Book: The Beginnings of New England

J >> John Fiske >> The Beginnings of New England




Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of
civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can
devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence,
it is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well
said, it is not the business of a government to support its people, but
of the people to support their government; and once to lose sight
of this vital truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy
narcotic poison. Of the two opposite perils which have perpetually
threatened the welfare of political society--anarchy on the one hand,
loss of self-government on the other--Jefferson was right in maintaining
that the latter is really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings
are so terribly insidious. Many will understand what is meant by a
threat of secession, where few take heed of the baneful principle
involved in a Texas Seed-bill.

That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of
these considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our
forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government.
From the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to
the days of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been
engaged in this struggle, not without some toughening of our political
fibre, not without some refining of our moral sense. Not among our
English forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and
modern Europe has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive
results. In all parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by
Teutonic tribes, self-government attempted to spring up. What may have
been the origin of the idea of representation we do not know; like most
origins, it seems lost in the prehistoric darkness. Wherever we find
Teutonic tribes settling down over a wide area, we find them holding
their primary assemblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like
those in which Mr. Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured.
Everywhere, too, we find some attempt at representative assemblies,
based on the principle of the three estates, clergy, nobles, and
commons. But nowhere save in England does the representative principle
become firmly established, at first in county-meetings, afterward in a
national parliament limiting the powers of the national monarch as the
primary tribal assembly had limited the powers of the tribal chief. It
is for this reason that we must call the method of nation-making by
means of a representative assembly the English method. While the idea of
representation was perhaps the common property of the Teutonic tribes,
it was only in England that it was successfully put into practice and
became the dominant political idea. We may therefore agree with Dr.
Stubbs that in its political development England is the most Teutonic of
all European countries,--the country which in becoming a great nation
has most fully preserved the local independence so characteristic of the
ancient Germans. The reasons for this are complicated, and to try to
assign them all would needlessly encumber our exposition. But there is
one that is apparent and extremely instructive. There is sometimes a
great advantage in being able to plant political institutions in a
virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or perhaps
metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions. In America the
Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in Britain;
and so far as institutions are concerned, our English forefathers
settled here as in an empty country. They were not obliged to modify
their political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the
Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians
were simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes.
[Sidenote: Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies]

This illustration will help us to understand the peculiar features of
the Teutonic settlement of Britain. Whether the English invaders really
slew all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who
found refuge in the mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or
fled across the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide. It
is enough to point out one respect in which the Teutonic conquest was
immeasurably more complete in Britain than in any other part of the
empire. Everywhere else the tribes who settled upon Roman soil--the
Goths, Vandals, Suevi, and Burgundians--were christianized, and so to
some extent romanized, before they came to take possession. Even the
more distant Franks had been converted to Christianity before they
had completed their conquest of Gaul. Everywhere except in Britain,
therefore, the conquerors had already imbibed Roman ideas, and the
authority of Rome was in a certain sense acknowledged. There was no
break in the continuity of political events. In Britain, on the other
hand, there was a complete break, so that while on the continent the
fifth and sixth centuries are seen in the full midday light of history,
in Britain they have lapsed into the twilight of half-legendary
tradition. The Saxon and English tribes, coming from the remote wilds
of northern Germany, whither Roman missionaries had not yet penetrated,
still worshipped Thor and Wodan; and their conquest of Britain was
effected with such deadly thoroughness that Christianity was destroyed
there, or lingered only in sequestered nooks. A land once christianized
thus actually fell back into paganism, so that the work of converting it
to Christianity had to be done over again. From the landing of heathen
Hengest on the isle of Thanet to the landing of Augustine and his monks
on the same spot, one hundred and forty-eight years elapsed, during
which English institutions found time to take deep root in British
soil with scarcely more interference, as to essential points, than in
American soil twelve centuries afterward. [Sidenote: Peculiarity of the
Teutonic conquest of Britain]

The century and a half between 449 and 597 is therefore one of the most
important epochs in the history of the people that speak the English
language. Before settling in Britain our forefathers had been tribes in
the upper stages of barbarism; now they began the process of coalescence
into a nation in which the principle of self-government should be
retained and developed. The township and its town-meeting we find there,
as later in New England. The county-meeting we also find, while the
county is a little state in itself and not a mere administrative
district. And in this county-meeting we may observe a singular feature,
something never seen before in the world, something destined to work
out vaster political results than Caesar ever dreamed of. This
county-meeting is not a primary assembly; all the freemen from all the
townships cannot leave their homes and their daily business to attend
it. Nor is it merely an assembly of notables, attended by the most
important men of the neighbourhood. It is a representative assembly,
attended by select men from each township. We may see in it the germ of
the British parliament and of the American congress, as indeed of all
modern legislative bodies, for it is a most suggestive commentary upon
what we are saying that in all other countries which have legislatures,
they have been copied, within quite recent times, from English or
American models. We can seldom if ever fix a date for the beginning
of anything, and we can by no means fix a date for the beginning of
representative assemblies in England. We can only say that where
we first find traces of county organization, we find traces of
representation. Clearly, if the English conquerors of Britain had left
the framework of Roman institutions standing there, as it remained
standing in Gaul, there would have been great danger of this principle
of representation not surviving. It would most likely have been crushed
in its callow infancy. The conquerors would insensibly have fallen into
the Roman way of doing things, as they did in Gaul. [Sidenote: Survival
and development of Teutonic representative assembly in England]


