been seriously laid 
 to the charge of the Republican House and its illustrious 
 Council of State. Firstly it was nicknamed the ‘ Rump,” 
 because it sat after the partizans of Charles Stuart had been 
 subjected to Pride’s Purge. But Parliament was jighting 
 the King, and the expulsion of his supporters from the House 
 was nothing more than an incident—a regrettable incident, 
 I admit—in the war. The ejected would be much less dan- 
 gerous in the field than in the Council. ‘We shall now 
 know,’ said Vane when Colonel Pride appeared on the scene, 
 ‘* who i is on the side of the king and who is on the side of the 
 people.”’ 
 
 Secondly, it has been asserted by admirers of Oliver Crom- 
 well, as by the dupes of Napoleon III., that the coup Wétat 
 prevented anarchy. But the fact was that from 1648 to 1653 
 the country, as a whole, was profoundly tranquil and pros- 
 perous. There was, indeed, no anarchy but what was caused 
 by the unprincipled ambition and unscrupulous intrigues of 
 Cromwell. But to do that arch-traitor justice he never for a | 
 moment pretended that the Civil Authority was unable to 
 maintain order. He had been one of them and knew 
 better. 
 
 The third charge is less easily rebutted. The Republican 
 Administration have been accused, and Cromwell loudly 
 accused them of a desire to perpetuate their own power un- 
 duly, but the House was in the very act of passing a Disso- 
 lution Bill, substantially in accordance with the famous 
 Agreement of the People, when it was forcibly broken up by 
 the very man who had long been planning its overthrow on 
 the pretext that it would not dissolve! Sir Henry Martin’s 
 reason for being in no hurry to appeal to the constituencies, 
 was, in the circumstances, equally witty and wise. The 
 Republic was a tender infant, and who “so proper to bring 
 it up as the mother who had brought it into the world ?”’ 
 
64 REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 
 
 PROTECTORS—OLIVER AND RICHARD CROMWELL 
 (1653—1659). 
 
 Between the Man of December, 1851, and the Man of 
 April, 1653, there is little tochoose. Napoleon turned on his 
 enemies, Cromwellturned on his friends. Cromwell before com- 
 mitting a flagitious act said his prayers: Napoleon drank 
 brandy. But both were the destroyers of Republics, and both 
 earned the everlasting execration of those who regard liberti- 
 cide as the greatest of crimes. However Cromwell came to 
 be looked on as a Republican is a mystery of mysteries ! 
 
 The character of Oliver Cromwell has been a great bone of 
 contention among historians and biographers. Nor is this to 
 be wondered at, for surely no more religiously unscrupulous, 
 humanely bloody, courageously crafty, and patriotically selfish 
 mortal ever lived. In his own day he deceived, almost down 
 to the coup d'état, the very elect of Englishmen—Sir Harry 
 Vane, Blake, Algernon Sidney, Scot, Sir Henry Martin, Sir 
 Peter Wentworth, Sir Arthur Hazelrig, Hutchinson, 
 Ludlow, Bradshaw, and the whole Council of State. If 
 he had been a hypocrite of the ordinary type depend 
 upon it such colleagues as these would have fathomed 
 and frustrated his self-seeking designs in time. But he 
 was a very extraordinary hypocrite. Bishop Burnet, 
 in a couple of sentences, gives what I believe to be the true 
 clue to his later character. ‘I had much discourse,” says 
 Burnet, ‘‘on this head (Oliver’s profound dissimulation) with 
 one who knew Cromwell well, and all that set of men, and asked 
 him how they could excuse all the prevarications and other 
 ill things of which they were visibly guilty in the conduct of 
 their affairs. He told me they believed theve were great occasions 
 in which some men weve called to great services, in the doing of which 
 they weve excused {vom the common rules of morality; such were the 
 practices of Ehud and Saul, Samson and David; and by this they 
 fancied they had a privilege from observing the standing rules.” ‘This 
 notion once imbibed Cromwell was not merely able to impose 
 successfully on others, but even on himself. In studying the 
 character of Cromwell one continually encounters not a single 
 Cromwell but several. You pay your money and you take 
 your choice. My view of the Cromwellian moral enigma is 
 
REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 65 
 
 simply this:—In youth he was an evil-liver. Presently 
 he suddenly became a Puritan, and the evil spirit having 
 been driven out, he for a time walked in dry places seeking 
 rest and finding none. _—‘- Later he returned to his house only 
 to find it empty, swept and garnished. ‘Then goeth he and 
 taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked than him- 
 self, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of 
 that man was worse than the first.” 
 
 One man only among his contemporaries seems to have 
 taken his true measure almost from the first—a remarkable 
 man, who died Cromwell’s prisoner in Elizabeth Castle, 
 Jersey, at the early age of 39. More than four years before 
 the fatal 20th of April, Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne, 
 leader of the Levellers, or Radicals of the day, wrote thus: 
 «« The present contest is merely no more than Self in the 
 Highest, and to set up the false saint and most desperate 
 apostate, murderer, and traitor, Oliver Cromwell, by a pre- 
 tended election of his mercenary soldiers, under the false 
 name of ‘ godly interest,’ to be King of England, that being 
 now too apparently all the intended liberties of the people he 
 ever sought for in his life.” 
 
 Colonel Streater also saw the drift of Cromwell’s intrigues. 
 Brave simple-minded Major-General Harrison had been 
 persuaded by Cromwell to take part against Parliament 
 on the ground that the reign of the saints could not 
 otherwise be inaugurated. Harrison ‘: was assured,” he . 
 told Streater, ‘‘that the Lord General (Cromwell) sought 
 not himself but that King Jesus (Harrison was a Fifth 
 Monarchy man) might take the sceptre.” ‘Christ had 
 better come before Christmas or he will come too late,’’ 
 was Streater’s grim response. And too late he did come for 
 poor Harrison, who ultimately found himself, like Lilburne, 
 Cromwell’s prisoner. 
 
 Nor could he bend stout Erorenctinte General Ludlow 
 from the paths of rectitude. ‘‘ Walking,’ says Ludlow, 
 “one day with Lieutenant-General Cromwell in Sir Robert 
 Cotton’s garden, he inveighed bitterly against them (the 
 Commons), saying in a familiar way to me, “If thy 
 father were alive, he would let some of them hear ee they 
 deserved ;” adding further, ‘that it was a miserable thing to 
 serve a Parliament to whom let a man be never so faithful, 
 
 F 
 
66 REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 
 
 if one pragmatical fellow rise up and asperse him, he shall 
 never wipe it off. Whereas,” said he, ‘‘ when one serves 
 under a general, he may do as much service, and yet be free © 
 from all envy and blame.’ This text, together with the com- 
 ment which his after-actions put upon it, hath since persuaded 
 me that he had already conceived the design of destroying 
 the Civil Authority, and setting up of himself; and that he 
 took the opportunity to feel my pulse, whether I were a fit 
 instrument to be employed by him to those ends. But having 
 replied to his discourse that we ought to perform the duty of 
 our stations, and trust God with our honour, power, and all 
 that is dear to us, not permitting any such considerations to 
 discourage us from the prosecution of our duty, I never heard 
 anything more from him upon that point.” 
 
 Major General Lambert, a vain man, but a skilful officer, 
 was more easily seduced from his allegiance to Parliament. 
 The House had resolved to abolish the title of Lord 
 Lieutenant of Ireland as unsuitable in a Republic. Never- 
 theless, Cromwell would inconsistently insist that Lambert 
 should be sent to that country with the title of Lord Deputy- 
 Lieutenant. The upshot was, that Fleetwood, Cromwell’s 
 son-in-law, got the post without the title, while Lambert 
 was so incensed against Parliament that he was easily 
 induced to conspire against it. 
 
 But Cromwell liked to have the sword of the spirit, as well 
 as that of the flesh on his side. Where there could be no 
 law, there might be gospel. In the ‘“ Life of Henry Neville,” 
 a member of the Council of State, there occurs the follow- 
 ing :— 
 
 ‘‘Cromwell on this great occasion sent for some of the chief City divines, 
 as if he made it a matter of conscience to be determined by their advice. 
 Among these were the leading Mr. Calamy, who very boldly opposed Mr. 
 Cromwell’s project (to eject Parliament), and offered to prove it both un- 
 dawful and impracticable. Cromwell answered readily upon the first head 
 ‘unlawful’ and appealed to the safety of thenation being the supreme law, 
 “But,’ says he, ‘pray Mr. Calamy, why impracticable?’ Calamy replied, 
 “Oh! ’tis against the voice of the nation; there will be nine in the ten 
 against you. ‘Very well,’ says Cromwell, ‘but what if I should disarm 
 
 the nine, and put a sword into the tenth man’s hand, would not that do 
 the business ?”’ ; 
 
 His master-stroke, however, was to get his own regiment — 
 which was bound to his interest by large extra pay, made 
 
REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 67 
 
 the guard of Parliament. The wolf being thus secure of his 
 prey, could choose his own time for devouring the flock. 
 This was even a worse machination than the Self-Denying 
 Q@rdinance, by which cuckoo-like he contrived to deprive all 
 the members of Parliament of their commissions in the army 
 except himself. Still the expulsion of Parliament, though the 
 greatest, was by no means one of his most artistic acts of 
 treason. Vane compelled him completely to take off the 
 mask at the last moment. He had hypocritically demanded 
 ‘what he dreaded most, viz. an appeal to the constituencies, 
 and when he was visibly about to have his wishes complied 
 with, he raved like a maniac. Sir Harry Vane was ‘a 
 juggler without common honesty!’’ But even in his wild 
 outburst of baffled rage he was prudent. He clutched the 
 Dissolution Bill, which unfortunately had not been printed 
 hid it under his cloak, and carried it to his chambers, where 
 it was seen no more. Cromwell meant to scatter the House 
 for not dissolving; as it was, thanks to Vane’s superior 
 strategy, he had to scatter it for dissolving ! 
 
 In judging of such a beast of prey as Cromwell, one should 
 never regard for an instant what he said, but mark intently 
 what he did. Vane, admittedly the purest, and as I think the 
 ablest statesman of his age, was “a juggler without common 
 honesty,” and the noble band of more than Roman Senators, 
 who clustered around him, were ordered to ‘give place to 
 better men?” Now, what of the men, the better men, by whom 
 Cromwell replaced the illustrious Forty-one, the Republican 
 Council of State? Himself and the ‘ Creature Colonels,’ as 
 Lilburne aptly called them, Lambert, Harrison, Bennet, 
 Sydenham, Stapely, Desborough! These the better men! 
 Nay, add the two chief of liars and traitors, Monk and Sir 
 Ashley Cooper (afterwards the thrice infamous Shaftesbury), 
 and one is able to see at a glance what Cromwell. meant by 
 ‘‘better men.” He meant men better suited for his own 
 sinister purposes. That two such villains as Monk and 
 Cooper enjoyed Cromwell’s confidence is his severest con- 
 _demnation. Shall not a man be judged by the company he 
 keeps ? 
 
 To secure at least one honoured name to gild thei 
 shame, this junto of knaves and dupes used every art to induce 
 that “juggler without common honesty,” Sir Harry Vane, to 
 
 thi; F2 
 
OX REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 
 
 join them. His reply was, that doubtless ithe reign of the 
 Saints had set in, but for his part, he preferred to wait 
 till he got to heaven for his share of the felicity. 
 
 No man, both of head and heart, with the single exception 
 of Milton, ever associated with the usurper more, and even 
 Milton, after the fall of Richard Cromwell perceived the 
 error which his blindness largely excused and wrote with feel- 
 ings of manifest relief of ‘‘ those unhappy interruptions (the 
 Cromwells) which God hath removed.” Oliver’s Parliaments 
 were like his Councils of State nominated, manipulated, 
 ‘purged, brow-beaten, dissolved, expelled in a manner that 
 neither Tudor nor Stuart would have dared attempt. When 
 the recalcitrant members of Barebone’s Parliament were 
 ejected by Colonel White they admonished him that they 
 were ‘“‘ seeking the Lord in prayer.”’ ‘‘ Youmay go elsewhere 
 to seek the Lord,’ was the cynical response, ‘for to my 
 certain knowledge He has not been here for many years.” 
 Oliver remorselessly distrained for taxes imposed by his sole 
 authority, and when one of his collectors was sued, he threw 
 the prosecuting counsel into prison. He gagged the press; 
 and dividing England into eleven satrapies, governed 
 them by the swords of his major-generals. He beheaded 
 Sir William Slingsby and Dr. Hewitt for conspiracy without 
 so much as the benefit of trial by jury. The cost of his 
 government was unprecedented in the annals of England: 
 enormous sums being spent in espionage. There was not an 
 offence laid to Charles’s charge of which Cromwell was not 
 guilty in an aggravated form. 
 
 It is not a little curious that, like Charles, Oliver traced 
 his descent on his mother’s side to Alexander, Lord High 
 Steward of Scotland—a fact which may to some extent 
 account for his bad charactcr. The name Cromwell .was 
 assumed by his great-great-grandfather, one Morgan 
 Williams, on his marriage with the sister of Henry the 
 Lighth’s famous minister, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. 
 
 Oliver trusted no one exc.pt his secretary Thurloe, and not 
 always him. Thurloe relates how ‘‘ he was once commanded 
 by Cromwell to go ata certain hour to Gray’s Inn, and at 
 such a place deliver a bill for £20,000, payable to bearer at 
 Genoa, te a man hv should find walking in such a habit 
 and posture as he described, without speaking one word.” 
 
REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 69 
 
 ‘Thurloe went, found his man, and to his dying day knew 
 nothing more of the transaction. 
 
 Cromwell’s organ of secretiveness was almost criminally 
 darge. Late one night in ‘Thurloe’s office he began 
 hurriedly to dictate to the secretary a secret dispatch, 
 without observing the presence of Moreland, afterwards 
 Sir Samuel Moreland, who was fast asleep at his desk. 
 Cromwell instantly seized a dagger, and, but for the 
 earnest entreaties of Thurloe, who protested that Moreland 
 ' was not awake, would have murdered him on the spot. 
 
 He had the tyrant’s unfailing taste for severe practical 
 jokes. In signing Charles the First’s death warrant, it is on 
 record that, taking up the pen, he smeared Sir Henry Martin’s 
 face with ink, the latter not failing tc retaliate. In camp he 
 would encourage his troopers to put live coals in each others’ 
 boots, in order to enjoy the effects. When his daughter was 
 married to Mr. Rich, heir of the Earl of Warwick—he was 
 an inveterate match maker—he amused himself by throwing 
 about the sack-posset, and by bedaubing the seats with wet 
 ‘sweetmeats in order tospoil the ladies’ dresses. ‘‘Cromwell,”’ 
 says Cowley in his famous ‘ Vision,” ‘‘ was wanton and merry, 
 unwittingly and ungracefully merry, with our sufferings. He 
 loved to say and do senseless and fantastical things only to 
 do or show his powerfof doing or saying anything. It would 
 ill befit mine or any civil mouth, to repeat those words which 
 he spoke concerning the most sacred of our English laws 
 the Petition of Right, or Magna Charta. Today you should 
 see him ranting so wildly that no one durst come near him ; 
 the morrow flinging of cushions and playing at snowballs 
 with his servants.’ 
 
 His recklessness of human life wa; almost as great as 
 that of the Roman Sulla, the Prussian Frederick, or the 
 Corsican Bonaparte. His innate ferocity came fully out 
 in his Irish campaign. At the storming of Drogheda 
 he exultingly writes, ‘“‘ Divers of the officers and soldiers 
 being fled over the bridge about 100 of them possessed | 
 St. Peter’s Church steeple. . . . These being summoned 
 to yield to mercy refused. Whereupon I ordered the 
 steeple of St. Peter’s Church to be fired, when one of 
 them was heard to say in the midst of the flames, ‘God 
 damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn.’ I 
 
7O REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 
 
 believe all their friars were knocked on the head promiscu- 
 ously, but two: the one of which was Father Peter Taaff, 
 whom the soldiers took next day, and made an end of.” | 
 Irish Papists were to Cromwell as were Hittites and Hivites 
 to the Jews of old. 
 
 Some despots have beennot insusceptible to the sentiment 
 of gratitude but Cromwell was not one of these. Parliament 
 had loaded him with favours conferring on him lands of in- 
 heritance worth more than £ 6000 per annum—an immense sum 
 in those days—out of the confiscated estates of royalists; yet 
 that did not prevent him, when he wished to discredit 
 the Legislature from lamenting that the injured ones were 
 ‘‘ driven like flocks of sheep by forty in a morning to the con- 
 fiscation of goods and estates without any man being able 
 to give a reason that two of them had deserved to forfeit 
 a shilling.” At other times he would find much consolation 
 in the text :—‘* He shall be called Maher-shalal-hash-bash, 
 because he maketh haste to the.spoil.’’ Latterly, in spite of 
 the Act of Oblivion, he rigorously exacted from all who had 
 borne arms for the King one tenth of their annual incomes! 
 
 But with all his craft, hypocrisy and daring he missed the 
 great object of his ambition—the Crown of’ England. On 
 this he had probably not set his heart before the execution 
 of the king. Attended by a private soldier named Bowtell 
 he went to look at Charles’s body. Being unable to raise the 
 lid of the coffin with his staff he forced it open with the 
 hilt of the other’s sword. As he gazed on the severed 
 neck Bowtell asked him what form of Government they 
 should now have. ‘The same as now,” was the reply. 
 
