THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
PERIOD III
The Development of the Modern World
A COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING THE FIRST LOCOMOTIVE EVER MADE
FOR A PUBLIC RAILWAY STANDING UPON THE SAME TRACK ALONG WHICH
IT HAULED THE FIRST TRAIN ON SEPTEMBER 27TH, 1825, AND THE
"FLYING SCOTSMAN" CROSSING THE OLD LINE AT DARLINGTON.
THE GREATEST STORY
IN THE WORLD
PERIOD III
The Development of the Modern World
BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
FIRST EDITION ... 1926
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES
PREFACE TO PERIOD III
In this third and final volume of the Greatest Story in the World I have tried to give an outline sketch of the happenings of the last five centuries. It is the period which must appeal more forcibly than any earlier time to all of Anglo-Saxon race, because it is the Anglo-Saxon race that plays by far the largest role in it, and a role which becomes of constantly increasing interest right down to the present day. We first see Great Britain, in the gallant figures of Elizabeth's sea-captains, as chief actor in thwarting the aims at world empire of Spain. A little while, and we see her again taking the lead in abating the arrogance of the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV. of France. But of far greater importance than even this checking of the powers of the would-be masters of the world is that part which fortune or Providence assigned to her to play so conspicuously throughout the second half of the period which this volume covers—the part of mother of nations. It is thus that the historian, J. R. Green, writes of her as she appeared to the world after the United States had fought their way to independence—not a nation broken by her loss, as all had perhaps expected to find her, possibly a sadder and certainly a wiser nation, but, most surprising of all, stronger and more adventurous.
These are Mr. Green's words: "From the moment of the Declaration of Independence it mattered little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around her. She was no longer a mere European power, no longer a mere rival of Germany or Russia or France. She was from that hour a mother of nations.... And to these nations she was to give not only her blood and her speech, but the freedom which she had won. It is the thought of this which flings its grandeur round the pettiest details of our story in the past. The history of France has little result beyond France itself. German or Italian history has no direct issue outside the boundaries of Germany or Italy. But England is only a small part of the outcome of English history. Its greater issues lie not within the narrow limits of the mother island, but in the destinies of nations yet to be. The struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her statesmen, the steady love of liberty and law in her people at large, were shaping in the past of our little island the future of mankind."
The greatest part, in fact, of this Greatest Story for the last hundred and fifty years has been made in England. That is, indeed, much to say, but it is not too much.
In this volume I have thought best not to take up space with description of the way in which men have so lately lived, have built their houses, and so on. I have assumed that all this would be more or less familiar to my readers from other books and pictures and talk. And not even in vaguest outline have I attempted a sketch of the Great War and its effects. The moving picture which I have tried to make intelligible stops before the curtain is rung up on that grim tragedy whose import we do not even now fully understand.
And yet again my best thanks are due to Mr. R. B. Lattimer for valuable criticisms and suggestions.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. [How Man sailed East and West]
II. [The Stories of the Old East and of the New West]
III. [Three Kings and a Monk]
IV. [The Waning Power of Spain]
V. [The Wars of Religion]
VI. [The Growing Power of France]
VII. [The Humbling of France]
VIII. [From the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle]
IX. [The Seven Years' War]
X. [How The United States won Independence]
XI. [How the Stage was set for the French Revolution]
XII. [The Revolution and the Terror]
XIII. [The Napoleonic Wars]
XIV. [The Expansion of the Anglo-Saxon and the Slav]
XV. [Steam and Evolution]
XVI. [The Resettlement of Europe]
XVII. [The Settlement of America]
XVIII. ["The White Man's Burden"]
SECTION I.—[Africa]
SECTION II.—[India and the Far East]
SECTION III.—[The Far South]
[Index]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[Railway Centenary, 1925: Ancient and Modern Locomotives] ... Frontispiece
[Ships of the Time of Henry VIII.]
[General Wolfe's Statue, Quebec]
[The Modern Palace of Versailles]
[H.M.S. "Victory" after Trafalgar]
[Old Hand Loom and Modern Power Loom]
[Old Japan: Entrance to the Tombs, Tokio]
[A Street Scene in Modern Japan]
[A Scene in New Zealand: Mt. Pembroke]
THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
HOW MAN SAILED EAST AND WEST
Suddenly, at the end of the fifteenth century, the persons of our story found the picture of the world which they carried in their minds wonderfully expanded, rather as if it were a closed fist widely opening. Columbus in 1492 "discovered America": Vasco da Gama, in 1487, "rounded the Cape of Good Hope."
That is the way in which most of the history books state it for us; but it is a statement which gives credit to Columbus for a little more than he actually did, and does not put enough to the credit of da Gama. For it was not what we call America at all which Columbus discovered in 1492, but only one of what we now know as the West Indies, or West Indian Islands: and the mere "rounding" of the Cape of Good Hope had been done by another before da Gama, but da Gama, after "rounding" and sailing up the eastern coast of Africa, struck across to the western coast of India. As a feat of navigation his voyage was far greater than that of Columbus.
Vasco da Gama
Thus Vasco da Gama, going eastward, reached the western coast of India, and Columbus, going westward, reached the "West Indies." The name is worth noting.
These islands, as further exploration showed them to be, were called "West Indies," because men had expected to reach India by sailing west. The geographers had no conception of the great continent of America and the vast ocean of the Pacific that lay between the land touched by Columbus and the land which he thought that he had touched.
No matter. He came back with a very marvellous story—a story which grew ever more marvellous as further exploration revealed the astonishing truth.
What made this discovery of America so intensely exciting was that it was discovery of a land wholly new and unexpected. Although the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India was a new and remarkable achievement in navigation, the people in the West, the only people with whom this "greatest story" has been concerned until this time, were tolerably informed about the East. But its story had never before come into their own and mingled itself with their own so that each should have an effect and make a change in the other, as did begin to happen now.
The "New World," as it was called, of America, unlike the East, scarcely had a story at all. A few, a very few, historical records were discovered by the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru. The inhabitants whom the Spaniards found there had been workers in gold and silver, and the riches which Spain obtained by robbery of this treasure and, later, by working the gold mines and silver mines from which the precious metals were taken, made a large difference, as we shall see, in the history of men in Europe. But for the rest the "New World" had no history, no activities, which worked into and altered the history of the old. The old world was vastly affected by the discovery nevertheless. Just because it was so new, and occupied by savages who were able to make very little resistance to invasion, it enlarged the actual size of the world both for men's imaginations and also as a place for them to live in. But except for the treasure which the Spaniards took, it had little to send back to the old world. All else was a going out of the old world to the new.
Da Gama did not discover a new world. He merely—but it made a vast difference to the story—proved possible a new and far more convenient route to a country already known. Thus he brought that known land into contact with Europe so that the story of the far East interpenetrated the European story as it never had done before. The whole, in fact, became one world-wide story.
The East had been sending her produce to the West ever since the West—by which term we here mean Europe—had been civilised enough to need and to value it. There was a very ancient overland route from the north-west of India through Persia and Mesopotamia to Tyre and the Mediterranean coast. Another way was oversea from some Indian port as far as the head, that is to say the northern end, of the Persian Gulf, and thence, as before, overland to a port on the coast of Syria. And thirdly, there was a route by longer sea, again starting from India, calling perhaps at one or two ports in Arabia and up through the Red Sea. At a port in the Red Sea the goods would be landed and taken, probably on camel-back, to the Nile, and would be brought down the river and transhipped at its mouth into vessels which would carry them to Venice or Genoa.
The chief Indian port from which the trading vessels sailed, whether to the Persian Gulf or to the Red Sea, was Calicut, which we still see marked on the maps of India. It is a town on what is called the Malabar Coast, on the western side of India, low down towards the west.
And not only did ships bearing the produce of India start from Calicut, but Calicut was also the port to which came ships, some of them of great size, from the farther East, bearing the silks of China, the spices of the islands of the Malay Archipelago, and so on.
All the carrying trade west of Calicut seems to have been in the hands of Mahommedans, by far the most part of them being Arabs, at the date of da Gama's adventurous voyage to India. It was, of course, by far the more adventurous and full of danger for that very reason, because here was he, a Christian, and therefore to be regarded as almost their natural enemy by all good Mahommedans, coming to interfere with a trade which they had made their own.
It does not seem possible that they did not realise what his coming was likely to mean for the future of that trade. The Arab traders themselves knew the eastern coast of Africa at least as far south as Mozambique, for it was at this point that da Gama first came into touch with them. And it is probable that they knew the African coast further south also. They must have realised that ships going round the Cape of Good Hope could carry goods from India to Europe very much more cheaply than they could be transported by means which involved several transhipments, the payment of duties at several ports, and a longer or shorter carriage overland.
The wonder is that da Gama, going with only three vessels and of no great size—they were of the kind that were known as caravels—was ever allowed by the Moslems to come home again. But he artfully pretended to them that these three were only part of a larger fleet from which they had become separated, and it may be that this pretence imposed upon the Arabs and deterred them from doing him any injury. As it was, he was imprisoned for awhile by one of the Sultans, or rulers of a territory on the Indian coast, but by some means he conciliated his captor and was allowed to trade and go home again with his ships laden with silks, pearls, rubies, and a variety of treasure. The question that naturally occurs now is why it should have been the Portuguese, of all the European nations, that were led to undertake this sailing round Africa. The answer is interesting, because it involves an explanation of a curious idea of the geographers of the day.
We saw, in the second volume of this Greatest Story, Arabs and Moors established along the fertile fringe of Northern Africa. Northward of this fringe lay the Mediterranean; behind it, that is to say to the south, the desert. But the African tribes had penetrated and traversed this desert. They had learnt that there was, on the far side of it, a fertile land again, a land which was later known as Guinea. And this land was watered by a great river, now known as the Senegal river, flowing from the east and coming out into the sea in the Gulf of Guinea. It appeared to come from much the same direction as that in which they rightly supposed lay the sources of the Nile, the river of Egypt; and they seem to have imagined it a western branch of that ancient river. If they could mount up this branch then far enough in their boats they deemed that they might come out on the Nile, and so, if they pleased, arrive again on the Mediterranean.
The land of slaves
Apart from this idea, the land in itself was rich and produced much that they valued—gold dust and ivory in the elephants' tusks which the natives brought or barter with them—but above the ivory and gold and the rest of the rich products they valued the natives themselves, whom they captured and brought to markets in the Mediterranean towns and sold for slaves. Slaves had a value then which is not easy for us to realise to-day when our great difficulty is to find work for men to do. At that time the difficulty was to find men to do the work; and perhaps this was more true of Portugal and Spain than of other European countries, because so much of their territory lay uncultivated and waste by reason of the continual wars which had been waged between the Christians and the Moors. They needed men badly to till those waste lands. This fertile country then, south of the extensive tract of desert, had much that might attract the Spaniard or the Portugee.
We do not know very precisely why it was that little Portugal, rather than great Spain, sent out the mariners which worked southward along the western coast of Africa. We do not know, but perhaps we may make a guess. Spain had a large stretch of coast, with many ports, along the Mediterranean, and it is likely that Portuguese vessels would not have been very welcome if they tried to trade in that direction. Moreover, the Mediterranean swarmed with pirates, both of Mahommedan and Christian nations. It was no peaceful sea for the trader. Again, Spain had a long coast line northward and north-eastward right away to where the Pyrenees come up to the Bay of Biscay. There was no warm welcome there for ships encroaching on Spanish trade. Therefore, if the Portuguese sailors were to be adventurous at all there was no other very apparent direction for their enterprise to take than that of the western coast of Africa and of the islands that lay off it, such as Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde islands.
