BY the opening of the seventeenth century the centralising bureaucratic monarchies were fairly established: nay, in France at least, they were even showing the birth of modern party government, which since—carried on, indeed, under the veil of constitutionalism—has been the type of all modern government. Richelieu—the Bismarck of his time and country—begins the series of prime ministers or real temporary kings, who govern in the interest of class society, not much encumbered and a good deal protected by their cloaks, the hereditary sham-kings. In England this prime-ministership was more incomplete, 105 though men like Burleigh approached the type. Elizabeth reduced the Tudor monarchy to an absurdity, a very burlesque of monarchy, under which flourished rankly an utterly unprincipled and corrupt struggle for the satisfaction of individual ambition and greed. This grew still more rankly, perhaps, under James I., who added abject cowardice to all the other vices which are more common to arbitrary high place and power.
As to the condition of the people during the latter years of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, the economical and religious revolution which had taken place had oppressed them terribly, and the “free workman” had to feel the full force of the causes which had presented him with his “freedom” in the interest of growing commerce. In England, on the one hand, the expropriation of the yeomanry from the land and the conversion of tillage into pasture had provided a large population of these free labourers, who, on the other hand, were not speedily worked up by the still scanty 106 manufactures of the country, but made a sort of semi-vagabond population, troublesome enough to the upper and middle classes. The laws made against such paupers in the time of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. were absolutely ferocious, and men were hanged out of the way by the thousand.
But in the reign of Elizabeth it was found out that even this was not enough to cure the evil, which of course had been much aggravated by the suppression of the religious houses, part of whose function was the housing and feeding of any part of the workmen temporarily displaced. A Poor Law, therefore, was passed (1601) for dealing with this misery, and, strange to say, it was far more humane than might have been expected from the way in which the poor had been dealt with up to that time; so much so, indeed, that the utilitarian philanthropists of the beginning of this century felt themselves obliged to deal with it in a drastic way, which left us a Poor Law as inhumane as could well be. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century 107 things began to improve with our working population: the growth of the towns stimulated agriculture, and tillage began to revive again, though of course under the new system of cultivation for profit. Matters were in fact settling down, and preparing the country by a time of something like prosperity for the new revolution in industry.81
The condition of the people was on the whole worse on the Continent than in England. Serfdom was by no means extinct in France, Hungary, or Germany, and that serfdom was far more burdensome and searching side by side with the exploitation of the market than it had been in the feudal period. Other survivals of the medieval epoch there were also—thus in Germany the guilds had still some life and power, and the people were not utterly divorced from the land as in England, although the predominant competition: of the markets destroyed much of the good that lingered in these half-extinct 108 customs. At the same time the populations were crushed by the frightful wars which passed over them—in all which religion was the immediate excuse.
The first of this series was the war carried on in Holland and the Netherlands against the Catholic foreigners— the Spaniards—into whose hands they had been thrown by the family affairs of the house of Austria. Although noblemen took up the side of the rebels—e.g. Egmont and Horn, executed for so doing—this war was in the main a war of the bourgeois democracy on behalf of Protestantism, embittered by the feeling of a Teutonic race against a Latinised one. There is to be found in it even some foretaste of the revolutionary sanscullote element, as shown by the eagerness with which the rebels took up the nickname of gueux, or beggars, flung at them in scorn by their foes, as well as by the extreme bitterness of the ruder seafaring population, the men whose hats bore the inscription, “Better Turk than Pope.”
In Germany the struggle known as 109 the “Thirty Years’ War” was between the two opposing parties amongst the great vassals of the German Empire, whose power was used for the aggrandisement of the house of Austria, and also for the enforcement of Catholicism on the more northern countries. The reader must not forget, moreover, that these countries were to the full as oppressively governed as those which obeyed the bidding of the emperor.
This miserable war, after inflicting the most terrible suffering on the unhappy people, who were throughout treated with far less mercy and consideration than if they had been beasts, after having crushed the rising intelligence of Germany into a condition from which it has only arisen in days close to our own, dribbled out in a miserable and aimless manner, leaving the limits of Protestant and Catholic pretty much where it had found them; but it also left the people quite defenceless against their masters, the bureaucratic kings and princes.
In France the religious struggle took a very bitter form, but it was far more 110 political than in Germany. The leaders were even prepared to change their creed when driven into a corner—as Henry of Navarre at the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. In France the popular sympathy was by no means in favour of Protestantism: the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which inflicted such a terrible blow on the Huguenot cause, would otherwise have been hardly possible. It is true that the great Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, became king of France, but his accession, the result of his personal genius, did not carry with it a Huguenot triumph as a consequence. Henry had to abjure Protestantism,—a Protestant King of France was impossible.
The great struggle in England came later, and probably in consequence the victory was more decided on the Puritan side. The enthusiasm with which Mary Tudor—“Bloody Mary”—was received, and the Catholic insurrections in the reign of her successor, show that there was at first some popular feeling on the Catholic side; but by the time of James I., Catholicism was practically dead in 111 England82 The Book of Sports issued by his Government, which encouraged the people to play various games on Sunday after the fashion of the Middle Ages, was widely received as an outrage on the feelings of the growing middle class in town and country. We have here the first manifestation of that curious Sabbatarianism, which seems to be confined to these islands, and the origin of which is very obscure, since the original Calvinists, such as John Knox, and even Calvin himself, were not enthralled by it.
The maritime power of England has its beginning in the later Tudor period in contrast to the Middle Ages, when seafaring matters were of little national importance in England, the carrying of the northern seas being almost entirely in the hands of the Flemings and the Hansers. But under Elizabeth the English seamen, gentlemen adventurers and merchants, stimulated by the discovery of America, the prosaic accounts 112 of practical money-getting, and the legends of fabulous wealth that there awaited the fearless and boundless greed of the new knight-errantry of commerce, fitted out ships for filibustering expeditions to the New World. They practically went to war on their own account with the Spaniards in that hemisphere; and there their reckless courage and superior seamanship won for them pretty much all the wealth which was not fabulous, and laid the foundation of the commercial enterprise of England. By this they converted a people once jovial, indolent, and generous into a nation of sordid, if energetic traders and restless money-getters, whose very courage was the courage of the counting-house, and the greater part of this was exercised vicariously at the expense of their hardliving employés by land and sea.
All was tending towards the irreconcilable quarrel which took place in the next reign between the court and the bourgeoisie, and which was nearly as much religious as political.
Meantime in France the last remnants of the old feudalism struggled in 113 the party warfare of the “Fronde” against Mazarin and his bureaucracy of simple corruption. Finally Louis XIV. put the coping-stone on the French monarchy by forcing his nobility, high and low, into the position of his courtiers, while his minister Colbert developed the kingdom as a tax-gathering machine by the care and talent with which he fostered the manufactures of France, just before his time at a very low ebb indeed. There was no need, therefore, to touch the revenues of the nobility, who were free to spend them in dancing attendance on the court; nay, were not free to do otherwise. The century began with the French monarchy triumphant over all its great vassals; it finished by reducing all its vassals, great and small, to the condition of courtiers, with little influence in the country-side, and diminished rents — mere absentee landlords of the worst type, endowed with privileges which could only be exercised at the cost of the starvation of the people, and the exasperation of the bourgeoisie, who furnished the funds for the court glory.
81. For a fuller exposition of this period Hyndman’s Historical Basis of Socialism in England may be consulted.Back
82. Yet the curious countryman’s book called the Shepherd’s Calendar, translated and printed here first about 1520, was reprinted literally, with all its Catholic prayers, etc., several times till as late as 1656.Back