 But this mood did not last long. Onedayin November 1652 
 Cromwell met Whitelocke, prudent lawyer that he was, in 
 St. James’s Park when the following dialogue ensued :— 
 
 Cromwell. What if a man should take upon him to be king? 
 
 Whitelocke. I think that remedy would be worse than the disease. 
 
 Cromwell. Why do you think so? 
 
 Whitelocke. Asto your own person, the title of king would be no ad- 
 vantage, because you have the full kingly power in you already cen- 
 cerning the militia, as you are general; so that I apprehend less envy, and 
 danger, and pomp, but not less power and opportunities of doing good in 
 you, being general, than would be if you had assumed the title of 
 
 king. 
 Cromwell. What do you apprehend would be the danger of taking the: 
 
 title ? 
 
REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 7 
 
 Whitelocke. The danger, I think, would be this: One of the main points 
 of controversy between us and our adversaries is whether the government 
 of this nation shall be established in monarchy, or ina free state, or com- 
 ntonwealth. Now if Your Excellency shall take on you the title of king, the 
 state of our cause will be thereby wholly determined, a monarchy estab- 
 lished in your person, and the question will be no more whether our 
 government shall be by a monarchy, or a free state, but whether Cromwell | 
 or Stuart shall be our king and monarch. Thus the state of our contro- 
 versy being totally changed, allthose who were for a Commonwealth (and 
 they are a very clear and considerable party), having their hopes therein 
 frustrated, will desert you. 
 
 Cromwell. I confess you speak reason in this; but what other things can 
 you propound that may obviate the dangers and difficulties wherein we 
 are all engaged ? 
 
 Whitelocke. Propose a private treaty with the King of Scots, (Charles 
 ‘II) securing everybody’s interest and civil and religious liberty. 
 
 Cromwell. More time and consideration. 
 
 Whitelocke adds: With this the general broke off and went to other 
 ‘company, and so into Whitehall, seeming, by his countenance, displeased 
 with what I had said; yet he never objected to me in any public meeting 
 ‘afterwards. Only his carriage towards me from that time was altered, and 
 his advising with me not so frequent or intimate as before. 
 
 When eventually offered the crown by a Committee of his 
 ‘mock Parliament in April 1657, Cromwell’s ianguage was 
 throughout the hollow negotiations which ensued a 
 miracle of ambiguity, though as to his wishes no man not by 
 nature a dupe can entertain a doubt. Like our Grand Old 
 Man he could become absolutely incomprehensible at will, 
 plunging into a sea of wordy distinctions which defied 
 analysis. But the “great business of the kingship” as he 
 called it was too much of a good thing. Not even the 
 ‘¢ creature colonels’’ would near of it. Lambert, Fleetwood, 
 and Desborough threw up their commissions, while the other 
 officers, headed by Pride, petitioned, or rather commanded 
 the House, ‘‘ in the name of the old cause for which they had 
 bled.” to withdraw the proposal. It was condemned by 
 Republicans and Monarchists alike and had perforce to be 
 given up. 
 
 His Jingo policy abroad was singularly unscrupulous and 
 short-sighted. To promote Protestantism he assailed in. 
 nocuous decadent Spain instead of formidable France. 
 His disastrous attack on San Domingo was as unprincipled as 
 Frederick’s seizure of Silesia—an unique act of royal treach- 
 ery. Blake’s splendid naval victories were in nowise owing 
 to Cromwell. Vane at the head of the Republican Admiralty 
 
72 REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 
 
 Committee had made the English Navy. Indeed it was with 
 ‘foul ships and musty biscuits” that Blake was compelled 
 to face the foe, Cromwell being at the time too intent on the - 
 ‘oreat business of the kingship ’’ to attend to such trifles. 
 The great Admiral would never for a moment acknowledge 
 the usurper, though he sadly told his men that “it was their 
 duty to fight for their country into whatever hands the 
 Government fell.” 
 
 At last the Protector’s arts of disimulation could deceive no 
 one. Though feared he was all but universally detested. 
 He complained that the ‘“ godly interest ”’ had deserted him. 
 Eventually appeared Colonel Titus’s terrible indictment— 
 terrible in its truthfulness and remorseless logic—entitled 
 “« Killing no Murder.” ‘The tyrant read it and smiled no more. 
 His nerves were unstrung by the constant dread of assassi- 
 nation. He habitually wore armour under his clothes, slept as. 
 seldom as possible in the same bed, and never stirred abroad 
 without a strong body-guard. His precautions were those of 
 a Russian Czar. His Government was merely a state of 
 siege. 
 
 To the last he kept up a show of religion. On his death- 
 bed he asked his chaplain if it were possible for a man once 
 in grace to go to perdition—‘‘ No!” replied the chaplain. 
 “Then,” said Oliver with a fine touch of ‘ other worldliness’ 
 **] am safe for I know I was once in grace.” If so, it were 
 the better for him, for in this world he must ever be classed 
 among the indescribable herd whom Dante admits neither 
 into his Paradiso nor his Inferno ‘“‘ who neither faithful nor 
 faithless were to God but only for themselves.” Hence it is 
 that this “ grandjuggler” as Lilburne called him has no 
 statue. 
 
 He had magnificent opportunities. He might have 
 played the part of an Epaminondas or a Washington and his 
 name might have taken the first place on the bead-roll of 
 human distinction. Instead of that he sold the mighty space 
 of his large honours for such trash as never yet delighted the 
 heart of a Brutus. His gigantic apostasy gave the cue to 
 scores of minor traitors. He made patriotism a bye-word 
 and a reproach among Englishmen. His guilty ambition 
 restored the Stuarts, who seemed a minor evil by comparison, 
 and threw back civilisation for a couple of centuries. 
 
REPUBLIC AND PROTECTORATE. 73 
 
 He was no ‘Saviour of Society.” ‘Self in the Highest’ 
 was ever first in histhoughts. I care nothing for the piety 
 of his ‘ Letters and Speeches:’ the Directors of the City of 
 Glasgow Bank were equally pious. I see in him only the 
 eats Iscariot of the English Republic on whose like let us 
 
 ope Englishmen will never have occasion to look again. 
 
 His son poor ‘“‘ dawdling Dick”’ next tried the ‘ protecting ’ 
 business for a few brief months and then “ at one stride came 
 the dark.” 
 
74 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 MORE’ STUART "ROYALTY. 
 
 Age, thou art sham’d! © 
 Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods ! 
 O! you and I have heard our fathers say 
 There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d 
 The eternal devil to keep his State in Rome 
 As easily as a king. 
 
 Cuar Les II]. ~ (1660-1685.) 
 
 N O sooner had the Cromwellian Protectorate collapsed than 
 
 the arch traitor Monk set towork. The nation, ashamed 
 as it were of the moral grandeur to which it had attained, 
 with the exception always of such choice souls as Milton and 
 Vane, threw itself in a delirium of servility at the feet 
 of a shameless and treacherous libertine. Charles II. “ en- 
 joyed his own again,” but for the English people, alas ! ““‘what 
 a fall was there!’ The rotting bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, 
 and Bradshaw were dug up, hanged on the gallows at 
 Tyburn, then decapitated, and the heads stuck on poles on 
 Westminster Hall, by wretches who never would have dared 
 to look them in the face had they been alive. 
 
 At his trial, Major-General Harrison, the bravest of the 
 brave, whose aged frame bore many battle scars, had the 
 hangman placed by his side, rope in hand, to give him a proper 
 foretaste of death, the courtiers enjoying the spectacle in large 
 numbers. He was cut down alive from the gibbet and dis- 
 embowelled ; he saw his entrails cast into the fire; his still 
 beating heart was torn out and shown to the degraded 
 herd. When Cook, the solicitor for the Republic, was — 
 quartered, the executioner, rubbing his bloody hands, was 
 made to approach Hugh Peters, who was about to sufter, 
 and ask him how he liked the work. 
 
MORE STUART ROYALTY. 715 
 
 Sir Harry Vane, the greatest and most spotless statesman 
 of his age, was sentenced to death beeause, as Charles wrote, 
 ‘‘ He is too dangerous a man to let live if we can safely put 
 ' him out of the way.” Vane was protected alike by statute 
 and by the solemn pledge of the king to the Convention 
 Parliament. But what of that? Though he had declined to 
 sit on the Commission that tried Charles I., he was the soul 
 of the Republican party, altogether too dangerous a man to 
 let live—nay, on the scaffold he was too dangerous to let 
 speak to the multitude. Stretching out his hands, he had 
 said, “I do here appeal to the Great God of Heaven and all 
 this assembly, or any other power, to show wherein I have 
 defiled my hands with any man’s blood or estate, or that I 
 have sought myself in any public capacity or place I have been 
 in,” when his voice was ordered to be drowned by drummers. 
 kept in readiness under the scaffold, lest his words should 
 find an echo in the bosoms of the people. The trum- 
 peters were made to “‘ murre”’ derisively in his face while his 
 pockets were brutally rifled. As he laid his head on the 
 block he prayed, ‘‘ Father, glorify Thy servant in the sight of 
 men that he may glorify Thee in the discharge of his duty to. 
 Thee and to his country.” ‘‘The Lord Jesus go with your 
 dear soul!” cried the agonised crowd. He wore a red silk 
 vest, ‘‘the victorious colour’”’ of the Commonwealth. He 
 never once changed countenance, and his severed head was. 
 instantly still. 
 
 And what of the king who found this man too dangerous to. 
 be let live? Could he, in similar circumstances, have made 
 Vane’s boast? Assuredly not. On Charles II., if on any 
 man, the terrible judgment may literally be pronounced— 
 vendidit hic auro patviam—this man sold his country for gold. 
 While good garrulous Pepys was jotting down, in his famous 
 diary, in regard to the triple alliance between England, 
 Holland and Sweden to curb the ambition of France, that 
 ‘“‘it is the only good public thing that hath been done since 
 the king came to England,” Charles was negotiating with 
 Louis the Fourteenth the secret Treaty: of Dover, to which 
 none but himself, his brother James, and two of his ministers, 
 Arlington and Clifford, both Catholics, were privy. For an 
 annual pension of £200,000 from the most Christian king, 
 Charles undertook to declare himself a Romanist, to join 
 
76 MORE STUART ROYALTY. 
 
 France in making war on Holland, and contingently- on 
 Flanders. Ifthe English people should prove restive under 
 so great a humiliation, it was stipulated that Louis should 
 supply an army to “ protect” his royal brother ‘‘in the exe- 
 cution,” to use the language of the French ambassador, “ of 
 his design of changing the present state of religion in England 
 for a better, and of establishing his authority so as to be able 
 to retain his subjects in the obedience they owe him.” 
 
 Like the first Defender of the Faith, Henry VIII., Charles 
 was personally highly qualified to reform the religion of the 
 State. His Court was a model. To his courtiers he was 
 familiarly known as ‘“‘ the Old Goat.’ On the day that the 
 Dutch fleet burned the English shipping in the Thames, the 
 king supped with the Duchess of Monmouth, and amused 
 himself by chasing a moth. He would quarrel with his 
 mistress in public. She called him an idiot; he retorted, 
 «You are a jade.” She had two other lovers at the same 
 time, actors, one of them a mountebank. In these circum- 
 stances the king not unnaturally, according to the unim- 
 peachable Pepys, ‘declared that he did not get the child 
 of which she is conceived at this time. But she told him, 
 «You ! You shall own it !’”” And own it he did; but by 
 way of consolation he took to himself a couple of actresses as 
 a sort of set-off to the lady’s actors. 
 
 On another occasion Pepys heard that the king had been 
 ‘¢into corners with Mrs. Stewart, and will be with her half an 
 hour, kissing her to the observation of all the world.” Again, 
 Captain Ferrers told him, “ how, at a ball at Court a child 
 was born by one of the ladies in dancing.” It was taken 
 off in a handkerchief. ‘‘ And the king had it in his closet a 
 week after, and did dissect it, making great sport of it.” 
 Pepys was loyal to the backbone, yet he characteristically 
 concludes, “Having heard the king and the Duke (James) 
 talk, and seeing and observing their habits and intercourse, 
 God forgive me, though I admire them with all the duty 
 possible, yet the more a man considers and observes them the 
 less difference he finds between them and other men, though, 
 blessed be God, they are both princes of great nobleness and 
 spirits.” What a libel is there here on “ other men” ! 
 
 ‘¢ Both princes of great nobleness and spirits!’? There is a. 
 world of significance in this saving clause. It is like John 
 
MORE STUART ROYALTY. /7 
 
 Bright’s great discovery that the Prince of Wales is “ good- 
 natured.”’ So also was Charles II. an exceedingly good- 
 
 natured man. On his death-bed he apologised to his courtiers 
 ' for taking such an unconscionable time to die. Yet a more 
 abominable scoundrel never breathed. 
 
 As was the “‘ Old Goat” so were his courtiers. The future 
 Duchess of Tyrconnel disguised herself as an orange-girl and 
 cried her wares in the streets. Sedley and Buckhurst after 
 midnight ran through the streets nearly nude. Another 
 courtier addressed the people from a window naked. 
 
 “The Duke of Buckingham, a lover of the Countess of 
 Shrewsbury, slew the Earl in a duel; the Countess, disguised 
 as a page, held Buckingham’s horse, while she embraced him, 
 covered as he was with her husband’s blood, and the murderers 
 and adulterers returned publicly as in a triumphal march to: 
 the house of the dead man.” 
 
 But Rochester was the model knight of the Court of the 
 Restoration. He was a poet as weli as a gallant. For five 
 years running he was drunk. He and Buckingham rented an 
 inn in the Newmarket Road, where they amused themselves 
 by stupefying husbands with drink and debauching their 
 wives. One of his happiest achievements was to introduce 
 himself, disguised as an old woman, into the house of a 
 miser, whose wife he bore off in triumph. Buckingham finally 
 got the lady, and to the intense gratification of the two peers, 
 the miser hanged himself. Eventually, Rochester turned 
 astrologer, and sold drugs for the vilest purposes. His poems 
 and pamphlets are so filthy that they can scarcely even be 
 named. ‘Here I first understood by their taik,” says the 
 pious, domesticated Pepys, “the meaning of the company 
 that lately were called Ballers; Harris telling how it was by 
 a meeting of some young blades, where he was among them, 
 and my Lady Bennett and her ladies, and their dancing 
 naked and all the roguish things in the world.” 
 
 Such was Charles and such his courtiers. The darker 
 features to be gathered from the ‘‘ Mémoires de Grammont” it 
 is impossible to fillin. To compare them with goats were 
 an odious libel on the goats. 
 
 By confiscating the principal of loans advanced to 
 the Treasury, the king and his advisers contrived at a 
 blow to make bankrupt half the goldsmiths, then the 
 
78 MORE STUART ROYALTY. 
 
 bankers, of London. The act was one of undisguised robbery 
 unparalleled in the annals of English Governments. The 
 Great Mogul never filled his coffers in a manner more> 
 reprehensible. Charles eventually reached a point when the 
 case-hardened Shaftesbury said of him that he ‘‘ had brought 
 his affairs to that pass that there is not a person in the world, 
 man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any confi- 
 dence in his word or friendship.” 
 
 On Sunday, 1st February, 1685, when death laid his icy 
 hand on Charles, he was thus surrounded, and thus employed, 
 according to Lord Macaulay :—‘‘ A party of twenty courtiers 
 were seated at cards round a large table, on which gold was 
 heaped in mountains. .« . . The king sat there, chattering 
 and toying with three women, whose charms were the boast 
 and whose vices were the disgrace of three nations. Barbara 
 Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, was then no longer young, but 
 still retaining some traces of that superb loveliness which 
 twenty years before overcame the hearts of all men. ‘There, 
 too, was the Duchess of Portsmouth, whose soft and infantine 
 features were lighted up with the vivacity of France. Hor- 
 tensia Marcini, Duchess of Mazarin, and niece of the great 
 cardinal, completed the group. No gift of nature or of fortune 
 seemed to be wanting to her. But her diseased mind required 
 stronger stimulants, and sought them in gallantry, in basset, 
 and in usquebaugh. While Charles flirted with his three 
 sultanas, Hortensia’s page, a handsome boy, whose vocal 
 performances were the delight of Whitehall, and were rewarded 
 by numerous presents of rich clothes, ponies, and guineas, 
 warbled some amorous verses.’ 
 
 As the disease progressed, the queen, whom he had de- 
 graded to the level of his concubines, was summoned to the 
 chamber of death, which was cleared of harlots. Last of all, 
 an, illiterate Catholic priest, named Huddleston, received the 
 dying man’s confession, and admitted him into the com- 
 munion of the Church of Rome. Meanwhile, infatuated crowds 
 thronged the churches, praying fervently that God would 
 
 raise him up to be again the father of his people. Happily 
 
 for themselves, their prayer was not answered, though cer- 
 tainly he was, as was wittily said of Henry IV. of France, 
 the father of his people in more senses than one. 
 
 The Pension List is a perpetual reminder of his fatherhood. 
 
MORE STUART ROYALTY. 79 
 
 By Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, he had three 
 sons, the Dukes of Southampton, Grafton, and Northumber- 
 land. By Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, 
 he had the Duke of Richmond; by Nell Gwynne, the actress, 
 the Duke of St. Albans; and by Lucy Walters, the Duke of 
 Monmouth. The costly trio of the present Dukes of Grafton, 
 Richmond, and St. Albans are supposed to be the lineal des- 
 cendants of the ‘Merry Monarch.” Charles himself was 
 more doubtful on the subject than the British taxpayer. 
 
