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an Archbishop-like himself a royal favourite and Chancellor? Politics are mostly earth-bound and prosaic, and Wolsey's Utopia went away upon the winds. A few years and he was disgraced.

The king had soon stepped out of the clouds. He betook himself to the old grooves of English statesmanship, and speedily the Englishman had outstripped the Frenchman. Not, indeed, that Henry VIII. allied himself with the Turk. But he dared as much, or more. He set absolutely and unreservedly at nought the whole Imperial and Papal system, disregarded and denied it in all the details-in respect to family ties, ecclesiastical decretals and dispensations, Biblical interpretation, connection of Church and State, and what not besides. He repudiated and was divorced from his Aragonese Queen, the aunt of the Emperor. Katharine's daughter, that Princess Mary, thought of just now as heiress of France and England and bride of Charles, was stigmatised as illegitimate, and declared incapable to succeed her father. He asserted the emancipation and independence of himself and England-Parliament and Convocation confirmed the assertion-in view of the whole public and private jurisdiction of Rome, Imperial and Apostolic. It is astonishing what little difficulty he had in the particular quarrel between him on the one part, and the Papal authority and the Imperial power on the other, in enlisting a general adhesion to his side. He entrenched himself behind legal and theological learning. The most ancient seats of law and divinity, Bologna and Paris, gave sentence for him, as well as his own universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He was in terrible earnest. He proceeded to execute a former Lord Chancellor of England and a Roman Cardinal, men beloved throughout England, More and Fisher, who refused to express their unqualified acquiescence in the royal and national will. It is not at all at present our concern either to judge or to justify Henry VIII., for whose effigy, in sooth, both mud and whitewash, long enough ago, did their utmost. But, whenever we reopen his reign, we are struck afresh and above all things with the way in which-in spite of his tempestuous temper, and the touches in him as of Eastern and old-world kings, so that he is from childhood upward imaged to us a very Nebuchadnezzar and Ahab of English history-his presence in his own days is invariably popular and his most audacious ventures are quite sure of success. There was no man in the country so English. He was bound up with England. His people were prepared for his acts, prepared to obey him, to back him up; there was nothing strange or unintelligible to them about his methods; strong measures were necessary. His reign was not a break, but a new link in the chain of English history. With him had come the right leadership,

leadership, a hot wave of restless blood, a vista of a renewed life, where there had been a pause and a fear, lest the pulses were beating out of time, were going to flag altogether. The reigns of three of the Henrys before him-Henry IV., Henry V., and Henry VI.—had fallen into a hapless and dreary period in our annals, filled with crooked designs, wicked foreign wars to stave off peremptory home questions, trials for witchcraft, aristocratic feuds and butcheries. The fifteenth century in England had worn the livery of a time when a late frost stays and partly blights the bursting of the spring. The nation had been waiting and watching for some such sovereign as Henry VIII. He might have followed straight upon Richard II.; a Hugh Latimer might have caught, as it fell, the mantle of a John Wiclif. When Fox, Bishop of Hereford, spoke, at Schmalkalden, of the Pope as Antichrist, he was not so very far in advance of the soundest English Episcopal opinion of pre-Lollard, of quite the olden days; the position that the then Pope Innocent IV. was an obstinate heretic had been substantiated, according to all the logic of the schools, in half-bitter, half-whimsical irony, on his deathbed, while his friend, the pride for knowledge of medicine and theology of the Dominican Order, stood by and reverently listened, by the foremost English Bishop in the, until the sixteenth, finest century of English life, by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. Henry VIII. took up, where it had been left, the work of the Third and of the First Edward, his statutes followed in the wake of the Great Charter and the Constitutions of Clarendon, and of the proud words of the Conqueror and his sons. The English spirit was throughout consentient with the dim oracle of primitive tradition and poetic legend, the tale of an unyielding retreat into and defence of an island fastness by Alfred or by Arthur.

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* Innocent III.'s condemnation of Magna Charta has a curious look for us Englishmen now. Here is a sample: Wherefore forasmuch as the Lord hath spoken unto us by the prophet; "behold thee have I set over the nations and over the kingdoms, that thou mightest root up and destroy, that thou mightest build and plant," and again in another place: "Loosen the bonds of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens," we will not cloak the hardihood of such malignant enterprise, contemptuous of the See of the Apostles, derogatory to the rights of the crown, shameful to the English people, menacing gravely the great cause of Him crucified. We, on the part of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. by the authority of His Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own, and by the common counsel of our brethren, reprobate utterly and condemn such document, and forbid under anathema the king from presuming to observe, the barons with their accomplices from urging him to observe it, and the charter and its guarantees and all things passed through it or for it, we make of no effect, and cancel, that never at any time should it be established.' tion.

