I have now brought forward the great essays at political organisation attempted in Europe up to the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, and have exhibited their failures. In my progress, I have endeavoured to indicate the causes of that bad success, but in truth they are summed up in one. Society was not sufficiently advanced for unity and amalgamation; everything was still too local, special, and straitened in existences and minds. There were neither general interests nor general opinions capable of controlling particular interests and opinions. The most enlightened and vigorous minds had no idea of a truly public administration or of public justice. It was clearly requisite that a very active and powerful civilisation must first come to mingle, assimilate, and bray together, if I may be so allowed to speak, all these disjointed elements; that an energetic centralisation of interests, laws, manners, and ideas, must be effected; in a word, it was essential that a public power and a public opinion should be created. We have arrived at an epoch in which this great work was finally achieved. Its first symptoms, the state of minds and manners during the course of the fifteenth century, and their tendency towards the formation of a central government, and towards identity of tone in public feeling, will be treated of in the next lecture.
Lecture XI.
Rise Of Nations And Governments.
We are approaching the threshold of modern history, properly so called, the threshold of that society which is our own, the institutions, opinions, and manners of which were forty years ago those of France, are still those of Europe, and yet exercise upon us, in spite of the metamorphosis our revolution has made us undergo, a very powerful influence. It was in the sixteenth century, as I have previously mentioned, that modern society truly commenced. Before entering upon it, I shall give a backward glance at the space we have traversed.
Amidst the ruins of the Roman Empire, we discerned all the essential elements of our Europe; we saw them come out and grow into prominence, each on its own account, and independently. During the first epoch of our history, we became aware of the constant tendency of those elements to separation and isolation, to a local and special existence. Then, when this object appeared attained, when feudalism, the boroughs, and the church, had each taken its distinct form and place, we found them immediately bent upon a reconcilement and union, upon forming themselves into a general society, a national body and government. To obtain that result, all the different systems which co-existed in the various countries of Europe were successively applied to; the principle of social unity, the political and moral nucleus, was sought from theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, and royalty. We have seen that so far these attempts failed, and that no one system or influence was enabled to monopolise society, and by its sway to secure it a really public organisation. We discovered the cause of the failure to consist in the absence of general interests and ideas, in everything being still too special, individual, and local; and it was evident that a prolonged and energetic effort at centralisation was required, to enable society simultaneously to extend and cement itself—in other words, to become at once both great and regular—a goal for which it naturally longs. It was in this state that we left Europe at the end of the fourteenth century.
Europe was not able rightly to understand her position, such as I have endeavoured to display it. She did not know distinctly what were her deficiencies, or what remedies were needful. Yet she applied herself to seek out those remedies as if she had been perfectly aware of them. The miscarriage of all the grand attempts at political organisation having been made apparent, Europe fell naturally, and as if by instinct, into the ways of centralisation. The fifteenth century is characterised by having constantly tended to this result, by having laboured to create general interests and general ideas, to extirpate the spirit of speciality and locality, to unite and rear together existences and minds; in fine, to call into being what had never previously existed on a large scale—nations and governments.
The outbreak of this fact belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the fifteenth served to prepare it. The object of our immediate inquiry is that preparation, that imperceptible working towards centralisation, both in social relations and in ideas, which was afterwards accomplished by the natural course of events, without foresight or design.
It is after this manner that man advances in the execution of a plan which he has not himself conceived, of which he is even quite ignorant. He is the intelligent and free labourer in a work which is not his own, and which he only recognises and understands at a later date, when it manifests itself outwardly and in realities; and even then, his comprehension is imperfect. And yet it is by him, by the development of his intelligence and liberty, that the work is accomplished. Conceive a great machine, the purpose of which is known to only one mind, but its different pieces are confided to separate workmen, kept apart and strangers to each other. Not one of them is acquainted with the entirety of the work, nor the definitive and general result towards which he is co-operating; nevertheless each executes with intelligence and liberty, by rational and voluntary acts, that with which he has been intrusted. Thus is the plan of Providence as to the world executed by the hands of mortals, and thus co-exist those two facts which break out in the history of civilisation: the one, what it has of fatalism, that which is unaffected by human knowledge and will; and the other, what it is indebted to the liberty and intelligence of man, what he has therein infused of himself, from the operations of his thought and inclination.
In order perfectly to understand the fifteenth century, to obtain a clear and exact knowledge of that precursor of modern society, it will be proper to distinguish the different classes of facts. We will first examine the political facts and changes which have tended to form both nations and governments. We will then pass to the moral facts, and investigate the changes produced in ideas and manners, thence deducing what general opinions were in process of formation.