 James II. (1685-1688.) 
 
 Charles was succeeded by his brother, James II., the con- 
 scientious bigot who ‘‘threw away three kingdoms for a 
 mass.” James once advised his royal brother to beware of 
 assassins. ‘¢ They will never kill me,” was the caustic reply, 
 **to make you king.” Unlike Charles, James I]. was neither 
 merry nor naturally humane. He was sullen and cruel. 
 Even John Churchill’s adamantine breast heaved with in- 
 dignation at the mercilessness exhibited by the king after 
 his victory over Monmouth at Sedgemoor. ‘This marble,” 
 he cried, striking a mantelpiece on which he leant, ‘is not 
 harder than the king’s heart!” In ‘the Bloody Circuit” 
 which succeeded the battle, his thrice infamous instrument, 
 Jeffreys, committed no fewer than three hundred and fifty 
 judicial murders, while eight hundred prisoners were sold 
 into slavery. 
 
 James was almost, if not altogether, as great a libertine as 
 his brother, and his taste was much less nice. Lord Chan- 
 cellor Clarendon’s daughter, Anne, whom he first seduced 
 but afterwards married, was no beauty. Her father, the 
 great historian, on being told by King Charles that she was 
 encente by the duke, exhibited’ more than Roman fortitude. 
 ** He was ready,” he informed the Council, ‘‘to give positive 
 judgment, in which he hoped their lordships would concur 
 with him—that the king should immediately cause the 
 woman to be sent to the Tower, and to be cast into a dun- 
 geon under so strict a guard that no person living should be 
 admitted to come to her; and then an Act of Parliament 
 should be passed for cutting off her head, to which he would 
 _ not only give his consent, but would very willingly be the 
 
80 MORE STUART ROYALTY. 
 
 first man that should propose it.” There surely spoke a true 
 friend of the monarchy. 
 
 The relatives of plain Arabella Churchill were more philo- . 
 sophically devoted tothe throne. ‘The necessities of the — 
 Churchills,” says Macaulay, ‘were pressing; their loyalty 
 was ardent ; and their only feeling about Arabella’s seduction 
 seems to have been joyful sutprise that so plain a girl should 
 have attained such high preterment.” 
 
 Immediately on his accession James called parliament to- 
 gether, but apologised to Barillon, the French ambassador, 
 for so doing. ‘‘ Assure your master of my gratitude and at- 
 tachment. I know that without his protection I can do 
 nothing. I know what trouble my brother brought on him- 
 self by not adhering steadily to France. I will take good 
 care not to let the House meddle with foreign affairs. If I 
 see in them any disposition to make mischief I will send them 
 about their business. Explain this to my good brother. I 
 hope he will not take it amiss that I have not consulted him. 
 He has a right to be consulted; and it is my wish to consult 
 him about everything. But in this case the delay even of a 
 week might’ have produced serious consequences.” 
 
 Next morning Rochester told Barilion, ‘It will be well 
 laid out. Your master cannot employ his revenues better. 
 Represent to him strongly how important it is that the king 
 of England should be dependent not on his own people, but 
 on the friendship of France alone-” 
 
 Louis at once collected bills of exchange on England to 
 the amount of £37,000, and sent them off. When Barillon 
 came to the king with the mouey, James shed tears of delight 
 and gratitude. ‘‘ Nobody but your king does such kind, such 
 noble things. Assure him that my attachment will last to 
 the end of my days.” 
 
 In recognition of such gratitude £120,000 more were pre- 
 sently forwarded to corrupt indifferently King, Court, and 
 Parliament. It was deemed advisable to send a special mes- 
 senger to thank Louis. The gentleman selected for this 
 high office was none other than John Churchill, the brother 
 of Arabella, the founder of the unsavoury house of Marl- 
 borough. So prudent a financier was he that instead of his 
 mistresses living on him he lived on his mistresses. Such 
 cases still occasionally come to light in our police courts, 
 
MORE STUART ROYALTY. 81 
 
 among the most degraded of human kind. Macaulay 
 thus describes John Churchill’s start in life :— 
 
 ** He was thrifty in his very vices, and levied ample con- 
 tributions on ladies enriched by the spoils of more liberal 
 lovers. He was during a short time the object of the violent 
 but fickle fondness of the Duchess of Cleveland. On one 
 occasion he was caught with her by the king, and was forced 
 to leap out of the window. She rewarded this hazardous 
 feat of gallantry with a present of £5,000. With this sum 
 the prudent young man instantly bought an annuity of £500 a 
 year well secured on landed property.” Pope puts the case 
 thus :-— 
 
 ‘The gallant, too, to whom she paid it down 
 Lived to refuse his mistress half-a-crown.” ‘ 
 
 After exhausting every other resource of tyranny,the narrow- 
 minded king concluded that he could coerce the Anglican 
 Church. Its prelates had long preached the doctrine of pas- 
 sive obedience, and he foolishly took them at their word. He 
 speedily found, however, that they had only meant passive 
 obedience for dissenters from their own ecclesiastical opinions 
 and emoluments. Not a blow was struck in his defence. 
 Even his daughter Anne, by Churchill’s advice, deserted him. 
 His other daughter, Mary, and his nephew, the Prince of 
 Orange, dutifully took his throne. He died in France, in all 
 the odour of monkish sanctity having literally, “thrown away 
 three kingdoms for a mass.” 
 
82 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 DUTCH AND GERMAN ROYALTY 
 
 Whence thinkest thou kings and parasites arose ? 
 Whence that unnatural line of drones, who heap 
 
 Toil and unvanquishable penury 
 
 On those who build their palaces and bring 
 
 ‘Their daily bread? From vice—black, loathsome, vice; 
 From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong ; 
 
 From all that genders misery, and makes 
 
 Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust, 
 
 Revenge, and murder. 
 
 WILLIAM AND Mary (1689—1702). 
 
 aE little knot of plotting aristocrats and ecclesiastics who 
 seated William and Mary onthe throne in place of James 
 II. saved England from unlimited monarchy and compulsory 
 Romanism. For these evils they substituted unlimited 
 Oligarchy, Continental Wars, Standing Armies, and the 
 National Debt. They sliced down the royal prerogative, but 
 divided the pieces carefully among themselves. Within the 
 last thirty-three years our dukes, earls, and marquises, with 
 their relatives, according to the ‘ Financial Reform Alma- 
 nack,” have looted the Exchequer of more than sixty-six 
 millions sterling! Itis for such adequate reasons as these 
 that the calling to the throne of Dutch William in 1688 has 
 been styled ‘the glorious Revolution.” For the aristocracy | 
 it was indeed a glorious revolution. 
 
 As for Dutch William himself, the praises that have been 
 heaped on him by Whig historians like Macaulay are almost 
 ludicrously overdone. His body was weak and his mind 
 devoid of culture. With a pious, Calvinistic creed, he was 
 as much addicted to wine and women as his feeble health 
 
So 
 
 DUTCH AND GERMAN ROYALTY. 83 
 
 would permit. His temper was sullen and despotic. If he 
 relinquished any attribute of kingship, it was not his fault. 
 But having no child to succeed him he submitted to succes- 
 sive limitations of his power in exchange for English gold and 
 English blood, which he caused to flow like water in his 
 Grand Alliance and Spanish Succession Wars. The national 
 debt he raised from one million to more than twenty-one 
 millions. As a general he was below mediocrity. 
 
 Macaulay has striven to free William’s memory from the 
 awful guilt of the massacre of Glencoe, but without success. 
 The extermination warrant was signed by the king at top and 
 bottom, as if purposely to emphasise the inhuman mandate. 
 The chief actors were all promoted. 
 
 The East India Company wanted a new charter, and in 
 order to procure it, bribed right and left. £10,000, it was 
 declared, were traced to the king himself. 
 
 A commission appointed in 1698 to enquire into the grant 
 of forfeited estatesin Ireland reported that 1,060,000 acres, 
 worth £211,623 per annum, had been confiscated since 1689. 
 The grantees were for the most part foreign favourites whom 
 the king loaded with dignities. Bentinck was made Earl of 
 Portland, Zuleisten Earl of Rochford, Schomberg Duke of 
 Schomberg, Auverquerque Earl of Grantham, Keppel Ear! 
 of Albermarle, Ginkill Earl of Athlone, and Ruvigny Earl of 
 Galway. But worst of all was the gift by this dutiful nephew 
 and son-in-law of James’s private estates, consisting of 95,000 
 acres, worth £26,000 per annum, to one of his (William’s) 
 mistresses, Elizabeth Villiers, Duchess of Orkney. Parlia- 
 ment insisted on resuming these forfeitures, and told the king 
 to his face he was.a dishonourable man. 
 
 On several occasions he threatened to resign, and it would 
 have been well for England if Parliament had taken him at 
 his word. On the flight of James the country might have 
 become a republic, and saved itself from an endless chain of 
 miseries ; but the idea of self-government is always the last 
 that occurs to Englishmen... They never seem to suspect 
 themselves capable of.such a thing.  Vult Vi Fekete decipr et 
 decipratur. 
 
 While busy planning on a gigantic scale further waste of 
 
 English blood and treasure in the War of the Spanish Suc- 
 cession, William died in 1702. Mary had preceded him. 
 Giz 
 
 A 
 
84 DUTCH AND GERMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 ANNE (1702—1714). 
 
 William and Mary were succeeded by James’s younger 
 daughter, Anne. Anne reigned, but certainly did not govern, 
 for thirteen years. She was, as the late Earl of Beaconsfield 
 described Queen Victoria, ‘‘ physically and morally incapable 
 of government.” She was physically lethargic, and mentally 
 imbecile. Of her husband, Prince George of Denmark, 
 Charles II. said, ‘“‘ I have tried Prince George drunk, and I 
 have tried him sober, but drunk or sober there is nothing in 
 him.” They were a well-matched couple. 
 
 For the better part of the reign the de facta sovereigns of 
 England were John Churchill and Sarah Jennings, otherwise 
 Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. It is difficult to say 
 whether William’s defeats or Marlborough’s famous victories 
 were the more disastrous to all concerned. ‘‘ What they 
 fought each other for,” no one yet has been able to ‘‘ make 
 out.” Eventually the duke’s enemies got him convicted of 
 peculation—theft is the Saxon word—and dismissed from his 
 command. He was, perhaps, the greatest of English generals, 
 yet, strange to say, he could not have passed the fifth standard 
 in a Board School to save his life. 
 
 GerorceE I. (1714—1727.) 
 
 To Anne succeeded George I., Elector of Hanover, the 
 first of the ignoble Guelphs. He could speak no English, 
 and his ministers, Carteret excepted, could speak no German. 
 Walpole had to use the medium of dog Latin in his commu- 
 nications with his august sovereign. He surrounded himself 
 with Germans. ‘The very dogs in England’s Court,” ac- 
 cording to the Scottish Jacobite song, ‘‘ they bark and howl in 
 German.” The king admonished his retinue, from mistress 
 to cook, to lay hold of everything they could get, lest their 
 time among so fickle a people as the English should be short. 
 “The German women plundered,” says Thackeray, ‘the 
 German secretaries plundered, the German cooks and attend- 
 ants plundered; even Mustapha and Mahomet, the German 
 negroes, had a share of the booty.” ‘* Coming,” says Lord 
 Mahon, ‘‘ from a poor electorate, a flight of hungry Hano- 
 verians, like so many famished vultures, fell with keen eyes 
 and bended talons on the fruitful soil of England.” And 
 
é 
 
 DUTCH AND GERMAN ROYALTY. 85 
 
 still, alas! they come, Where the carrion is, there the Teu- 
 tonic vultures are gathered together. 
 
 In his own petty principality George had been accustomed 
 to sell his subjects as mercenary soldiers at so many ducats 
 per head. In England such things could not be done with 
 impunity ; consequently the king drew unfavourable compa- 
 risons between the two countries, and never remained a 
 moment longer in London than he could help. He appropri- 
 
 _ ated estates left to others under the wills of his wife and his 
 
 father-in-law by the simple process of burning the obnoxious 
 testaments. In England this offence was then punishable by 
 hanging, and it is quite likely that George signed a few 
 death-warrants as a lesson to such transgressors as himself. 
 
 As a husband and as a father his relations were simply 
 brutal. His wife he immured in a dungeon at the age of 
 twenty-eight for a suspected intrigue with Count Kénigsmark. 
 There she remained till she was sixty; and when her son, 
 afterwards George II., sought to visit her, he was arrested by 
 his father, and narrowly escaped with his life. Kénigsmark, 
 by the king’s order, was brutally murdered. Ata later date 
 George deprived his son and daughter-in-law of the custody 
 of their own children, and drove them with ignominy from 
 St. James’s Palace. 
 
 George I. literally kept a seraglio, with the Oriental acces- 
 sories of two negro eunuchs, Mustapha and Mahomet. Among 
 the host of his painted women were Frau von Kilmansegge 
 (Countess of Darlington), Frau von Schulenberg (Duchess of 
 Kendal), the Countess of Platen, and the two sisters, Elizabeth 
 and Melusina, of the murdered Kénigsmark. No such ugly © 
 and rapacious harpies had ever been seen or heard of in 
 England. The Duchess of Kendal, being tall and lean, was 
 popularly known as “ Giraffe ;’’ while the Countess of Dar- 
 lington, from her enormous dimensions, was named ‘the 
 Elephant.” In describing George’s predilections, Chesterfield 
 went straight to the point—‘‘ No woman came amiss to him, 
 if she were only very willing and very fat.” 
 
 And to such courtesans, ministers and courtiers had humbly 
 to bow if they desired either title, pension, or place. To 
 bribes they were always open. Of the ‘South Sea Bill” 
 promotion money, no less than £30,000 were traced to their 
 unhallowed coffers. ‘A train of the deepest villany and 
 
86 DUTCH AND GERMAN ROYALTY, 
 
 fraud with which hell ever contrived to ruin a nation,” was 
 the verdict of a Select Committee of the House of Commecns 
 on these corruptions. 
 
 The subsidies granted by Parliament for the defence or 
 augmentation of George’s Hanoverian Dominions were enor- 
 mous. While the Englishman and the Hanoverian hunted 
 together, it was invariably the Hanoverian that got the turkey 
 and the Englishman the crow. 
 
 George’s death, it is said, happened in this wise. Hislong 
 imprisoned queen pre-deceased him by a few months, but 
 before leaving this world she wrote a letter to her royalspouse 
 in which she protested her innocence, and summoned him to 
 meet her before the tribunal of God within a year and a day. 
 This disquieting epistle a faithful hand placed in his coach 
 as he was entering Germany in the summer of 1714. On 
 reading it he was seized with a convulsion from which he 
 never recovered. 
 
 Georce II. (1727—1760.) 
 
 George the First was succeeded by George the Second of 
 our stock of ‘‘ wee wee German lairdies.” He can hardly be 
 regarded as much of an improvement on his father, who, 
 by the way, never, except for State reasons, acknowledged 
 the paternity. He commenced by unceremoniously making 
 away with his father’s will. There was, however, a trouble- 
 some duplicate in the hands of the Duke of Brunswick, who 
 had to be heavily bribed to give it up. Needless to say the 
 British tax-payer had to pay the bribe. Macaulay thus com- 
 prehensively characterises him :—‘‘ Not one magnanimous or 
 humane action is recorded of him, but many instances of 
 meanness and of a harshness which, but for the strong con- 
 stitutional restraints under which he was placed, might have 
 _ made the misery of his people.”’ | 
 
 During his reign the nation was never done paying his 
 debts, subsidising his continental allies, and fighting in his 
 Hanoverian quarrels. His allies he changed as often as 
 caprice or the supposed interests of Hanover required. 
 The national debt he more than doubled, raising it to 
 £ 146,000,000. 
 
 The morality of his court was equally incredible and indes- 
 cribable. Queen Caroline, a woman of bad heart, but mas- 
 
bd 
 
 DUTCH AND GERMAN ROYALTY. 87 
 
 culine head, not merely tolerated the presence of his 
 concubines, but even at times acted as his procuress. His 
 dutiful daughter advocated a beneficial change of mistress 
 from Lady Suffolk, who had become stale; while, to improve 
 the royal temper, Walpole admonished the queen to bring 
 him in contact with pretty Lady Tankerville, “it being im- 
 possible that it should be otherwise, since the king had tasted 
 better things,” 7.¢., than Caroline herself. 
 
 Both king and queen hated their hopeful son and heir, 
 Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III., with 
 undying rancour. ‘ My dear lord,” said Caroline, to Lord 
 Harvey, ‘‘1 will give it you under my hand, if you are in any 
 fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest 
 ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the 
 greatest beast in the whole world, and that I heartily wish he 
 were out of it.””, Thus spoke a loving royal mother! Her 
 wish was gratified. Frederick preceeded his father to the 
 grave. 
 
 But of all the death-bed scenes on record, that of Queen 
 Caroline is, perhaps, the most grotesque and suggestive of 
 the order of moral ideas engendered by royalty. The king 
 blubbered freely, alternately praising his wife’s virtues and 
 his own. ‘You should marry again,” moaned the dying 
 woman. ‘Non, j’auvat des mattresses (No, I will have mistres- 
 ses), sighed the Defender of the Faith. ‘‘ Cela n’empéche pas” 
 (That is no obstacle), faintly articulated Caroline, and passed, 
 let us hope in charity, into that better land, ‘‘ where,” accord- 
 ing to stern republican George Buchanan, “few kings dare 
 enter.” 
 