tion. We have been seeking to show that it is, at the commencement, the history of a severe and unseasonable curb on. the growth of that mingled religious and political life which goes on, as one whole, in a nation, which combines the members of a nation or, in fact, of any association, expanding outward from the original germ of the family. We have been seeking to show how scholarship, philosophy, theology, statesmanship were perplexed and petrified at the reappearance-as if the evil genii of children's fables were to stride bodily into our streetsin the plenitude of power of the Empire and Papacy, vampirelike, thirsting to suck the life-blood out of letters, belief, freedom, adventure, ambition. We have been seeking to show that what we style the Reformation is only part of a formation in process before and after that particular century, subject also, so far as we see, in that century to oscillation and counteraction as much as in any other. Once more, we have been seeking to show that the sixteenth century, like all history, is to be read, on the one hand as the history of states, on the other hand as the history of individuals. Nor do we think, though here we may not demand nor count upon any unanimous approval of our readers, that any advantage is to be derived from the study, apart from the history of states and individuals, of the history, as such, of the medieval Church. Religion seems to us to owe an incalculable debt to the inspiration, the valour, the indomitable spirituality of individuals; to owe a most insignificant debt to its ecclesiastical organisations, imitated after, and never, under accurate analysis, differing from, the organisations of States; to owe, moreover, wondrous little, considering at once the unselfishness, the devotion, and the tools at the disposal of such champions, to the efforts, however heroic and sustained, of men of special political genius, who have seemed to gain for the ecclesiastical system independence among, or supremacy over, civil societies. The noblest part of individual life is the religious part, lies in the faith and hope and charity, of which the last is greatest, of the individual; the most ignoble part of ecclesiastical life is its quasi-religious part, lies in the extinction and extermination of faith, hope, and charity, beyond a certain so-called organisation of religion. Leo X. and his Bulls could never banish Luther from the history of religion. In any true history of the successors of the Apostles, the Pope Alexander Borgia has no place at all; the Sacred College of Cardinals, which admitted into their body John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was an oddly constituted circle of diplomatists, the martyr cardinal himself was-not by their vain breath or dictate-doubtless a prince of the Church militant and triumphant.

ART.

ART. IX.-England and Russia in the East. A Series of Papers on the Political and Geographical Condition of Central Asia. By Major-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, formerly Envoy and Minister at the Court of Persia. London, 1875.

[P to a year or two ago few things were apt to strike the

the general indifference of the English public to the affairs of Central Asia.

The Russian newspapers had long teemed with articles on the subject; but it was rarely noticed by the leading English journals, and Englishmen otherwise well informed on all matters of foreign policy, generally showed a strange ignorance of the details and bearing of many questions likely to lead to misunderstanding between the two great Christian empires of the East.

Latterly this seeming indifference has given place to a rather restless anxiety, and since it has become apparent that Russia either could not or would not withdraw from the position she had acquired by her success at Khiva, not only has much more attention been given by our own countrymen to the proceedings of Russia in Asia, but the general tone of the Press has become more or less alarmist, and men of experience and reflection may be found arguing in favour of measures which could hardly be adopted without at once bringing us into direct antagonism with the great Power which has thus made such rapid strides towards close neighbourhood with our own Indian Empire.

It is observable that ever since we have possessed an empire in India, we have rarely been without some question of the kind occupying our attention; some rivalry of a European Power for Asiatic Empire, which disturbed us. At one time it was the French who contended with us for supremacy, on pretty equal terms, in India itself. Subsequently when we had clearly taken the lead of all other European Powers in India, we were troubled, and not without reason, lest the French should attack us from the Mediterranean, and impel upon our ill-consolidated possessions in the East a fresh invasion of semibarbarian Powers-Turks, Persians, Afgans, and Arabs. That this was a very real and proximate danger in the judgment of many leading statesmen from the days of Pitt till the end of the revolutionary war, is clear from the great exertions they made to avert or meet it. It would not be amiss if we were now to consider what were the French designs, why they were laid aside, and what Pitt, and Dundas, and Lord Wellesley, and the sagacious men who then directed the policy of the India Com

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pany did, while they thought the danger of a Franco-Oriental invasion imminent.

There is abundant evidence to show that Napoleon's expedition to Egypt was by no means such a crack-brained scheme as it has appeared to many, even of his later historians. To occupy Egypt, to destroy the effete Mamluk dynasty, and to rule the Fellaheen so as to make the country pay for a French occupation, were not more difficult exploits in those days than Mehmet Ali's establishment of his own dynasty, or the French occupation of Algiers have been in later years. Napoleon could have had but a general idea of the difficulties attending further progress eastward; but he knew that men then alive remembered Nadir Shah marching an army from Persia to Delhi; that the Afgans had subsequently performed a very similar exploit, and that the Turks in their better days had found no difficulty in maintaining a formidable fleet in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. To one who was master of Egypt, the conquest of Syria and a march to the bank of the Euphrates was no impossible dream, as Ibrahim Pasha showed a generation afterwards; and once on the shores of the Persian Gulf the French conqueror would have been in a position to command and direct such aid as the Persians, Afgans, or maritime Arabs could afford. None of them would have objected to an expedition to plunder the unbelievers in India, with a French force to aid in meeting the English. If Turkey and Russia could have been induced to join, success would be all the more certain; but, even if he had been left single-handed, with a fair force of French troops freed from all religious prejudices in fraternising with Moslems, there was no impossibility in the dreams which led the young Gallic Alexander to Egypt and Syria.

What he did not adequately allow for was the naval power of England. But it must be remembered that when he first began his expedition, the English superiority at sea was by no means unquestioned; and in both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean the French fleets and squadrons maintained a not unequal contest, which at any time by the fortune of war or by aid from other maritime Powers, such as Spain and Turkey then were, might have been converted into at least a temporary superiority.

All these visions were dissipated when Nelson's victory at the Nile gave the English a decided superiority in the Mediterranean, and cut off the French troops in Egypt from their own country. It then became evident that much must be done in Europe before any onward move could be attempted from Egypt, and Napoleon abandoned the enterprise, bequeathing to his successors, in the idea of the Suez Canal, one of the most important

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