Part 20

The People’s Charter remains unfulfilled, but two of its points have long been granted--the ballot, and the abolition of a property qualification for members of parliament. Annual parliaments are no longer desired by any section of political reformers, the extension of the franchise to the agricultural labourer in 1884 brought manhood suffrage appreciably nearer, equal electoral districts were never more than a plan of quite reasonable political theorists, and the demand for payment of members, never altogether dropped by Radicals, is once more heard in the land.

The great contention of Ernest Jones and the Chartists that political liberty should precede the granting of reforms by parliament, that the people should have the power to control and direct the deliberations of parliaments still has its advocates; but government is passing--almost unnoticed--once more into the hands of an executive, for that “eternal vigilance” which is the price of political liberty is oftentimes relaxed.

Conclusion

CONCLUSION

Two political movements may be noted to-day in Great Britain by all who are interested in such things: the Labour movement and the Women’s movement for political enfranchisement.

The efforts of the past twenty-five years to establish a separate socialist party in parliament have not been directly successful, but the Labour Party has managed to return a group of some thirty workmen to the House of Commons, and these men are the responsible and trusted leaders of the trade-unions and the Independent Labour Party. Without requiring any formal acknowledgment of socialist belief, the Labour Party is largely inspired by socialist teaching, and its goal is the conquest of government by the labouring people, and a more even distribution of wealth by the gradual expropriation of the landlord and the capitalist. While adhering strictly to constitutional methods of agitation, giving full respect to the procedure of parliament and the legal conduct of elections, the leaders of the Labour Party, in their speeches at public meetings, use much of the old revolutionary talk of John Ball and Robert Ket, and the arguments of Winstanley for the popular ownership of the land. To the Labour Party as to the Chartists democratic politics are but a stepping-stone to social reform, and as in the days of the Chartists the strength of the Labour Party is in the industrial districts of the North of England, and in South Wales.

The Women’s movement, on the other hand, while demanding nothing but the right to the franchise, and claiming this right to a voice in the affairs of the State on the old constitutional ground of Pym and Hampden--that those who pay direct taxation to the government must have some political control of the expenditure--boldly avows in the face of government refusal the necessity for revolutionary methods to acquire the franchise. More than 600 women have gone to prison in the last four years in the cause of Women’s Suffrage, and the methods adopted have startled the public, created an enthusiasm, and generally aroused the attention of a formerly indifferent parliament to the claim of women to political enfranchisement.

Mary Wollstonecraft, in her _Vindication of the Rights of Women_, published in 1792, struck the first note of this movement. In the latter half of the nineteenth century it received the support of John Stuart Mill and a certain number of parliamentary radicals, and Women’s Suffrage societies were formed. Then, five years ago, the Women’s Social and Political Union was started at Manchester by Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Miss Christabel Pankhurst, and the extraordinary energy and activity of this union and the daring and resource of its members have made the women’s demand for the vote a vital question in politics.

Both these movements--the agitation of the Labour Party for a fuller and more abundant life for wage-earners, and the agitation of the women for political enfranchisement are proceeding in our midst--a guarantee that the centuries of struggle for freedom are not fruitless.

“The battle of freedom is never done and the field never quiet,” and while ever sun and moon endure and man seeks to dominate his neighbour, so long in England shall men and women be found to resist such dominance. For “to meet such troubles and overcome them, or to die in strife with them--this is a great part of a man’s life.”

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

[1] “By the mouth of the clergy spoke the voice of the helpless, defenceless multitudes who shared with them in the misery of living in a time when law was the feeblest and most untrustworthy stay of right, and men held everything at the mercy of masters, who had many desires and less scruples, were quickly and fiercely quarrelsome, impatient of control, superiority and quiet, and simply indifferent to the suffering, the fear, the waste that make bitter the days when society is enslaved to the terrible fascination of the sword.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

“Unrestrained by religion, by principle or by policy, with no family interests to limit his greed, extravagance and hatred of his kind, a foul incarnation of selfishness in its most abhorrent form, the enemy of God and man, William Rufus gave to England and Christendom a pattern of absolutism.”--Stubbs, _Constitutional History_. Vol. I.

[2] No Archbishop of Canterbury has received the pallium since Cranmer, but the sign of it remains in the archiepiscopal arms of Canterbury.

[3] “No one in those days imagined Christianity without Christendom, and Christendom without a Pope: and all these bishops understood exactly as Anselm did the favourite papal text, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.’ Nobody in those days doubted the divine authority of the Pope.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

[4] “The boldness of Anselm’s attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical servitude, but infused through the nation at large a new spirit of independence.”--J. R. Green.

[5] “When in Anglo-Norman times you speak of the ‘King’s Court,’ it is only a phrase for the king’s despotism.”--Sir F. Palgrave, _History of Normandy and England_.

