ART. IX.-MR. TREVELYAN'S STUARTS.' England under the Stuarts. By G. M. TREVELYAN, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. London: Methuen & Co., 1904. THE HE division of history into 'periods' marked off by some common characteristic may be arbitrary, but it is inevitable so long as the human mind occupies itself with finding in the elements of likeness and unlikeness a motive of tragedy or epic, or a ground of generalisation. Periods may be named by some ruling interest which affected the lives of a generation of men: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, are convenient frames in which is set much that has no special relation to the title chosen. Or they may be marked by great names: the age of Elizabeth, of Cromwell, of Walpole or of Pittsuch are sufficient designations of acts in the drama. England 'under the Stuarts' is a drama in itself, with a fate-motive running through it, a world-chorus to comment upon high action and high passion, a climax and a peripeteia, and at the end the moral of the Greek poet : 'Many are the shapings of divinity, many the unlooked-for decrees of the gods; Mr. Trevelyan is more of a philosophical essayist than an annalist; he writes for thinkers rather than learners. His narrative is flowing and spirited; but he is so familiar with the actors and the spirit and temper of the time of which he is writing that he sometimes leaves the narrative to take care of itself, and the portrait gallery contains sketches or silhouettes where we expect finished pictures. A complete history should be in the first place a narrative. His volume is rather a guide to the history than a history of the Stuarts in England; it does not fill the whole canvas like the voluminous works of which Macaulay's History' is the type and Gardiner's 'History' the latest instance, nor yet is it a mere abridgement of the period. The cautious reader may say that Mr. Trevelyan generalises too much. Mr. Trevelyan knows enough to justify generalisation, and he generalises soundly; but the ordinary reader wants to see more of the evidence for the how and why than Mr. Trevelyan sometimes gives him, having to pack much into a small compass. So fluent a pen may sometimes run into common places and laxities of phrase, for it is not everyone whose sentences can stand up of themselves like those of Gibbon and Johnson, where every word is expressive of the thought, and the fine clothes only set off the figure. But redundancy is more instructive than dryness, and Mr. Trevelyan is never dry. We begin with one of those unwholesome levels or flats of history in which mean men take the place of men famous for wisdom or valour; we pass from Elizabeth to James, from Raleigh and Cecil to Somerset and Buckingham, from Shakespeare and Spenser to the Church poets and concettisti. As it was said of Chatham, so it may be said of Elizabeth, that she made men braver; her subjects would dare and endure anything for her, not because she was wiser or stronger or more courageous than they, but because her majestic approval glorified their wisdom and strength and courage. When James came to wear that royal robe, a world too wide for him, Englishmen, who had been accustomed for half a century to look to their sovereign for the direction and correction of their own efforts, certain that she was above all the patriot queen who chose to be served by the best men in her kingdom, now found in her place a king with nothing royal about him but his title and an inordinate conceit of it, an alien, a schoolmaster, a statesman whose idea of statesmanship was management through personal friends. The patriotism of Eliot repelled him; the large political wisdom of Bacon appeared to him a rushlight rival to his own royal beam; the daring and unquiet genius of Raleigh was opposed alike to his peaceful instincts and his pedestrian intellect. Turning from all this varied wealth of excellence, he deliberately chose Carr and Villiers. One who thus judged of persons was not likely to understand the real problems with which his kingcraft had to deal.'* And in fact he misunderstood and mismanaged all he undertook, except (an important exception) the attempted Union with Scotland, in dealing with which he showed more good sense and good feeling than his subjects on either side of the Border. Elizabeth's continental policy, which with all its vacillations kept England at the head of the forces that made for enlightenment, gave way to a meddlesome statecraft which disquieted and angered all parties, and under the cloak of the peacemaker helped to bring on the most calamitous of wars, the Thirty Years' War. At home, James I., not understanding how the English nation will obey a wise and masterful rider, but will throw off one who rules not by instinct but by theory, imagined * P. 76. that he could govern the Church by bishops' injunctions, and the State by proclamations and regulations of restriction. Burleigh had done the same, but Burleigh was acquainted with every county and every parish in England, and knew the limits of command and obedience. Robert Cecil, a smaller man, had some of his father's good sense and industry, and knew the people; and as long as he lived he dissuaded James from ignorant experiments in arbitrary government. Both in Church and State James I., left to himself, tried to govern by repression, not by encouragement; he played off one party against the other in the interest of monarchism; he had no intelligence of the nature of the people committed to his charge, in whom a national character, like but unlike that of the Middle Ages, had been developed under the Tudors. As Mr. Trevelyan well says: 'The England created by the Elizabethans lasted with consider able development, but with little change, down to the industrial and social revolution that ushered in our own world a hundred years ago... a state of society so healthy in its general influence that it made life strong and good for large masses of men and women, and produced out of a small population a proportion of great men unmatched either in the earlier ages or in our own generation as at present ordered.' * Mr. Trevelyan goes on from