With regard to political facts, to simplify and expedite our progress, I will take all the great countries of Europe, and show what the fifteenth century made of them, in what state it found and left them.
I will commence with France. The last half of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century, were the times, as is well known, of the great national wars against the English. It was the epoch in which the struggle for the independence of the territories and name of France against a foreign sway was maintained. It is sufficient to take a glance at history, to perceive with what ardour all classes of society in France, in spite of numberless dissensions and acts of treachery, co-operated in that struggle, and what patriotism was displayed by the feudal nobility, the burghers, and even the peasants. If there were nothing but the history of Jeanne d'Arc to show the popular character of the era, it would be in itself a convincing proof. The Maid of Orleans sprang from the people, and she drew her inspiration and support from the feelings, convictions, and passions prevailing amongst the people. She was viewed with doubt, scorn, and even enmity by the gentry of the court and the chiefs of the army, but the soldiers and the people were her constant adherents. It was the peasants of Lorraine who sent her to the citizens of Orleans. No event could more strikingly evince the popular character of that war, and the feeling which the whole country bore regarding it.
Thus the French nationality commenced to be formed. Up to the reign of the Valois, the feudal character predominated in France, and the French nation, French spirit or patriotism, had no existence. It may be said that France began with the Valois, for it was in the course of their wars, and through the hazards of their fortunes, that the nobility, burgesses, and peasants were for the first time united by a moral tie, by the tie of a common name, a common honour, and an identical desire to subdue the enemy. Still there was no true political spirit, no great principle of unity in the government and the institutions, such as we conceive those terms to mean at the present day. The unity laboured for by France at that epoch was restricted to the glory of its name, to its national honour, and to the existence of a national royalty, whatever it might be, so that the foreigner was excluded from it. But even in this sense the contest with the English greatly promoted the formation of the French nation and its tendency towards concentration.
At the same time that France was thus morally forming itself, and the national spirit taking development, it was also constituting itself materially, so to speak—that is to say, its territory was arranged, extended, and consolidated. The incorporation of the greater number of the provinces which became France occurred at that period. Under Charles VII., after the expulsion of the English, almost all the provinces which they had occupied, Normandy, Angoumais, Touraine, Poitou, Saintonge, &c. became definitively French. Under Louis XI, ten provinces, of which three were subsequently lost and regained, were united to France; namely, Roussillon and Cerdagne, Burgundy, Franche-Comté, Picardy, Artois, Provence, Maine, Anjou, and Perche. Under Charles VIII. and Louis XII., the successive marriages of Anne with those two kings gave us Brittany. Thus, at the same epoch, and in the course of the same events, the national territory and spirit were conjointly formed; both moral France and physical France acquired together force and unity.
Passing from the nation to the government, we see facts of the same nature accomplished, an advancement to the same result. The French government was never more powerless, or more stripped of unity and connecting ties, than under the reign of Charles VI., and in the first part of that of Charles VII. At the end of that reign, things assumed a very different aspect. There was then evidently a consolidated, extended, and organised power; whilst all the great instruments of government—taxation, military force, and the administration of justice—were arranged upon a great scale, and with an appearance of forming parts of one whole. It was at this time that a standing soldiery was formed, composed of regular companies of cavalry, and archers as infantry. With these forces Charles VII. re-established some order in the provinces desolated by the debaucheries and rapine of the troops, even after the war had ceased. All contemporary historians expatiate upon the wonderful effects of the regular companies. It was at the same epoch that the poll-tax, one of the principal sources of the royal revenue, became perpetual; certainly a heavy blow aimed at the liberty of the people, but which powerfully contributed to the regularity and force of government. At the same time that great instrument of power, the administration of justice, was extended and organised. The number of parliaments was increased. Five new parliaments [Footnote 15] were instituted in a very short space of time; under Louis XI. the parliaments of Grenoble (in 1451), of Bordeaux (in 1462), and of Dijon (in 1477); under Louis XII. the parliaments of Rouen (in 1499), and of Aix (in 1501). The parliament of Paris then also assumed much more importance and stability, both with regard to the administration of justice, and as charged with the police of its jurisdiction.
[Footnote 15: From the very different meaning implied by the word parliament in Britain, it will be proper to remind the English reader that the parliaments of France were mere local tribunals, invested with scarcely any political or legislative character.]