Portuguese adventurers
And there can be no doubt about the adventurous spirit of the Portuguese sailors of that day. They were inspired by the spirit of adventure, but also—for human motives are generally mixed—the adventure attracted them by the profits to be gained in it, the gold and the slaves. Further, we have to credit them with a more noble and spiritual motive, for they were inspired with a fervent conviction that it was a work most pleasing to God to induce the natives of new-found lands to become Christians. The means employed to this end were often cruel, but we ought to realise that it was a very real motive, both with the Spaniard and the Portugee. It is a motive which gives dignity to their conquests. They were not undertaken solely for material gain. Even if the means were cruel by which they converted a savage, whether of Africa or of America, they believed that it was in the truest sense a kindness to be thus cruel, if by so dealing with his body his soul might be saved.
Such motives as the above had their influence not only with the adventurers themselves, but also with the Governments of their countries. A member of the Royal family of Portugal, known in story as Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), especially favoured and helped to equip these expeditions. He was grandson of our own John of Gaunt. Perhaps his title of "Navigator" was cheaply earned, for there is no evidence that he ventured far oversea himself, but the distant voyages owed very much of their success to his assistance.
Thus the Portuguese crept farther and farther down the African coast until at length they rounded it, and in the last years of the fifteenth century da Gama achieved the great adventure. He must have deemed himself uncommonly fortunate to come home, with those three "caravels," to his native land, and that he was considered to have been favoured by fortune we may gather from Portugal's later conduct. Her rulers were far from trusting that it would be always so—that her trading ships might always go safely voyaging in those seas which the Moslems had hitherto deemed to be their own. One fleet, more powerful and more numerous than da Gama's poor three ships, was sent out, and again another, greater still, until the Portuguese had taken all the chief ports—Mozambique, on the eastern shore of Africa itself, the ports commanding the entries of the Red Sea and of the Persian Gulf—had penetrated farther east and captured the great trading port of Malacca, had even landed in China, and had established their headquarters at Goa, in the Indian peninsula.
It is not the least wonderful part of the whole surprising story that they should have made this conquest so completely and so easily. We must attribute it to the superiority of their ships in comparison with those of the Arabs and other Moslems in that sea, to their better armament and to their greater skill in using these ships for naval battle. Had the Mahommedans of that ocean possessed anything like the ships and the experience of marine warfare that sailors of the same religion in the Mediterranean had acquired by perpetual sea-fighting, it is not possible that Portugal could have dominated them so decisively and at such slight cost to herself. Besides that the Portuguese could manœuvre far more skilfully with their ships, and knew how to combine them for attack, the guns which their ships carried seem to have been far more powerful than any that the Moslems had, whether ashore or afloat; for not only do we find them gaining the victory in all the naval battles, but they employed their ships' guns in bombarding the ports and combining the bombardment from the sea with attacks by their landing forces.
The result of it all was that within a dozen or so years of da Gama's reaching India the Portuguese were the masters of those seas, and had the whole of that trade in their hands. And while Portugal thus worked her way to the dominance of the eastern sea, Spain was confirming the conquests for which Columbus had pointed her the way in the West.
Atlantis
For some years there had been vague rumours in Europe of an island far out in the western sea, and a still more confident idea that if men could sail westward far enough they would come to the eastern side of Asia. That was the goal at which they aimed, in the westward sailing. Columbus' special genius and courage inspired him to go bravely on this western cruise, not troubling himself, as others had done before him, with the search for that fabulous island, of Atlantis, supposed to be somewhere in the mid-ocean, but holding his way continuously towards the sunset until he did at length touch a land which he thought to be that eastern Asia which he had set out to look for.
We know how that it was something very different. During the next few years Spain kept sending out expedition after expedition, to find out what sort of new world it was that this bold sailor had thus reached. To Spain fell the enterprise and the conquest first, but not by any natural sequence of events, for it was truly due to the genius of Columbus, who was a man of Genoa, and no son of Spain at all, that the first enterprise of discovery was undertaken. He could not attempt it at his own cost. His native state would not furnish him with the means. For four years he was trying to get his voyage "financed," as we should say now—that is, get its expenses paid—by the Governments either of Spain or of England. He had a brother working to this end at the English Court, while he was pleading his own cause at the Court of Spain. Our Henry VII. was just beginning to listen favourably to the prayer of the brother, when Isabella, joint ruler, with Ferdinand, of Spain, was won by the eloquence of Christopher Columbus. Spain equipped the ships, and England, whether for her good or her ill it is interesting to speculate, but impossible surely to know, lost her chance of achieving the astonishingly rich conquest which thus came to Spain.
For what the repeated Spanish expeditions established ever more conclusively was the amazing richness of the new world, or, at least, of that part of it which she was first to conquer. And yet, at the beginning, there was some disappointment. We have seen how one of the great needs of these countries of the old world was men to cultivate their war-wasted lands. This man-power they were constantly hoping to increase by acquiring slaves. Portugal did acquire slaves, who proved excellent workers, from Africa. The slaves which the first conquerors of the West brought to Spain were nearly useless. The Red Indian, as it became the fashion to call him later, has never been of any value, as the African negro and the East Indian "coolie" have been valuable, in the service of the white man.
Thence, just at first, arose disappointment in Spain. But later, as the treasures in gold and silver and gems of the new land were brought over and became known and appreciated, there was ever growing joy and triumph over the El Dorado—the Golden Land—which had thus surprisingly been added to the Spanish Crown. There were new riches, without limit, to be brought home, new souls, beyond number, to be saved. Priests went out with the conquerors. It was a spiritual, as well as a material conquest. Immense treasure was taken when in 1521 Cortez made himself master of Mexico, and twelve years later the yet greater wealth of Peru was added by the conquest of Pizarro.
And it was a conquest and a source of riches with which at first no other country interfered. We have seen, however, that Columbus in the first instance, sailing west, had supposed himself to arrive on the eastern shore of Asia and of India—the eastern shore, that is to say, of the very land at which the Portuguese arrived by sailing east. It was apparent then that if these voyagings were prolonged far enough the ships must meet, or at least must cross each other's path. Therefore the two nations came to an agreement between themselves for the amicable partition of the world. It was arranged that Spain should have all lands, that she should conquer from any non-Christian peoples, to the west of a line drawn from north to south half-way between the Azores and the West Indies, and that Portugal should have the lands that she might similarly conquer to the east of that line. Each country would establish the Christian Church in its conquered territories; and the division was sanctioned by the Pope in a "Bull," as the Papal pronouncement is called, dated as early as 1493.
The northern nations of Europe paid only a partial respect to the Bull. Before the close of the fifteenth century Henry VII. of England had given a charter to a Venetian seaman—he had learnt his seamanship in Venice, though he, like Columbus, was a Genoese by birth—Cabot and his three sons to claim as England's possession any non-Christian lands that they might discover in the West. This charter, however, was expressly stated to apply to the northern, western, and eastern seas, but not the southern, a restriction which obviously shows that the rights of Spain and Portugal in the south were observed.
America
Long years before this, Northmen, as is told in the Saga of Eric the Red, sailing from Iceland and going west, had come to a land which they had called Vineland the Good. It is supposed to have been either Newfoundland or the mainland of North America. Very likely they touched both. There is a small grape that grows there which might justify the name. They tried to form a settlement there, but the settlers were all murdered by the natives, and the attempt was not repeated. From the port of Bristol there was commerce with Iceland. There can be no doubt that sailors brought the account of this enterprise, and of this Vineland, to Bristol. When the Cabots went westward it is likely that it was this land which they had a mind to seek.
The result of their expedition was that they reached and explored the western coasts of Newfoundland and of Labrador, but found nothing of such promise as tempted them to bring back any glowing reports of the new-found land. Its effect was indeed to extinguish the interest of England in these western voyages for many years.
In the very last year of the century the coast of South America was touched by two expeditions, one Spanish, the other Portuguese. The former had on board that Amerigo Vespucci who later wrote an account of the voyage and after whom America has its name. The expedition with which Amerigo sailed touched the coast of what we now call Brazil, and it seems to have been a surprise to discover that this part of the continent lay within the north and south line which had been drawn on the chart to define the westernmost possession of the Portuguese.
A circumnavigation
Within the first quarter of the following century the Spaniards exploring northward had proved the continuity of the great continent with that land which Cabot had reached. Southward a Portugee, Magellan, had sailed through the straits which bear his name, had rounded Cape Horn and come out into the Pacific. This boldest perhaps of all seamen, in an age of bold seamen, pressed still westward over the ocean, to meet his death from the spear of a native in the far west islands of the Philippines. He had, in fact, made real the vision of Columbus—to reach the East by sailing west. His ship, the Victoria, returned safely to Europe, being the first to accomplish a circumnavigation, or voyage round the world, in 1522. The voyage had occupied three years all but a fortnight.
SHIPS OF THE TIME OF HENRY VIII.
And by this time the coast of the Pacific on the western side of America had been reached at several points by travellers overland, and the extent and contour of the New World could be tolerably well mapped out except in its north-western quarter.
CHAPTER II
THE STORIES OF THE OLD EAST AND OF THE NEW WEST
The story of the New World before the coming of the Spaniards may be told shortly because we know so little of it.
At its far north-westerly corner the Continent of America is divided from Asia by a narrow strait. It is a shallow strip of ocean, and there is no doubt that there was a time when it did not exist as a dividing barrier, and that animals—man among the rest—poured into America from Asia at what was then a point of junction between them.
It is therefore generally thought that it was from the great birthplace and nursery of the human race, the central and northern parts of Asia, that the American continent was populated. The so-called Indian tribes which still exist both in North and South America are supposed to be the descendants of those Asiatic immigrants. One might almost say of them that they have no story, in the sense of any record along the lines of what we know as human progress in other parts of the world. Apart from what they have learnt from the white man since the year 1500—and unhappily they learned from him much evil, as well as good—they still represent what we imagine mankind generally to have been in nearly the earliest days of his existence as man and as something better than the apes. They represent man in the hunting phase: that is to say before he passed into the second of the three recognised phases and became pastoral, a keeper of flocks and herds.
The Red Indian
Some historians and students of man's story tell us that a principal reason why the Indians of America had gone so little way in civilisation was because that great country had been so ill-supplied by nature with the species of animals which man has domesticated to his service. It has been said that America has no animals that could serve to develop the pastoral phase, no sheep or cattle. It may be so, yet I scarcely think that we can build the explanation very confidently on that as a foundation, for we do not know what man might or might not have done, in course of many generations, in domesticating some of the native animals of America. The only one that he does seem to have domesticated is the dog, and the dog he may have brought with him from Asia, or may have domesticated from one or other species of the American wolf. He had no horses before the Spaniards came, and it has been conjectured that one of the reasons why the Indians were conquered so easily is that they then saw for the first time a man on horseback, and thought that they were meeting some supernatural creature of unknown powers.
But America had its bison, commonly called buffalo, in countless numbers. Who can say that they might not have been trained to do service for man as readily as the wild cattle of Asia? America has its caribou, a kind of deer closely akin to the reindeer which is the invaluable servant of the Laplanders. There are native mountain sheep, and in the south there are the llama and the vicuna, which are species intermediate between the sheep and the camels.
Therefore it is difficult to be sure that it was any lack of animals capable of domestication that prevented the early inhabitants of America from passing into the pastoral stage.
And then, most interestingly and most strangely, it appears that there were certain places in which, even before the Spaniards came, the Indians had cultivated plants—notably that maize, sometimes called Indian corn, which certainly seems as if it must have been imported into North America from the south.
MEXICAN PICTURE WRITING.
