Part 15

Baron Vaerst indulges in some curious speculations as to the origin of this flourishing and unmixed race of mountaineers. "Some say they are an aboriginal tribe, and that their language was spoken by Adam(!); others set them down as an old Phœnician colony, whilst others again vaguely guess them to be the descendants of a wandering horde from the north or east. The language is like no other, and those who speak it know nothing of its history. Except before God, these people have never bent the knee in homage, and have never paid taxes, but only a voluntary tribute, collected amongst themselves.

"Proud of the independence they have so well defended, they for the most part, in order to preserve their nationality, have married amongst themselves. The Basque tongue has one thing in common with those of Spaniard Gascony, namely, the indiscriminate use of the B. and the V. They say indifferently Biscaya or Viscaya, Balmaseda or Valmaseda. The story is a well-known one, of the Spaniard who maintained French to be a miserable language, because in speaking it no distinction was made between a widow and an ox,--_veuve_ and _bœuf_ receiving from him pretty nearly the same pronunciation. I have still a letter from the well-known Echeverria, addressed to me as Baron Baerst. Scaliger, when speaking of the Gascons and of their custom of confounding the _v_ and _b_, says; _felicitas populi quibus bibere est vivere_." Many troubadours have written and sung in the Gascon dialect; the memory of one of the most ancient of them is preserved in popular legends on account of his tragical fate. Beloved by an illustrious lady, the wife of Baron Castel Roussillon, he was enticed into an ambuscade and murdered by the jealous husband, who then tore out his heart, and had it dressed for the Countess's dinner. The meal concluded, he produced the severed head of her lover, told her what she had eaten, and inquired if the flavour was good. "_Si bon et si savoureux_," she replied, "_que jamais autre manger ne m'en ôtera le gout_." And she threw herself headlong from her balcony. The nobles of the land, the King of Arragon at their head, held the conduct of the husband so unworthy that they threw him into prison, confiscated his estates, and united in one grave the mortal remains of the unfortunate lovers.

Whilst the Basques and Bearnese enjoyed a long series of tranquil and happy years, Roussillon was a prey to bloody wars and to the ravages of ruthless conquerors. Goths and Saracens, Normans, Arragonese, and French, fought for centuries about its possession. This state of perpetual warfare naturally had great influence on the character of the people, who continued wild and savage much longer than their neighbours. The passes of the Pyrenees were a constant motive for fresh hostilities, and pretext for lawless aggression. The rich committed every sort of crime, without being made personally answerable. One of the old laws of Roussillon, significant of the state of the country, fixes the rate of payment at which crimes might be committed. Five _sous_ were the fine for inflicting a wound; if a bone was broken, it was ten times as dear; a box on the ear cost five _sous_, the tearing out of an eye a hundred; a common murder three hundred _sous_, that of a monk four hundred, and of a priest nine hundred. Other luxuries in proportion. From which curious statement, a priest in those days appears to have been worth three laymen, and a gouged eye to have been estimated at twice the value of a broken bone. Flesh-wounds and punches on the head were decidedly cheap and within the reach of persons of very moderate means. For the delightful state of comfort and prosperity, indicated by this tariff of mutilation and manslaughter, the men of Roussillon had to thank their last Count, who, in the year 1173, bequeathed his dominions to Alphonso II. of Arragon. Thence eternal strife with the French, who did not choose to see the key to their country in the hands of a Spanish prince; and Roussillon, the bone of contention, was also the battle ground. Nearly five centuries elapsed before the treaty of the Pyrenees put an end to these dissensions.