Therefore under the heads of military force, taxation, and judicature—that is to say, in what forms its essence—the government acquired in France, during the fifteenth century, a character of unity, regularity, and stability which was previously unknown. The public power then definitively supplanted the feudal or local powers.
Identical with this fact was the accomplishment of another change, one less visible and less noticed by historians, but perhaps of still greater importance; namely, that which Louis XI. effected in the manner of governing.
Much has been said of the contest waged by Louis XI. against the nobles of the realm, of their reduction, and of his favour for the burghers and weaker individuals. There is some truth in all that, though much exaggeration has been made use of in describing it; and it is also true that the conduct of Louis XI., with the different classes of society, far oftener disturbed than served the state. But he did something much more important. Before his time, the government had scarcely ever proceeded except by force, by physical means. Persuasion, address, the art of managing men, and enticing them into the purposed vein—in a word, policy, properly so called, the policy of falsehood and of deceit doubtless, but also of skill and prudence, had previously been little used. Louis XI. substituted in his government intellectual for material means, trickery for force, the Italian system of policy for the feudal. Take the two men whoso rivalship fills that epoch of French history, Charles the Bold, [Footnote 16] and Louis XI.
[Footnote 16: Charles the Bold was the last Duke of Burgundy. The general reader cannot do better than take a glance at Sir Walter Scott's 'Quentin Durward' for an admirable picture of these two men.]
Charles was the representative of the ancient mode of governing; he proceeded by violence alone, and his appeal was incessantly to war. He was a person incapable of calm or patient reflection, or of addressing himself to the minds of men to mould them into instruments of success. It was, on the contrary, the delight of Louis XI. to avoid the employment of force, and to win men individually, by personal persuasion, or by apt appeals to their interests and understandings. He changed not the institutions or the outward system, but the hidden courses, the tactics of power. It was reserved for modern times to attempt a yet greater revolution, by tending to the substitution of justice in lieu of grasping selfishness, of candid and open dealing for falsehood and secrecy, as well as in the means adopted to gain political ends as in the ends themselves. Yet it was a great step to make, to cease the continual employment of force, to appeal to an intellectual superiority, to govern through the understandings of men, and not by inflicting injuries upon all existences. This Louis XI. commenced, in the midst of his crimes and errors, and in spite of his own perverse nature, at the instigation of his strong intellect alone.
From France I pass into Spain, where I find events of the same nature. It was likewise in the fifteenth century that the national unity of Spain was formed; and in that era was finished, by the conquest of the kingdom of Grenada, the long strife between the Christians and the Arabs. Then also the territory was consolidated: by the marriage of Ferdinand the Catholic with Isabella, the two principal kingdoms, Castile and Arragon, were united under the same power. As in France, the royal power was extended and strengthened; institutions of a harsher order, and bearing names more pregnant with wo, served as its props; instead of parliaments, it was the Inquisition which was established in Spain. It contained the seeds of what it afterwards became: but at the commencement it was very different: it was at first more political than religious, intended rather for the maintenance of order than for the defence of the faith. The analogy between the two countries is carried beyond the institutions to the very persons of the sovereigns. With less subtlety, with less of the mental movement, and with a smaller portion of restlessness and trickery, the character and government of Ferdinand the Catholic greatly resembled those of Louis XI. I attach little importance to arbitrary comparisons, to fantastic parallels, but here the analogy is really profound, and imprinted on general facts as well as on details.
The same result is exhibited in the state of Germany. It was in the middle of the fifteenth century, in 1438, that the house of Austria returned to the empire, and with it the imperial power acquired a stability which it had never possessed before: the form of election became almost a mere consecration of hereditary right. At the end of the fifteenth century, Maximilian I. definitively fixed the preponderance of his house, and the regular exercise of the central power. Charles VII. had been the first in France to create a standing force for the maintenance of order, so also Maximilian in his hereditary states adopted the same means for the same object. Louis XI. had established the post-office in France, and Maximilian introduced it into Germany. In every quarter similar advancements in civilisation universally conduced to the advantage of the central power.
The history of England in the fifteenth century consists of two great events—the war with France outwardly, and that of the Roses inwardly, a foreign and a civil war. These two wars, so different in appearance, tended to the same result. The contest with France was maintained by the English people with a zeal which turned almost exclusively to the profit of the royal power. This nation, even then more skilful and firm than any other in sparing its troops and its money, abandoned them to its kings at that epoch without foresight or calculation. In the reign of Henry V., a considerable revenue, the rights of customs, was granted to the king for life from his accession to the throne. The foreign war being finished, or nearly so, the civil war, which had been at first connected with it, continued alone, and the houses of York and Lancaster maintained their respective claims with the sword. When a final term was put to their bloody contests, the high English aristocracy was ruined, thinned, and utterly unable to preserve the power which it had exercised in former times. A coalition of the great barons could no longer awe the crown. When the Tudors mounted the throne in the person of Henry VII., in 1485, the era of political centralisation and the triumph of royalty commenced.