 With exemplary fidelity the inconsolable sovereign perse- 
 vered with mattresses, Ladies Walmoden, Yarmouth, and 
 others, to the last. Truly if ever there was, as Frederick’s 
 mother called him, an absolute canaille and beast in this 
 world, it was the second of the illustrious house of Guelph. 
 
&38 
 
 CHAPTER XE. 
 GERMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 “FARMER GEORGE” AND ‘THE FIRST GENTLEMAN IN 
 EUROPE,” 
 
 Let us speak plain. There is more in names 
 Than most men dream of; and a liemay keep 
 Its throne a whole age longer if it skulk 
 Behind the shield of some fair-seeming name, 
 — Lowell. 
 
 GeorcE III. (1760-1820.) 
 
 {pas George II. succeeded his grandson, George I1I.— Farmer 
 
 George, of pious memory. This man reigned longer 
 —nearly sixty years—and possibly did more harm than any 
 of his predecessors on the throne. His intellect resembled 
 in its narrow bigotry that of James II., aggravated by inter- 
 mittent madness. If James ‘“‘threw away three kingdoms 
 for a mass,” George threw away a virgin continent for a 
 tyrannical caprice. 
 
 If George had remained a lunatic the whole of his reign it 
 would have been well for the country. As it was, his sanity 
 was far more to be dreaded than his insanity. His education 
 had been wretched, and the. few erroneous ideas that had 
 found their way into his barren brain he pursued with in- 
 credible obstinacy. His pliant ministers yielded to him 
 rather than yield up their places. And so it came to pass 
 that this contemptible creature wielded a power for evil far 
 greater than any of his contemptible race. He hated men of 
 talent. Pitt, the elder, was ‘‘a trumpet of sedition,” and 
 when he died George inveighed against the proposal to erect 
 a public monument to his memory as ‘an offensive measure 
 
GERMAN ROYALTY. 89 
 
 to me personally.” Fox’s name he struck off the list of 
 privy councillors with hisown hand. In the plenitude of 
 his critical judgment, he triumphantly asked, ‘‘ Was there 
 ever such stuff as Shakespeare ?’’ Only once was he known 
 to have stumbled on a choice remark. With regard to a 
 treatise on Biblical apologetics, he sagaciously observed 
 that ‘‘he had never understood that the Bible required an 
 apology.” 
 
 _ George’s mother, the Princess Dowager of Wales, and her 
 alleged paramour, the Earl of Bute, were the king’s earliest 
 mentors, and worse he could scarce have had. Their influ- 
 ence induced him systematically to deceive his ministers. and 
 to display so many other royal gifts and graces, that Philli- 
 more does not hesitate to describe him as an ‘‘ignorant, 
 dishonest, obstinate, narrow-minded boy, at that very moment 
 the tool of an adulteress and her paramour.” 
 
 George’s own life was held up by the bishops and other 
 shepherds of souls of his day as a pattern of all the Christian 
 virtues. As Queen Victoria is lauded now for her exemplary 
 morality, so was George III. lauded then. But the fact of 
 the matter was, Farmer George was all the while guilty of 
 an offence not merely against public decency, but against the 
 law of the iand, which in the case of aless highly placed 
 criminal would have landed him in Newgate. 
 
 In 1759 he married Hannah Lightfoot, a Quakeress, in 
 Curzon Street Chapel, Mayfair, and in 1761, in the lifetime 
 of the said Hannah, he led to the altar the Princess Charlotte 
 Sophia (‘‘ snuffy Charlotte”) of Mecklenburgh Strelitz. In 
 other words, George III. wasa bigamist. In 1762, George, 
 Prince of Wales, ‘‘the first gentleman in Europe’ that was 
 to be, was born. In 1764, Hannah Lightfoot died, leaving 
 issue whose fate is uncertain. ‘There is, however, an honest 
 couple, well-known in certain circles in London, who claim, 
 and probably with good reason, to be King amd Queen of 
 England in virtue of descent from the fair Quakeress. 
 Shortly after Hannah’s death, as if to set at rest any 
 doubt as to the legality of the first marriage, George 
 and Charlotte were privately remarried at Kew. Of the il- 
 legitimacy of George IV. there can scarcely, therefore, be a 
 doubt. At all events, when the ‘“ first gentleman’’ was im- 
 pecunious—his normal condition—he did not fail to threaten 
 
go | GERMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 his royal parents with an exposure as a means of extorting 
 money. Still, for a Guelph, George III.’s conduct was 
 reasonably decorous. sae 
 
 His chief faults lay in other directions even more disas- 
 trous to the nation. He insisted on being his own prime 
 minister and dictating the national policy. And such a 
 policy! He found the national debt some £146,000,000 in 
 amount; he raised it to £900,000,000. 
 
 His wars had but one object—to crush liberty, which he 
 hated with a rancour undistinguishable from insanity. For 
 resisting the tea-tax—a notoriously illegal impost—Massa- 
 chussets was deprived of its chartered rights of self-govern- 
 ment, and royalist functionaries superseded the colonial ad- 
 ministrators. Political offenders were ordered to be sent 
 home to England for trial. These acts of despotism, against 
 which both Chatham and Burke inveighed, were the result of 
 the king’s personal intervention. Members of parliament 
 voting in favour of the repeal of the tea-tax were declared not 
 to be ‘‘king’s friends.’’ George kept lists of the divisions, 
 and put a stigma against the name of every advocate of 
 liberty. 
 
 Nor was this the worst. The means taken to crush the 
 colonists were such as only the most brutal of tyrants would 
 have had recourse to. Even Frederick of Prussia expressed 
 his unqualified disgust. The Czarina of Russia was appealed 
 to in vain to supply 20,000 Muscovite troops to re-establish 
 the royal authority in New England. Recourse was then 
 had to the Duke of Brunswick, the Landgrave of- Hesse- 
 Cassel, and other German princelings accustomed to kidnap 
 and sell their subjects as mercenaries to the highest bidder. 
 In this way 17,000 Germans were conveyed to the scene of 
 action, while the Creek and Cherokee Indians were encou- 
 raged to do their worst on the scalps of the descendants of 
 the Pilgrim Fathers. 
 
 In vain Chatham and Fox with their matchless eloquence 
 denounced the royal methods of conquest ; crown patronage 
 and royal bribery did their work. The war went on, and the 
 upshot was ‘“‘the Free and Independent States” of America. 
 After charging George with an evident design to establish an 
 absolute despotism, the famous Declaration of Independence 
 runs :—“ In every stage of these oppressions we have peti- 
 
GERMAN ROYALTY Or 
 
 tioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our petitions. 
 have been answered only by repeated injuries. A prince 
 whose character is thus marked by every act which may 
 define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” 
 George II]. was the father—the involuntary father—of the. 
 American Republic, the mightiest and most enlightened 
 commonwealth that the world has ever seen. 
 For He, who flung the bright blue fold 
 O’ermantling land and sea, 
 One third part of the sky unfurl’d 
 For the banner of the free! 
 Truly the crazy tyrant builded more wisely than he knew ! 
 
 The war cost England well nigh £140,000,000! And so 
 little was George satisfied with these trifling sacrifices of 
 honour, blood, and treasure, that he threatened to resign his 
 sceptre by reason of their insufficiency. 
 
 A wise people would have taken the maniac at his word, 
 and following the illustrious example of our kin beyond sea, 
 have established a sister Federal Republic, giving self-govern- 
 ment to Ireland, and laying the basis of a true and lasting 
 union with the United States. It is not too much to say that 
 monarchy has ever acted on the grand possibilities of the 
 English race like an extinguisher. 
 
 Nor did George confine his malignant detestation of justice 
 and good government to America. He put forth all his 
 strength to defeat Fox’s statesmanlike India Bill, and suc- 
 ceeded. He canvassed the peers, many of whom he had 
 created for reasons other than their deserts, and induced 
 them to reject the measure. ‘* Thank God!” he cried, “it is. 
 all over, so there is an end to Mr. Fox.” That brave and 
 tenacious friend of freedom was accordingly driven from 
 
 ower. 
 
 H Almost as a matter of course, the influence of the Court 
 was exercised on behalf of the culprit during the long im- 
 peachment of Warren Hastings, who was eventually ac-. 
 quitted. Hastings, it was alleged and firmly believed, 
 judiciously conveyed to the king certain priceless diamonds, 
 which perhaps were not needed to secure the royal counten- 
 ance for so great an oppressor of his kind. 
 
 The part which George took in the iniquitous attempt to 
 restore the Bourbons to the throne of France has been cloaked. 
 
‘Q2 GERMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 in a great measure, by the misdeeds of delinquents—so much 
 more responsible—like the younger Pitt and Edmund Burke. 
 Yet from first to last the king and the ‘king’s friends”’ 
 fanned the flame with might and main. To say that England 
 which had expelled the Stuarts, should have abortively 
 squandered more than £1,000,000,000, not to speak of 
 the hecatombs of slain, to restore the Bourbons at the 
 behest of a mad Guelph is really to question the sanity of 
 the entire British nation. But so it was. Of the handful 
 of discerning men who tried to stem the torrent of folly 
 and wickedness some were exiled, some imprisoned, some 
 slaughtered, and all calumniated. 
 
 In January, 1820, the king died, deeply lamented. by all who 
 did not know him. Previous to his decease he had been re- 
 peatedly stark-mad, quite obviously ‘‘ physically and morally 
 incapable of government.” The “ first gentleman in Europe” 
 had in these unhappy circumstances acted as regent, discharg- 
 ing the royal functions as only the first gentleman could. 
 
 The Regent and his amiable brothers exerted themselves 
 with true filial piety to relieve the sufferings of their miserable 
 parent. But occasionally they took a method of testifying 
 their sympathy which would perhaps occur to none but royal 
 minds. They tied the paternal leg to a bed-post, and played 
 “*bait the bear” with their august sire, who would run at 
 them with demoniacal shrieks and jabber as far as his tether 
 would permit. 
 
 And so entertaining was the sport that these amiable uncles 
 of Queen Victoria would roar with laughter at a spectacle so 
 comical. Nor did the entertainment cease in the sick 
 chamber. The Princehad a talent for mimicry, and when he 
 and the Duke of York went to Brooks’s would convulse the 
 company with close imitations of the insane parental gestures 
 and ravings. But it is put on record by Jesse that “ the 
 brutality of that stupid sot (York) disgusted even the most 
 profligate of his associates.” Singularly enough a loyal par- | 
 liament bestowed £10,000 a year on the said sot for paying 
 two weekly visits to his afflicted father ! 
 
 GEORGE IV. (1820-1830). 
 
 The reign of George IV. is crammed with little but adul- 
 teries, lies, and debts. The former are too filthy, and the 
 
GERMAN ROYALTY. 93 
 
 latter too monotonous, for detailed narration. Like his 
 father, George IV. was a bigamist. In December, 1785, he 
 ‘married Mrs. Fitzherbert with whom he openly lived as his 
 wife. He, of course, denied the contract when it suited his 
 purpose; but after his death his executors, the Duke of Wel- 
 lington and Sir William Knighton, admitted the validity of 
 the proofs. 
 
 In April, 1794, he led to the altar Caroline ff Brunswick. 
 ‘“‘ Led to the altar”’ is here used in a metaphorical sense, for 
 George was in a condition to be led, not to lead: He was so 
 drunk that his two royal brothers could scarce keep him on 
 his feet. He fairly astonished his grace of Canterbury by 
 rising from his knees before the ceremony was half over. 
 Caroline in after life may not have been a pattern of matronly 
 virtue, but the English people with a correct instinct stood 
 by her, holding that she was more sinned against than sinning. 
 To procure evidence in the famous divorce suit against her, 
 the Secret Service Money of the State was freely drawn 
 upon. 
 
 The First Gentleman was, in fact, as expert a wife-beater 
 as any coal-heaver, and his language habitually smacked of 
 the brothel. When Napoleon’s death was announced to him 
 in the words, ‘‘ Your majesty’s bitterest enemy is dead,” 
 George jumped to the hasty conclusion that Caroline was no 
 more, and joyfully exclaimed, ‘‘Is she, by God!” He was in 
 Ireland, where he had arrived ‘‘in the last stage of beastly 
 intoxication,’ when the news of the poor lady’s actual demise 
 reached him. * This is one of the happiest days in my life,” 
 he soon afterwards remarked. Nor was he less heartless to 
 the women he “ protected’ than to those he married. Lady 
 Jersey, Lady Conyngham, Lady Hertford. “ Perdita”’ 
 Robinson, and a host of others discovered, by bitter experi- 
 ence, that Thackeray was right when he affirmed that George 
 owed everything to his tailor. 
 
 As a gambler, he repudiated his debts of honour, because 
 honour he had none, and if he was not a turf swindler, his 
 contemporaries in the affair of his horse Escape slandered him 
 most foully. He professed to present George III.’s library to 
 the nation, was secretly paid for it, and then received the 
 effusive thanks of parliament for his munificence ! With regard 
 to so vile a creature as ‘the first gentleman in Europe”’ it is 
 
‘94 GERMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 abundantly safe to reverse the ordinary legal maxim, and hold 
 him guilty of everything till he is proved innocent. ‘He 
 leads,” says Greville, ‘‘a most extraordinary life—never gets 
 up till six inthe afternoon. They come to him and open the 
 window curtains at six or seven in the morning; he break- 
 fasts in bed; does whatever business he can be brought to 
 transact in bed too; he reads every newspaper quite through, 
 dozes three or four hours; gets up in time for dinner, and 
 goes to bed between ten and eleven. He sleeps very ill, and 
 rings his bell forty times in the night; if he wants to know 
 the hour, though a watch hangs close to him, he will have his 
 valet de chambre down rather than turn his head to look at it. 
 The same thing if he wants a glass of water ; he won’t stretch 
 out his hand to get it. His valets are nearly destroyed, and at 
 last Lady Conyngham prevailed on him to agree to an arrange- 
 ment by which they wait on him on alternate days. The 
 service is still most severe, as on the days they are waiting 
 their labours are incessant, and they cannot take off their 
 clothes at night and hardly lie down. He is in good health 
 but irritable.’’ And these be your Gods, O Israel! 
 
 The only thing he left behind him which was worth ‘any- 
 thing was his old clothes, which realised £15,000—a miserable 
 asset for a sovereign who, though his reign was brief, must 
 have cost the country some twenty millions sterling. 
 
 The political harm which he did was comparatively small, 
 but what time he could spare from the more congenial pur- 
 suits of fiddling, tailoring, dancing, drinking, gambling, and 
 worse things was chiefly devoted to mischief. 
 
 The best thing that can be said of him is that he was not 
 worse than his brothers, York and Clarence, and that, like his 
 father, he suffered from occasionallunacy. He had heard so 
 much about Waterloo that he ultimately convinced himself 
 that he had led a murderous charge of cavalry on that decisive 
 battle-field under the name of General Brock. ‘Did I not 
 do so, Arthur ?”” he would on occcasion demand of the. Duke 
 of Wellington. ‘I have often heard your majesty relate the 
 iucident,” was the diplomatic reply. 
 
 George the First was reckoned vile—viler George the Second ; 
 
 And what mortal ever heard any good of George the Third ? 
 
 When from earth the Fourth descended, Heaven be praised, 
 the Georges ended. 
 
95 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 MORE GERMAN ROYALTY, 
 
 eee 
 
 It is the third Gate of Barbarism—the Monarchical Gate—which is 
 closing at this moment, The nineteenth century hears it rolling on its 
 hinges. Victor Hugo, 
 
 Witiiam IV. (1830—1837.) 
 
 NAGE EM IV., who succeeded George IV., was a curious 
 contrast to the ‘‘ First Gentleman in Europe.’ Nobody 
 ever accused William of being a gentleman. He was absolutely 
 lacking in personal dignity, and kept his ministers and 
 courtiers in perpetual anxiety lest he should do something | 
 that would make royalty ridiculous in the eyes of what Burke 
 called ‘‘the swinish multitude.’’ His ecentricities were in 
 the last degree droll, and remind one more of Sancho Panza’s 
 attempts at government than anything else. 
 
 ‘‘ His first speech to the council,” says Greville, ‘‘ was well 
 enough given; but his burlesque character began even then 
 toshow itself. Nobody expected from him much real grief, but 
 he does not seem to have known how to act it consistently. 
 He spoke of his brother with all the semblance of feeling, and 
 in a tone of voice properly softened and subdued; but just 
 afterwards, when they gave him the pen to sign the declara- 
 tion, he said, in his usual tone, *' This is a damned bad pen 
 you have given me!”’ 
 
 In another passage the Clerk of the Council thus charac- 
 terises him :—‘‘ He was a man who, coming to the throne at 
 
 the mature age of sixty-five, was so excited by the exaltation 
 that he nearly went mad, and distinguished himself by a 
 thousand extravagances of language and conduct, to the 
 alarm and amusement of all who witnessed his strange 
 freaks ; and though he was shortly afterwards sobered down 
 
96 MORE GERMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 into more becoming habits, he always continued to be some- 
 thing of a blackguard, and something more of a buffoon.” 
 