Moreover, when the Spaniards came to Mexico, and again, and yet more strikingly, when they came to Peru, they found evidence of a civilization very much higher than that to which the great majority of the inhabitants of the country had attained. They found finely worked treasures of silver and gold; they found large stone monuments. One circular stone which I have myself seen in the City of Mexico, called "The Calendar Stone," was engraved with signs which showed that the Mexicans had a system of reckoning time and the seasons of the year. They had a means of communicating thoughts and of recording facts by picture writing. They had large works in stone, for the conduct of water and for irrigation. When the Spaniards came to know something of the ways of thought and of the religion of the people, they found that the sun was the great god of their worship. They also had the hideous practice, but a practice which we saw in the first volume of this Greatest Story to be a very ancient and universal one, of sacrificing human victims, with the idea that the blood received into the ground would dispose the Earth deity to grant them good harvests.
Egypt and Mexico
These are ideas and practices which must recall very strikingly much of what we know about the religion of the ancient Egyptians; and in Peru, particularly, were found other practices which might be thought to point to Egypt as their source. Is it at all possible that they really may have come thence? There is a theory about man's story in the world which would answer "yes," and it is a theory which seems to be gaining adherents.
According to this theory, explorers, belonging to the date of the ancient sun-worship in Egypt, pushed out from that country adventurously in search of certain definite objects. Chief among those objects were gold and pearls. And they were sought and prized not only because of their rarity and beauty, but far more because they were considered to have certain magical qualities, to be great "life-givers." The theory then is that the explorers—who were sun-worshippers, who offered human sacrifices, made stone-works, understood irrigation and were distinguished by other practices and beliefs—travelled widely in search for these "life-givers." Traces of their sojourn, it is claimed, are to be found in India, in the chain of islands which is called Indonesia, thence onwards through other islands of the Pacific, until finally we find them on the American continent, in Mexico and Peru, and in various places in North America. Their traces are in the north of Europe also. These traces consist chiefly in large stone works. One or other, and in some places many, of the distinctive elements of the civilisation and religion of ancient Egypt are to be found among the peoples who live where the ancient stone works are. Very commonly they have the belief that there was once among them a ruling family who were "children of the sun," whose forefather actually was the sun himself, to whom, according to some legends, they would return at death. It was the belief that the Spaniards were the sun children, or sun-gods, come again, which greatly assisted them in their conquest of Mexico, and perhaps of Peru also. In the latter country there still existed, at the time of its conquest, the custom common among some of the Pharaohs of Egypt, for the ruler to take his own sister for his queen. Besides its interest, this is a theory which gives a plausible account of facts, such as the stone working and the widely spread belief in the sun children, which are otherwise very difficult to explain. But it is not to be taken as proved, nor even as generally accepted.
In Peru, exceptionally, the Spaniards found a distinct race, the Incas, supposed to be descended from the sun, still ruling, and ruling with a singular benevolence. But throughout the whole of the rest of the continent, North and South, the natives had made very little progress along any lines of civilisation. Here and there was some cultivation, chiefly of the Indian corn; but generally the people were hunters, going nearly naked in the warmer regions, clad in the skins of beasts in the colder climates, poorly armed with bows and arrows.
Thus obscure and scanty is the story of this great newly found world of the Spaniards. In the East, on the other hand, were lands whose stories dated, with actual records, thousands of years back. There was one, that wonderland of China, with earliest annals between two and three thousand years before Christ—by no means the oldest annals of humanity, but incomparably older than those of any other empire that still exists.
The permanence of China
That has been the chief wonder of the Chinese Empire, its permanence. And it is wonder that only grows, the more we realise the nature of that empire and the principles by which the society which has held it so long together has been guided. Again and again conquerors have forced their way in upon it from the north—rude, uncivilised tribes invading a highly civilised land. Again and again the chiefs of the invaders have established themselves on the throne of China. They and their sons for many generations have governed the land. But the country generally, with its vast extent and its large population, has gone on its way very little troubled by the change of rulers. Those military conquerors have in fact been themselves conquered by the higher civilisation in which they have found themselves.
The Chinese themselves appear to have come into the country from the west. Although they always have been a people who held soldiers and the military caste in very low esteem, they gradually pushed out the original natives until their empire had boundaries even more extensive than its present wide limits. It is one of the many wonders of this most singular nation, that though it relied so little on force of arms it gained a very marked respect from all the other peoples of the East.
Confucius
Since the empire grew to be so vast, it is not surprising that the great men far from the centre became very independent, so that the social conditions in the sixth century before Christ have been likened to those feudal conditions which we saw prevailing in Europe at a much later date. Chinese rulers of provinces have been written of as "feudal dukes." And just at that time, when the country was in the disturbed state which such conditions made inevitable, there arose two great teachers of whom the younger, Confucius, exercised a very extraordinary influence over all China, an influence that has force even to-day.
He expounded sage maxims for man's conduct towards his fellow-men, maxims not necessarily of his own invention but taken from wise men before him. "Do good," he enjoined, "not only to those who do good to you, but to those who do you injury." It had been said even before him. But to "do unto others as you would they should do unto you" may be taken as the principal basis of his own teaching, and the Christian goes no further, in respect of man's "duty to his neighbour." But about man's duty towards God Confucius had nothing to say. Obedience and piety of the son towards the father were, according to him, "the beginning of virtue, that which distinguishes man from the brutes."
And this relation and piety he conceived ought to prevail all through the State. The Emperor ought to act as the father of his people, and the people ought to be obedient to him, like his sons. But he naïvely qualified this, in a way calculated to prevent the Emperor's acting as a tyrannical parent, by saying that he forfeited his claim on this obedience if he governed wrongly.
Confucius never claimed, as did Mahomet, for instance, to be divinely inspired. He came as a mere man, preaching unselfishness and filial piety and the duty of obedience and the beauty of goodness. Those to whom he preached accepted his words, and certainly in some large measure formed their conduct accordingly. It was a sermon advocating peace in a country distracted by disturbances; and its ultimate effect is that the Chinese even to-day are a peace-loving nation. For all that, the great empire has been the scene of very frequent war, both by invaders from without and rebels within; but unhappily that is the state which has been usual throughout man's history everywhere.
Confucius put the highest value on education. In the second century B.C. competitive examinations began to be held for selecting ministers to posts in the Government—a curiously democratic measure, and perhaps possible in no other country than China. Some of the scientific inventions, which have made much difference in the story of the West, were known in China far earlier than elsewhere—the power and use of gunpowder, for instance, and the art and craft of printing. China discovered them early; but after their first discovery she did not develop them at all, as did the Western nations when they relearned them or took them from her.
It was in the third century B.C. that one of the world's wonders, the Great Wall of China, was built—running west from the sea to a length of a thousand and four hundred miles, and going over mountain and valley without deviation. Its purpose was to act as a barrier, easy of defence, against the wild tribes that pressed in from the north. The Emperor under whom this mighty, though not wholly effective, obstacle was raised, was powerful enough to put down most of the feudal dukes, and, much as the feudal dukes and lords in Europe were replaced by the king's official tax collectors, so in China, Viceroys of provinces, appointed by the Emperor, took the place of the dukes. The Viceroys also were not always obedient to the central power, but on the whole the change made for peace within the empire.
Confucianism then, as the doctrine of that great teacher was called, was not a religion, but merely a system for the ordinance of man's life on earth, without reference to a God; but about the same time as Confucius, Buddha lived and founded the religion of Buddhism in India; and in the first century A.D. Buddhist missionaries came to China. It is to this influence that the pagoda-shaped temples are due which are a prominent feature in Chinese scenery, for it was in this form that the Buddhist temples were roofed. The new religion gained numerous converts, and its monasteries are many in China to this day; but it really seems to have made but little difference in the lives of the people—for two reasons. First because the Chinese are least ready to change their way of life of any people in the world, and secondly because the unselfishness, which is the leading principle in the religion of Buddha, had been already preached as a leading principle in the maxims of Confucius and of wise men of China before him.
The general story of China nevertheless continues to be the story of dissensions within the empire and of uncivilised tribes threatening its borders on the north and west. Among these we may notice that there were Huns, akin to those who threatened, and from time to time overran, parts of Europe also.
The Nestorians
Christianity was brought into the country probably in the sixth century, by members of a Christian sect called Nestorians, after a certain bishop Nestorius, their founder. His doctrine respecting the divine and human natures of Christ was condemned as unorthodox both by the Church of Rome and also by the head of the Eastern Church, at Constantinople. The sect had its headquarters in Syria, and was dispersed by order of the Eastern Emperor. The result was that its members travelled and settled in Central and Eastern Asia. They were Asiatics and found themselves among peoples well disposed towards them. By this violent dispersal of them the Emperor helped their doctrines to prevail as he never could have helped their prevalence by his greatest favours. Incidentally, one of the results of his action was that silkworms, as we are told, were first carried to the West by some of the Nestorians returning from the far East—the ancient land whence silk had been brought for many centuries.
Mahommedanism was introduced not very long after, and the most interesting point to note about these successively introduced religions is that all seem to have been permitted and even encouraged with equal favour, or with equal indifference, by the Chinese rulers. This was in strict accord with the counsel of the sage Confucius, whose expressed opinion was that the ruler should interfere as little as might be with the life of his people. And that life was still principally influenced by the doctrines of Confucius, no matter what religions were brought in.
Thus went the story of China through century after century, with violent dissensions, yet never dissensions deep enough or wide enough to create a real change in an empire so vast and in a people so unwilling to change. We have to picture them living chiefly along the river banks, cultivating the rice which was their principal food, and with unwearied patience and industry making their silk, from the cocoons spun by the caterpillars, their beautiful porcelain, their lacquered furniture and vessels, their ivory carvings, and so on.
And then, towards the end of the twelfth century, began to rise to great power in Asia a people called the Mongols. Huns, Tartars, and Mongols we have to look on as closely related; and to some degree the last two names are interchangeable. They were divided into tribes under the rule of chieftains called Khans; and over the whole was a chosen ruler named the Khakan—the Khan of Khans. Their numbers grew. They led the pastoral life. As conquerors they were as ruthless as the Huns from whom they were descended, and at length, under the famous Kublai Khan, they possessed by far the greater portion of Asia and Europe as far as the boundaries of Poland. Before the end of the thirteenth century Kublai Khan, with his palace at Peking, dominated the whole of China, and a vast portion of the earth's surface besides. It was to his court that the famous Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, made his way. He lived there no less than seventeen years in all, and probably at no other time was it so easy for a western traveller to go to China overland, because at no other time has there been a single power which could ensure his safety on so long a journey through lands in possession of such lawless people.
On land, Kublai and his Mongols were irresistible, but they failed entirely by sea in two expeditions sent out to attempt the conquest of Japan.
Kublai's successors had little of what must have been his very extraordinary genius, both for government and war. In the middle of the fourteenth century a Buddhist monk headed a revolution in China which was completely successful, and ended with the expulsion of the Mongol conquerors and the establishment of the monk on the throne as Emperor, the first of the great Ming dynasty which lasted till 1626. It was the last native dynasty to rule in China, for in that year, 1626, the Manchus came in as conquerors, and are there still.
The first of the Mings not only drove the Mongols out of China, but defeated their principal armies so decisively that it was the beginning of the end of their power in other parts of Asia and in Europe. The tribes broke away from their dependence on the Khakan, or central ruler, and with that loss of union their military predominance was lost and they ceased to take nearly so large a part in our story.
Japan
In striking contrast with China, Japan is a land of no ancient story, and of recent civilisation. It was not until near the end of the third century A.D. that Chinese writing and letters were brought into the islands. They were brought in from the independent kingdom of Korea which we may see on the map running down southward from Manchuria, that northern province from which the Manchus came to conquer China. It shows how little we really know of Japanese history, that though there is a legend that Korea was conquered by Japan about the beginning of the third century, modern historians are in much doubt whether any such conquest actually occurred. It was, at all events, but temporary, and Korea soon regained independence. Its fortunes, or misfortunes, however, play a very small part in this Greatest Story.
