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In the “Edinburgh Review” of September, 1828, there was an elaborate article on “Hallam’s Constitutional History,” which, in 1846, was reprinted by Mr. Macaulay in his “Essays.” It is a connected view of the great struggle of eight centuries for civil and religious liberty, and which was still dividing the country into “two hostile armies,” at the time when this able paper was originally published. My readers will not, I think, be displeased at finding here an extract from this article, which presents a lucid summary of facts upon which I have touched in the present chapter. “In the reign of Henry the Seventh, all the political differences which had agitated England since the Norman Conquest seemed to be set at rest. The long and fierce struggle between the Crown and the Barons had terminated. The grievances which had produced the rebellions of Tyler and Cade had disappeared. Villanage was scarcely known. The two royal houses, whose conflicting claims had long convulsed the kingdom, were at length united. The claimants whose pretensions, just or unjust, had disturbed the new settlement, were overthrown. In religion there was no open dissent, and probably very little secret heresy. The old subjects of contention, in short, had vanished; those which were to succeed had not yet appeared. “Soon, however, new principles were announced; principles
which were destined to keep England during two centuries and a half in a state of
commotion. The Reformation divided the people into two great parties. The
Protestants were victorious. They again subdivided themselves. Political factions
were engrafted on theological sects. The mutual animosities of the two parties
gradually emerged into the light of public life. First came conflicts in
Parliament; then civil war; then revolutions upon revolutions, each at-
* * * * *
“How soon faction again began to ferment is well known. In
the ‘Letters of Junius,’ in
Burke’s ‘Thoughts on the Cause of the
Discontents,’ and in many other writings of less merit, the violent
dissensions which speedily convulsed the country are imputed to the system of
favouritism which George the Third introduced,
to the influence of Bute, or to the profligacy
of those who called themselves the King’s friends. With all deference to the
eminent writers to whom we have referred, we may venture to say that they lived too
near the events of which they treated, to judge correctly. The schism which was
then appearing in the nation, and which has been from that time almost constantly
widening, had little in common with those schisms which had divided it during the
reigns of the Tudors and the Stuarts. The symptoms of popular feeling, indeed, will
always be in a great measure the same; but the principle which excited that feeling
was here new. The support which was given to Wilkes, the clamour for reform during the American war, the
disaffected conduct of large classes of people at the time of the French
Revolution, no more resembled the opposition which had been offered to the
Government of Charles the Second, than that
opposition resembled the contest between the Roses. . . . . The conflict of the
seventeenth century was maintained by the Parliament against the Crown. The
conflict which commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century,
It would be premature to assert that the conflict thus described was put an end to by the vast changes that were scarcely imagined possible in 1828. But “the hostile armies,” as I have endeavoured to show, have been disbanded. To trace the course of long and fierce struggles between the Crown and the Barons; of grievances producing rebellion; of conflicting claims of royal houses; of political factions engrafted on theological sects; and of factions again fermenting—this is not necessarily to minister to a democratic spirit, as those would infer who choose to mistake the true intent and meaning of the word “Popular” as applied to a “History of England.” |
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