 He had about the same regard for the press of the country 
 as his father, George III., had for Shakspere. ‘‘ After break- 
 fast,’ adds Greville, ‘‘ he reads the Times and Morning Post, 
 commenting aloud on what he reads in very plain terms; 
 and sometimes they hear, ‘ That’s a damned lie!’ or some 
 such remark, without knowing to what it applies.” 
 
 But his freaks, though certainly strange, were not always 
 amiable. At acertain levee he would insist that an unfor- 
 tunate wooden-legged lieutenant should kneel down; while 
 the president of the Royal Academy, who on one occasion 
 chanced, among other portraits, to point out to him that of 
 the late Admiral Napier, was amazed to be told, ‘‘ Captain 
 Napier may be damned, sir! and you may be damned, sir! 
 and if the queen was not here, sir, I would kick you down- 
 stairs, sir! ’’ Indeed, it were hard to say whether the black- 
 guard, the buffoon, or the madman predominated in the 
 character of ‘the bluff Sailor King ”—nay, saving the mark! 
 ‘‘the Reformer King.” 
 
 For the Post of Lord High Admiral of England he had but 
 one qualification—profane swearing. In other respects his 
 incapacity was so marked that resignation was forced on him. 
 But though unfit to be a cabin boy he was quite goodenough 
 to be made a king. When king, he wasted the time of the 
 Council by rambling, incoherent speeches to such an extent 
 that Mr. Greville makes the following note :—‘‘ We are kept 
 about three times as long by this regular, punctual king as by 
 the capricious irregular monarch who last ruled us.” 
 
 His zeal as a reformer was entirely on theadverse principle, 
 His aversion to the reformers, particularly Lord John Russell, 
 was extreme. When his son Adolphus told him that a 
 dinner ought to be given for the Ascot races, he said, ‘‘ You 
 know I cannot give a dinner; I cannot give any dinner ~ 
 without inviting the Ministers, and I would rather see the 
 devil than any one of them in my house.” As Duke of 
 Clarence, the slave trade had enjoyed the full benefit of 
 William’s distinguished patronage, and when king he expressly 
 declared in writing that nothing in the world would ever 
 induce him to sanction vote by ballot or manhood suffrage. 
 During the first Reform Bill agitation, when the people in 
 
MORE GERMAN ROYALTY. 97 
 
 many places were starving by thousands, his only anxiety 
 seems to have been to bring about a collision between the 
 reformers and the military. What distressed him most was 
 the orderly character of the meetings, which afforded no suf- 
 ficient pretext for violent interference. Though he did not 
 ultimately dare to veto the Bill, his deceitful and protracted 
 opposition brought the country within twenty-four hours of 
 revolution. Mr. John Arthur Roebuck’s comment on the 
 part played by the king is to the point—‘‘ very weak and 
 very false; a finished dissembler.’’ At a somewhat later 
 date William astonished the guests at a diplomatic dinner, at 
 which the American ambassador was present, by declaring 
 ‘‘that it had always been a matter of serious regret to him 
 (William) that he had not been born a free, independent 
 American.” This was dissembling, no doubt, but it can 
 hardly be called “finished.” William’s function was to 
 burlesque royalty, and in that vé/e he was always tolerably 
 successful. 
 
 When Dr. Allen came to do homage to him for the See of 
 Ely, William graciously said to him, “My lord, I do not 
 mean to interfere in any way with your vote in Parliament 
 except on one subject, the Jews, and I trust I may depend on 
 your always voting against them.” 
 
 But this bizarre monarch, though he could not control 
 home legislation as he wished, peremptorily insisted on the 
 full measure of his prerogative with regard to foreign affairs. 
 Earl Grey was admonished that no diplomatic despatches 
 were to be sent off without the king’s ‘“‘ previous concurrence,” 
 and this important point is still conceded to the reigning 
 Guelph, even though ‘“ physically and morally incapable.” 
 
 In early life William’s debts were of a very pressing nature, 
 and he and his brothers Wales and York had recourse to a 
 singularly successful method of raising money. They issued 
 joint and several bonds to an enormous amount, bearing 
 interest at six per cent. These were taken up chiefly on the 
 Continent, the foolish holders fancying that royal securities 
 
 must be exceptionally secure. They found it otherwise, to 
 
 their cost, receiving neither interest nor principal. Five or 
 
 six of them were so ill-advised as to come to Engand, in the 
 
 hope of being able by legal process to charge the revenues of 
 
 the Duchy of Cornwall. They were at once arrested under 
 H 
 
98 MORE GERMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 the Alien Act by order of the Secretary of State, and deported 
 to France, where they were seized and guillotined for carry- 
 ing on treasonable correspondence with the enemy—as severe . 
 a commentary certainly as could well be imagined on the 
 wise injunction, ‘‘ Put not your trust in princes.” 
 
 William’s treatment of Mrs. Jordan, by whom he had nine 
 children, was peculiarly heartless even for a king. Charles II.’s 
 last words to his brother James were, ‘ Don’t let poor Nell 
 (Gwynne) starve.” But no such lingering sentiment of 
 honour seems ever to have entered into William’s callous 
 bosom. Mrs. Jordan died in a foreign land, deserted and in 
 the deepest poverty. Her numerous offspring, the Fitz- 
 clarences, William did indeed handsomely provide for—at 
 the public expense; while Mr. Ford, her previous ‘ pro- 
 tector,” was knighted, and made a stipendiary magistrate at 
 Bow Street. 
 
 Fourteen of the Fitzclarence fraternity have held or hold 
 no fewer than twenty-one public offices and pensions—all 
 gross jobs—which have already yielded them £220,500! 
 
 Who paid the Bill? 
 *T,”’ said John Bull, 
 ‘“‘ Because I'm a fool. 
 I paid the Bill.” 
 
 (VicToRIA 1837 ——.) 
 
 William was succeeded by his niece, Queen Victoria, 
 daughter of his brother, the Duke of Kent; our present 
 Monarch. With regard to this lady, we are asked to believe 
 all manner of incredible things. She is reported to be an 
 incariation of all the personal, political, and domestic 
 virtues. But eulogies of kings and queens during their lives 
 should always be received with the greatest caution. Very 
 seldom is the real character of English princes known to 
 their contemporaries. Lord Tennyson tells us of ‘the fierce ~ 
 light that beats upon a throne,” and simple-minded folks 
 repeat the well-turned phrase till they deem it the embodiment 
 of areality. Itis,in fact, with the greatest difficulty that 
 a single ray of public light can be made to penetrate the dark 
 recesses of a Court. If, for example, the same fierce light 
 that beats on the presidential chair of the United States were 
 
MORE GERMAN ROYALTY. g9 
 
 to be applied to the thrones of Europe, they would all, in- 
 cluding that of Queen Victoria, be burned up in a fortnight. 
 
 Mr. Henry George generously proposed in a memorable 
 speech in St. James’ Hall to allow the Queen, as a widow 
 ‘woman, #100 per annum out of the rent or revenue 
 of the national soil. Her services to the State as a Queen 
 he correctly estimated at nil. Not so reckon the dis- 
 cerning British taxpayers. They pay her over £600,000 4 
 year on the score of queenship; while her late husband, the 
 Prince Consort, who impudently told us that ‘‘ Parliamentary 
 Government was on its trial,” received altogether £630,000 
 for marrying her! ‘ What is called Monarchy,” says the 
 immortal Thomas Paine, ‘‘ always appears to me a silly, 
 contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind 
 a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and 
 fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when by 
 any accident the curtain happens to be open, and the 
 company see what it is, they burst into laughter,’—or, he 
 might have added shrink into loathing. 
 
 We have seen in previous chapters what the lives of the 
 kings and queens of England have been, from the Norman 
 Conquest downwards, for a period of more than eight cen- 
 turies. It is a record that reads more like the Newgate 
 Calendar than any other kind of literature ; from beginning 
 to end one long revolting tale of ingratitude, deceit, selfishness, 
 rapine, torture, tyranny, waste, lust, madness, bloodshed, 
 murder—atrocious misgovernment. And we are now asked 
 to believe that an institution which for so many centuries has 
 produced such fruit as naturally as a thornbush produces 
 thorns, has become suddenly respectable and innocuous. The 
 Ethopian has been pleased to change his skin, and the leopard 
 his spots. I, for one, do not credit it. A good queen is as 
 much a contradiction in terms as an amiable wolf, cheerful 
 lightning, or a benevolent earthquake. That which has been 
 is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the 
 sun. Royalty cannot change its character. 
 
 It is not that kings and queens are worse naturally than 
 other men and women. It is the institution that corrupts 
 and degrades them below the level of their fellows. Let us 
 demand the abolition of kingship in the interest of kings as 
 well as in the interest of those whom they misgovern. No 
 
 H2 
 
100 MORE GERMAN ROYALTY. 
 
 community has a right to place man or woman in a position 
 where the temptations to vice are such as to render virtue 
 next to impossible. Royalty is essentially an immoral insti- - 
 tution, for the existence of which monarchists are more 
 responsible than monarchs. The Hebrew prophet, Samuel, 
 once and for all drew the moral, economic, and political 
 lmeaments of royalty in ineffaceable characters. (See 1 
 Sam., vili.), Itis an institution that can neither be cured 
 nor longer endured.—Delenda est Carthago. 
 
 And with the big kings or monarchs must go the smaller 
 kings or peers who shine by light borrowed from the throne. 
 In a word, the time has come when the whole system of 
 aristocracy and land monopoly, on which it rests, must be 
 brought to an end—a peaceable end, if possible, but at all 
 events to an end. The people demand two things—a com- 
 plete system of representative government and the restoration 
 of the land. With the former royalty, with the latter aristo- 
 cracy, iS. incompatible. Both must therefore fall. The 
 people must begin sternly to agitate for the repeal of the Act 
 of Settlement. ‘The third Gate of Barbarism—the Monar- 
 chical Gate—is closing.’’ The first Gate of Civilisation— 
 the Republican Gate—is ajar, and soon will be flung wide 
 open. Long live the Republic! 
 
 « At the birth of each new era, 
 With a recognising start, 
 Nation wildly looks at nation, 
 Standing with mute lips apart, 
 And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child ’ 
 Leaps beneath the Future's heart."’ 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 THE COST OF THE CROWN. 
 
 “ These gilded flies, 
 That bask within the sunshine of a court, 
 What are they? The drones of the community ! 
 They feed on the mechanic’s labour ; 
 The starved hind for them compels the stubborn glebe 
 To yield its unshared harvest. 
 And yon squalid form, leaner than fleshless misery, 
 Drags out his life in darkness in the unwholesome rine 
 To glad their grandeur ; 
 Many faint with toil 
 That few may know the cares and woes of sloth.” 
 —SHELLEY, 
 
 4 o[nste bitter cry of outcast London” has at last, let us 
 
 hope, smitten the dull ear of society. All the fashionable 
 world has gone ‘‘a-slumming.’’ The journals teem with 
 suggestions, and the pulpits follow suit. It is conceded on 
 all hands that the poor are altogether too poor and miserable, 
 and that something must be done for them, and done quickly. 
 But where to begin is the difficulty. The rich and powerful 
 are willing to give charity, but the dwellers in the slums ask 
 for something very different. Their demand, however in- 
 articulate, is for political equality and social justice, and 
 these are precisely the concessions that the so-called upper 
 classes never do make, except on compulsion. 
 
 The community is divisible into three great classes— 
 beggars, robbers, and workers. The robbers make the 
 beggars, and the workers toil for both. Now, is it not very 
 remarkable that among so many philanthropic advisers it 
 should seemingly occur to none that the first thing to be 
 done is to get rid of the robbers? Who are the robbers / 
 An ill-defined company, doubtless, but their chief, thei: 
 shield and buckler, is, as a matter of course, the occupant of 
 
102 THE COST OF THE CROWN. 
 
 the throne. Hereditary royalty, at the top of society, neces- 
 sarily implies hereditary poverty at the base. 
 
 Here we have a single family of perfectly useless royal 
 people making away with a million per annum in the very > 
 teeth of the apostolic injunction which forbids those who 
 will not work to eat. A million per annum would support 
 20,000 East-end of .London families, say 120,000 souls, in 
 comparative affluence. Yet philanthropists stand aghast at 
 the inadequacy of the remedial means at their disposal. The 
 Queen and her family must already have cost the nation 
 considerably over twenty millions sterling —an almost 
 fabulous sum to pay for purely imaginary services. The 
 indirect cost of the Crown as the fountain of corruption in 
 church,farmy, navy, and diplomacy, it is impossible to esti- 
 mate. How any people not absolutely demented could ever 
 have permitted such a senseless expenditure is well-nigh 
 incomprehensible. 
 
 Before Norman William landed in England there was 
 hardly a manor or ecclesiastical benefice in the country that 
 he had not by anticipation apportioned among himself and 
 his fellow robbers. His own share was, to be sure, a hand- 
 some one, and though repeatedly confiscated and largely 
 alienated, the Crown lands were still of considerable value at 
 the Revolution of 1688. If they ever did belong to the kings 
 of England as individuals—that is to say, as private estates— 
 they completely lost that character when James II. fled to 
 France. ‘They then reverted to the nation, and parliament, 
 as representing the nation, used them as it had 4 mind. The 
 pretence that the Guelphs have some personal right to the 
 duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, from which they are 
 permitted to draw large revenues, is as hollow as their more 
 general claim to all the Crown lands. The Crown lands are 
 in the strictest sense national lands, and ought, for the sake 
 of accuracy and clearness, to be always so designated. Any 
 revenue accruing to royalty from such sources is contributed 
 by the nation as surely as if it arose from the tax on tea or 
 on tobacco. It is important to remember this, as apologists 
 of the monarchy have succeeded in breeding considerable 
 confusion in the public mind on the subject. — 
 
 If the whole of the royal salaries were taken directly from 
 the Consolidated Fund the cost of the Crown would then 
 
THE COST OF THE CROWN. 103 
 
 appear in all its shameful enormity. But its exact amount 
 it is all but impossible to set down, so numerous and varied 
 are the royal perquisites that turn up in the most unexpected 
 sections of the national accounts. Sir Charles Dilke and 
 Mr. Bradlaugh have both gone into the matter energetically, 
 and both have in a measure been foiled. The Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer ought to be made to-furnish an exact balance 
 sheet, setting forth every farthing of royal income and ex- 
 penditure. Patriotic Mr. Broadhurst will perhaps see to 
 this when he can spare time from the more pressing duties 
 of coercing Ireland and preserving working men from ‘the 
 abominations to be seen in art museums on Sundays 
 
 Let us now look for a moment at the little bill of costs so 
 far as we are permitted to know it. 
 
 THE QUEEN. 
 
 Civil List aes -» £385,000 
 Perpetual pension in lieu of | prisage and batlerage on wines in 
 Duchy of Lancaster .. é Be os 803 
 Ancient fee voted in Civil Service Estimates .. ¥ aN Tol 
 Net income from Duchy of Lancaster .. 41,000 
 Repairs of palaces and appurtenances occupied by the ‘Queen 15,065, 
 Repairs of palaces partly occupied by the Queen as =i 6,350 
 Royal yachts. as estimated by Sir Charles Dilke Lf a 100,000 
 Naval aides-de-camp to the Queen te Ms te 1,460 
 Military 5k ne 2. os res 1,150 
 Queen’s Plates for Scotland ee ‘ ve we 218 
 + Ireland a a a = Se 1,562 
 Queen’ s bounties in Scotland .. ee ee ee ee 1,300 
 3 Ireland Es » ot 48 go 
 Queen’ s limner i os +e “s ee se 97 
 i ¥ historiographer ve .% os ‘6 oe 184 
 is clockmaker es ts fie Oe <0 16 
 Windsor Castle turncock .. 201 
 Ratcatcher, turncock, and labourers at Buckingham Palace.. . 201 
 Albert Memorial attendants Ae ei os 120 
 Expenses of royal household in naval estimates | »* as 1,296 
 
 Altogether this retiring German lady, according to the 
 estimate of the Financial Reform Almanack, costs the nation 
 no less than £619,379 per annum! She receives from a 
 grateful people for doing nothing more in one year than an 
 American Chief Magistrate does in sixty, for being about the 
 hardest worked man on the Continent. Truly, “always a 
 wonderful people the English!’ as Mr. Carlyle would have 
 said. 
 
£04 THE COST OF THE CROWN. 
 
 Nor is this robbery—and it would be a misnomer to call it 
 by any other name—perpetrated in a straightforward Captain 
 Kidd-like manner. When the House of Commons settled 
 the amount of the Civil List it was careful to divide the vote 
 into so many fixed portions. Thus: for the Queen’s privy 
 purse, £60,000; for household salaries, £131,000; for trades- 
 men’s bills, £172,500; for bounties, £13,200. It was in- 
 tended by parliament—foolishly intended, no doubt—that all 
 the moneys not appropriated to Her Majesty’s privy purse 
 or private use should be rigorously spent in maintaining the 
 dignity of office of the Chief of the State. Indeed, so careful 
 were the faithful Commons to secure this object, that they 
 inserted a clause in the Act to prevent savings, except of 
 trifling amount, in any one category from being carried to 
 any other. Now, it is well known that a good many sinecure 
 offices in the royal household have been abolished: but what 
 has become of the savings? Have they gone back to the 
 Exchequer, as they were clearly bound to go? Not at all. 
 They have, in defiance of the Act, found their way into the 
 privy purse, or the Queen is very much belied. But what is 
 worse, the £172,000 allocated for ‘*tradesmen’s bills’ have 
 notoriously never been spent. For many years there has 
 practically been no court ; consequently it is safe to conclude 
 that a good £100,000 a-year have gone into the privy purse 
 from that source alone. Ministers who have been parties to 
 such breaches of trust, whether Liberal or Conservative, 
 deserve not merely moral reprobation, but legal impeach- 
 ment: and there have been times in the history of England 
 when they would have been impeached. They are very 
 much more to be blamed ithan the Queen, who, according 
 to “our glorious constitution,’ can, of course, “ do no 
 wrong.” 
 