In Italy, royalty was not established, at least not under that name; but it is of little moment with regard to the result. The republics fell in the fifteenth century; or where the name still lingered, power was concentrated in the hands of one or a few families; the republican life was burnt to the socket In the north of Italy, almost all the Lombardian republics merged in the duchy of Milan. In 1434, Florence fell under the dominion of the Medicis. In 1464, Genoa became subject to the Milanese. The majority of the republics, great and small, gave place to sovereign houses. Shortly afterwards, the pretensions of foreign sovereigns to the north and south of Italy—to the Milanese on the one hand, and to the kingdom of Naples on the other—began to be advanced.
Upon whatever country of Europe our eyes fall, whatever portion of its history we contemplate—whether it have reference to the nations themselves, or to the governments, to institutions, or territories—we everywhere perceive the ancient elements and forms of society decaying, and ready to disappear. Old traditional liberties are swamped and perish, whilst new powers arise, more regular and concentrated. There is something infinitely mournful in this spectacle of the fall of the old European liberties; and at the period of its occurrence, it inspired the bitterest sorrow. In France, in Germany, and especially in Italy, the patriots of the fifteenth century fiercely, and with the energy of despair, opposed and deplored a revolution, which on all sides was working up to what they had a right to call despotism. We cannot but admire their courage and compassionate their grief, but at the same time we must allow that the revolution in question was not only inevitable, but also useful. The primitive system of Europe, the old feudal and borough liberties, had utterly failed in organising society. Security and progressiveness are the main ingredients in the social state. Any system which does not effect order for the present, and advancement for the future, is vicious, and soon abandoned. This was the fate of the old political forms and liberties in the fifteenth century. They were unable to impart to society either security or advancement. These consequences were to be sought for elsewhere, and from other principles, other means of action. This is the purport of all the facts I have just dilated upon.
Another fact dates from the same epoch, one which has held a great place in the history of Europe. In the fifteenth century, the relation of governments amongst themselves commenced to become frequent, regular, and permanent. Then were formed for the first time those great combinations and alliances, either for peace or war, which ultimately produced the system of the balance of power. Diplomacy in Europe dates from the fifteenth century. In fact, towards the end of that century, we see the principal powers of the continent, the popes, the dukes of Milan, the Venetians, the emperors of Germany, the kings of Spain, and the kings of France, form connections, negotiate, come to understandings, and unite amongst themselves, and balance their respective states. Thus at the time that Charles VIII. made his expedition for the conquest of Naples, a grand league was formed against him between Spain, the pope, and the Venetians. The league of Cambray was arranged some years later (in 1508) against the Venetians. The holy league, directed against Louis XII., succeeded, in 1511, the league of Cambray. All these combinations sprang from Italian politics, from the desire entertained by the different sovereigns to possess its territory, and from the fear that one of them, by seizing upon it exclusively, should gain too great a preponderance. This new order of facts was highly favourable to the development of the royal power. In the first place, from the very nature of the external relations of states, they can only be managed by one person, or by a small number of persons, and they require a certain degree of secrecy. In the next, the people possessed so little foresight that the consequences of a combination of this description were not appreciated by them; such things had for them no direct, home interest, and therefore they concerned themselves very little respecting them, and left them to the discretion of the central power. Thus diplomacy, as it arose, fell into the hands of the kings; and the idea that it belonged to them exclusively, that the country, even when free, and monopolising the right of levying its own taxes, and interfering in its own affairs, was not permitted to meddle with foreign concerns, was established in almost all minds as a settled principle, as a maxim of common right. Look at the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; we there perceive what power this idea possessed, and what obstacles it opposed to English liberties, in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. It was always under plea of this principle that peace and war, commercial relations, in a word, all external affairs, belonged to the royal prerogative, that absolute power defended itself against the rights of the country. Nations have been excessively timid in confessing this portion of prerogative, and this shyness has been the more prejudicial to them, since, dating from the epoch upon which we are shortly to enter—that is, from the sixteenth century—the history of Europe is essentially diplomatic. Exterior relations form, for nearly three centuries, the important part of history. Within, the countries were organised, and the settlement of the internal government, on the continent at least, produced no more shocks, and no longer absorbed the whole public activity. Hence the external relations, wars, negotiations, and alliances, are the matters which draw attention, and fill the pages of history. Thus it appears that the greater portion of the destinies of nations have been abandoned to the royal prerogative, to the central power.