Thus Chinese civilisation came to Japan, and was followed by Buddhism replacing the ancient religion of Shinto in which ancestor worship was the principal element.
Buddhism was essentially a religion of peace, and all the teaching of Chinese civilisation was opposed to war. The Chinese held the profession of arms, the military caste, in the lowest esteem. Therefore it is very singular that Japan, in spite of Buddhism and of this Chinese civilisation, gave highest possible honour to her soldiers. The Japanese had the greatest reverence for their aristocracy, moreover—-for their highly born—and the real government was in the hands of one or other of the noble families. The country was distracted for years and years by perpetual fighting between two of these great families and their followers. It is a story which may recall our Wars of the Roses.
The conclusion of that long conflict was brought about in what certainly was the greatest of naval battles ever fought up to that time in any Asiatic sea. It is called the Battle of Dannoura and its date is 1188. More than a thousand junks, as the native vessels are still called, took part in it, and by the slaughter, both in the actual fighting and afterwards, the defeated clan was all but wiped out of existence.
It was cruel work, but it opened the way for a period of comparative peace. The mode of government was reformed. There was the Mikado, the Emperor, by whom all power was supposed to be wielded, and there was also an official called the Shogun, the head of the army. Perhaps we may best designate his powers by calling him Commander-in-Chief. But his authority was far more independent than that of our highest military officer. For centuries the Shogun appears as the real power in the land, although in theory his power is derived from the Mikado.
After the victorious repulse of the great Kublai Khan, above mentioned, the Daimios, as the great nobles were called, again became powerful and turbulent and the condition of the country when the Portuguese first visited it, in the early years of the sixteenth century, seems to have been not very unlike that of Europe in the worst days of the fighting among the feudal barons.
India
In that disordered condition we have to leave, for the time being, the story of the Yellow Race in the Farthest East, and pass to the story of India previous to the epoch-making voyage of da Gama.
In a former volume we noticed the "Indo-European" as one of the great human families. It is a word which indicates an immigration of a people from Central Asia into India and also into Europe. The kinship of Indians with Europeans is testified by the likeness of many words in the languages of both. Especially is this likeness apparent in the words which express simple things, conveying ideas which people would be likely to wish to communicate to each other in a primitive state of society.
The immigrants found a people in the land before them, and remnants of that people still remain. In India itself those survivors are called Dravidians, and the Tamils of Ceylon are probably of the same race.
The Indians or Hindus appear to have lived, from their first coming into the land that we call India, in village communities, each community independent of the rest and producing all that its members needed. It is very like the way in which we have seen that the Germanic or Gothic tribes lived.
What is unlike those tribes is the "caste" system which still prevails in India. Their highest "caste" was that of the Brahmans or priests who kept in their own families the many secrets of a mysterious religion. It consisted in "Nature worship," especially worship of the forces that produce human food, and more particularly worship of the sun. Our knowledge of it is derived from their sacred books, the Vedas and others. The Brahmans claimed that they were formed by the Creator of the world from his mouth; the caste of soldiers, the military caste, from his arm; the farmer caste from his thigh, and the tillers of the soil from his feet. There were other castes. The divisions were so very rigid that it was unlawful and irreligious for one caste to do the work of another, to eat with another, or to inter-marry. The restrictions were many and severe, and are but little relaxed even now. They exist still as we find them laid down in a Brahmany code called "The Laws of Manu," which is supposed to date from the fifth century B.C.
Buddha
The institutions and manners of life in the East have been very slow to change, in comparison with the West, and it is likely that the life of these village communities continued for many centuries to be much as it had been when the immigrants first came down from the north to that valley of the Indus river which seems to have been their earliest place of settlement. And then, about 550 years before Christ, or a little earlier, was born a wonderful man Buddha, son of the Rajah of a small territory which is now Nepal. Here and there the headman of a village more powerful than those about him had begun to exercise some authority over more villages than one and to be called a rajah: and of one such Buddha was born.
STATUE OF BUDDHA.
When he came to manhood he was struck by the misery of man's life in the world. It appeared to him that the first cause of all that misery was man's selfish wishes, and his desire for all kinds of pleasure. He arrived at the belief that if man could rid himself of these desires his misery would cease. One might think that if this were so the simple remedy for it all would be death. But that was no remedy in the eyes of Buddha, for he firmly believed that this life which we lead here is but one in a cycle, or succession, of lives which each soul has to live through. The only way then by which man's misery could be relieved was that he should strive by all means to rid himself of his desires, to become, as it were, selfless, that is to say a creature not taking any satisfaction in gratifying his natural desires. And so convinced was this young prince, or rajah, that it was thus and thus only that man's grief could be assuaged, that he gave up his princely position, he left wife and child and all his wealth and wandered in poverty about the world preaching this doctrine.
No doubt it was developed by his followers—for he quickly gained a numerous following—beyond his own first ideas. It taught that the final satisfaction and peace of the soul of man was only to be won, after many re-incarnations—that is to say, after living again and again on the earth in different human bodies—by being absorbed into some kind of universal or divine soul which was called Nirvana. In that state the individual self of each soul would be lost, at length, and it might know peace because all selfish desires had gone from it.
Buddhism
What he preached, then, was not quite unselfishness as we understand it; for our unselfishness seems to imply an active concern for the selves of other people. Buddha's idea was much more passive than active. We might better call it selflessness. His great thought was how to get rid of all self, both a man's own self and that of all others. He did, however, devote himself to what we may describe even in our sense as a perfectly unselfish life, for he not only denied himself all but the barest necessities, but went through northern India trying to save other men from what he considered, and pitied, as their misery, by explaining to them how he thought they might escape from it.
The theory of re-incarnation opened a way for the union of Buddhism with the older Brahmanism, for the priests taught that in Buddha himself was the incarnated soul of Vishnu, the supreme spirit of the Brahmans. So they taught, and who was there to contradict them?
For the regulation of social life the maxims of Buddha are such as the highest Christian morality must approve. Hatred was to be conquered by love. Wives, children, and servants were to be treated with wise kindness. After a while, as has happened with other religions, the followers of Buddhism split up into sects, and especially into what were called the Northern and the Southern Churches. Although it was in the north of India that Buddha had preached, it was there that his rules of life were modified and made less severe. The Southern Church observed them more strictly.
In the centuries that followed, the doctrines of Buddha won converts far beyond India itself—in Tibet in the north, in Burma and Siam in the east and south, and so to the Malay Peninsula and to the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Farther west it was carried down into Ceylon.
Whatever, we may think of the religion of Buddha, it is obvious that it was in no sense a "fighting religion." It did not inspire its followers to be soldiers. Perhaps this is the reason why the Hindus never seem to have been able to resist the incursions of warlike neighbours. In the fourth century B.C. came Alexander of Macedon and pushed his wonderful conquests into the very heart of India. His general, Seleucus, organised part of the conquered territory under his rule, but it made little lasting impression on the story of the country. About the middle of the second century A.D., the wild hordes of the Parthians, the people who gave such continual trouble to the mighty Roman Empire, swept into Northern India, and with them they brought Christianity. Christianity, too, came early to that Malabar coast where the Portuguese, more than a thousand years later, found the Moslems in full possession. But Christianity was not imposed by force.
Although many wars have been fought for Christianity, it would be no more right to speak of it, than of Buddhism itself, as a "fighting religion." Mahommedanism, on the contrary, has ever been the great fighting religion of the world.
In the eighth century, while the Mahommedans in the West were making themselves dominant in Spain, other armies of the same faith went conquering eastwards through Central Asia to the very borders of China. They conquered, but they did not succeed in establishing any permanent empire. There was no power at their centre to control such an extent of the world's surface. The local princes became practically independent again. But in many parts the Mahommedan religion remained. It failed to make any impression in Tibet, where the Great Llama, as the chief of the Tibetan Buddhists was called, was ruler as well as high priest.
In India Mahommedanism established itself the more easily because Buddhism was by that time a waning force in many parts and was being re-absorbed by the older Brahmanism. Spread by its missionaries, called Mullahs, the new creed won its way right through the country to Siam, down the Malay Peninsula and into the islands of the archipelago. It penetrated southward also. We have noted that when the Portuguese came to the western shores of Southern India in 1500 or so they found Sultans, as the heads of Mahommedan states were called, in possession. To these seaports, however, and to the islands it is likely enough that the religion of Mahomet was brought by the Arab traders as much as or more than by any overland route.
Of the principalities which gained, or regained, independence after the flood of Moslem conquest had swept from West to East, that which became of greatest importance in the story was the kingdom of Afghanistan. It has been of importance by reason of its geographical position making it "the gate of India," as it has been called. It is the "gate" for such nations as Persia and Russia which might seek to enter India from the west and north.
From the kingdom of Afghanistan itself a Moslem army swept again into India about the year A.D. 1000. A confederacy of Hindu princes assembled a force to oppose it, but it is said that this army was entirely demoralised by the sound—the first of its kind that they had heard—of a gun brought by the invaders. The rule of the Moslem Viceroys, under which a large portion of Northern India was administered as the result of this Afghan victory, seems to have been equitable and effective, and in the course of the four centuries that followed a great part of all India became Mahommedan.
Timour, the Tartar
At the end of that period appeared on the Indian scene the formidable figure of Timour, the Tartar, sometimes known as Tamerlane or Tambourlaine, meaning Tamer, or Timour, the Lame. He too was a Mahommedan, and doubtless was of the same stock as those Afghan rulers who claimed Turkish descent; but that distant relationship did not deter him from the invasion of India from the north. He won his way easily enough as far as Delhi, and there appears no reason why he should not have pushed his conquests as far south as he wished. He returned to his own country, however, and shortly afterwards went westward against the Ottoman Turks and very heavily defeated them at Angora, the new capital of modern Turkey.
But for the lack of ships, it seems certain that Timour, with his Tartar hordes, would have passed over into Europe—with what result on our story no one can say. But he had no means of crossing the Dardanelles, and once more he went back to his own country.
Rather more than a thousand years later one of his descendants again invaded India from the north, and made a beginning of that Mogul empire which was to become far more widely and firmly established, under the great Akbar, towards the end of the sixteenth century.
Such, or somewhat such, are the main features of the stories of that new world in the West and that old world in the East which were opened up by the enterprise of Spain and Portugal about the year 1500.
CHAPTER III
THREE KINGS AND A MONK
Apart from the discovery of the West and of the new sea-route to the East, the most important events in the early years of the sixteenth century happened in Italy—Northern Italy. We have seen that Italy was almost the only country which showed no sign, as yet, of settling down within something like the boundaries which delimited the European nations up to the time of the Great War. It must be understood that this is a statement which takes no account of the differences made by Napoleon's victories at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We may disregard them, for the moment, because they were not lasting.
But the most important of all the events happening in Italy had nothing to do with changes of territories or national boundaries. Far more interesting and more helpful to the world was the growth of that Renaissance, or new birth, of love of letters and of all artistic beauty which we saw beginning with Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio, and some of the early Italian painters, sculptors, and jewellers. Moreover, we must not forget the glorious architecture which goes by the name of Gothic, nor the noble buildings in that Byzantine style which the influence of the Moors carried into Spain.
We should notice that a very great impetus was given to that study of Greek literature, which Petrarch and Boccaccio in particular had revived, by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in the middle of the fifteenth century; for it had the effect of scattering the Greeks far and wide, seeking new homes and bringing their books and their traditions with them.
And further, we ought to observe how this learning had been carried into every country and corner of Europe by the establishment of colleges and universities where it now became possible for every student to read "the classics." Their establishment was the work of the Church or of wealthy men acting under the advice of the Church. Moreover, for what we may call elementary education the teaching of the children of the poorer classes, so far as they received any teaching at all, was also the Church's work, for it was done by the members of the monasteries and convents all over Christendom. It is well that we should bear this in mind, to the Church's credit, at this moment, for the time is close at hand when we shall have to see that same Church accused, and in large measure convicted, of acts very greatly to her discredit.