 It is one of the many perfections of the said constitution 
 that if the Monarch were to commit a murder to-morrow, 
 there is no provision for bringing her to justice. The Queen 
 against the Queen, in an indictment at the Old Bailey, 
 would be a constitutional veductio ad absuvdum, which would 
 nonplus the united wisdom of bench, bar, and parliament. 
 
 But though it is surprising enough that the nation should 
 have to pay over £600,000 a-year to a Queen Do-Nothing, it 
 is yet more astounding that the lady cannot maintain her 
 
THE COST OF THE CROWN. 105 
 
 own family ont of that sum. With a grasping avarice that 
 nothing could exceed, she has called on parliament time after 
 time to quarter her sons and daughters on the taxes wrung 
 from the toiling masses. The sin of bringing into the world 
 children whom they cannot or will not support is one fre- 
 quently hurled at working men and women. When their 
 offspring come on the rates, there is not a voice lifted up in 
 their jnstification. But what does this royal person do with 
 impunity? She charges the nation some £170,000 per 
 annum for the maintenance of her able-bodied sons, 
 daughters, and relatives. 
 
 Now, the amazing feature of this unheard-of imposition is 
 that the whole family are absolutely unfit to render the State 
 any responsible service whatever. The royal supersition 
 aside, what part, for example, in this world’s business would 
 any discerning man be disposed to assign to the Prince of 
 Wales? Could he be trusted to drive a ’bus or a hansom? 
 If so, that would be about the likeliest occupation for him. 
 When the noblesse were happily cleared out of France, many 
 of them earned an honest, if not very useful, livelihood by 
 turning dancing masters; but the Heir Apparent is altogether 
 too clumsy to compete in any such line of life. As for any 
 form of intellectual labour, that would clearly be beyond him. 
 In a Republic political life would be closed to him. In the 
 United States it is not too much to say that he would have 
 no chance of being elected even a parish constable by reason 
 of his “‘record.” As for the Duke of Edinburgh, does anyone 
 imagine that he could ever have become an Admiral of the 
 Fleet, had he had to rely on his merits instead of his birth? 
 He might have attained to the state and dignity of an A.B. ; 
 but it is extremely doubtful if he would have had talent and 
 perseverance to get further uptheladder. As for Connaught, 
 nobody could imagine him any more than the Commander- 
 in-Chief ever getting beyond the rank of drill-sergeant. Of 
 the late Duke of Albany it might have been safe to predict 
 that, had he lived longer he would have been fit to assist 
 - with advantage at penny readings, or even to act as a copy- 
 ing clerk. But surely there is nothing very extraordinary in 
 this—nothing to justify the oceans of mendacious ink that 
 have lately been shed in his praise. In a world of sorrow, 
 where ‘‘every moment dies a man, every moment one is 
 
Ico THE COST OF THE CROWN. 
 
 born,”’ his death was of no public consequence whatever. 
 His most memorable achievement was, characteristically 
 enough, a heartless speech at Liverpool against out-door relief 
 for the poor! Yet let us see how a grateful and starving people 
 delight to reward such nonentities. 
 
 Crown Princess of Prussia .. oe oe «se £8,000 
 Prince of Wales Py 4s ws ee 40,000 
 Princess ae “5 A Hie ae 10,000 
 Duke of Edinburgh of SS & ye 3 25,000 
 Princess Christian on S is ay thy 6,000 
 Marchioness of Lorne... sr es aa ns 6,000 
 Duke of Connaught .. a oe a be 25,000 
 Late Duke of Albany . Py a < x 25,000 
 Duchess of Cambridge | ne at xe 6,000 
 
 Me Mecklenburgh- -Strelitz 4 ry th 3,080 
 Duke of Cambridge .. ts 4S LS 12,000 
 Princess Mary of Teck s ae 4 5 5,000 
 
 If these indisputable figures represented the entire cost of 
 the Guelphic brood there would be less to be said though 
 much to be condemned. But there are, as in the case of the 
 Queen, sundry tantalising perquisites, difficult—nay, im- 
 possible to fix, and indeed almost surreptitious in character. 
 For example, the Prince of Wales has £55,000 from the 
 Duchy of Cornwall, which, by a fiction, is treated as his 
 private property. He has likewise, as Duke of Cornwall, a 
 snug perpetual pension of £16,216, granted in lieu of ‘ post 
 groats and whitc rents.” When this little job was perpet- 
 rated in 1838 the entire revenue of the duchy was £11,536; so 
 that compensation was given on the principle that the part 
 is greater than the whole, a discovery that would certainly 
 have astonished Euclid. Altogether Wales and ‘the Sea 
 King’s daughter from over the Sea,’’ cost the nation over 
 £120,000 per annum, or twelve times as much as the American 
 Presidency ! Always a wonderful people the English ! 
 
 There are, besides, innumerable other thoughtful provisions 
 made at the expense of the taxpayers for the convenience of 
 travelling royalty; and when they condescend to take up 
 their abode in public buildings it is amazing what sums have 
 to be expended in ‘‘repairs.” These tenants of the State 
 are the worst imaginable. They are about twenty degrees 
 worse than the worst Irish tenants ever known. They not 
 merely pay no rent, but they recklessly destroy their land- 
 
THE COST OF THE CROWN. 107 
 
 lord’s property. They are Socialists with a vengence. The 
 State does everything for them on a scale of munificence, 
 and they do nothing for the State. Is there a Socialist 
 working man in Soho or Clerkenwell who ever in his wildest 
 dreams made such heavy demands on the State as these 
 insatiable Guelphs, whose muddy German ‘* blood” con- 
 stitutes their sole claim to public consideration? It may be 
 asserted without exaggeration that there is scarcely a family 
 in England with a less creditable record. 
 
 Is it possible that this degrading monarchical superstition 
 can survive in England much longer? Has the schoolmaster 
 now been abroad so long in vain? Will the English people 
 never take their destinies into their own hands, and close the 
 long era of monarchical and aristocratic robbery? Are we 
 never to have a Government that can hear the bitter cry of 
 the outcast, and hearing, act? We know the goal. The goal 
 is the Democratic Republic. Every minor reform is a delusion 
 and a snare. Let us therefore walk in faith, and listen to 
 the prophets. Listen more especially to the Right Hon. Sir 
 Charles Dilke, at Newcastle-on-Tyne (6th November, 1871): 
 
 —‘‘ There is a widespread belief that a Republic here is only 
 a question of education and of time. It is said that some 
 day a Commonwealth will be our Government. Now history 
 and experience show that you cannot have a Republic with- 
 out you possess at the same time the Republican virtues; 
 but you answer, Have we not public spirit? Have we not 
 the practice of self- government? Are we not gaining general. 
 education? Well, if you can show me a fair chance that a 
 Repubic here will be free from the political corruption that 
 hangs about the Monarchy, I say for my part—and I believe 
 that the middle classes in general will say—let it come!’’ 
 Amen. 
 
 Se 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 PROGRESS IN LIBERTY. 
 
 A land of old and just renown 
 Where freedom slowly broadens down 
 From precedent to precedent. 
 
 | Raa aererpes slowly down! Alas, how slowly! English 
 freedom, such as it is, is the resultant of more than eight 
 centuries of struggle between selfish forces striving to supplant 
 each other and to secure the mastery. 
 
 Kings, ecclesiastics, aristocrats, plutocrats, have happily 
 never been able to form an enduring alliance among them- 
 selves, otherwise the sparse national liberties about which we 
 sing such loud hosannahs would at this day be absolutely 
 non-existent. 
 
 In the most primitive times the strong killed the weak and 
 ate them. That was the age of cannibalism. Later, the con- 
 querors made captives in battle and set them-to labour for 
 them. That was the age of slavery. By-and-by the slaves 
 were permitted to retain some portion of their earnings for 
 their own use. That was the age of sevfdom. The fourth, or 
 present stage of human evolution is wagedom. The producer’s 
 toil is treated asa chattel to be purchased in the cheapest 
 market. He gets subsistence-money—no, not always that— 
 while the non-producer revels in rent, interest, and profit. 
 That is the gospel according to Bright. The fifth era of 
 development, when co-operative industry shall supersede com- 
 petitive or internecine production, has hardly yet dawned. 
 It is in the womb of the future, and its heralds, like their 
 precursors at every antecedent stage in the progress of the 
 race, must look for nothing but misrepresentation, obloquy, 
 and persecution. 
 
PROGRESS IN LIBERTY. TOg 
 
 There are practically four forms of government in the world 
 -—viz,, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, and Democracy. 
 In no country does any one of these forms exist in an 
 altogether unmixed state. Russia is as nearly as pos- 
 sible an absolute monarchy, or one-man Government; but 
 even the Muscovite despotism is ‘‘ tempered by assassination.” 
 On the other hand, the United States Constitution, grandly 
 democratic as it is, imposes many checks on the popular will, 
 copied by its framers from the monarchical institutions of 
 Europe. The English Government—it would be absolutely 
 wrong to speak of the English constitution, for constitution 
 there is none—is a cunning compound of monarchy, aristo- 
 cracy, Oligarchy,and democracy, which produces the minimum 
 of advantage and the maximum of disadvantage inherent in 
 each system. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment how monarchies, aristocracies, 
 oligarchies, and democracies are constituted. In every State 
 there is a governing mind and an executive force. The ex- 
 ecutive force may, for practical purposes, be defined as the 
 police, armed or otherwise. When an individual like the 
 Czar of Russia or the Emperor of Germany obtains firm hold 
 of overwhelming armed force, monarchy exists in its simplest 
 form. But simple or mixed, it always strives to control the 
 army. 
 
 Why do we see the Prince of Wales made a Field-Marshal ; 
 Connaught promoted to one of the most responsible commands 
 in India; Edinburgh sent to command the Channel Fleet ; 
 to say nothing of the position of the Duke of Cambridge as 
 Commander-in-Chief of the British army? The reason is 
 obvious. These men never mean—indeed, could not be 
 trusted by reason of their incapacity—to command against a 
 foreign foe ; but in the event of the English people resolving 
 to rid themselves once and for all of the burden and disgrace 
 of royalty, what easier for them than to take advantage of 
 their military rank to stifle Republican aspirations in blood? 
 
 When a small number of families succeed in obtaining 
 possession of the soil of a country along with control of the 
 armed force, then an Aristocracy pure and simple is formed. 
 England is the nearest approach that exists toa pure Aris- 
 tocracy, and, as in the case of the monarchy, mark the anxiety 
 of its members to obtain control of the armed forces of the 
 
Y1o PROGRESS IN LIBERTY. 
 
 State. Hardly by any chance can the most meritorious 
 private soldier in the British army get beyond the rank of a 
 non-commissioned officer. Hence the severe but just taunt 
 of the first Napoleon, that our troops are a host of lions led 
 by asses. And such is still the condition of the British army, 
 military examinations and the abolition of purchase notwith- 
 standing. But to officer the army is in the last resort to keep 
 aristocracy alive. 
 
 Where a minority in a State—a minority that is neither 
 monarchical nor territorially aristocratic—controls the dis- 
 ciplined force, then we have a pure Oligarchy. Such were 
 the governments of Sparta, Rome, Carthage and the Italian 
 Republics of the middle ages. 
 
 In modern England the distinctive element of oligarchy is 
 plutocracy, which, unfortunately for public liberty, is but toa - 
 often the humble handmaiden of monarchy and aristocracy. 
 Successful merchants and manufacturers are but too frequently 
 willing to barter their well-dowered daughters in matrimonial 
 exchange for mortgaged acres and tarnished titles. Monarchy, 
 aristocracy, and plutocracy in combination form a close 
 Oligarchy or rule of the few, with aims sharply opposed to 
 those of the Democracy or party of the people. At present 
 this triple Oligarchy have everything pretty much their own 
 way. They live by taxes, rent, interest, profit, and place. 
 
 ‘ Still press us for your cohorts, 
 
 And when the fight is done, 
 
 Still fill your garners from the soil - 
 That our good swords have won. 
 
 Still, like a spreading ulcer 
 
 That leech-craft may not cure, 
 
 Let your foul usance eat away 
 
 The substance of the poor.” 
 
 But the chained lion of democracy, who lives by the sweat 
 of his brow, has at last begun to think—to reflect on the 
 miserable condition to which the superior cunning of the few 
 has reduced the many. ‘‘The people at large,’ wrote the 
 penetrating Aristotle, ‘‘may always quash the vain preten- 
 sions of the few by saying, ‘ we, collectively, are richer, wiser, 
 and nobler than you.’”’ And the vain pretensions of the few 
 the many will at last know how to quash. The many must 
 learn to control the executive force in their own interests, as 
 monarchs, aristocrats, and oligarchs have hitherto centrolled 
 
FROGRESS IN LIBERTY. IIt 
 
 it in theirs. In such a government kings, peers, and pluto- 
 crats can have no place. The three estates of the realm will 
 then be reduced to one, viz.,a democratic House of Commons 
 —as in the time of the Commonwealth. 
 
 When the Long Parliament was expelled by the armed 
 force and its treacherous chief the thread of political pro- 
 gress was rudely snapped; and ever since English public life 
 has been destitute both of vigour and sincerity. But itisa 
 long road that has no turning. Ideals like those of Vane, 
 Hampden, Pym, Eliot, and Milton cannot finally be lost. 
 The broken thread of seventeenth century Republicanism 
 must be re-united with that of the nineteenth century. When 
 an English Constitution comes to be framed, there should be 
 no copying of the American, French, or Swiss Constitutions, 
 with their monarchical reproductions of Senates and Presi- 
 dents. What the far-sighted statesmen of the Commonwealth 
 strove ultimately to establish was biennial parliaments, 
 returned by the widest and most equal suffrage practicable. 
 The House thus constituted was to elect a large Executive 
 Committee for one year; this committee or Council of State 
 to choose its own president monthly or otherwise, as it had a 
 mind. By this means, good administrators, irrespective of 
 party, could be secured, and the reprehensible idolatry of 
 Grand Old Men prevented. The executive committee, forty- 
 one in number under the Commonwealth, was divided into 
 sub-committees for the different departments of State. These 
 after deliberation, reported first to the full Council and then 
 to the House, and if their policy was affirmed there was an 
 end of the matter. If wehad a Foreign Relations Committee, 
 for example, like that of the United States, acting in a straight- 
 forward manner, instead of a conclave of Cabinet Ministers 
 meeting in secret like a band of ‘conspirators to involve the 
 nation in iniquitous wars without so much as a pretence of 
 consulting parliament, how different the financial burdens of 
 the people to-day! In the Commonwealth parliament the 
 figure-head was Mr. Speaker, and all commissions issued, and 
 appointments made by the House were signed by him as 
 nominal Chief of the State. By these simple arrangements the 
 Republican Parliament of England combined simplicity and 
 _ efficiency of administration in a manner never attained by 
 any English Government before nor since. 
 
II2 PROGRESS IN LIBERTY. 
 
 - And now by what means is the strong triple alliance of 
 monarchy, aristocracy, and plutocracy to be overthrown by 
 
 the toil-worn half-dazed giant of democracy? First, the 
 
 giant must, above all things, attend to his political and, 
 general education. This task, his sore toil and grinding 
 poverty render doubly difficult, but it is an imperative duty 
 which, left undischarged, will be found an insuperable barrier 
 to his emancipation. Were the giant but fully conscious of 
 his rights and his irresistible strength, he would shatter the 
 triple alliance of his enemies as easily as Samson snapped 
 asunder the withs with which the Philistines had bound him. 
 In order to grasp and retain the whole machinery of Govern- 
 ment in his hand he has but to keep two objects steadily in 
 view. He must possess himself of equal manhood suffrage 
 and the land. These acquisitions are necessarily antecedent 
 to all others. To the old watchwords of democracy, ‘“ Liberty, 
 Equality, Fraternity,” Pyopevty must now be added. Liberty 
 to starve or to be driven into exile is not a kind of liberty 
 worth having. 
 
 It is at this point that Mr. Henry George’s land gospel 
 comes to be of such vital importance.to the British democracy. 
 It smites at the very root of aristocracy and monarchy. Give 
 every man, woman, and child in the country an equal inalien- 
 able interest in the national soil, and the feet of the demo- 
 cratic giant are at once planted on a rock. The whole earth 
 is a natural monopoly, and cannot, therefore, become a true 
 subject of free trade, much less of entail or striét settlement. 
 Granted this—and it is impossible seriously to dispute it— 
 the only question that remains is how to secure to each son 
 and daughter of Adam an equitable share. The problem may 
 be more difficult than Mr. George seems to think; but after 
 all it is only a question of detail. In Russia the men of the 
 Mir divide the land periodically, according to the number of 
 mouths in the commune, and there is. an end of the matter. 
 But in England the population is vastly more urban, and such 
 a primitive method of distribution might be found inapplic- 
 able ; though M. Laveleye' does not hesitate to recommend 
 its gradual adoption, and the Highland Crofters Commission 
 have (mivabile dictu!) just recommended something very like 
 
 a communal tenure. 
 But the democratic giant need not harass himself too much 
 
 . 
 