The sea, the Ebro, and the Pyrenees, form the natural boundaries and bulwarks of the Spanish Basque provinces. Favoured by these defences, the three provinces were the natural and safe refuge of the Iberians, when hunted by various conquerors from the plains of southern and middle Spain. Of Navarre, only the mountainous portion afforded similar safety; the levels, and especially the rich banks of the Ebro, were occupied by the victors. Biscay, Alava, and Guipuzcoa were never under the dominion of the Moors, who obtained quiet possession of Navarre as far as Pampeluna, but only held it about twelve years. Each of the three provinces has its own constitution and rights, peculiar to itself, some of the privileges and laws being of a very original character. In Alava, the general procurator, or chief of the provincial government, swears every year upon an old knife--the _Machete Vitoriano_--to uphold the privileges of the province. "I desire," he says, "that my throat may be cut with this knife if I fail to maintain and defend the _fueros_ of the land." The Biscayan coasts breed excellent sailors; as already mentioned, they were the first to undertake the distant fisheries of the whale and cod. They are probably better calculated for enterprising merchant-seamen than for men-of-war's men, the inveterate independence and stiff-neckedness of the race being obnoxious to regular military discipline. "_Quisiera mucho mas ser leonero que tener carga de Biscaynos_,"[6] was a saying of Gonsalvo de Cordova. The naval squadrons of Biscay, however, are to be read of in history. It seems strange enough to Englishmen, to whom these petty provinces are known but as obscure nooks of the Peninsula, to read in Baron Vaerst's pages that "the fleet of Guipuzcoa, united with that of Biscay, completely annihilated, in a bloody naval action, fought on the 29th August 1350, the English fleet of King Edward the Third, and thereby procured Spain an advantageous treaty of commerce with England." There is small probability, we presume, of Lord Auckland's sending half-a-dozen frigates to revenge this old insult by fetching the present Spanish fleet into an English port, and there retaining them until the wise men of Madrid reduce their suicidal duties on foreign manufactures. We have stated our firm conviction that England would gain little by such reduction. Little, that is to say, in the way in which Messieurs Louis-Philippe and Guizot and their organs are pleased to assume that she expects to be benefited. "England," says a writer, already quoted, "has never asked any thing for which she did not offer a generous reciprocity. If the Spanish government, blind to its true interests, has constantly refused, in consequence of chimerical fears and false views, to renounce a prohibitive system, rendered illusory by smuggling, itself alone has suffered. For England it is a mere question of morality. The contraband trade compensates her for the ignorance of Spanish rulers.... But the government of a commercial country must grieve to see commercial transactions resting on the basis of smuggling--on a violation of law and of public morality. England, where every thing reposes on credit and good faith, submits with strong repugnance to stipulations so organised that smuggling is the rule, and legal traffic the exception."[7]

[6] "I would much rather be a keeper of lions than have charge of Biscayans."

[7] Marliani, ii. 317.

JUDAISM IN THE LEGISLATURE.

It has been frequently observed, that the chief events of the English history, during the last three centuries, have turned on religion.

Until the Reformation, our history scarcely deserved the name. The government an iron despotism, the people serfs, the barons tyrants, and the religion Popery, England possessed neither equal law, nor popular knowledge, nor security of property. And she suffered the natural evils of a condition of moral disorder; all her nobler qualities only aggravated the national misfortune, her bravery only wasted her blood in foreign fields. Her fidelity to her lords only strewed the soil with corpses; her devotional spirit only bound her to the observances of a pedantic superstition. While every kingdom of the Continent was advancing in the march of power, or knowledge, or the arts; while Germany in her mail gathered round her the chivalry of Europe; while Italy began that glittering pageant of the arts which has left such brilliant remnants behind, even in her dilapidated archives and tottering palaces; while Portugal was spreading her sails for the subjugation of the ocean, and Spain was sending Columbus to the west for a prouder conquest than was ever won by consul or emperor,--England remained like a barbarian gazer on this passing pomp of kings.

The Reformation changed all,--gave her a new sense of existence, a new knowledge of her own faculties, new views of her destination; and brought her, like the wanderers in the parable, from the highways and hedges, to that marriage feast of power and fame, from which so many of the original guests were to be rejected.

The change was remarkable, even from its rapidity. It had none of the slow growth by which the infancy of nations ascends into manhood. She assumed the vigour of a leading member of the European commonwealth with the life of a generation. Actually expelled from the Continent in the middle of the sixteenth century, she held the balance of European power in its hand before its close. But the effect of the Reformation in England was of a superior order to its effect on the Continent. We shall not say that it lived and died in Germany with Luther; or in France with Calvin; but there can be no doubt, that its purer and loftier portion perished with those great reformers. The schools of the prophets remained; but when the Elijah had been swept upwards on the chariot and horses of fire, they uttered the prophetic voice more feebly, and their harps no longer resounded through Israel. But, in England, the double portion of the spirit had been given; the Reformation had become _national_; and there is scarcely a national act, from that period, which has not held some connexion with Protestantism; been modified by its influence, or required by its necessities, originated in its principles, or governed by its power.

And it is not the less remarkable, that this continued operation has existed in England alone.

The gift of the Reformation was, like the gift of Christianity, a universal offer. It came, as the rising of the sun comes, to all Europe at once. The preaching of Luther and his contemporaries was heard in every country of the civilised world, and by a large portion of that world is retained, in all its substantial doctrines, to the present hour. Within the lapse of a few years, it had made a progress scarcely less rapid and triumphant than the career of the apostolic mission; but in a period incomparably more intellectual, and among nations more active, intelligent, and vigorous, than the dwellers among the languor of Asia Minor, the dissolute populace of ancient Italy, or the rugged barbarians of Thrace and Arabia.