All the while that the love of letters and of art was growing within the walls of the fortified cities of Italy, the cities were constantly at variance with one another, and even within their walls civic strife seems to have been the rule rather than the exception; but apart from these small local fights there were two principal causes of unrest. The first was the fact that the kings of France were not at all disposed to regard the Alps as forming a natural boundary of their possessions—they were constantly coveting the fertile land of Northern Italy—and a second cause of unrest was the desire, which was strong enough to unite for a time most of the other states, to cripple the excessive power of Venice.
The decline of Venice
Several circumstances combined to make possible the curbing of that power. The Turks were strong enough at sea to demand the full attention of the naval force of Venice, and her resources were vastly diminished by the diversion of that Eastern trade, for which she had held the gate into Europe, to the newly found sea-way round Africa. The Pope took the lead against her. He formed a league which was joined by the Emperor and by the kings of France and Spain. The alliance was too strong for the single state, and after the first battle Venice resigned nearly all her possessions on the mainland. She ceased to be a danger to the neighbouring states.
There was, however, no such combination of circumstances to diminish the power of France. Within a few years after the beginning of the century the French, by the capture of Genoa, had established themselves in a strong position to menace the whole of Italy. The French king Louis XII. had some pretext for the menace, for he could produce a kind of hereditary claim on the sovereignty both of Naples and of Milan. He had served the Pope against Venice, and after rendering this assistance he was not disposed to withdraw his claims. The Pope therefore arranged a new league against his late ally. Spain, the Emperor, and England were parties to this, which was called the Holy League—England under Henry VIII., who was not always to prove himself so close a friend of the Pope! The result was the speedy expulsion from Italy of the French, chiefly by the Spanish armies. Very shortly afterwards the French king died and was succeeded on the throne by his cousin Francis I. in 1515.
It has been my aim, through all the course of this Greatest Story, to encumber it with as few names as possible, in order that the names of the most important actors may stand out the more clearly and be remembered the more easily. But just at the moment which the story has now reached the names of four men, three being powerful kings and one a humble cleric, stand out pre-eminently. We might almost say that the story of those four is the story of all Europe, so large is their part in it.
Luther is the name of the cleric. He was the leader in that great schism, or cleaving off, of the Protestant Church—the Church which "protested"—from the ancient Church of Rome. It is that cleaving off from the old and founding of the new, the reformed, Church, which is called the Reformation.
The three great kings were Francis I. of France, above mentioned, our own King Henry VIII., and—by far the greatest of the three—Charles V.
It was the greatness of Charles V., the accident, as we may perhaps call it, that he held, in his own person and by rightful succession, the sovereignty of so many and extensive countries so far apart from each other, which was one of the chief factors of the story at this time. For he was of the ancient house of the Habsburgs. He was the ruler of Austria. He became Emperor. He became King of Spain. He was Duke of Brabant and Count of Flanders and Holland. He had a claim of sovereignty over Burgundy. The Pope purchased his help against the Reformation movement of Luther by giving up to him such sovereignty as he was able to enforce over the greater part of Italy.
We can see at once what was the position of France thus surrounded. And we must always remember that it was the day of despotic monarchy, when the king could make war or peace at his own pleasure and regarded the lands over which he was king as his own private property. Especially of this despotic kind was the monarchy of Francis. He appears in history as a brilliant figure, ambitious, eager for deeds of arms, without depth of character or fixed principles. He came to the throne as a young man and at once was attracted by the lure of Italy.
At first his arms had a rapid success, and he defeated the combined forces of Spain, the Papal states, and Venice—Venice being then in alliance with the Pope. He was thus victorious over Italy in arms, but the culture of Italy and of the Renaissance made a complete conquest of him. A new combination of Swiss, German, and Spanish arms drove the French out of Italy, and Francis returned, strongly influenced by that new light of art and letters which he had there found. From that invasion of Italy by the French we may date the beginning of the Renaissance in France, whence it spread to other nations of Europe.
The "Cloth of Gold"
It was in the year 1516 that Charles succeeded to the throne of Spain and to the possession of all the wealth that the Spanish ships had begun to bring in from the New World. Three years later he was elected Emperor, giving offence thereby to Henry VIII. of England, as well as to Francis, since both had sought to be Emperor. Their common cause of offence led to their famous meeting known as the "Field of the Cloth of Gold" by reason of the magnificence of the decorations, the gay and splendid tents, and so on. But it all ended in nothing, or indeed less than nothing, except an exchange of compliments, for almost immediately afterwards we find Henry, under the influence of the great Cardinal Wolsey, pledged to support Charles. In the shifting alliances of the time it was nearly always against France that England was engaged, notwithstanding that Henry's sister had married Francis' predecessor on the throne of France. Charles, on the other hand, was Henry's nephew. But France was constantly giving aid to Scotland, whether secretly or openly, in her continual fight with England. Scotland, however, had just been beaten to her very knees in the battle of Flodden, and had little fighting left in her for the moment. With such forces as these opposed to France the wonder really is that she maintained her power undiminished. It is yet more wonderful that, under Francis, she should have been ready for still further adventures in Italy. Yet she did so adventure, and though she and her king met with grievous disaster there—especially at the battle of Pavia where Francis was made prisoner and whence he was taken to Madrid—we have to notice that at the death of Francis, shortly before the middle of the century, France was in possession of the provinces of Savoy and Piedmont, both on the Italian side of the Alps—and this, although Charles had been crowned "King of Italy" by the Pope nearly twenty years earlier. Probably the explanation lies chiefly in the fact that the territories over which Charles ruled were so extensive, and also so scattered, that it was impossible for him to bring any great force together at any one place. Moreover, on his south-eastern border, in and around Austria, he was constantly menaced by the Turks ever pressing up from Constantinople. He seems to have tried to rid himself of the Turkish trouble by handing over to his brother some of the provinces on the side which lay most dangerously exposed; but even so their defence must have remained practically on his hands.
He never made good his claim to Burgundy—in which matter again it is rather wonderful that Francis should have been able to resist him. And, not having Burgundy in his possession, he was obliged to maintain a fleet able to command the seas on the west of France in order to go to and fro between Spain and the Netherlands. He must also have a second fleet of ships for bringing treasure from the East; and, since Spain had a long sea-coast on the Mediterranean where the Turks and pirates swarmed, he must have yet a third fleet there for the protection of his trade. Besides, he had a claim of sovereignty over Naples and Sicily.
Therefore, with these, and other less important, calls upon his power it is really not surprising, great although that power was, that it did not prove equal to all he would have liked to demand of it. And further, in those states over which he had been elected Emperor, with the rather vague authority and duties belonging to that title, another cause arose of great and increasing trouble, the Reformation.
Luther
For the last few pages we have been occupied with kings and emperors: it is time that our story concerned itself with the cleric of low degree. I put this phrase in place of that which was on my pen's tip to write, namely, "humble cleric," because, however we may think of Luther, "humble" he certainly does not appear. Humble before God he may indeed, as a good Christian, have been. It was perhaps the most striking feature in his character that he would not humble himself before men—not even before that great man whom he had been taught to look on as endowed with a quite special grace and blessing, the Pope of Rome. His origin was humble enough. He was the son of a miner in the German state of Saxony. He had the education of a monk, was made Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He went on a pilgrimage to Rome and came back grieving sorely over what he saw there.
The way in which the Pope and his council, called the Curia, had been governing, or misgoverning, the Church, had given great offence for many years. The monasteries and the convents, that is to say, the establishments of the monks and the nuns, had done much useful work in acquiring learning and in educating the people throughout Christendom in religious and other knowledge. Many of them were doing good work still. But the condition of most of them appears to have become very bad, both monks and nuns being lazy, gluttonous, and worse—setting the worst possible example to the common people. They were careful perhaps about the performance of the religious ceremonies in the churches, but their religion had little or no influence on the conduct of their lives.
Against Rome itself the complaint of Christendom was not only that it did not exercise its authority to amend these ill practices, and that the very same practices were followed in Rome itself, but also that the Pope and his council exacted money, from the people generally and even from the clergy themselves, and did not apply the money to the purposes for which it had been demanded. For the demand was made on the plea that the money was needed to equip armies to fight the Turk, and those armies were never summoned or put in movement. The money was diverted to increase the private wealth and pomp of Pope and Cardinals and high church dignitaries at Rome.
So there was sufficient cause of offence, both at the centre and in every part of the world over which the Pope claimed authority. We saw in the last volume how our own Wycliffe, and how Huss, in Bohemia, had raised furious protests against these evils in the Church. The fire of those fierce protests was still smouldering. The people understood the protests better. The knowledge of the Bible was not so entirely the possession of the clerics as it had been. The printing press had made many copies. Moreover, the Greeks and the knowledge of the Greek language, in which the New Testament was written, had been widely dispersed when the Turks took Constantinople—the headquarters of the Greek Church.
Luther's first act of protest against the action of Rome was directed against the sale of "Indulgences," as they were called. These "indulgences" were written pardons for sin. They were even credited with power to bring out of Purgatory a soul that was there already. And they—that is to say, the parchments or papers with the pardon written on them—could be bought. They could be bought from people called "pardoners" who sold them on behalf of Rome, and the Pope's explanation was that the money was needed for the building at Rome of the Cathedral of St. Peter.
The burning of the "Bull"
Luther boldly declared that the "indulgences" were valueless, because no man, not even the Pope, had the power to forgive sins, and he nailed a declaration to this effect on the door of the great church at Wittenberg and sent another copy to his Archbishop. At first the Pope seems to have made light of the matter; but at length, as Luther's supporters increased in number, he issued a Bull of excommunication against Luther as a heretic, summoning him to Rome to give an account of his actions, and commanding the burning of books which he had written against Rome. We have seen before what such a Bull meant. It had meant so much in the way of setting a man outside the protection of the laws in this world, and in condemning him in the world to come, that even the great Emperor Frederic had to yield before it, cowed and vanquished. The act of the monk of Wittenberg, when he received it, was to throw it publicly on the fire kindled for the very purpose in an open space of the city!
The fire created by the burning of the Papal document set all the smouldering embers into a more furious flame than ever before. That burning of the Bull happened in 1520.
Luther did not go to Rome; but he did go, when summoned by Charles, the Emperor, and appeared before him at the Diet, or meeting, of the German States, held at Worms. Charles, after listening to his passionate pleadings, pronounced that he should receive the treatment of a heretic, but he was allowed to leave Worms and start for his home. On the journey he was taken prisoner by the Elector of Saxony, who had always been a friend to him. It is supposed that this capture was effected for his better protection. In his imprisonment he made the translation into German of the New Testament. Later, he translated the whole Bible.
It is not impossible that this capture was made with the cognisance of Charles himself. The course of events forced him to side with the Pope and oppose the reformers, but there are several incidents which show him much more anxious to make peace, if that were possible, between the two parties, than to take a leading part in the strife. He had much to attend to elsewhere. In 1526 the Protestant states of Germany had leagued themselves together for mutual support; and in the very same year the Turks had made themselves masters of the whole of Hungary, and reduced it to a Turkish province.
It was now only a year since Charles had released Francis, whom he had taken prisoner at Pavia, after making a solemn compact with him; yet Francis was already intriguing against him. Francis had induced the Pope of all people—the Pope whom Charles had so helped against Francis—to be his ally against Charles. Charles's reply was to send a strong force into Italy which sacked Rome and took the Pope prisoner. Thus he disposed of that trouble. He then again made peace with Francis on liberal terms. The Pope was soon set at liberty and returned to his see, but he seems to have learnt his lesson—namely, that Charles held a power far too great to be opposed, if he cared to put that power forth. In 1530 Charles was crowned King of Italy by the Pope and at the same time he received the Pope's consecration as Emperor.