It was indeed scarcely possible that it should be otherwise. It requires a great advancement in civilisation, a prodigious development of political comprehension and studies, to enable the public to interfere with credit in affairs of this nature. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the people were very far from possessing any such capability. Take, as an instance, a scene from the history of England at the commencement of the seventeenth century, under James I. His son-in-law, the elector-palatine, having been elected king of Bohemia, had lost his crown, and had even been despoiled of his hereditary states, the palatinate. The whole of Protestantism was interested in his cause, and on that account England was affected with a strong sympathy for his success. There was a powerful ebullition of public opinion to force James to take the part of his son-in-law, and to procure his restoration to the palatinate. The parliament furiously demanded war, promising ample means to sustain it. James was not very eager for it; he eluded the question, made some attempts at negotiation, sent a few troops into Germany, and then came to inform parliament that he would need £900,000 sterling to carry on the war with any chance of success. It was not said, and in fact it does not appear, that his calculation was exaggerated. But the parliament recoiled with surprise and affright at the prospect of such an expense, and it voted, with much reluctance, a sum of £70,000 sterling to re-establish a prince, and reconquer a country some hundreds of miles from England. Such was the ignorance and political incapacity of the public in such matters. It acted without knowledge of facts, and without burdening itself with any responsibility: therefore it was not enabled to interfere with regularity or efficiency. This was the principal reason that caused the external relations to fall into the hands of the central power, for it alone was in a condition to direct them, I will not say for the public good, as that necessarily was not always consulted, but with any continuity and sound sense.
Thus we see that under whatever point of view the political history of Europe of that epoch presents itself to us—whether our attention is directed to the internal state of the countries, or to their mutual relations with each other—whether we look to the administration of war, justice, or taxation—the same general character is in all distinguishable; we perceive everywhere the same tendency to centralisation and unity, to the formation and predominance of general interests and public powers. This was the hidden labour at work in the fifteenth century—a labour which did not then produce any very apparent result, any revolution, properly so called, in society, but which prepared the way for all. I now proceed to facts of another nature, to moral facts, or those which have reference to the development of the human understanding and of general ideas. We shall there also discern the same phenomenon, and be carried to the same conclusion.
I will commence with an order of facts which has very often been the subject of our inquiry, and which, under various forms, has always occupied an important station in the history of Europe: I mean the facts relative to the church. In our views of affairs in Europe up till the fifteenth century, we have been made aware that the only general and potential ideas operating veritably on the masses were religious ideas. We have seen that the church alone was invested with authority to regulate, promulgate, and prescribe these ideas. Often, it is true, attempts at independence and separation were made, and the church was called upon for its most strenuous exertions to put them down. Those exertions had hitherto been successful; the dogmas anathematised by the church had not taken general and permanent possession of the minds of the people; even the Albigenses had been crushed. Dissent and strife were continual in the bosom of the church, but without any decisive or striking result. At the opening of the fifteenth century, a very different state of things appeared; new ideas, and a public, avowed desire for alteration and reform, agitated the church itself. The close of the fourteenth, and the dawn of the fifteenth century, were illustrated by the great western schism, arising from the translation of the Holy See to Avignon, and the creation of two popes, the one at Avignon, and the other at Rome. The contest between these two papacies is what is called the great schism of the west. It commenced in 1378. In 1409, the Council of Pisa, wishing to bring it to an end, named a third, Alexander V. This proceeding, so far from moderating the violence of the schism, fanned it into additional fury, and instead of two opposition popes, there were three. The disorder and abuses caused by this lamentable dissension went on increasing. In 1414, the Council of Constance assembled at the instance of the Emperor Sigismond. It entered upon a very different matter than naming a new pope; it undertook the reform of the church. It first of all proclaimed the indissolubility of the general council, and its superiority over the papal power. It endeavoured to make these principles recognised as fundamental in the church, and then set about the task of reforming the abuses which had crept into it, especially the exactions by which the court of Rome drew money from the faithful. The better to attain its object, the council named what we would call a committee of inquiry—that is to say, a reforming college, composed of deputies taken from the different nations represented in it. This college was charged to investigate the abuses which tarnished the church, and the means of remedying them, and to make a report to the council, which would deliberate on the modes of execution. But whilst the council was engaged upon the labour, a question was submitted to it—Whether it could proceed to the reform of abuses without the participation of the head of the Church, without the sanction of the pope? It was decided in the negative, by the influence of the Romanist party, supported by honest but timid men; so the council elected a new pope, Martin V ., in 1417. This pope was instructed to present a plan of reform for the church, which was not acceptable, and the council separated. In 1431, a fresh council assembled at Basle, with the same design. It took up and continued the reforming labour of the Council of Constance, but had no better success. The schism which divided Christianity broke out in the assembly likewise. The pope removed the Council of Basle to Ferrara, and afterwards to Florence. A portion of the prelates refused to obey the pope, and remained at Basle; so as there were formerly two popes, there were then also two councils. That of Basle stuck to its projects of reform, and named its own pope, Felix V. After a certain period it migrated to Lausanne, and finally broke up in 1449, without having effected a single object.