Before the close of the century in which it was born, the Reformation had founded churches far beyond the German frontier, in the most active portion of France, in the British Isles, in the north of Europe; it had even forced its way through the sullen prejudices and fierce persecutions of Spain; by a still more singular success, it had given a temporary impulse to Italy itself; made converts in the natural land of the monk, built churches under the shadow of the convent; and redeemed at least one generation from the profligate supineness of their fathers. But this gush of the living breeze into the cloister was soon overpowered by the habitual heaviness of the atmosphere of cells and censers. The light, which had shot in through the chinks of the dungeon, was soon shut out, and all within was dark as ever. The multitude, at first exulting in their freedom, no sooner found that they must march through the wilderness, than they longed for the fatness and the flesh of Egypt, and returned to their house of bondage. The name of Protestantism still existed on the Continent, but its power was no more. Statesmen, in their political projects, passed it by; philosophers, in their calculations of human progress, left it out of their elements. The popular feelings were no longer roused or abused at its command. The teacher remained, but the gift of miracles was gone.

But, in England, it was a political creator. The manners, the feelings, the laws in a great degree, and the political movements almost wholly, were impressed with this one image and superscription. Since her first emergence from feudalism, when, like the traveller struggling through defiles and forests to the brow of the mountains which shows him the plain and the ocean before him, she saw the first boundless sweep of national power and moral renown before her, Protestantism, in all the casualties of its course, in its purity, or its profanation, in the vindication of its rights, or in the sufferance of its wrongs, in the national zeal for its advance, or in the national zeal for its retrenchment and spoil, has been the great object of contemplation and interest to every leader of the councils of England. It has been the voice which has never died in the statesman's ear, the shape which has met him at every step, the star which, whether clouded or serene, has never set in his horizon. The whole line of British sovereignty seemed scarcely more than royal administrators of the concerns of Religion.

Even the striking variety of royal character, during this long and stirring period, made but slight difference in their general connexion with the public belief. The brutish self-will of Henry, the savage bloodthirstiness of Mary, the proud supremacy of Elizabeth, the chivalry of Charles, the republicanism of Cromwell, the languid decline of the Stuarts, the energy of William, and the law-loving quietude of the Brunswicks, all bore the impress of the same principle.

During the last three hundred years, the world had been singularly active, and England perhaps its most active portion; but what relics of its political questions are left to posterity? The passions and the power of the great parties even of the last century have sunk into their graves. Even their names, which were supposed to have made an imperishable fixture in the political strifes of the country, and under which it was presumed that ministers and opposition would be marshalled for ever, have gone like the rest, and the difficulty would now be, to give a name to the political principles of any party in the state. But the religious questions of our ancestry are still not merely existing, but absorbing all others at this moment; instead of clearing up, they are darkening by time; instead of giving way to the thousand questions which year by year press on public deliberation, they still exalt their frowning front above them all. Ireland and Rome are as powerful objects of anxiety as in the days of Pius V. and Elizabeth; and Protestantism is forced to be as vigilant as in the days when the Bible was first read at Paul's Cross, or the Long Parliament drove the bishops out of the pale of the constitution.

In this language we are claiming no peculiar merit for the character of England; we are not arrogating for her any religious superiority; we are not pronouncing on her especial sensitiveness to conscience; we are simply giving facts; and those urge us to one conclusion alone, that by the determinate and original dispensation of Providence, our country has been selected as the especial arena for great religious inquiries, and the establishment of great religious principles.

On this subject we speak with the utmost sincerity. There is nothing in historical experience to forbid the idea, that peculiar nations may have been appointed to separate purposes, and that they may be even divinely placed under the discipline most suitable to those purposes. If to ancient Greece was almost exclusively given the intellectual advancement of the world; if to ancient Rome was as exclusively given the preparative discipline for its government; there can be no doubt that to Judea was assigned the guardianship of religion.

The process may be diversified in later times; but the principle may remain. The rapidity with which the derelictions of duty in Judah were followed by punishments _declaredly_ divine, finds a memorable counterpart in the annals of England, even down to the present hour. But we shall limit ourselves to the evidence in Ireland; and on this point we shall be as brief as possible.

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, Popery, hitherto kept down, became suddenly triumphant in Ireland, and began its habitual system of severity to the heretic. Confiscation and exile swept away the rights of Protestantism. The result was the national punishment by the scourge of civil war, a renewal of conquest, the expatriation of the Romish army, and the decay of all the sources of national prosperity.