Spread of Reformation
Meanwhile the Turks had been extending their aggressions and besieged Venice. And the Reformation, that schism, or cleaving off, which denied the authority of the Pope, spread more widely and took deeper root. Its direction of growth was chiefly northward, from Saxony which is one of the Southern German states. It worked up through Germany and so to Scandinavia and Denmark, to the Netherlands and to France. The help of those German princes who had formed themselves into a Protestant league was essential to Charles if he was to be successful in repelling the Turks, and he consented to withdraw the edicts condemning the so-called "heretics" which had been passed by his own authority.
Finally he did march against the Turks, and though he did not gain any striking victory, a peace on favourable terms was made with them in 1538, after their fleet had suffered a heavy defeat from the Venetians. For the Turks were constantly at war at various points of their wide empire. On the eastern, the Persian side, there was continual fighting, with the result that they maintained their hold on Bagdad, the capital; but it was a possession which they always had to keep strongly defended. Their pirate fleets had established themselves in Tunis and Algiers on the North African coast. Charles made two naval expeditions against them, in the first of which he succeeded tolerably, but in the second had no success at all. The Moslem corsairs remained dominant in the Mediterranean until they suffered a notable defeat in the famous battle of Lepanto in 1571.
Luther died in 1546, boldly uttering, both by speech and writing, his doctrines until the last. He lived to see them firmly grounded in Germany, and spreading north and west. On the Continent of Europe the kings were in opposition to them. In England, exceptional circumstances arose which disposed Henry VIII. to receive them with favour.
Rather as Francis was attracted by the idea of adding to his French possessions the northern and western provinces of Italy, so Henry VIII. was tempted by the desire to regain for England some of the continental territory that had once been hers. It was largely to this end that he had sought alliance with Spain and had helped Spain and the Pope in driving the French out of Italy in 1512. Later he had the assistance of the King of Spain in an invasion of a part of France which had belonged to England in a former reign. He gained a quick success, but before he could establish himself in the conquered province the Spanish help was withdrawn. The adventure gained nothing for England, but cost her a large sum and created much dissatisfaction among the people.
The idea of the Spanish alliance had been in the mind of Henry VIII.'s father, before him, and to confirm it he had married his eldest son to a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon. That eldest son died, and left Catherine a widow. Henry VIII. pursuing the same policy, sought, and obtained, from the Pope a "dispensation," as it was called—that is to say, a permission—to marry Catherine, although she was his brother's widow.
Henry VIII. and his Queens
The alliance with Spain did not bring Henry nearly all that he had hoped of it. He was disgusted by the withdrawal from France of the Spanish force that we have just noted. Catherine's children died, with the exception of a daughter, Mary. Perhaps his great minister, Cardinal Wolsey, put it into Henry's head that there was a curse on his marriage with his brother's widow, or perhaps it was a thought that came to him without Wolsey's suggestion. However it came, it seems that it took possession of him. He expressed doubts about the legality of the marriage. Also he had fallen in love with a lady of the Court, Anne Boleyn. He began to desire the annulment of his marriage with Catherine in order that he might marry Anne Boleyn, and approached the Pope with a request that he should pronounce that marriage invalid and illegal. It was, in effect, asking the head of the Church, who, in theory, could do no wrong, and was infallible, to confess that such infallible authority had erred.
The Pope was not at all anxious to make an enemy of Henry. In the troubles created by Luther's preaching and writing, Henry, so late as 1521, had appeared as a true friend to the Pope by ordering the burning of all Luther's books. So the Pope sent great Churchmen to England to look into the matter of the marriage. There was much talk and many conferences, but in the end Henry must have realised, what he probably had deemed probable from the beginning, that the Pope would not reverse a former decision. He could not get his marriage declared to be illegal by the Church at Rome. He determined to act without that Church, to have the illegality pronounced by English bishops, whom he could trust to express such opinions as he should command them to utter, and to proceed in accordance with their views thus expressed. Catherine was divorced. He married Anne Boleyn.
Once he had taken this step, he followed on the path to which it led, never looking back. The proud Cardinal Wolsey fell from the king's favour, largely by reason of his pride and arrogant ostentation which had raised him up a number of enemies among the English nobles, but he was succeeded by another adviser, Thomas Cromwell, whose influence was even greater in determining the king to be the absolute master of England. Under Wolsey he had gone far in this direction. Parliament had power in its hands, because it had the power of granting subsidies for the king's wars and expenses. Wolsey had advised the king not to summon Parliament, but to extort contributions from his subjects instead. They did not give cheerfully, nor to the full extent of the sums demanded, but they gave grudgingly, in fear of punishment for some charge that would be brought against them if they did not.
Under Cromwell's influence, the king did call his Parliament together; but by that time, with his growing power, he had succeeded in getting his own friends in a majority in that Parliament. And in order to put down any possible opposition in the Upper House, he did not hesitate to bring to the executioner's block some of the noblest and most venerable of the Peers. It was a reign of terror, with Henry as absolute despot.
And he made himself despotic in the Church no less; for that was the final end of that path on which he made the first step when he divorced Catherine and married Anne in defiance of Rome. For first came thunders, ever louder and louder, from Rome, answered by ever louder defiance. It was defiance that was not displeasing to a large number in England. Already, before any of the ideas of the Reformation were introduced, we have noticed England growing restive under the attempts of the Popes of Rome to dictate to her. We may be sure that this restiveness had been increased of later years. Some of the clergy themselves, as we have seen, were none too pleased at the demands which Rome made upon them for money for Turkish wars, or for the building of St. Peter's Cathedral. They were the less pleased, because of a strong suspicion that it never was intended to use the money for the purposes stated.
Henry, therefore, and his powerful and ruthless counsellor were able to turn this dissatisfaction to their own use. The clergy were very ready to support Henry in asserting that the English Church was not to be subservient to Rome. Even the bishops in the Upper House probably thought that they were doing a good work for the freedom of the Church when they passed the Act called the Act of Supremacy which made the King of England head of the English Church. That Church was indeed freed, by the Act, from the authority of Rome, but it was only to put it under another authority, the authority of the English king.
And it gave equally little offence to the majority of the clergy when the king drove the monks from their monasteries, and took their land and its revenues for the service of the Crown or gave them to his friends. The good work of the monasteries had been done, and they had passed the time of their usefulness, for their inmates no longer studied to acquire knowledge, nor imparted it to the laity and their children. Only in the north of England did their suppression rouse opposition and lead to a dangerous rising which the Crown's forces put down with great severity.
But education had been spreading in England, as elsewhere in Christendom, in spite of the religious troubles. The new opening of the ancient stores of classical literature, and their diffusion by the printing press, could scarcely fail to arouse the interest of men of intelligence.
The spirit of protest against Rome which Luther preached had this, at least, in common with the spirit in which Henry of England acted, that both were bitterly and even violently opposed to the Pope's claim of authority. So this spirit of the Reformation made its way in England without encountering the difficulties which it had met in other parts of Europe. The clergy, who, in an earlier reign, would have opposed it, had now become subject, in part by their own act, to the King of England rather than to the Pope of Rome. Protestantism was accepted as the State religion.
In Ireland also Henry declared himself head of the Church as well as king. All Acts of the Irish Parliament, from his reign for several centuries, had to receive the assent of England before they became law.
Of the four great men who had so large a share in the making of our story in the first half of the sixteenth century, the monk, the most important figure of the four, was the first to die, in 1546. The next year saw the deaths of Francis and of Henry. Charles, greatest of the three kings, lived on until 1558, though he laid down his honours two years or so earlier and retired to a monastery to end his days.
By the death of Francis, Charles was relieved of his life-long enemy, and took advantage of that relief to turn all his attention to the Protestant princes of Germany who were leagued together to support their faith by arms. He defeated them at that time, and, using his victory, as was his custom, with moderation, he drew up a document called the "Interim," a statement of doctrines to which he hoped that both Catholics and Protestants would agree. It failed, however, to satisfy either. Five years later the Protestant princes again took arms, and this time their Emperor, whom they found unprepared, had to fly for his life. The ultimate result was a treaty called the Peace of Religion, of which the most important provision was that the Emperor permitted the Protestants, so far as the permission lay with him to give, to hold their doctrines and perform their religious services as they thought right.
The Peace of Religion
It was a beautiful name—the Peace of Religion—but unfortunately the name of peace was not sufficient to ensure that peace would follow. Even within the Protestant Church itself there soon arose acute differences of opinion.
The doctrines of the monk won their way over most of North-Western Europe. Into Scandinavia and Denmark they were introduced with the support and favour of the king himself. They made little penetration on the eastern side, for the simple reason that those particular abuses against which they protested did not exist there. Their protest was mainly against evil practices in the Church of Rome. But over Russia, rising into greatness in the east of Europe, the Greek Church prevailed. Constantinople, until its capture by the Turks, had been the capital city, the Holy Place, of that Church; but now the Tsar of Russia claimed to be its head, speaking from his capital city of Moscow.
We saw something of the break-up of the Mongol power, which had extended over nearly the whole of Asia and threatened Europe also, when we were recounting the story of China. The blow that was dealt it at the end of the fourteenth century by the Buddhist monk who became the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty doubtless helped in its break-up even so far away as its western border. The centre of its power was shattered. It no longer had the strength that comes from unity. The Mongols fell apart into a number of independent tribes. Early in the sixteenth century Russia began to throw off the domination with which those Mongols, or Tartars, always threatened her, and from time to time exercised. She had partly amalgamated with the Tartars, and partly ruled over them, by the middle of that century.
The knowledge of Russia began about the same time to be brought to England, by traders who had found their way to Moscow by adventurous voyages round the top of Scandinavia and so on to the White Sea, whereon is the city of Archangel, and so down into the centre and capital of the great country, travelling partly by river and partly overland. A treaty, for the exchange of the products of the two countries, was made, and the English were allowed to build warehouses for storing those goods which they brought in to trade with and those Russian goods which they obtained in return.
It is of interest to note that this discovery of Muscovy, as Russia for a long while was called in England, was made by sailors in search of a very different land, namely, China. For there was an idea in the minds of the men of the fifteenth century that a way to China, and all its riches, might be found by sea round the top of Scandinavia and so eastward until China was reached.
And so, in fact, some sort of a way was ultimately found through Behring's Straits—the narrow sea-way between the extreme north-east of Asia and the extreme north-west of America. But it is a way so blocked by the ice for so large a part of the year as to be of no practical use, and the discovery of the south-west passage round the Cape took all the interest and zest out of the search for what was called the North-West Passage. Portuguese trading vessels had reached China and Japan before the middle of the century and missionaries of the Order of Jesus, or Jesuits, had introduced Christianity into Japan as they had already brought it to India. Spanish missionaries of the same great monastic order had carried Christianity westward into the New World. Thousands of Indians in Mexico and Peru and other countries conquered by the Spaniards were baptised as Christians. Churches and cathedrals built by the labour of the natives, which cost the Spaniards nothing, began to rise on the sites of the pagan temples.
Cross and Crescent
Thus both eastward and westward the Cross, the Christian emblem, travelled with the conquering sword of those who went by sea; but on land, and in the Mediterranean itself, the Mahommedan Crescent was carried far by the scimitar, or curved blade, of the Moslem.
The Moslem Turks fought their way, as we have seen, so far, in Europe, as Vienna, which they nearly, but not quite, captured. On the other side they had subdued Persia, and established themselves at Bagdad. Up to the year 1571 and the heavy defeat of their fleet at Lepanto, they continued to be the strongest naval force in the Mediterranean. It was in the first half of the century that they touched the highest point of their power and extended their sway most widely. In further course of the story we shall find them for the most part on the defensive, striving, especially against the growing might of Russia, to retain what they had won.