Thus the papacy ultimately prevailed, and remained in possession of the field of battle and of the government of the church. The councils had been unable to accomplish what they had undertaken, but the consequences of their acts survived their failure. At the time the Council of Basle miscarried in its essays at reform, certain sovereigns availed themselves of the ideas which it had promulgated, and of the institutions it had recommended. In France, Charles VII. issued the pragmatic sanction, founded on the decrees of the Council of Basle, which he proclaimed at Bourges in 1438. It maintained the election of bishops, the suppression of first fruits, and the reform of the principal abuses prevalent in the church. The pragmatic sanction was declared the law of the state in France. In Germany, the diet of Mayence adopted it in 1439, and likewise made it a law of the German empire. Thus what the spiritual power had attempted without success, the temporal power seemed determined upon accomplishing.
The reforming projects were destined to encounter fresh reverses. As the councils had failed, so also did the pragmatic sanction. In Germany, it perished with great abruptness; the diet formally abandoned it in 1448, in consequence of a negotiation with Nicholas V. In France, Francis I. likewise gave it up in 1516, and substituted in its stead his concordat with Leo X. Thus the princely reform was not more successful than the clerical. But we are not to conclude that it completely died away. As the councils had done things which left consequences behind, so also had the pragmatic sanction effects which survived it, and were destined to play an important part in modern history. The principles asserted by the Council of Basle were vigorous and fruitful. Some superior and determined men adopted and maintained them. John of Paris, D'Ailly, Gerson, and a great number of distinguished men of the fifteenth century, devoted themselves to their defence. Although the council was dissolved, and the pragmatic sanction abandoned, their general doctrines upon the government of the church, and upon the reforms necessary to be worked out, had taken root in France, and were there perpetuated. They passed into the parliaments, gradually grew into a powerful opinion, and gave birth first to the Jansenists, then to the Gallicans. All that series of maxims and efforts tending to reform the church, which commenced with the Council of Constance and terminated in the four propositions of Bossuet, emanated from the same source, and proceeded to the same goal. It was an identical fact successively transformed. In spite of the failure of the legal and regular attempts at reform in the fifteenth century, they had taken their station in the course of civilisation, and exercised indirectly a prodigious influence.
The councils showed wisdom in pursuing their legal reform, for it alone could avert a revolution. Almost at the same moment that the Council of Pisa endeavoured to bring the great schism of the west to a cessation, and the Council of Constance to reform the church, the first efforts of a popular religious reform broke out with violence in Bohemia. The preachings and progress of John Huss date from 1404, the period that he commenced to teach at Prague. Thus there were two reforms marching side by side; the one in the very bosom of the church, experimented by the aristocratical ecclesiastics themselves, a prudent, timid, and thwarted reform; the other a reform outside the church, opposed to it, violent and fierce. War soon raged between these two powers or designs. The council summoned John Huss and Jerome of Prague to Constance, and condemned them to the stake as heretics and revolutionists. These events are perfectly intelligible to us at the present day. We can very readily understand the simultaneousness of separate reforms, the one undertaken by governments, the other by the people, enemies of each other, and yet emanating from the same source, and conducting to the same end; reforms which, although making war upon each other, actually and definitively agreed in a common object. Such was the occurrence in the fifteenth century. The popular reform of John Huss was momentarily stifled; the war of the Hussites did not break out for three or four years after the death of their master. It continued for a long time with great violence, but the Empire finally triumphed. But as the reform attempted by the councils was unattended with effect, as the object they had pursued was not attained, the popular reform ceased not to ferment; it waited only for an opportunity, and it found one at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Had the reform undertaken by the councils been carried to a beneficial length, the popular reform perhaps would have been prevented. But the success of the one or the other was unavoidable, for their coincidence proves a necessity.