Another era came. Under the government of Protestantism the country had recovered, privileges were successively awarded, and it enjoyed the peace and gradual opulence which belong to English government. But a parliamentary faction at length allied itself with Popery; parliament was subdued by clamour, or seduced by popularity, and the Popish population obtained the elective franchise. The elections instantly became scenes of national iniquity. Perjury was scarcely less than a profession, and that notoriously ruinous system of "sub-letting," which has covered Ireland with pauperism, became general, for the sole object of multiplying votes. This was followed by the foundation of Maynooth, a college expressly formed for the training of a Popish priesthood, whose tenets, every man who voted for this foundation, had sworn to be "superstitious and idolatrous." But when did faction care what it swore? The cup was now full. The priesthood of Maynooth had scarcely begun to learn their trade, when vengeance fell upon both Popery and the Parliament. Instead of the promise of popular gratitude, which had been so ostentatiously given by the Popish associations, and so ostentatiously echoed by parliamentary Liberalism, the first act of the Popish peasantry was to take up arms; a rebellion of the most treacherous and bloody nature broke out, in which the murder of Protestants was perpetrated in cold blood, and with the most horrid atrocity. Ireland was convulsed and impoverished, the rebellion was extinguished and punished by the sword, and at the cost of ten thousand peasant lives. The next blow was on the feeble and factious Parliament. The Irish Legislature was extinguished at a blow; and its fall was as ignominious as it was judicial. Its national pride and acknowledged talent gave way without a struggle, and with scarcely a remonstrance. It had already lost the respect of the nation. The _mind_ of Ireland disdained the deliberations which had suffered the dictation of a mob. Parliament, existing without national honour, perished without national sympathy. Its own principle was retaliated on itself. The Papist sold it, the Borough-monger sold it, the Protestant sold it, not for the baser bribe of the populace, but for the prospect of peace; it was given over to execution, with the calm acquiescence of a sense of justice, and tossed on the funeral pile amid a population which danced round the blaze.

Popery now talks of its restoration. It is impossible. The very idea is absurd. As well might the ashes of the dead be gathered and reshaped into the living man. As well might the vapours of the swamp be purified by filling it with the firedamp. Every hour, since that time, has made the country still more unfit for legislation, more furious and inflammable. As well might the nakedness of the people be covered by rags, reeking with the pestilence.

We rejoice to escape from the subject. It can be no gratification to us to trace the progress of disease through the political frame which it first enfeebles, and then makes a source of contagion. We have no love for the history of an hospital, or those frightful displays of a "surgeons' hall," where every skeleton is connected with public crime, and where science is demonstrated from the remnants of the scaffold. But it is notorious that the morals even of the Irish peasant have been degraded in the exact proportion of his rise in political power.

Every favour of the English parliament, from the beginning of the century until the fatal year 1829, only furnished him with an additional weapon, to be used with a more seditious violence. In that year, the British Legislature was thrown open to him, and he entered it in a barbarian triumph.

From that moment, England and Ireland were sufferers alike. In England, Irish faction was an insolent mercenary, which openly and alternately hired its services to both sides alike. In Ireland it was a ferocious rebel, which, as the notorious preparative for broader hostilities, exercised its arms in midnight murder.

At length the final endowment of Maynooth came; and an establishment, solely for the Romish priesthood, without any admixture of laity, and allowing the means of an increase in the number of those pupils of Rome, and propagators of Romish doctrines, from about five hundred to double the number, was fixed on the empire for ever, taken wholly out of the further deliberation of the Legislature, and conferred, to three times the amount of its former grant, on a religion which professes the worship of a _Creature_, the Virgin Mary; which bows down to _images_; which assigns thrones in heaven to dead men, promoted by itself to nominal saintship; which offers weekly absolution for all crimes; which apportions the judgments of the eternal tribunal in a purgatory, and releases the supposed criminal on payment of money for masses; and which offers the most solemn _adoration_ to a composition of flour and water, manufactured by a baker, distributed by the hands of a priest, and which it actually declares to be the Eternal God, whom "the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain."

These are doctrines utterly abhorrent to the feelings of all sincere Protestants; and unquestionably the encouragement of their teachers, and the virtual propagation of a belief which they pronounce desperate defiances of the truth, startled many wise and religious men with fear of the consequences. We leave the connexion of this most unhappy act with the subsequent events to the various contemplation of our countrymen.

The subject is too solemn for the mingling of human conjectures with its awful reality. But whether in the shape of retribution or warning, the singular force of the blow which has fallen on both--the Irish criminal and the English abettor of the crime--may well humble us before the Power which holds the prosperity of nations in its hand. Yet even now, while the two countries are still lying struck down by the same irresistible flash, and while the cloud which discharged it is still overhanging the horizon--while the only voice which ought to issue from the national lips would be the supplication for help and the hope of forgiveness, they are meditating an act more hazardous and daring than ever.