Towards the latter part of his reign that great king and emperor, Charles V., had trouble in the most northern section of his wide domain—in the Netherlands. He put down, with severity, a rising of the great city of Ghent, formidable, within its walls, because of the privileges that had been granted to its burghers, because of the wealth and of the numbers of its inhabitants and their independent spirit. This little trouble in the Netherlands might have sounded in his ears, if they had been able to appreciate its meaning, as the first note of an immense trouble that was to follow, for in the years to come we shall find unrest and fighting over almost the whole stage, which has become world-wide, of our story; and we may trace the origin of it all back to what now happened in that comparatively small corner which was called the Netherlands.
CHAPTER IV
THE WANING POWER OF SPAIN
Charles V. resigning the Crown of Spain, gave it over to his son Philip II., who married Mary, Queen of England. He had already ceded to him the kingdom of Naples. With the Crown of Spain went the Netherlands; and Charles would have wished his son to receive the Imperial title also. The Electors of Germany, however, refused to elect Philip and, with the assent of Charles, Ferdinand, Charles's younger brother, became the new Emperor.
Charles, although a firm supporter of the authority of the Church of Rome, had done his best, by the publication of that "Interim" mentioned in the last chapter, and by a merciful treatment of the defeated Protestants, to bring the two parties together again. He failed; but he had made the effort. The character of Philip did not dispose him to follow his father in any attempts at peace-making. He was ardently jealous for the ecclesiastical authority of Rome and appears to have had much of the tyrant's spirit: he was very impatient of opposition, and showed no favour to any who differed from him in opinion. Heresy was, in his view, a sin against the Church, which it was his duty to put down by the most effective means in his power, wherever he might find it among his subjects. Wherever it was even so much as suspected, the strictest search should be made for its unmasking.
And to him, being in this mood, there was a machine ready to his hand—an institution of the Church known as the Inquisition. Inquisition means inquiry; and the particular object for which the Inquisition was instituted was to inquire into alleged instances of heresy—that is to say, of doctrines and practices of which the Church did not approve—and also into instances of the practice of magic and sorcery, which were deemed to be miracles performed by men with the aid of the devil.
The first institution of "Inquisitors," or officials appointed for such inquiry, dated back to the early centuries of the Church's existence, and in those early centuries the punishment which the Inquisitors were allowed to impose on persons convicted of heresy were very mild in comparison with later penalties. They were not allowed to inflict death, nor to use torture in order to extract confession.
In the time of Philip II., the Inquisition in Spain, under the name of the Holy Office, became largely independent of the Church of Rome. It actually brought before its Courts bishops of the Church. And it shrank from no cruelty of torture inflicted on suspected persons, in order to make them confess: it even tortured witnesses, to extract from them the testimony, true or false, which the Inquisitors desired. Convicted persons were publicly burnt. There was no appeal from its decisions. An accused person had scarcely a chance of escaping conviction. And the religious zeal of the Inquisitors was quickened by the circumstance that the estates of the convicted were confiscated and distributed to the Church, or partly to the Church and partly to the Crown.
Netherlands in revolt
It is no more than fair to the Church of Rome to say that though the severity and injustice of the Inquisition under the Church's direct authority were harsh enough, they were far less cruel than under the Holy Office of Spain, which became a veritable terror. The Netherlanders had largely accepted reformed doctrines. They had become Protestant, that is to say heretics, in the eyes of Philip. He had been their sovereign only a few years when he sent his Inquisitors among them to root the heresy out by torture, confiscation of estates, and by burning at the stake. The natives were brave and stubborn. They resisted with armed force.
It had all the aspect of a vain, even a ridiculous resistance—bound to fail, certain to be punished with relentless cruelty. To enforce obedience and to carry out measures of punishment, Philip sent an army under command of a general notorious for his harsh severity, the Duke of Alva. In such an outlined sketch as this the details cannot be given of the extraordinary struggle which the Netherlands, under that very great leader and statesman, William of Orange, surnamed the Silent, finally brought to a successful end against all the might of Spain. Again and again their endurance seemed on the point of being overcome. Once, at least, they were saved only by the desperate expedient of breaking chasms in the raised dykes which protect that low-lying land from the sea, and allowing the water to flood the country. They had a small naval force before this struggle began. Dutch ships had helped Charles in that attempt which he made to put down the Mahommedan pirates of the north coast of Africa. Now, as the fight with Spain went on, they added to their fleet. With but a few ships, they gained a victory, which meant much to them, over a far larger Spanish fleet. Some of the Spanish ships captured in that battle helped to increase their own naval forces.
England, under Mary, whom Philip had married in 1554, naturally would give Holland no help. She had, besides, her own religious troubles, for Mary, under her husband's direction, was doing all that she dared to bring England back under the authority of Rome. No tribunal with the name of Inquisition or of Holy Office was established, but the persecution of Protestants, with torture and burning, went forward almost as briskly as if there had been. A small force came to Holland's help from Germany, at one moment of the long struggle, but little could be expected from that country, in which the states were divided in their sympathies between Rome and the Reformation. The attitude of France was uncertain and varied. Her natural action would have been to oppose Spain, as in the days of Francis and Charles, but she was a Roman Catholic country. She was distracted, too, by her own troubles with her own Protestants, called Huguenots. The form of Protestantism which had made its way in France was somewhat different from that taught by Luther. It inclined to the doctrines taught by Calvin. But Calvin was a reformer as earnest and even more bitter than Luther himself in opposition to Rome. It was what has been called, after him, the Calvinistic form of Protestantism which prevailed in the Netherlands also, and, with some modification, in England and Scotland. The details of the difference we need not consider. The main feature which they had in common and which so affected this Greatest Story was their resistance to Rome.
The Huguenots
The origin of that name Huguenot, by which the Protestants in France were known, is doubtful, nor does it greatly matter. Beginning in the reign of Francis, the reformed party in France grew stronger during the reign of several succeeding kings. There were two great families in France at this time, the Bourbons and the Guises. The former became leaders of the Protestants and the latter of the Catholics. Civil war broke out in 1562. Elizabeth of England sent troops to help the Huguenots, but the fortune of the war went against them. A Catholic League was formed for their extermination. A general massacre of Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day, in 1572, has made that day lamentable in the reformed Church ever since.
Still the Protestants held on, in the far west of France, under the leadership of that Henry of Navarre who became King of France in 1589. To bring peace to his country he formally declared himself a Catholic, but he so favoured the cause of reform that two years before the end of the century he passed a famous measure, the Edict of Nantes, by which the French Protestants were granted freedom to think and act as they pleased in all religious matters, without penalty of any kind.
Such being the divisions in France during the struggle of the Netherlands against Spain, it was not likely that she would give much assistance to either side. Elizabeth sent a small army, which effected little. She might perhaps have been more liberal with her help, but England had her full share of troubles too. There was still a large English party sympathising with Rome. The change in the State religion which Elizabeth effected as soon as she succeeded her half-sister Mary—the Catholic and the wife of the King of Spain—was not easy. She found herself with a French war on her hands, a war into which Philip had persuaded Mary towards the end of her reign. Almost its only result had been that Calais, England's last possession in France, had been lost to her.
Elizabeth quickly made peace with France; and that peace included Scotland also. We have seen, and we shall see again, how ready France always was to embarrass England by taking the side of Scotland in the constant Scottish and English wars. Elizabeth made peace with France; but since at this moment there really were two parties dividing France, it was not easy to be at peace with both. Elizabeth, as we also have seen, so far helped the Bourbons, the Huguenots, as to send some troops to their aid; and for that aid Havre, with its fine harbour at the mouth of the Seine, was handed over to England. But the Huguenots were defeated. Havre was English only for a very short time.
And Catholic France was now again helping Scotland, favouring the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots, who married a short-lived French king. In Scotland the reformed religion, of Calvin's type, had taken a hold which was destined to grow firmer as time went on; but for the present the Catholics were in strength there too. Their queen was Catholic. She was hardly more than in name a queen, for she was but a child when she came to the throne, and spent years of her short life as Elizabeth's prisoner. Finally she was executed, most probably by Elizabeth's order, although it was an order which Elizabeth denied.
It was almost wholly by their own stout courage that the United Provinces, as they were called, of the Netherlands did at length gain their freedom, and not only freedom to serve God as they saw fit, but also freedom from the sovereignty of Spain. It was a freedom which was not formally acknowledged till many years later; but it was practically won in 1579. These United Provinces were seven in number, of which one was called Holland: and this Holland came, after a while, to be the name for the whole. The seven lay in the north, and were united as a federation under the rule of William of Orange. The southern provinces remained for a while longer under the power of Spain.
Into this new and free State came many of the reformed religion flying from persecution in their own countries. Holland became populous. Her industries developed. Her foreign trade increased. She had a large trading fleet. It ventured into those waters round the Cape of Good Hope which the Portuguese claimed as their own. It disputed with them the trade of the islands in the Malay Archipelago. And even here the fighting took on something of a religious character, for the battle was between ships of Protestant Holland and of Catholic Portugal.
Exactly the same character pertained to certain encounters of ships which began to take place more and more frequently westward of the line which the Pope's Bull had marked out to divide the sphere of Portugal from that of Spain—encounters between the ships of Elizabeth and of Philip of Spain. By the year 1581 that line lost what importance it ever had, because Philip made good, by force of arms, his rather doubtful claim to the throne of Portugal. For three reigns, lasting over sixty years, the King of Spain was King of Portugal also, although the smaller kingdom never lost her national identity.
England's Navy
England had begun to have a considerable fleet. She had long had necessity for ships of war to protect her exports, principally of wool, to the Continent. She was under the necessity of making her fleet stronger and stronger by reason of the growing strength, just noted, of the Dutch fleet, which came from all the ports across the Channel. And especially she had need to strengthen it since Philip, whose proposal of marriage Elizabeth had declined, threatened her with his Armadas. Hostility to England had become a religious duty in his sight. Elizabeth had been excommunicated. The Act of Supremacy, by virtue of which her father had been declared head of the Church in England, had been passed again in her favour, in order to wipe out the measures of reaction towards Rome which had marked the reign of Mary. Ireland had risen in revolt in 1560, and a joint expedition of Spaniards and Italians landed to aid the rebels. They were overwhelmed and destroyed by one, Raleigh, whom Elizabeth knighted as Sir Walter.
And so, on the English side, and on the side of all the princes of Europe who professed the reformed religion, the war against Spain became a religious war. To waylay the Spanish treasure-ships from the Indies was an adventure which appealed to the sailors of England. It gratified them to get these treasures for their own and for their Queen and country, and moreover it was this wealth, thus robbed from the conquered Indies, with which the enemies of the reformed Church built and equipped their ships of war. So we have Drake and Frobisher and other heroes adventuring into the Pacific and even sailing round the world in vessels which seem to us almost ridiculously small for such great enterprise. They attacked any Spanish ship they met, they landed and sacked Spanish settlements in South America, they even ventured into the very harbours of Spain herself, to "singe the King of Spain's beard," as they put it.
The King of Spain could not for ever endure these "singeings" so insulting to his dignity. In 1588 he launched, for the destruction of England, the largest naval force ever seen. It was that force known to history as the Great Armada.
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.
Our country was saved assuredly more by the storms of heaven than by the valour of even such splendid fighting seamen as the troublous times had produced. Survivors of the vast fleet of Spain, after a severe hammering by Drake in the Channel, completely circumnavigated our islands, going eastward and northward through the Straits of Dover and so round the north coasts of Scotland and down along the western shores, everywhere losing ships on the way. Even now, in such lonely places as some of the small islands lying to the north of Scotland, are found evidences of the Spaniards' wreckage. Only a very small number of that Grand Armada sailed their crippled way back into the harbours of Spain.