[6] “The see of St. Peter was the acknowledged constitutional centre of spiritual law in the West.... It was looked upon as the guide and regulator of teaching, the tribunal and court from which issued the oracles of right and discipline, the judgment seat to which an appeal was open to all, and which gave sentence on wrong and vice without fear or favour, without respect of persons, even the highest and the mightiest.... If ever there was a time when the popes honestly endeavoured to carry out the idea of their office, it was just at this period of the Middle Ages. They attempted to erect an independent throne of truth and justice above the passions and the force which reigned in the world around.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

“Under the rule of William the Red, law had become unlaw, and in appealing from him to the apostolic throne Anselm might deem he was appealing from mere force and fraud to the only shadow of right that was still left on earth.”--Freeman, _Norman Conquest_, Vol. V.

[7] “In England Anselm had stood only for right and liberty; he, the chief witness for religion and righteousness, saw all round him vice rampant, men spoiled of what was their own--justice, decency, honour trampled under foot. Law was unknown, except to ensnare and oppress. The King’s Court was the instrument of one man’s selfish and cruel will, and of the devices of a cunning and greedy minister. The natural remedies of wrong were destroyed and corrupted; the king’s peace, the king’s law, the king’s justice, to which men in those days looked for help, could only be thought of in mocking contrast to the reality. Against this energetic reign of misrule and injustice, a resistance as energetic was wanted; and to resist it was felt to be the call and bounden duty of a man in Anselm’s place. He resisted, as was the way in those days, man to man, person to person, in outright fashion and plain-spoken words. He resisted lawlessness, wickedness, oppression, corruption. When others acquiesced in the evil state, he refused; and further, he taught a lesson which England has since largely learned, though in a very different way. He taught his generation to appeal from force and arbitrary will to law. It was idle to talk of appealing to law in England; its time had not yet come.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

[8] “No discipline restrained them (the king’s attendants); they plundered, they devastated, they destroyed. What they found in the houses which they invaded and could not consume, they took to market to sell for themselves or they burnt it. If it was liquor they would bathe the feet of their horses in it or pour it on the ground. It shames me to recall the cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families and the insults on their wives and daughters. And so, whenever the king’s coming was known beforehand, people fled from their houses and hid themselves and their goods, as far as they could, in the woods or wherever safety might be found.”--Eadmer.

[9] “If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king’s whom it annointed, or if the struggle had terminated in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism.”--Acton, _History of Freedom in Christianity_.

[10] “By the surrender of the significant ceremony of delivering the bishopric by the emblematic staff and ring, it was emphatically put on record that the spiritual powers of the bishop were not the king’s to give; the prescription of feudalism was broken.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

[11] “With regard to Thomas’ dealings with the Church, if one thing is clear it is this--that he was not in the least a man who pushed his Order at the expense of his loyalty. More than once he refused to listen to an ecclesiastical claim against the king, even when his old friend Theobald was behind it: he was perfectly impartial: he taxed churchmen as he taxed laymen, and in fact, so loyal and reasonable was he that Henry, when he made him archbishop, seems to have thought that he was wholly on his side. There were innumerable questions to be decided between Church and State. Again and again small points came up as to the appointment of this man or the other, as to the infliction or remission of a fine; and again and again Thomas decided the cause and advised the king on the merits of the case.... He was as zealous now for the State as he was for the Church afterwards. There he stood Chancellor of England; his business was to administer the laws, and he knew and did his business.”--R. H. Benson, _St. Thomas of Canterbury_.

[12] “The only instance which has occurred of the chancellorship being voluntarily resigned either by layman or ecclesiastic.”--Campbell, _Lives of the Chancellors_.

[13] “It must be held in mind that the archbisholp had on his side the Church or _Canon Law_, which he had sworn to obey, and certainly the law courts erred as much on the side of harshness and cruelty as those of the Church on that of foolish pity towards evil-doers.”--F. York Powell.

“We have to take ourselves back to a state of society in which a judicial trial was a tournament, and the ordeal an approved substitute for evidence, to realise what civilization owes to the Canon Law and the canonists, with their elaborate system of written law, their judicial evidence, and their written procedure.”--Rashdall, _Universities of Europe during the Middle Ages_.

[14] W. H. Hutton.

[15] This conversation is reported by Roger of Pontigny, who ministered to St. Thomas when the latter was in exile at that place.

[16] Garnier was a poet, and he protests passionately against this law, maintaining that God has called us all to His service. Much more worth is the villein’s son who is honourable than a nobleman’s son who is false.

[17] W. FitzStephen.

[18] W. FitzStephen.

[19] Dean Stanley.

[20] Freeman, _Historical Essays_. First series.