From the start, then, we find the English nationality growing up under
very different conditions from those which obtained in other parts
of Europe. So far as institutions are concerned, Teutonism was less
modified in England than in the German fatherland itself, For the
gradual conquest and Christianization of Germany which began with
Charles the Great, and went on until in the thirteenth century the
frontier had advanced eastward to the Vistula, entailed to a certain
extent the romanization of Germany. For a thousand years after Charles
the Great, the political head of Germany was also the political head
of the Holy Roman Empire, and the civil and criminal code by which the
daily life of the modern German citizen is regulated is based upon the
jurisprudence of Rome. Nothing, perhaps, could illustrate more forcibly
than this sheer contrast the peculiarly Teutonic character of English
civilization. Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, when the
formation of English nationality was approaching completion, it received
a fresh and powerful infusion of Teutonism in the swarms of heathen
Northmen or Danes who occupied the eastern coasts, struggled long for
the supremacy, and gradually becoming christianized, for a moment
succeeded in seizing the crown. Of the invasion of partially romanized
Northmen from Normandy which followed soon after, and which has so
profoundly affected English society and English speech, we need notice
here but two conspicuous features. First, it increased the power of the
crown and the clergy, brought all England more than ever under one law,
and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It thus made England a
formidable military power, while at the same time it brought her into
closer relations with continental Europe than she had held since the
fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal nobility as the
upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English thanehood into
the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that has ever
existed in any country; a point of especial interest to Americans, since
it was in this stratum of society that the two most powerful streams of
English migration to America--the Virginia stream and the New
England stream--alike had their source. [Sidenote: Primitive Teutonic
institutions less modified in England than in Germany]

By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the
crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about
a result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought
about a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry
and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing
royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up
representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result
was partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in
the Norman conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits
generated by long experience of local representative assemblies,--habits
which made it comparatively easy for different classes of society to
find their voice and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the
continent of Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with
here and there an arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and
rebellious town; in England, in this first great crisis of popular
government, he found himself confronted by a united people. The fruits
of the grand combination were _first_, the wresting of Magna Charta from
King John in 1215, and _secondly_, the meeting of the first House of
Commons in 1265. Four years of civil war were required to secure these
noble results. The Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an
event of the same order of importance as the Great Rebellion of the
seventeenth century and the American Revolution; and among the
founders of that political freedom which is enjoyed to-day by all
English-speaking people, the name of Simon de Montfort, Earl of
Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful remembrance beside the names
of Cromwell and Washington. Simon's great victory at Lewes in 1264 must
rank with Naseby and Yorktown. The work begun by his House of Commons
was the same work that has continued to go on without essential
interruption down to the days of Cleveland and Gladstone. The
fundamental principle of political freedom is "no taxation without
representation"; you must not take a farthing of my money without
consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only
when this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did
government begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric
system of tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that
in the fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to
men. Of all dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be
commemorated than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and
applied at Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle
of "no taxation without representation," that innermost kernel of the
English Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly
five hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way,
we realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a
thousand years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord
cannot be done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much
strife by sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the
boon to mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field
of Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the
day of peril is yet past. From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear;
they have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery. But the
gravest dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against
which people's minds have not yet been fortified with traditional
sentiments and phrases. The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize
upon the fruits of other people's labour is still very strong, and while
we have nothing more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough
from commercial monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the
polls their hordes of bribed retainers. Well indeed has it been said
that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. God never meant that in
this fair but treacherous world in which He has placed us we should earn
our salvation without steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price
of liberty]

To return to Earl Simon, we see that it was just in that wonderful
thirteenth century, when the Roman idea of government might seem to
have been attaining its richest and most fruitful development, that the
richer and more fruitful English idea first became incarnate in the
political constitution of a great and rapidly growing nation. It was not
long before the struggle between the Roman Idea and the English Idea,
clothed in various forms, became the dominating issue in European
history. We have now to observe the rise of modern nationalities, as new
centres of political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman
world. In the course of this development the Teutonic representative
assembly is at first everywhere discernible, in some form or other,
as in the Spanish Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the
continent it generally dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and
the Netherlands does it survive. In the great nations it succumbs before
the encroachments of the crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of
power delegated by the people to their representatives had not become
deeply enough rooted in the political soil of the continent; and
accordingly we find it more and more disused and at length almost
forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted Roman idea of power delegated
by the governing body to its lieutenants and prefects usurps its place.
Let us observe some of the most striking features of this growth of
modern nationalities. [Sidenote: Conflict between Roman Idea and English
Idea begins to become clearly visible in the thirteenth century]