In the years that followed, England then being allied with Henry IV. of France, her ships were seen more than once attacking the shipping in the very harbours of proud Spain.
It is obvious, from the position as official head of the reformed Church in which the Act of Supremacy had first placed our Henry VIII., and had then confirmed, in a position of scarcely less authority, his daughter Elizabeth, that the form which Protestantism took in England, as the State religion, differed from its forms elsewhere. On the Continent, none of the rulers of the States that had adopted the doctrines of Luther or of Calvin had thought of claiming such a position. In England under Henry and under Elizabeth it must have seemed that, while protesting against the authority of the Pope over the Church, Englishmen acquiesced in a like authority vested in the Crown. It was a transfer of allegiance. But Luther, and yet more so Calvin, would have bitterly resented that the Church should be under any authority except that of her own choosing. Moreover, the English Protestants retained many of the ceremonies and services, and performed many of the rites, of the Church of Rome. Calvin's ideal of worship was that it should consist in the simplest and most direct communication of man with God, with no aids of beautiful music and rich colour and other appeal to the emotions, such as the Romans used. All this he specially hated. The rules of life among pious followers of Calvin were extremely strict. Austere behaviour and a serious expression of countenance were rigidly demanded of them. They regarded even the most innocent amusement as contrary to the spirit of their religion.
This is perhaps a difference which it would be out of place, in a story sketched in mere outlines, to mention even at such short length as this, were it not that it was a difference which had serious consequences in the reigns of those Scottish kings who succeeded Elizabeth on the throne of England. How that came about was thus:
The Puritans
In the reign of Mary, the Roman Catholic queen, very many English Protestants had fled abroad. They had gone to lands where the Calvinistic doctrines were followed. Under Elizabeth they ventured back into their native land; and the form of Protestantism that they found there was a shock to them. They could not range themselves as members of a Church that had practices which they detested. They formed themselves into a separate sect under the name of Puritans. At once they found themselves in opposition to, not in conformity with (and were therefore sometimes spoken of as Non-conformists), the national Church. They were subjected to persecution even by a Protestant Government. From denying the authority of the Crown as head of the Church, it was not a very long step to denying the authority of the Crown in other, less spiritual, matters. And it was this denial that led to Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, to the cutting off of Charles I.'s head, to the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers to America, and all that was to follow therefrom. Surely we are justified in finding a space to note a difference of opinion in which such astonishing things had their beginning.
During Elizabeth's reign our country was reduced to its insular boundaries, and yet never before does there seem to have been a time when England was so aware of her greatness as she was under Elizabeth. Never, moreover, was there such a splendour of English literary achievement, from the plays of Shakespeare downward.
The truth is that she really was doing a very great work, though probably Englishmen of that day only dimly realised what that work was. She, with the Dutch and other Protestant States, was gradually wearing down the greatness of Spain, and all that Spain stood for.
What Spain stood for was despotic power in Church and State. Our Henry and Elizabeth were despotic in both, but the Stuart kings who succeeded them were not made of the right human stuff for despots, and both Church and State won freedom under them. Spain's power suffered a gradual but constant diminution. She was fighting on all sides—constantly struggling with France or Italy.
And Elizabeth's seamen kept harrying her in every quarter of the Atlantic and even in the far Pacific, The English Colony of Newfoundland was established. Elizabeth had relations as far east and south as Persia, as far east and north as Muscovy, where Russia was gradually consolidating herself.
Russia gained an important victory over the Turks in 1569. Moscow, her capital, was indeed burnt by invading Mongols as late as 1571, but in the year following the conquerors were themselves defeated. The other Slav State, Poland, gained a great accession of strength by absorbing the large territories of Livonia and Lithuania. During the sixteenth century we do not find the Scandinavian nations taking much direct part in the big story, but in 1587 the King of Sweden was King of Poland also. The general tendency of affairs in that part of the world's stage, however, was for those two, Poland and Russia, to be forming themselves into two strong nations of Slav people, on the eastern border of the Teutonic people of Germany. That is an element in the story to be borne in mind.
Affairs in the East
Farther eastward again, Russia was extending her power in Siberia and working out towards that China of which there is still little story to tell, because, of all nations of the world, she has ever changed least and most slowly. The day had not yet come for Russia's reaching southward towards Constantinople on the one side or towards India on the other. The Turk was as yet so strong that she had to fight hard to keep him out of her own borders. She was still on the defensive in that south-western corner of her empire.
But India had to suffer invasion nevertheless in this sixteenth century by a people coming down from Afghanistan and the north. They were Mongols, usually given the name of Moguls. They were a Mahommedan people, and under the reign of the Grand Mogul, Akbar, which covered nearly all the latter half of the century, they were continually extending their rule over the Hindus. It is in this Mahommedan invasion that we see the real beginning of that division and opposition in India of Hindus and Mahommedans which has played a large part in the story of that country ever since, and which is a principal cause of her troubles even to-day. There were Moslems in India before the coming of the so-called Moguls, but not in anything like the same force or number.
On the eastern side of Afghanistan lay Persia, and beyond Persia, to the west again, began the Turkish Empire. Between the Persians and these Ottoman Turks—Mahommedans both, but belonging to different sects—fighting went on with little pause, and with no result of any long duration. Persia's position was difficult, for on the eastern border she was always subject to attack from the Moguls. That she kept her independence is due in part doubtless to the valour of her soldiers, but also, in large part, to the engagements of the Moguls with India and of the Turks with their European neighbours on land and sea. Even the heavy defeat of the Turkish navy at Lepanto by no means put an end to their activities in the Mediterranean. In 1573, two years after that battle, they lost Tunis; but were still strong enough to regain that valuable port the very next year.
CHAPTER V
THE WARS OF RELIGION
Elizabeth died in 1603, and there was no descendant of Henry VIII. to inherit the throne. But Henry VII.'s daughter had married the King of Scotland, and a grandson of Henry VII. now held the Scottish Crown with the title of James VI. On the death of Elizabeth he became rightful hereditary King of England also, with the title of James I.
And now it might indeed seem as if the United Kingdom was about to enter upon years of peace and glory. Elizabeth's prudence and the valour of her seamen had won her military fame. Her alliance was sought by princes as far off as the Tsar of Russia and the Sophy, as the ruler was called, of Persia. She had possessions in India, far away in the East, in America far in the West. For the first time in her story she had Scotland as a second self, instead of a constant enemy on her very border. Ireland appeared to be subjugated. And she had no possessions on the Continent to draw her into troubles with France.
This hopeful prospect was soon clouded over owing, in large measure, to the folly of the Stuart kings, as that dynasty was called of which the Scottish James was the first. And yet, if it had not been for their folly, and also for their weakness, it is possible that England might have had to suffer even greater trials than did befall her, by reason of the despotic power which had been won for the Crown by Henry VIII, and his great ministers Wolsey and Cromwell. But before that power could be broken, and the people could regain the rights that legally were theirs under the provisions of Magna Carta, the country had to suffer miserably through civil war and one of the kings had to lose his head on the executioner's block.
James I. tried to govern as Henry VIII. had governed before him, that is to say, he tried to govern without summoning a Parliament. Legally it was Parliament only that could vote the money that the king required to carry on the government. James tried to extort this money by what were politely called "loans." If those from whom they were demanded paid the required contributions, well and good. If they refused to pay, the Crown had sufficient power to misuse the processes of the law so as to punish them for their refusal.
The "middle class"
Henry had been able to govern despotically because the power of the nobles had been so reduced by the Wars of the Roses, and because he did not hesitate to reduce their power still further by executing all who withstood him. But by the time we come to the seventeenth century and the Stuart kings we find a change in the composition of the nation. It is a change which had been in progress elsewhere in Europe. It was that change by which what was soon to be called the "middle class" came into existence.
We saw it beginning first, where all modern culture had its first beginning and rebirth (renaissance) in the cities of Italy. It was the change occasioned by the growing habit of men to live in towns and cities, in larger collections, no longer so scattered. After the cities of Italy, we saw that the cities of the Netherlands came to be strong and to acquire much independence. In our own land London was, from a very early day, the chief city. Its power was the greater because it had, like the Continental cities, its trained bands, its citizens who were more or less trained as soldiers, ready to fight for the city liberties under the lead of the Lord Mayor as the chief citizen. Our country never produced quite such important citizens of this class as the Doges, as the rulers of Venice were called, or the Medici, the great bankers, the merchant princes, of Florence, and others. We may class our Lord Mayor more nearly with the Burgomasters of the semi-independent cities of the Netherlands. True, he never either had or claimed an independence equal to theirs at the time of their greatest power: but that was a power which became much diminished during the struggles of the Reformation period.
It is worth notice that many words in our language indicate how the dwellers in cities and towns seem to have been considered as necessarily superior in culture and civilisation to the countrymen. The very word "civilisation" itself is from "civis," a citizen, one who lives in a city. The man of "urbane" or "polite" manners is the man who lives in an "urbs," which is Latin for "town," or πόλις, which is Greek for "city."
Thus there grew everywhere a force of this kind, a force of burghers or townsfolk, a middle class, which increased in power as the numbers of townsmen and their riches increased. In England the people, as against the king, had an advantage which the people of Continental countries had not, in their legal right to send representatives to Parliament before contributing to the expense of government. The right existed, even while they were not able to enforce it. And with the growth of this new power of the middle class they began to have greater power for its enforcement, or, at least, greater power to resist the punishments which the king had tried to impose on those who refused to supply him with money which had not been legally voted for his use.
The Tudors, for all their masterfulness, had been more prudent than the Stuarts proved themselves. Even Henry VIII., in Wolsey's time, had consented to take only one-half of the sum which he had demanded as a contribution from the people. And we may often see that these Tudors, although they dealt so despotically with their nobility, appear to have kept a finger, as it were, on the pulse of the nation, and to have known how to give way when that pulse beat too forcibly in opposition. Perhaps it takes a strong character to yield, on occasion. Certainly the Tudors had what we should call strong characters, and they knew how to yield. The Stuarts had less strength, and they brought the country into cruel trouble by their inability to yield. Rather, perhaps, we should say, they yielded when they should have stood firm, and stood firm when they should have yielded. Had they yielded more discreetly the people would have had to wait longer for their freedom, though it is possible they might have won it by less painful means.
And although James's prospects looked so fair when he came to the throne of England, he yet came to a troubled inheritance. There was all that trouble between the State Church and the Puritans, a trouble which grew greater and which perhaps the Scottish element that James brought down to England with him increased. The Scottish element, if it were not Roman Catholic in religion, was mainly of the extreme Puritan type.
There was this double source of trouble, therefore—the king's illegal endeavour to govern and to extort supplies of money without a Parliament, and the increasing tension between the persecuted Puritan party and the party of the State Church. Both Puritans and Catholics had already suffered some persecution under Elizabeth, and under James these persecutions became more severe. It was only a year or two after his accession that the Gunpowder Plot was discovered—a plot contrived by the Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament and all the legislators therein. After this discovery, the persecution of the Catholics became more severe than ever.
The Stuart Kings
The Puritans did not attempt any desperate measures of the kind, but we have seen that the very spirit of the whole Protestant movement was a critical spirit, a spirit of judging, of forming an opinion and not merely accepting the opinion of some one else, even if that some one were the Pope himself. We have seen how difficult it was for those English Protestants who had been abroad to accept the conditions which they found when they returned to England—the king occupying a position in the Church not very different from that which the Pope claimed. They were very apt, then, to be critical in matters of government as well as in matters of religion. And the actions of James, and of all the Stuart kings, were of a kind to provoke a great deal of criticism. The feeling throughout England began to be very strong against the Crown. It was tension, strained feeling, between a large section of the nation—a section that began to be more powerful with that growing power, which we have noticed, of the middle class—and the king who was the head of the State Church.