the passage quoted above to say that between 1603 and 1640' a deep change of temper had taken place, due to great political events.' It might be truer to say that it was not so much a change of temper as an awakening of temper brought about by misgovernment in an atmosphere charged with elements of discord. Mutual toleration is inherent in the English character; Elizabeth's discipline tended on the whole to local harmony and unity; but James I. and Charles I. taught Englishmen to quarrel by representing government and liberty as irreconcilable principles, and treating the friends of liberty as enemies of government. James I.'s interference with the Puritans, and his action after the Hampton Court Conference, drove out a number of the Puritan clergy, variously estimated at from forty-nine to three hundred. This is one of the chief public acts by which nonconformity became an established religion. James con founded Puritan doctrine with anti-episcopal politics. If the Puritan clergy had been let alone they would have come int line, the desire for 'parity' between bishops and priests would have been kept in the background; if they were put under $ * Pp. 2, 3. ban they would become open enemies of the Church, instead of remaining within her pale as 'nonconformists' or discontented 'conformists.' James was not alone; he was supported by Robert Cecil and by all who approved the Elizabethan discipline. Only Bacon protested. As yet men did not recognise that 'there were vigorous variations in English religion; that either 'the Church must be widely comprehensive, or else cease to be the national Church of all English Protestants.' * 6 We are inclined to doubt whether the distinction of religious opinion between town and country at this time was so sharp as Mr. Trevelyan makes out. That religious feeling in the great towns was strongly Protestant is beyond dispute; nor can it be reasonably doubted that here and there, especially in the northern and western shires, or where great Catholic landowners bore sway, Protestantism made more show in the churches than in the farmhouses and cottages.† Official returns, however, show that the whole number of recusants on the books was less than nine thousand, while the Anglican communicants numbered more than two millions; and less than twenty wealthy Catholics paid the fine of 20l. a month.‡ We cannot agree with Mr. Trevelyan that the translated 'Bible, the Church service, and the Puritan propaganda had not 'had time to do their work;' modern experience shows us that much may be altered in fifty years, both in ritual and doctrine. True, opinion moves faster now; but then, the pace was quickened by the fear of punishment, temperately and uncertainly administered, but not ineffective.§ It was understood that some measure of toleration for Roman Catholics was to be looked for, and in fact the fines for recusancy were for a time remitted. This lasted for a few months only. The recusants showed a greater numerical strength and more organisation than the Government had suspected. Severities were resumed. A few desperate men thought to unite all Catholics by a bold stroke. The Gunpowder Plot was devised and failed. Sharp justice overtook the plotters, and with them some innocent men suffered; but the comparative leniency of the Government showed that the danger had not been criticalthe Roman Catholics were neither strong enough in numbers nor sufficiently united in policy to sanction violent measures and provoke civil war. The result of the Gunpowder Plot * P. 81. † W. H. Frere, The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabet1 and James I.' + P. 98. § See Gardiner, vol. i. 228 sqq. was to hasten the process by which Popery had already become discredited before the fear of Jesuit machinations made it detested. The Gunpowder Plot and its suppression were not a canse, but a test, of decline. Elizabeth would never have been so foolish as to claim for herself any political power which she could not exercise effectually. James I. thought that he could become an absolute monarch by saying so; but when he told his first Parliament that kings are gods and Parliamentary privilege the sovereign's gift, they answered by asserting the ancient general and undoubted ' right of Parliament to debate freely all matters which properly 'concern the subject and his right or state.' It was all very well for James to tear out pages from the order book of the House of Commons: the people of England, court and country, orthodox and Puritan, landowners and tenants, were unanimous in their resolution to have a voice in their own affairs. Selfgovernment is the security for redress of grievance, not the good intentions of kings. But to the Stuart mind the mirror of good government was the machinery of Star Chamber and High Commission, which gave the King the idea of personal government and seemly order and discipline, whilst all the time he was training his subjects for rebellion. The Petition of Right summarised grievance in the body politic; the religious grievance was still unredressed, and Charles, like his father, had set his heart upon the suppression of Puritanism. Mr. Trevelyan recalls to us the right meaning of the misused word Puritanism. 'That word, so variously and often inaccurately defined,' originally signified the religion of all those who wished either "to" purify" the usages of the Established Church from taint ' of Popery, or to worship separately by forms so "purified.” It may be compared with the word 'serious' as used by the Evangelicals, or religious' in our own time, denoting a temper of mind quite as much as a scheme of doctrine. Sir Symonds d'Ewes's county neighbours in Suffolk, who held prayer-meetings and valued lectures, were churchgoers and Episcopalians. So were Oliver Cromwell and his friends in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, and the Pyms and Hampdens, men of the world, country gentlemen of standing, and a majority of the clergy. The next class were those who did not love the Prayer Book and favoured the Scottish Presbyterian system, but were loyal subjects, and willing to accept episcopal government and the * P. 60. |