The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the
suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in
the thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial
position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the
Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until
by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant.
The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable. The
grandchildren of the men who had witnessed the spectacle of a king of
France and a king of England humbled at the feet of Innocent III., the
children of the men who had found the gigantic powers of a Frederick II.
unequal to the task of curbing the papacy, now beheld the successors of
St. Peter carried away to Avignon, there to be kept for seventy years
under the supervision of the kings of France. Henceforth the glory of
the papacy in its political aspect was to be but the faint shadow of
that with which it had shone before. This sudden change in its position
showed that the medieval dream of a world-empire was passing away,
and that new powers were coming uppermost in the shape of modern
nationalities with their national sovereigns. So long as these
nationalities were in the weakness of their early formation, it was
possible for pope and emperor to assert, and sometimes to come near
maintaining, universal supremacy. But the time was now at hand when
kings could assert their independence of the pope, while the emperor was
fast sinking to be merely one among kings.

As modern kingdoms thus grew at the expense of empire and papacy above,
so they also grew at the expense of feudal dukedoms, earldoms, and
baronies below. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal
to feudalism as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars
occurring at this time were especially remarkable for the wholesale
slaughter of the feudal nobility, whether on the field or under the
headsman's axe. This was a conspicuous feature of the feuds of the
Trastamare in Spain, of the English invasions of France, followed by the
quarrel between Burgundians and Armagnacs, and of the great war of the
Roses in England. So thorough-going was the butchery in England, for
example, that only twenty-nine lay peers could be found to sit in the
first parliament of Henry VII in 1485. The old nobility was almost
annihilated, both in person and in property; for along with the
slaughter there went wholesale confiscation, and this added greatly to
the disposable wealth of the crown. The case was essentially similar in
France and Spain. In all three countries the beginning of the sixteenth
century saw the power of the crown increased and increasing. Its vast
accessions of wealth made it more independent of legislative assemblies,
and at the same time enabled it to make the baronage more subservient in
character by filling up the vacant places with new creations of its own.
Through the turbulent history of the next two centuries, we see the
royal power aiming at unchecked supremacy and in the principal instances
attaining it except in England. Absolute despotism was reached first in
Spain, under Philip II.; in France it was reached a century later, under
Louis XIV.; and at about the same time in the hereditary estates of
Austria; while over all the Italian and German soil of the disorganized
empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland and the dykes of the
Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up a host of petty
tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great autocrats at
Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [Sidenote: Increasing power of the crown]

As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but
be struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong
nationality without sacrificing self-government. Powerful, indeed, is
the tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward
political death. Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not
to the Oriental method. As often as we reflect upon the general state of
things at the end of the seventeenth century--the dreadful ignorance and
misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe,
and apparently without hope of remedy--so often must we be impressed
anew with the stupendous significance of the part played by
self-governing England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the
very existence of modern civilization. It is not too much to say that
in the seventeenth century the entire political future of mankind was
staked upon the questions that were at issue in England. To keep the
sacred flame of liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful
concurrence of conditions that, had our forefathers then succumbed in
the strife, it is hard to imagine how or where the failure could have
been repaired. Some of these conditions we have already considered; let
us now observe one of the most important of all. Let us note the part
played by that most tremendous of social forces, religious sentiment,
in its relation to the political circumstances which we have passed
in review. If we ask why it was that among modern nations absolute
despotism was soonest and most completely established in Spain, we find
it instructive to observe that the circumstances under which the
Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries of deadly struggle with the
Mussulman, were such as to enlist the religious sentiment on the side of
despotic methods in church and state. It becomes interesting, then, to
observe by contrast how it was that in England the dominant religious
sentiment came to be enlisted on the side of political freedom.
[Illustration: Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would
probably have disappeared from the world]

In such an inquiry we have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of
any system of doctrines, whether Catholic or Protestant. The legitimate
purposes of the historian do not require him to intrude upon the
province of the theologian. Our business is to trace the sequence of
political cause and effect. Nor shall we get much help from crude
sweeping statements which set forth Catholicism as invariably the enemy
and Protestantism as invariably the ally of human liberty. The Catholic
has a right to be offended at statements which would involve a
Hildebrand or a St. Francis in the same historical judgment with a
Sigismund or a Torquemada. The character of ecclesiastical as of all
other institutions has varied with the character of the men who have
worked them and the varying needs of the times and places in which they
have been worked; and our intense feeling of the gratitude we owe to
English Puritanism need in nowise diminish the enthusiasm with which we
praise the glorious work of the mediaeval church. It is the duty of
the historian to learn how to limit and qualify his words of blame or
approval; for so curiously is human nature compounded of strength and
weakness that the best of human institutions are likely to be infected
with some germs of vice or folly. [Sidenote: Beginnings of Protestantism
in the thirteenth century]