Therefore the state in which the fifteenth century left Europe, as to religious matters, was this: an aristocratical reform had been attempted without success, and a popular reform had been broached and stifled, but was ever ready to explode. But the fermentation of the human mind was not confined at that epoch to the sphere of religious dogmas. It was in the course of the fourteenth century, as is well known, that the Greek and Roman antiquity was restored, so to speak, to Europe. The ardour with which Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and all their contemporaries, sought out Greek and Latin manuscripts, and gave them to the world, is matter of notoriety. The least discovery of that sort excited an amazing bustle and transport of joy. In the midst of this excitement, a school commenced to be formed, which has played a much more important part in the development of the human understanding than is ordinarily attributed to it; I mean the classical school. I do not attach to this word the meaning in which it is used at present; it was then concerned with anything but a literary system or contest. The classical school of that epoch was inflamed with admiration not only for the writings of the ancients, for Virgil and for Homer, but also for the whole ancient society—its institutions, opinions, and philosophy, as well as literature. It must be confessed that antiquity, under the heads of politics, philosophy, and literature, was far superior to the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is not, therefore, at all surprising that it exercised so great an influence, or that the majority of enlightened, active, refined, and fastidious minds conceived an utter disgust for the coarse manners, confused ideas, and barbarous forms of their own times, and gave themselves up with rapture to the study, and almost to the worship, of a society so much more regular, and at the same time so much more developed. Thus was originated that school of freethinkers which appeared at the commencement of the fifteenth century, and in which prelates, jurisconsults, and scholars were united together.
In the midst of this movement occurred the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the fall of the Eastern Empire, and the settling of the fugitive Greeks in Italy. They brought with them an increased knowledge of antiquity, numerous manuscripts, and a multitude of fresh means by which the ancient civilisation might be more thoroughly studied. The classical school became animated with redoubled admiration and ardour. This was the period of the most brilliant development of the aristocratic church, especially in Italy, not in point of political power, so much as in luxuriousness and wealth. It abandoned itself with lordly pride to all the pleasures of a voluptuous, effeminate, elegant, and licentious civilisation, to a taste for letters and arts, for social and material enjoyments. See the sort of life led by men who bore an important part in politics and literature at that epoch—by Cardinal Bembo, for example. We are astonished at so singular a medley of refined sensuality and intellectual development, of enervated manners and hardihood of mind. We might imagine, in fact, when we survey that era, and behold its ideas and social relations, that we are in the middle of the French eighteenth century. We perceive the same zeal for intellectual movement and for new ideas, the same taste for a soft and agreeable life; in a word, the same effeminacy and libertinism, the same deficiency in political energy and in moral doctrines, accompanied by a remarkable candour and activity of mind. The literati of the fifteenth century were, in regard to the prelates of the church, in the same relation as the men of letters and the philosophers of the eighteenth with respect to the great aristocrats; they were all imbued with the same opinions, all pursued the same course of life, mingled harmoniously together, and looked with indifference on the agitation that was brewing around them. The prelates of the fifteenth century, commencing with Cardinal Bembo, assuredly no more foresaw the rising of Luther and Calvin, than the courtiers had any preconception of the French Revolution. The situation was analogous.
Three great facts, therefore, of the moral order present themselves at this epoch. First, an ecclesiastical reform attempted by the church itself; secondly, a popular movement for religious reform; and lastly, an intellectual revolution, which formed the school of freethinkers. And all these changes were progressing amid the greatest political alteration which had previously occurred in Europe, amid the working towards centralisation in nations and governments.
Nor was this all. It was also the period of the greatest outward activity of mankind—the period of voyages, enterprises, discoveries, and inventions of all sorts. This was the era of the great expeditions of the Portuguese along the coasts of Africa, of the discovery of the passage by the Cape of Good Hope, of the discovery of America by Columbus, and of the wonderful extension of European commerce. A multitude of new inventions came forth, whilst others, previously known in a confined sphere, became popular, and passed into general use. Gunpowder changed the system of war, and the compass changed the system of navigation. The art of oil-painting was developed, and covered Europe with masterpieces. Engraving on copper, invented in 1460, multiplied and disseminated them. The use of linen paper became common. Finally, between 1436 and 1452, printing was invented, the theme of so much declamation, and of so many commonplaces, but the merit and effects of which will never be obscured by either vapid declamation or nauseous small-talk.