PROGRESS IN LIBERTY. 113 
 
 with details. Suffice it for him to assert his equal right to the 
 soil with the Westminsters, Portlands, Devonshires, and 
 Sutherlands. Our Bramwells and Argylls have attempted 
 in a feeble way to deny the doctrine of equal land rights; but 
 they could not have taken up more dangerous ground ; for if 
 there are no natural rights, what remain but natural mights ? 
 If the Oligarchy have might on their side to-day, they cannot 
 complain if the Democracy, feeling their strength, exercise 
 their might of numbers to-morrow. Better secure exemption 
 from all taxes, with a reasonable provision for widows and 
 orphans, than run the risks of the French noblesse in 1789. 
 
 But in addition to Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Property, 
 Faith—faith inGodand Man—faith that the noblest aspirations 
 of the soul will ultimately be justified by the severest revela- 
 tions of science is needed for all abiding progress. ‘The far- 
 seeing and devoted Robespierre was right when he said :— 
 ** Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a Great Being who 
 watches over oppressed innocence and punishes trium- 
 phant crime is essentially the idea of the People.” Mankind 
 cannot live by bread alone. The new Socialistic Gospel, 
 though an improvement on false and barren atheism, is, after — 
 all, only a gospel for beavers. It tells nothing of that 
 ‘¢ one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves,”’ 
 which from the dawn of history has inspired all true religion 
 and philosophy. | 
 
 ‘Our little systems have their day, 
 They have their day and cease to be, 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 
 And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.” 
 
 The Norman Conquest found the English people well ad- 
 vanced in the essentials of arude liberty. They enjoyed much 
 more equal land and suffrage rights than Englishmen do at 
 this moment. With the introduction of feudalism in all its 
 rigour they were reduced to serfdom. Before William the 
 Conqueror, and his fellow-freebooters set a foot in England, 
 they divided between themselves, on paper, every manor and 
 every ecclesiastical benefice in the country, and the spoils 
 - were subsequently divided with scrupulous exactitude. Here 
 was robbery, if you please. Not a word about compensation. 
 And, singularly enough, the present race of landlords, who 
 are so horrified at Mr. Henry George’s proposal to put rents 
 
 I 
 
At 4 PROGRESS IN LIBERTY. 
 
 into the Exchequer instead of their pockets, make it their 
 special boast that their ancestors ‘‘ came over with the Con- 
 queror.’’ They gloryin their descent from robbers. But Mr. 
 George’s objects are not at all to their minds, and no wonder. 
 What their forefathers, real or pretended, did, was to take 
 from the many and give to the few. That, indeed, was rob- 
 bery pure and simple. Mr. George, on the contrary, though - 
 he would deprive no son or daughter of Adam of his or her 
 natural stake in the bounty of Providence, would take their 
 ill-gotten possessions from the robber few and restore them to 
 the lawful owners, the lackland many. Mr. George’s scheme 
 _is not one of robbery, but of confiscation in the original ety- 
 _mological sense of the word. Confiscation means the ap- 
 propriation of the estates of robbers, traitors, and other felons 
 to the uses of the fiscus or national treasury. It is in this 
 sense that the American economist is a confiscator, and no 
 other. He is not arobber. It is his landholding calumnia- 
 tors that are the robbers, and the inheritors of stolen property. 
 They began at the Conquest by an act of universal robbery, 
 and they continue the process under the very eyes of the 
 people to this day. 
 
 An authority no less weighty than Sir James Caird has 
 calculated that between the years 1857 and 1875 the land- 
 lords of the United Kingdom added to the value of their 
 estates a sum,if capitalised, of £331,000,000 at a cost to 
 themselves of £60,009,000! Here was a clean sweep in 
 eighteen years of £271,000,000, for which tltese aristocratic 
 lilies of the field did ‘‘ neither toil nor spin.” One moiety of 
 this huge “ find’”’ was of course taken from the tenant farmers 
 in the shape of uncompensated improvements, while the re- 
 mainder was filched from the nation at large as ‘‘ unearned 
 increment.” 
 
 Mr. Samuel Laing, M.P,, a recent convert from Whiggery 
 to Radicalism, and one of the greatest living authorities on 
 railways and finance, has lately given us, in the ‘* Nineteenth 
 Century,” a notion of the way in which ‘“‘unearned increment’ 
 is created. £50,000,000 over market value, he tells us, have 
 ' been paid to the landlords of the United Kingdom for the 
 land taken for purposes of railway construction. The rail- 
 ways have at the same time improved real estate to the al- 
 most fabulous extent of £150,000,000 while relieving it of one 
 
PROGRESS IN LIBERTY. I15§ 
 
 half the rates! Heretruly is robbery, if we had the trick to 
 see it. A few hard concrete nuts like these given to the land- 
 lords and their friends to crack were worth bushels of abstract 
 theories, however irrefragable in themselves. 
 
 At the head of the feudal system stood the king. He was 
 
 ‘in theory, and to a large extent in practice, the universal 
 landlord. The Crown lands alone when Domesday Book 
 was compiled consisted of no fewer than 1,442 manors. In 
 Saxon times they were strictly national property, inalienably 
 set apart to meet the expenses of Government. They were 
 dissipated by the descendants of the Conqueror, and in some 
 respects the results were not unfortunate. If kings had not 
 been improvident, they would have had no need for national 
 subsidies or parliaments to grant them. The extravagance 
 of kings was the opportunity of the people. When the Com- 
 mons voted any extraordinary supply they generally contrived, 
 in exchange, to wring some small concession of liberty from 
 the reigning tyrant. This is the history of English freedom, 
 down even to the time of George III. 
 
 After the king came the royal vassals, or tenants 7 capite. 
 The king was their immediate suzerain, to whom they owed 
 homage, fealty, and military service. These royal vassals in 
 the same way parcelled out their domains among less potent 
 robbers, towards whom they stood in the relation of suzerains. 
 By these means England was transformed into a camp, and 
 what had been won by the sword was maintained by the 
 sword, supplemented by the hardly less formidable weapon of 
 feudal law. The Norman freebooters indeed elaborated a 
 system of government so ingeniously compounded of violence 
 and cunning, that to this day the mass of the people groan 
 under it, while taught to believe that they are in the enjoy- 
 ment of a ‘‘ glorious constitution” that is the envy and ad- 
 miration of the whole world. : 
 
 The first great landmark in the development of English 
 freedom is, perhaps not incorrectly, heldto be Magna Charta. 
 By that instrument the barons, spiritual and temporal, 
 emancipated themselves from the arbitrary thraldom of 
 the king. For the serfs, that is to say the great mass of 
 the population, they did nothing except to stipulate that fines 
 hould not extend to the deprivation of their tools. Still, 
 
 iagna Charta was a beginning. It was the first break in 
 | pee 
 
rro PROGRESS IN LIBERTY. 
 
 cast-iron feudalism, and foreshadowed, however faintly, the 
 representative system of government. 
 
 Next appeared on the scene the great figure of Simon de 
 Montfort, Earl of Leicester, the founder of the House of Com- 
 mons. In 1265 he summoned to parliament for the first time 
 the representatives of towns, or, to put it otherwise, of move- . 
 able property. This was beyond doubt the introduction into 
 the body politic of a new force—the force of numbers, or 
 democracy. 
 
 But it wasnot till the communistic preaching of John Ball 
 and the rising of Wat Tyler that the serfs began to raise their 
 bowed heads. ‘Tyler was treacherously assassinated and the 
 insurrection suppressed, but the moral effect of the movement 
 was very great throughout rural England. What Simon de 
 Montfort did for the trading or middle class at the cost of his 
 life was hardly surpassed by what Wat Tyler effected for the 
 serfs by the sacrifice of his. 
 
 Another blow of a different kind was struck at feudalism in 
 the reign of Richard II. The first peer by patent was created 
 in the person of John de Beauchamp, Baron of Kidderminster. 
 A territorial was thus changed into a personal dignity, and by 
 this means land, to some extent, was stripped of the legisla- 
 tive power hitherto attached to it. At a later period it was 
 decided that peerages were held merely 7m trust, and that 
 absenteeism or poverty entailed, the former forfeiture of 
 estates, the latter loss of dignity. Absenteeism and bank- 
 ruptcy in these more enlightened days are no disqualification 
 for the duties of a hereditary legislator, any more than 
 ‘“¢ physical and moral incapacity ” in a queen. 
 
 During the Tudor period, as has been already shown, the 
 dial of national liberty went back many degrees; yet anew 
 factor was introduced into politics. In the reign of the very 
 worst of these tyrants, Henry VIII., the principle of the 
 sovereignty of the people, as expressed by public opinion, first 
 took root. Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth, by repeatedly 
 changing the national faith, compelled the people to think for 
 themselves in matters ecclesiastical. Discarding false opinion 
 or superstition in religion, a large section of the nation was 
 led to challenge false opinion or superstition in politics. The 
 Puritan party—the political ancestors of the Radicals of to- 
 day—slowly grew in numbers, resolution, and clearness of 
 democratic aim. 
 
ERGERESS IN LIBERTY. 19 
 
 Their first great achievement was to wring from the king 
 the Petition of Right, rendering illegal arbitrary imprison- 
 ment, billeting soldiers, martial law, forced loans, benevol- 
 ences, and generally taxation without the consent of par- 
 liament. The second great and tragical blow struck by this 
 new and incalculable power of public opinion was the trial and 
 execution of ‘‘the man, Charles Stuart,’ for treason to the 
 Sovereign People.. The bruit of this unparalleled event is 
 yet resounding throughout the world; and loosening every- 
 where the knees of tyrants. 
 
 When wilt Thou save the people, Lord— 
 Oh, God of mercy, when ? 
 
 Not kings and thrones but nations; 
 Not chiefs and lords, but men. 
 
b Ga) 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 SALUS"PUBLICA) SUPREMA LEX 
 
 The One and the All are, as ruling powers, the only final quantities. 
 The Few and the Many are either instalments and cempromises, or 
 quackeries, delusions, and names.—Partridge. 
 
 The Cromwell of this age is an intelligent, resolute, and united People. 
 —Goldwin Smith. 
 
 "a unhappy restoration of the Stuarts brought with it a 
 
 whole train of evils, from which the nation still suffers. In 
 1660 a House of Commons, in which the landlords were 
 supreme, relieved their estates of all feudal dues, then 
 amounting to about one-half of the entire revenues of the 
 State. Military service, purveyance, aids, relief, premier 
 seisin, wardship, alienation, escheat, all disappeared in a day. 
 In their place were substituted Excise duties. By 12 Charles 
 II. c. 24 the great bulk of taxation was for the first time 
 transferred from the land to the people, who have borne it 
 ever since. In 1883 the revenue proper—i.e., exclusive of 
 receipts from the Post-office, Telegraphs, &c.—amounted to 
 £73,128,000. Towards this sum Customs and Excise alone 
 contributed £46,587,000. The Land-tax yielded £1,055,000! 
 - Our rulers tax the vices of smoking and drinking at home 
 as a means of murdering Afghans, Zulus, Egyptians, and 
 Soudanese abroad. Raise all taxes from the land, and we 
 shall speedily hear of the last of these enormities. 
 
 For every shilling paid over the counter for cocoa, 14d. is 
 for tax; for coffee, 14d.; for currants, 2$d.; for raisins, 
 24d.; for tea, over 44d.; while a shilling’s worth of spirits is 
 raised to 4s. 44d.; anda shilling’s worth of tobacco to 6s. 82d. 
 The smoker who buys an ounce of tobacco for 3d. pays 24d. 
 for tax and 4d. for tobacco. And this is exemplary free-trade 
 England! It is noteworthy that this infamous statute of 
 Charles II., which abolished the feudal burdens of the land- 
 
° 
 
 SALUS PUBLICA SUPREMA LEX. Tig 
 
 lords, while leaving them in full enjoyment of their privileges, 
 wag carried by a majority of two, the numbers being—for 
 the measure, 151; against, 149. 
 
 The Land-tax was fixed in 1692 at 4s. in the pound of true 
 annual vental, but the landlords soon found this charge too 
 onerous, and in 1697 they reduced their payments to a fixed 
 sum, which was raised in 1798 to £2,037,627, and declared to 
 be perpetual, subject to redemption. To-day the tax, if 
 honestly levied on true annual rental, would yield about 
 £35,000,000. Had it been honestly levied all along, there 
 would have been no National Debt, and probably very few 
 wars. Landlord parliaments, it is pretty certain, would have 
 been careful to keep out of wars for which they themselves 
 would have had to pay, and pay at once out of rent instead 
 of the mortgaged wages of industry. 
 
 Still, the Restoration period was not wholly unfavourable 
 to liberty. The Act of Uniformity drove two thousand 
 Presbyterian clergymen out of the Church, and laid the 
 foundation of political as well as ecclesiastical nonconformity 
 deep and strong. Standing armies were declared to be 
 illegal, and the Habeas Corpus. Act guaranteeing to the 
 people immunity from arbitrary imprisonment was passed. 
 Nevertheless, standing armies exist to our. cost, and during 
 the present parliament we have seen nearly a thousand 
 Irishmen and Irish women under lock and key at one time 
 ‘¢on suspicion.” 
 
 The expulsion of the Stuarts and the choice of William as 
 king by a majority of two votes in the Convention Parliament 
 made England beyond cavil an elective monarchy. The Act 
 of Settlement has only to be abolished in order to bring . 
 royalty to a legal end, for what parliament has done it is 
 clearly competent for parliament to undo. To the Dutch 
 king’s reign we are indebted for the Civil List as well as the 
 abominable funding system, which enables *‘ sovereigns and 
 statesmen” by anticipating revenue to carry on flagitious 
 wars at the cost of posterity. 
 
 In George the First’s time, parliament passed the Sep- 
 tennial Act as a temporary measure to keep out the Pre- 
 tender. Honourable members have since fraudulently 
 retained it on the Statute Book to keep themselves in power 
 a little longer. | 
 
120 SALUS PUBLICA SUPREMA LEX. 
 
 As early as 1780 a great public meeting in Westminster 
 demanded Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, Equal 
 Electoral Districts, Payment of Members, No Money Quali- 
 fication, and Vote by Ballot. The then Duke of Richmond, 
 who was president of the ‘‘ Society for Constitutional Informa- 
 tion,” and Charles James Fox, considered these propositions 
 reasonable, and maintained their urgency. Yet more than a 
 hundred years have elapsed, and with the exception of vote 
 by ballot not one of them has been made good. There is 
 nominally, it is true, no money qualification demanded of 
 parliamentary candidates, but they have to bear the charge 
 of official election expenses, and that is a money qualification 
 in the very worst form. Who shall say that in this ‘‘ land of 
 old renown freedom has not slowly broadened down from 
 precedent to precedent ?” 
 
 The Reform Bill of 1832 was a step towards the emancipa- 
 tion of the people, but a step marked by the basest perfidy on 
 the part of the middle class, who, once inside the fortress of 
 citizenship, faithlessly helped to bolt the door in the face of 
 their working-class brethren, whom they had solemnly under- 
 taken promptly to admit. This treachery brought into 
 existence the famous People’s Charter, which was first 
 published in May, 1838. It re-affrmed with emphasis the 
 Richmond-Fox ‘ points’ of 1780, and secured an amount of 
 zealous and intelligent advocacy unparalleled in the history 
 of political reform. It gave birth to a generation of workmen 
 patriots, whose honourable ‘‘ records” are among the most 
 precious memorials of their day and country. 
 
 But the Oligarchy was not to be overthrown by such feeble 
 _ weapons as reason, eloquence, and justice. Peaceable meet- 
 ings were broken up by armed force, and the leaders of the 
 movement were arrested, imprisoned, and exiled. The late 
 Napoleon III. endeared himself to ‘‘ Society ”’ by playing the 
 part of an Anti-Chartist special constable. 
 
 Though stifled by oligarchic force and fraud, the demo- 
 cratic cause, however, was not dead, but it unhappily 
 slumbered for many years. In 1867, Mr. Benjamin Disraeli 
 caught the Whigs bathing, and made off with the suffrage 
 clothes in which they had for years been masquerading as 
 friends of the people. It was decided to admit, by ‘a leap 
 in the dark,” urban artisans to citizenship, but carefully to 
 
’ SALUS PUBLICA SUPREMA: LEX. ¥21 
 
 exclude their brethren in the country, as well as the whole 
 class of agricultural labourers. Of course, no honest effort 
 was made either by Conservatives or Liberals to redistribute 
 political power; consequently, as usual the flattering promise 
 of reform made to the ear has been broken to the hope. The 
 vast interest of labour—the only interest in a properly- 
 constituted society—is represented in the House of Commons 
 by two members all told, and one of these unfortunately, 
 generally acts as henchman and decoy-duck to the capitalist. 
 _ On the other hand, the peers have no fewer than 272 
 relatives in ‘‘ the People’s House;”’ the Fighting Interests, 
 168; the Landlords, 282; the Lawyers, 122; Liquor, 18; 
 Money (bankers, &c.), 25; Literary, Professional, and Scien- 
 tific Interests, 94; Placemen (past and present), 113; and 
 Trade, Commerce, and Manufactures, 155. 
 
 The producing classes, while contributing at least three- 
 fifths of the revenue, have certainly not more than a score of 
 even passable representatives in parliament. The spending 
 classes have the rest, the fighting interest alone making away 
 with no less than thirty millions of the national income ! 
 