Of no human institution is this more true than of the great medieval
church of Gregory and Innocent when viewed in the light of its claims
to unlimited temporal and spiritual sovereignty. In striking down the
headship of the emperors, it would have reduced Europe to a sort of
Oriental caliphate, had it not been checked by the rising spirit of
nationality already referred to. But there was another and even mightier
agency coming in to curb its undue pretensions to absolute sovereignty.
That same thirteenth century which witnessed the culmination of its
power witnessed also the first bold and determined manifestation of the
Protestant temper of revolt against spiritual despotism. It was long
before this that the earliest Protestant heresy had percolated into
Europe, having its source, like so many other heresies, in that eastern
world where the stimulating thought of the Greeks busied itself with the
ancient theologies of Asia. From Armenia in the eighth century came the
Manichaean sect of Paulicians into Thrace, and for twenty generations
played a considerable part in the history of the Eastern Empire. In the
Bulgarian tongue they were known as Bogomilians, or men constant in
prayer. In Greek they were called Cathari, or "Puritans." They accepted
the New Testament, but set little store by the Old; they laughed at
transubstantiation, denied any mystical efficiency to baptism, frowned
upon image-worship as no better than idolatry, despised the intercession
of saints, and condemned the worship of the Virgin Mary. As for the
symbol of the cross, they scornfully asked, "If any man slew the son of
a king with a bit of wood, how could this piece of wood be dear to the
king?" Their ecclesiastical government was in the main presbyterian, and
in politics they showed a decided leaning toward democracy. They wore
long faces, looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were terribly in
earnest. Of the more obscure pages of mediaeval history, none are fuller
of interest than those in which we decipher the westward progress of
these sturdy heretics through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, and
thence into southern France, where toward the end of the twelfth century
we find their ideas coming to full blossom in the great Albigensian
heresy. It was no light affair to assault the church in the days of
Innocent III. The terrible crusade against the Albigenses, beginning in
1207, was the joint work of the most powerful of popes and one of the
most powerful of French kings. On the part of Innocent it was the
stamping out of a revolt that threatened the very existence of
the Catholic hierarchy; on the part of Philip Augustus it was the
suppression of those too independent vassals the Counts of Toulouse, and
the decisive subjection of the southern provinces to the government at
Paris. Nowhere in European history do we read a more frightful story
than that which tells of the blazing fires which consumed thousand after
thousand of the most intelligent and thrifty people in France. It was
now that the Holy Inquisition came into existence, and after forty years
of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated.
The practice of burning heretics, first enacted by statute in Aragon in
1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe during the thirteenth century,
but in England not until the beginning of the fifteenth. The Inquisition
was never established in England. Edward II. attempted to introduce
it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the Templars, but his utter
failure showed that the instinct of self-government was too strong in
the English people to tolerate the entrusting of so much power over
men's lives to agents of the papacy. Mediaeval England was ignorant and
bigoted enough, but under a representative government which so strongly
permeated society, it was impossible to set the machinery of repression
to work with such deadly thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of
Roman methods. When we read the history of persecution in England, the
story in itself is dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the
horrors enacted in other countries, we arrive at some startling results.
During the two centuries of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James
I., some 400 persons were burned at the stake, and three-fourths of
these cases occurred in 1555-57, the last three years of Mary Tudor.
Now in a single province of Spain, in the single year 1482, about 2000
persons were burned. The lowest estimates of the number slain for heresy
in the Netherlands in the course of the sixteenth century place it at
75,000. Very likely such figures are in many cases grossly exaggerated.
But after making due allowance for this, the contrast is sufficiently
impressive. In England the persecution of heretics was feeble and
spasmodic, and only at one moment rose to anything like the appalling
vigour which ordinarily characterized it in countries where the
Inquisition was firmly established. Now among the victims of religious
persecution must necessarily be found an unusual proportion of men and
women more independent than the average in their thinking, and more
bold than the average in uttering their thoughts. The Inquisition was a
diabolical winnowing machine for removing from society the most flexible
minds and the stoutest hearts; and among every people in which it was
established for a length of time it wrought serious damage to the
national character. It ruined the fair promise of Spain, and inflicted
incalculable detriment upon the fortunes of France. No nation could
afford to deprive itself of such a valuable element in its political
life as was furnished in the thirteenth century by the intelligent and
sturdy Cathari of southern Gaul. [Sidenote: The Cathari, or Puritans of
the Eastern Empire] [Sidenote: The Albigenses] [Sidenote: Effects of
persecution; its feebleness in England]

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