Such was the greatness and activity of this century; a greatness still scarcely apparent, an activity which had not yet brought its results under the disposition of mankind. Violent reforms had been suppressed; governments were consolidated, and the people hushed. It might be imagined that society was preparing merely to enjoy a better order of things, accompanied by a quickened impulse. But the revolutions of the sixteenth century were impending, which the fifteenth had only been preparing. They will be the object of my next lecture.
Lecture XII.
Effects Of The Reformation.
In the course of our inquiry, we have had frequent occasion to lament the disorder and anarchy of European society, and to complain of the difficulty of analysing and depicting a society so scattered, incohesive, and discordant. We have longed for, and impatiently invoked, the era of general interests, of order, and of social unity. We have now reached it, and are entering upon the epoch in which everything is summed into general facts and general ideas, upon the very epoch of order and unity. We there, however, encounter a difficulty of another kind. It has hitherto required great pains to link facts together, to place them in their proper stations, to seize what they possessed in common, and unfold some appearance of a whole. In modern Europe, things are in an opposite vein. All the elements and incidents of the social state are modified by, and act and react upon, each other; the mutual relations of men are far more numerous and complicated; and the same multiplicity and entanglement occur in their relations with the government of the state, in the relations of states amongst themselves, and in the ideas and in all the workings of the human mind. In the periods we have passed through, a great number of facts appeared isolated, alien to each other, and without reciprocal influence. Now, we have no more isolation; all things meet, commingle, and vary as they meet. Can anything be conceived more difficult than to distinguish the veritable unity amid such a diversity, to determine the bent of a movement so extended and complex, to present so prodigious a throng of different elements, all closely linked together, in a general summary; in a word, to predicate the general predominant fact which sums up and expresses a long series of facts, which is the characteristic of an epoch, and the faithful expression of its influence and its action in the history of civilisation?
We shall quickly perceive the extent of this difficulty in the great event which has now to occupy our attention.
We encountered in the twelfth century an event, religious in its origin, if rather the reverse in its nature—I mean the Crusades. Notwithstanding the vastness of the event, its long duration, and the variety of circumstances it produced, it was an easy task to unravel its general character, and to determine with some precision its unity and influence. We have at present to consider the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, that which is commonly called the Reformation. Allow me here to premise, that I shall make use of the word reformation, as of a simple and settled term, synonymous with religious revolution, and without implying a judgment of its nature. Thus on the threshold we perceive how difficult it is to assign the veritable character of that great crisis—to state in a general form what it was, and what it effected.
We must seek for the Reformation between the beginning of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century, for it was within this interval that the life, so to speak, of the event was comprised, that it took birth and ended. All historical events have in some sort a limited career. Their consequences are prolonged to infinity, they are connected with all the past and all the future, but at the same time they have a peculiar and restricted existence, in which they arise, expand, and fill with their development a certain portion of space, then shrink and retire from the stage to give place to some new occurrence.
The precise date that we assign to the origin of the Reformation is of little importance. We may take the year 1520, in which Luther burnt publicly at Wittemburg the bull of Leo X. which condemned him, and thus severed himself officially from the Roman church. It is between this year and the middle of the seventeenth century, the year 1648, the date of the treaty of Westphalia, that the life of the Reformation is comprised. Here is the proof of it. The first and greatest effect of the religious revolution was to create two classes of states in Europe—the Catholic and the Protestant—to bring them in front of each other, and engage them in war. With a variety of vicissitudes, that war lasted from the commencement of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century. It was not until the treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, that the Catholic and Protestant states came finally to a reciprocal recognition, agreed upon a mutual existence, and undertook to live in society and in peace, in spite of the diversity in religion. Dating from 1648, diversity in religion ceased to be the predominant principle in the classification of states, or in their external policy, relations, and alliances. Up till that epoch, Europe, with certain modifications, was essentially divided into a Catholic league and a Protestant league. After the treaty of Westphalia, this distinction disappeared, and states became allied or divided from very different considerations than religious dogmas. At that point, therefore, the preponderance, or rather the career, of the Reformation was stopped, although its consequences did not cease their course of development.
Let us now go hastily over this career, and, without doing more than naming events and men, let us touch upon what it contains. By this mere indication, by this dry and partial nomenclature, we shall see what must be the difficulty of summing up a series of facts, so varied and complex, into one general fact, and of determining the veritable character of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, and assigning its station in the history of our civilisation.