 Now, however, it is proposed to redress some of these 
 startling anomalies. For the first time in the history of 
 parliamentary reform we have a Ministry which almost un- 
 solicited comes forward to extend the liberties of the people. 
 They have raised the banner of household suffrage in the 
 counties and encouraged the hope that a Redistribution Bill 
 is to follow. But desirable as it is in every way that the 
 toilers in field and mine should be promptly enrolled in the 
 ranks of citizens, it is quite possible to effect this object, as 
 was done by the Bill of 1867, without perceptibly altering . 
 what Lord Salisbury calls ‘‘ the balance of the constitution.” 
 Household suffrage in the boroughs has given us six years of 
 Tory Jingoism, supplemented by Whig coercion in Ireland, 
 the thrice-infamous bondholders’ war in Egypt, and a crush- 
 ing expenditure never exceeded in time of peace by the worst 
 of recent Governments. 
 
 The cure for these and many other evils that afflict the 
 body politic is to be found in the numerical equalisation of 
 constituencies—in the one man one equal vote contention 
 of the Chartists. To extend the franchise without redistribu- 
 tion is merely to increase the cost of elections, and thereby 
 
722 SALUS PUBLICA SUPREMA LEX. 
 
 make the “rich man’s club at’ St. Stephen’s” even less 
 accessible to honest poverty than it is at present. The 
 equalisation of voting districts, on the other hand, would 
 undoubtedly “ alter the balance of the Constitution,” trans- 
 forming oligarchic England into a democracy, in which those 
 who toil and spin might lead lives really worth living. 
 
 This being so, the question arises whether the franchise 
 being once conceded to the counties, there will be any anxiety 
 on the part either of Liberals or Conservatives to proceed to 
 redistribution. All previous experience is against the suppo- 
 sition. Time—twenty or thirty years—it will plausibly be 
 alleged, is needed to get at the wishes of the new voters whose 
 choice of candidates will meanwhile lie between Dives and 
 Croesus. This is the rock ahead, and genuine democrats 
 must beware lest their bark be wrecked within measuravle 
 distance of the land of promise. 
 
 The anomalies of our representative, or rather misrepre- 
 sentative, system can hardly be exaggerated. One hundred 
 and eighty borough constituencies, with 3,500,000 inhabitants, 
 return 231 members to parliament ; while seventy-one others, 
 with 11,500,000, return only 129 representatives! Forty-two 
 boroughs, with less than 7,000 inhabitants, have one member 
 each; while 178 towns, with an aggregate population of 
 3,630,000, and in no case counting less than 10,000 souls, are 
 for voting purposes included in counties. Could there be a 
 better reason than this for getting rid once and for all of the 
 obsolete distinction between boroughs ant counties ? 
 While say a Lambeth journalist, accustomed to handle every 
 political topic of the day, has the twenty-fifth thousandth 
 part of a representative in parliament, the enlightened Por- 
 tarlington voter has the hundred and fortieth share in an 
 honourable member all to himself! Could the perverse 
 ingenuity of man invent a more preposterous system of 
 governmeat? Indeed, slight as have been the achievements 
 of British democracy, as compared with the triumphs of our 
 Republican “kin beyond sea,”’ they are great and laudable in 
 view of the mighty barriers which the craft of oligarchy has 
 erected on every hand. 
 
 But barrier or no barrier, ultimate victory is assured. 
 Democracy, it has been well said, like death, never gives up a 
 victim, never abandons an ideal It is something that the 
 
SALUS PUBLICA SUPREMA LEX. 1235 
 
 people should know what they want. With equal land and 
 suffrage rights democracy becomes possible. Without both 
 itis impossible, and liberty, its offspring, remains unborn. 
 A great future, a mighty inheritance, is opening up to the 
 honest toilers of every land. The triple alliance of monarchy, 
 aristocracy, and plutocracyis strong, but it can and shall be 
 broken. Evenif they are let alone they are sure ultimately 
 to quarrel amongthemselves. The profit-monger will quarrel 
 with the rent-monger because the latter neither toils nor 
 spins, or for some other reason. Providence is on the side of © 
 the heavy democratic battalions. The people will at last 
 enjoy their own and sit down under their vine and fig-tree, 
 with none to make them afraid. The golden age—the age of 
 Republican brotherhood—* when man to man the world o’er 
 shall brothers be, an’ a’ that,’ is not in the past, but in the 
 future. To us itis given to see it only in visions and glimpses, 
 as Moses saw the Promised .Land from the height of Mount 
 Pisgah ; to see it only, like him, 
 ‘‘Who, rowing hard against the stream, 
 
 Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, 
 And did not dreamit was a dream,” 
 
 a 
 
PRINTED AT 
 THE MODERN PRESS, 
 I13 AND I4, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 
 
Crown 8vo.,128 pp. Prices—Paper, 6d., cloth, 1s. 6d. 
 
 The New Book of Kings, 
 
 THe Mopern Press, 13 & 14, PaTERNOSTER Row, E.C.; 
 _JouN Hrywoop, MANCHESTER; AND OF ALL BooKSELLERS. 
 
 Opinions of the Press. 
 
 If literature of this kind is becoming popular in England, the reign of 
 Albert Edward may be a short and a troubled one.—New York Sun. 
 
 There are many valuable truths in the ‘‘ New Book of Kings” justly and 
 forcibly expressed. The remarks on the existing monarchy should be laid 
 to heart by all thoughtful and candid readers.—Algernon C. Swinburne. 
 
 It really ought to be circulated as a tract by hundreds of thousands. If 
 this were done, it would have a tremendous political effect, and would 
 quickly and greatly strengthen the hands of the Radical section ot the 
 Liberal party. —Henry George. 
 
 I doubt whether Mr. George’s ‘‘ Progress and Poverty’' has madea 
 deeper impression than the ‘‘New Book of Kings” by Mr. Morrison 
 Davidson, a well-known controversialist and original thinker.—Cor. Brook- 
 lyn Eagle. 
 
 Enough of Mr. Davidson's words have been given to show how elegant 
 and pure his style is; how felicitous his wit; how keen his satire.— 
 Philadelphia Press. 
 
 A singularly able and powerful. book this—the sort of work that prepares 
 for great changes, great reforms.—Northamptonshire Guardian. 
 
 The book is rankly Republican—so written that it reads more like the 
 Newgate Calendar than any other kind of literature —A berdeen Free Press. 
 
 If Mr. Davidson had not fortified all his assertions by unquestionable 
 historical authority, one would be very much inclined to set down his book 
 as the nightmare of a man with a very powerful and a very morbid imagina- 
 tion.—The Freeman's Fournal. 
 
 A remarkably scathing and exhaustive review.—The Irish World. 
 Mr. Davidson handles the Kings and Queens asa skilful surgeon would 
 
 describe a skeleton to a class of students. There isan immense mischief- 
 making power in this little paper-covered publication.—Philadelphia Times. 
 
 None can deny that Mr. Davidson is an able writer.—East .4 berdeenshire 
 Observer. 
 
 O’Donovan Rossa would write such a book against Irish landlords if 
 book-making instead of dynamite-plotting were in his way.—Weekly 
 Dispatch (London.) 
 
 Mr. Davidson is master of a lucid and vigorous literary style. Against 
 the whole lot of our English Sovereigns he stands in the attitude of devil’ s 
 advocate.—People’s Fournal (Dundee.) 
 
A slashing, relentless, yet scholarly impeachment.—Batley News. 
 
 He (Mr. Davidson) stalks through history like a pestilence.—The Re- 
 publican. 
 
 As these essays in their original form have possibly: passed under the 
 eyes of two millions of readers, they can hardly have failed to. accomplish 
 their author’s purpose.—New York Nation. 
 
 He has succeeded admirably in painting vile pictures. His canvas is 
 filled with the most repulsive-looking monsters.—Dwmbarton Herald. . i 
 
 He (the author) conclusively proves that we would have been much 
 better without them (the Kings.)—Stivling Observer. 
 
 Mr. Davidson’s book should be in the hands of every thinking man,—- 
 Dunfermline Press. 
 
 Mr. Davidson isa vigorous writer, and might have used his pen for 
 better purposes.—Brighton Herald. 
 
 The ‘‘ New Book of Kings”’ is nothing more nor less than a ‘‘ scandalous 
 chronicle” of the English Monarchy which under ordinary circumstances 
 would be consigned with a feeling of disgust to the waste-paper basket. 
 The denunciatory paragraphs now going the rounds of nearly the whole 
 English, Irish and Scottish press are but gratuitous advertisements of 
 a book which ought never to have been printed.—Dublin Mail. 
 
 The New Book of Kings’’ embraces a travesty of history as unscru- 
 pulous, served up in a sauce of rhetorical malignity as base, as the most 
 zealous foe of the monarchy could desire. To the entire satisfaction of 
 his own insolence he (the author) shows that from the time of William the 
 Conqueror to that of William IV. the career of royalty was one of con- 
 sistent cruelty, fraud and debauchery.—Fifeshive Fournal. 
 
 Among literary items be it recorded that Mr. Morrison Davidson, 
 Barrister and Journalist, has just published the ‘‘New Book of Kings” 
 which is as fiercely revolutionary as Diderot himself could desire.—Jrish 
 Times, 
 
 The ‘‘ New Book of Kings ”’ is an interesting and cleverly written little 
 book by an Universal Iconoclast who not only pulverises all our English: 
 Kings, but even attempts to drag Oliver Cromwell from his grave and to 
 gibbet him once more. There is a terrific amount ‘of truth in Mr. 
 Davidson’s impeachment of Crowned Heads; but we do most certainly 
 challenge the assertion that Cromwell wasa ‘beast of prey.’ What we 
 do admire about the author is his consistency; he has no mercy even for 
 those who might be presumed to be his friends.—Daylight. (Norwich). 
 
 This is a very clever little book. The best point in Mr. Davidson’s 
 work is that he seems to have shaken himself clear almost if not altogether 
 from middle-class prejudices. The history of the great Middle-Class 
 Revolution of the seventeenth century has yet to be written. Mr. David- 
 son’s sympathy with the Levellers and genuine Republicans is so manifest 
 that he would start with much in his favour. It needs some pluck even 
 now to write this sentence, ‘‘judging of such a beast of prey as Cromwell 
 we should never regard for an instant what he said but mark intently what 
 he did.—Fustice. 
 
 Mr. Morrison Davidson describes the war in Egypt, carried on by the 
 noble Mr. Gladstone for whom Mr. Davidson worked in 1880 as ‘“‘ the most 
 iniquitous of modern times.’’—Yorkshive Post. 
 
 The blackest of all the black marks is set against Cromwell, the hero of 
 
Carlyle and the demigod of English democracy. It is needless to say that 
 Froude’s affection for ‘‘ Bluff King Hal’? and Macaulay's enthusiasm for 
 William III, find no place in these ruthless pages.—Eastern Evening News. 
 
 Altogether it is an awful story, as pungent asa clever writer can make it, 
 and perhaps the telling it in blunt language is not without its uses. I 
 would advise any bad bold Radical who believes neither in king nor lord, 
 to buy it and harden his wicked heart therewith.—Suffolk Mercury. 
 
 The author of that very spirited book ‘‘ Eminent Radicals’’ has issued 
 from the Modern Press another very powerful Radical publication 
 characteristically called the ‘‘ New Book of Kings.” It is written in Mr. 
 ‘Davidson’s most trenchant style.-—Hull Express. 
 
 The ‘‘ New Book of Kings”’ is a ferocious attack on Monarchy which is 
 certain to have a great circulation both in this country and America. It 
 has as much interest as a sensational novel and far more solidity.—The 
 Galloway Free Press. 
 
 Mr. Morrison Davidson has published his ‘‘New Book of Kings.’’ Its 
 author has not a word to say in favour of any English sovereign from 
 William the Conqueror to Victoria. This monotony of turpitude would be 
 wearisome were it not for the vivacious and trenchant style. It is calcu- 
 lated to serve the useful purpose of opening the eyes of people who now 
 worship Monarchy as a fetish.—London Echo. 
 
 The ‘‘New Book of Kings’’ would be justified in its tone if Queen 
 Victoria were like King Bomba. It is a long libel on the sovereigns of 
 England.—Western Morning News. 
 
 I have hardly seen a book of this character since the days of Ernest 
 Jones and Feargus O’Connor, Frost, Williams, and Jones. Such a book 
 should be a sign to the Tories that society may want saving again. The 
 ‘‘ New Book of Kings’’ must be set down as avery advanced and thoroughly 
 Republican production.—Rochdale Observer. 
 
 If I wanted to convert any friend from the errors of Republicanism I 
 should give him Mr. Davidson’s book. ‘Nothing could be so bad as 
 that,’ he would say. Onecan hardly criticise a volume written in this 
 extraordinary style.—Liverpool Mercury. 
 
 The Duke of Connaught, it is hinted, may not care to go back to India 
 While here he can compare notes with his royal relatives holding similar 
 cosy positions with respect to a book published recently entitled the ‘‘ New 
 Book of Kings.’’—Belfast Morning News. 
 
 Mr. Morrison Davidson’s ‘‘ New Book of Kings’’ is causing something 
 of a flutter in the Ministerialist dovecots. His writings read like the 
 cry of the injured spirit of Liberalism coming to earth to indict false 
 leaders and traitorous followers.—Wolverhampton Evening Star. 
 
 The ‘‘New Book of Kings” is an astounding one and in any other 
 country would be almost certainly suppressed. It is a savage attack on 
 the Monarchy and strange to say on the present government.—Dublin Daily 
 Express. 
 
 The ‘‘New Book of Kings,’ by Mr. Morrison Davidson who wrote the 
 smart sketches in the Echo ‘‘ Senators in Harness’’ is written in too can- 
 tankerous a spirit. The book dwells on the bad side of each monarch’s 
 character and ignores the good.—Ji wchester Evening News. 
 
 . The style of the ‘‘New Book ot Kings’’ is able and agreeable but 
 its rampant Radicalism is calculated ‘o appal even the followers of Mr. 
 Chamberlain.—Newcastle Daily Fournal. 
 
Mr. Morrison Davidson's ‘‘ New Book of Kings’' is a curious specimen — 
 of the literature with which extreme politicians occasionally favour us. 
 Written with masculine vigour and no want of that it is yet about the 
 most remarkable perversion of history that one could reasonably expect 
 to see.—Glasgow Herald. 
 
 The object of this Radical writer is to show that the sovereigns of 
 England have been the vilest wretches that ever crawled.—Middlesbro' poets 
 Exchange. 
 
 The ‘‘New Book of Kings ’”’ is simply a violent attack on the memory of 
 the rulers of England from the time of the Conquest down to the present 
 reign. It has the merit of being well written, but it is cruelly plain- 
 spoken. There are passages in the book savouring of rank disloyalty.— 
 Belfast News Letter. 
 
 Mr. Davidson is the unblushing accuser of all the Kings and Queens that 
 ever reigned over England. His little book is a veritable ‘‘ bloody circuit’’ 
 by a modern Judge Jeffries. It is a collection of short and pithy condem- 
 nations of their acts, their characters and their lives written with sarcastic 
 force and unsparing hate.—Norfolk News. 
 
 Mr. Morrison Davidson—a gentleman well and honourably known in 
 connection with the London Press—has published a short, severe and 
 somewhat satirical sketch of the English Kings. The sketches are done 
 with great skill and smartness and the declamation is trenchant and effect- 
 ive. It is a scathing criticism of modern Liberalism interwoven and 
 illustrated by facts and arguments drawn from the lives of our 
 monarchs.—Newcastle Daily Chronicle, . 
 
 It is a history of Royal blackguardism ; eloquent and spirited but not 
 always logical or even fair.—Shefield Independent. 
 
 Mr. Davidson is, however, an able and vigorous writer, and those who 
 do not share his opinions will read his criticism.on the Royalties of Eng- 
 land with interest.—Dundee Advertiser. 
 
 It is written from a thoroughly democratic and revolutionary stand- 
 point; and even those who do not adopt its views may appreciate its 
 vigorous treatment of the topic with which it deals.—Leeds Mercury. 
 
 Mr. Morrison Davidson shows up with merciless severity the short- 
 comings of our Kings and Queens. The book is written’ with great ability, 
 but the tone is characterised more by. the vehemence of the pleader than 
 by the calmness of the judge.—Northern Ensign. 
 
 Its thoroughness raises a doubt as to its honesty. It should be read, 
 but read with reserve and inquiry.—Eastern Morning News. 
 
 A wholesome spirit runs through the whole work. Every line should be 
 read by all who either believe or believe not in Kings.—The Centaur. 
 
 Now and again efforts have been made to bring to light the real char- 
 acteristics of the Kings and Queens of England. Possibly the most 
 vigorous and truthful work upon the subject is the ‘‘ New Book of Kings.”’ 
 Mr. Morrison Davidson spares no one; and he gives evidence of his state- 
 ments. Every political or historical student should have the ‘‘ New Book 
 of Kings.’’—Boston Guardian. 
 
 A perusal of ‘‘The New Book of Kings” will astonish the student of 
 political history as to the number of evil things which can be raked to- 
 gether to the prejudice of Monarchs.—Edinburgh Daily Review. 
 
 His criticism of past and present English Royalty is often fair enough 
 but it is often coarse and altogether out of proportion.—Bradford Observer 
 
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