[21] “Hubert was very gracious in the eyes of all the host that lay before Acre, and in warlike things so magnificent that he was admired even by King Richard. He was in stature tall, in council prudent, and though not having the gift of eloquence, he was an able and shrewd wit. His mind was more on human than divine things, and he knew all the laws of the realm.”--Gervase.

[22] It is notable that in our day only peerages and knighthoods are sold, and these by political leaders to their partisans. Government offices, the judicial bench and bishoprics are still fortunately not in the market, though frequently allotted for partisan reasons.

[23] “Owing to the craft of the richer citizens the main part of the burden fell on the poor.”--Matthew Paris.

[24] Some writers say 50,000.

[25] William of Newburgh.

[26] “Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a shrewd financier, and an honourable, conscientious statesman; but as a prelate he is noted chiefly for his quarrels with his chapter.”--W. H. Hutton, _Social England_.

[27] Matthew Paris.

[28] “If he was to give up all for which he had been fighting, and fighting successfully, against the pope and the Church for the past six years, he must make quite sure of gaining such an advantage as would be worth the sacrifice. Mere release from excommunication and interdict was certainly, in his eyes, not worth any sacrifice at all. To change the pope from an enemy into a political friend was worth it, but--from John’s point of view--only if the friendship could be made something much more close and indissoluble than the ordinary official relation between the pope and every Christian sovereign. He must bind the pope to his personal interest by some special tie of such a nature that the interest of the papacy itself would prevent Innocent from casting it off or breaking it.... To outward personal humiliation of any kind John was absolutely indifferent, when there was any advantage to be gained by undergoing it. To any humiliation which the crown or the nation might suffer in his person, he was indifferent under all circumstances. His plighted faith he had never had a moment’s hesitation in breaking, whether it were sworn to his father, his brother, his allies or his people, and he would break it with equal facility when sworn to the supreme pontiff.... There seems, in short, to be good reason for believing that John’s homage to the pope was offered without any pressure from Rome and on grounds of deliberate policy.”--K. Norgate, _John Lackland_.

[29] K. Norgate, _John Lackland_.

[30] “By the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with several of his bishops and some barons, a sort of peace (_quasi pax_) was made between the king and the barons.”--Ralph of Coggeshall.

[31] Matthew Paris, _Greater Chronicle_, quoted by K. Norgate.

[32] “The Charter was a treaty between two powers neither of which trusted, or even pretended to trust, the other.”--Stubbs, _Constitutional History_. Vol. II.

[33] Luard. Preface to _Grosseteste’s Letters_. Rolls’ Series. 1861.

[34] A well-known passage in Matthew Paris, vol. v, gives the monk’s point of view of Grosseteste, the reformer:--“At this time the Bishop of Lincoln made a visitation of the religious houses in the diocese. If one were to tell all the acts of tyranny he committed therein, the bishop would seem not merely unfeeling but inhuman in his severity. For amongst other things when he came to Ramsey he went round the whole place, examined each one of the monks’ beds in the dormitory, scrutinized everything, and if he found anything locked up destroyed it. He broke open the monks’ coffers as a thief would, and if he found any cups wrought with decoration and with feet to stand on he broke them to pieces, though it would have been wiser to have demanded them unbroken for the poor. He also heaped the terrible curses of Moses on the heads of those who disobeyed his injunctions and the blessings of Moses on those who should observe the same.... And it is believed all this he hath done to restrain from sin those over whom he hath authority, and for whose souls he must give account.” This was written in 1251, when Grosseteste had been sixteen years at Lincoln.

[35] Wright, _Political Songs_. Camden Society, 1839.

[36] Grosseteste had been unable to get his way with the barons on the question of legitimacy of children before legal wedlock. By the old church law marriage made such children legitimate, and at the council of Merton, in 1236, Grosseteste, with the bishops, tried to bring the common law into union with the church view on this matter. He was defeated, and to this day these children are illegitimate. “It would indeed have been better if the independence exhibited by the majority who opposed the prelates at Merton had been reserved for another occasion; for it cannot be deemed that the perpetuation of a law contrary to that which prevails on the subject in almost every European country, and which still differentiates Scotland from England by abroad, though unintelligible line of demarcation, has been open to grave objection on grounds of public convenience, apart from any inherent merits or demerits it may possess.”--F. S. Stevenson, _Robert Grosseteste_.

[37] “Grosseteste, then, may be regarded in a threefold aspect; first, as a reformer who sought to reform the Church from within and not from without, by the removal of existing abuses, by the encouragement he gave to the great religious revival of the early part of the 13th century, and by the example of unflinching fearlessness and rectitude which he set in his performance of the episcopal office; secondly, as the teacher who guided the rising fortunes of the University of Oxford; and thirdly, as the statesman who, applying to new conditions the policy associated with the name of Stephen Langton, endeavoured to combine into one effort the struggle of the clergy for the liberties of the Church with the struggle of the laity for the liberties of the nation, imbued Simon de Montfort with principles of ‘truth and justice’ which went far beyond the mere maintenance of the privileges of his own order, and at the same time, by his effort to reconcile him with his sovereign, and by the whole tenour of his actions, showed that had he lived a few years longer, his influence would have been directed to the task of achieving by peaceful means the constitutional advance brought about by those who, taking the sword, perished by the sword.”--Stevenson, _Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln_.

[38] See recent article on “Grosseteste” in _Catholic Encyclopædia_.

[39] Yet out of this letter and out of his great knowledge and love of the Scriptures a notion has been current that Grosseteste was a forerunner of Protestantism, and “a harbinger of the Reformation.” “If this implies that he had any tendency towards the doctrinal changes brought about in the Church at the Reformation, or that he evidenced any idea of a separation of the Church of England from that of Rome, a more utterly mistaken statement has never been made.”--Luard, Preface to _Grosseteste’s Letters_. (Rolls Series.)

As for Grosseteste’s Scriptural knowledge, “The thorough familiarity with the Old Testament is, perhaps, only what we might expect; but the use which is made of the actions of all the characters of Scripture, and the forced and sometimes outrageous way in which they are introduced to illustrate his argument, show how thoroughly ‘biblical’ the age was, and how completely the Old Testament history was regarded rather as the guide of men’s conduct in Christian times, than as a mere historical record of past events.”--_Ibid._

[40] “The king acted as if he had sent him abroad simply to ruin his fortunes and wreck his reputation.”--Stubbs.

[41] Matthew Paris.

[42] Rishanger, the chronicler for St. Albans, puts the case for the national party:--

“The king that tries without advice to seek his people’s weal Must often fail, he cannot know the wants and woes they feel. The Parliament must tell the king how he may serve them best, And he must see their wants fulfilled and injuries redressed. A king should seek his people’s good and not his own sweet will, Nor think himself a slave because men hold him back from ill.

For they that keep the king from sin serve him the best of all, Making him free that else would be to sin a wretched thrall. True king is he, and truly free, who rules himself aright, And chooses freely what he knows will ease his people’s plight. Think not it is the king’s goodwill that makes the law to be, For law is steadfast, and a king has no stability. No! law stands high above the king, for law is that true light Without whose ray the king would stray and wander from the right. When a king strays he ought to be called back into the way By those he rules, who lawfully his will may disobey Until he seeks the path, but when his wandering is o’er, They ought to help and succour him and love him as before.”

(Translated by F. York Powell.)

[43] “The new form of government bears evidence of its origin; it is intended rather to fetter the king than to extend or develop the action of the community at large. The baronial council clearly regards itself as competent to act on behalf of all the estates of the realm, and the expedient of reducing the national deliberations to three sessions of select committees, betrays a desire to abridge the frequent and somewhat irksome duty of attendance in parliament rather than to share the central legislative and deliberative power with the whole body of the people. It must however be remembered that the scheme makes a very indistinct claim to the character of a final arrangement.”--Stubbs.

[44] A board of twenty-four--half chosen by the king and half by the barons--had laid a body of resolutions before the Oxford Parliament, and the first of these resolutions declared that all castles and estates alienated from the crown should be at once resumed.

[45] “The first time, as far as we know, English was used in any public document.”--Blaauw, _The Barons’ War_.

[46]

“End, O Earl of Gloster, what thou hast begun! Save thou end it fitly, we are all undone. Play the man, we pray thee, as thou hast promised, Cherish steadfastly the cause of which thou wast the head. He that takes the Lord’s work up, and lays it down again, Shamed and cursed may he be, and all shall say Amen.

Earl Simon, thou of Montfort, so powerful and brave, Bring up thy strong companies thy country now to save, Have thou no fear of menaces or terrors of the grave, Defend with might the nation’s cause, naught else thine own needs crave.”

--Rishanger, _Political Songs_.

[47] Stubbs.

[48] “The Song of Lewes”--_Political Songs_.

[49] I am indebted to my friend Fr. Bede Jarrett, O.P., for this interesting and, I believe, hitherto unpublished suggestion.

[50] It was to a Dominican Convent at Montargis that Simon’s widow, the Princess Eleanor, retired after the fatal battle of Evesham.

[51] An appeal was lodged at Rome by several English bishops against the threatened excommunication, but the papal legate himself became pope early in 1265, and, as Pope Clement V., was the strongest enemy of Simon and the national cause. It was only after Evesham and the death of Simon that Clement urged a wise policy of mercy on Henry and the royalists.

[52] “In this year, while Edward, the king’s son, was still held in ward in the Castle of Hereford, dissension arose between Simon, Earl of Leicester, and Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester....