scornfully thrown behind them, in a manner | a great artist might produce a portrait of this a single trait not authenticated by ample testimony. In the mean time, we should see arts cultivated, wealth accumulated, the conve niences of life improved. We should see the keeps, where nobles, insecure themselves, spread insecurity around them, gradually giving place to the halls of peaceful opulence, to the oriels of Longleat, and the stately pinnacles of Burleigh. We should see towns extended, deserts cultivated, the hamlets of fishermen turned into wealthy havens, the meal of the peasant improved, and his hut more The early part of our imaginary history those opinions and feelings which produced commodiously furnished. We should see would be rich with colouring from romance, the great struggle against the house of Stuart, ballad, and chronicle. We should find our-slowly growing up in the bosom of private selves in the company of knights such as families, before they manifested themselves in those of Froissart, and of pilgrims such as Parliamentary debates. Then would come those who rode with Chaucer from the Tabard. the Civil War. Those skirmishes, on which Society would be shown from the highest to Clarendon dwells so minutely, would be told, the lowest-from the royal cloth of state to the as Thucydides would have told them, with den of the outlaw; from the throne of the le- perspicuous conciseness. gate to the chimney-corner where the begging connecting links. But the great characterfriar regaled himself. They are merely crusaders Palmers, minstrels, istics of the age, the loyal enthusiasm of the the stately monastery, with the brave English gentry, the fierce licentiousness good cheer in its refectory, and the high-mass of the swearing, dicing, drunken reprobates, in its chapel-the manor-house, with its hunt- whose excesses disgraced the royal causeing and hawking-the tournament, with the the austerity of the Presbyterian Sabbaths in heralds and ladies, the trumpets and the cloth the city, the extravagance of the Independent of gold-would give truth and life to the re- preachers in the camp, the precise garb, the presentation. We should perceive, in a thou- severe countenance, the petty scruples, the sand slight touches, the importance of the pri- affected accent, the absurd names and phrases vileged burgher, and the fierce and haughty which marked the Puritans-the valour, the spirit which swelled under the collar of the policy, the public spirit, which lurked beneath degraded villain. The revival of letters would these ungraceful disguises, the dreams of the not merely be described in a few magnificent raving Fifth Monarchyman, the dreams, scarceperiods. We should discern, in innumerable ly less wild, of the philosophic republican-all particulars, the fermentation of mind, the eager these would enter into the representation, and appetite for knowledge, which distinguished render it at once more exact and more strikthe sixteenth from the fifteenth century. In ing. the Reformation we should see, not merely a schism which changed the ecclesiastical con-written would be of a vivid and practical chaThe instruction derived from history thus stitution of England, and the mutual relationsracter. It would be received by the imaginaof the European powers, but a moral war tion as well as by the reason. It would be not which raged in every family, which set the merely traced on the mind, but branded into father against the son, and the son against the it. Many truths, too, would be learned, which father, the mother against the daughter, and can be learned in no other manner. As the the daughter against the mother. Henry history of states is generally written, the greatwould be painted with the skill of Tacitus.est and most momentous revolutions seem to We should have the change of his character come upon them like supernatural inflictions, from his profuse and joyous youth to his without warning or cause. But the fact is, that savage and imperious old age. perceive the gradual progress of selfish and quences of moral changes, which have graWe should such revolutions are almost always the consetyrannical passions, in a mind not naturally dually passed on the mass of the community, insensible or ungenerous; and to the last we and which ordinarily proceed far, before their should detect some remains of that open and progress is indicated by any public measure. noble temper which endeared him to a people | An intimate knowledge of the domestic history whom he oppressed, struggling with the hard-of nations is therefore absolutely necessary to ness of despotism and the irritability of dis- the prognosis of political events. A narrative, case. We should see Elizabeth in all her weakness, and in all her strength, surrounded by the handsome favourites whom she never trusted, and the wise old statesmen, whom she never dismissed, uniting in herself the most contradictory qualities of both her parentsthe coquetry, the caprice, the petty malice of Anne the haughty and resolute spirit of llenry. We have no hesitation in saying, that defective in this respect, is as useless as a me- ing to describe, would indeed be an intellectual HALLAM'S CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY. an exquisite harmony. We shall sooner see another Shakspeare or another Homer. The highest excellence, to which any single faculty can be brought, would be less surprising than such a happy and delicate combination of qualities. Yet the contemplation of imaginary models is not an unpleasant or useless employ ment of the mind. It cannot indeed produce HALLAM'S CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1828.} companion to the traveller or the general than HISTORY, at least in its state of imaginary perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind by a vivid representation of particular characters and incidents. But, in fact, the two hostile elements of which it consists have never been known to form a perfect amalgama-ing the two ingredients of which history is tion; and at length, in our own time, they have composed has become prevalent on the Contibeen completely and professedly separated. nent as well as in this country. Italy has alGood histories, in the proper sense of the word, ready produced an historical novel, of high merit we have not. But we have good historical ro- and of still higher promise. In France, the mances and good historical essays. The ima-practice has been carried to a length somegination and the reason, if we may use a legal what whimsical. metaphor, have made partition of a province of literature of which they were formerly seised per my et pour tout; and now they hold their respective portions in severalty, instead of holding the whole in common. M. Sismondi publishes a grave and stately history, very valuable, and a little tedious. He then sends forth as a companion to it a novel, in which he attempts to manners. This course, as it seems to us, has give a lively representation of characters and To make the past present, to bring the dis- all the disadvantages of a division of labour, tant near, to place us in the society of a great and none of its advantages. We understand man, or on the eminence which overlooks the the expediency of keeping the functions of field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reali-cook and coachman distinct-the dinner will ty of human flesh and blood beings whom we be better dressed, and the horses better maare too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over We manage these things better in England. their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture-these Sir Walter Scott gives us a novel; Mr. Hallam parts of the duty which properly belongs to the a critical and argumentative history, Both are historian have been appropriated by the histo- occupied with the same matter. But the forrical novelist. On the other hand, to extract mer looks at it with the eye of a sculptor. His the philosophy of history-to direct our judg-intention is to give an express and lively ment of events and men-to trace the connec-image of its external form. The latter is an tion of causes and effects, and to draw from the occurrences of former times general lessons of moral and political wisdom, has become the business of a distinct class of writers. naged. But where the two situations are united, anatomist. His task is to dissect the subject to its inmost recesses, and to lay bare before us all the springs of motion and all the causes of de cay. Mr. Hallam is, on the whole, far better qualiOf the two kinds of composition into which history has been thus divided, the one may be fied than any other writer of our time for the compared to a map, the other to a painted land-office which he has undertaken. He has great His scape. The picture, though it places the ob-industry and great acuteness. His knowledge ject before us, does not enable us to ascertain is extensive, various, and profound. His mind with accuracy the form and dimensions of its is equally distinguished by the amplitude of component parts, the distances, and the angles. its grasp and by the delicacy of its tact. The map is not a work of imitative art. It speculations have none of that vagueness On the contrary, they are strikingly presents no scene to the imagination; but it which is the common fault of political philosogives us exact information as to the bearings phy. rule, but the mode of applying it to solve parof the various points, and is a more useful practical. They teach us not only the general In this respect they often reticular cases. mind us of the Discourses of Machiavelli By • The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II. HENRY HALLAN. In 2 vols. 1827. The style is sometimes harsh, and sometimes obscure. We have also here and there remarked a little of that unpleasant trick which Gibbon brought into fashion-the trick, we mean, of narrating by implication and allusion. Mr. Hallam, however, has an excuse which Gibbon had not. His work is designed for readers who are already acquainted with the ordinary books on English history, and who can therefore unriddle these little enigmas without difficulty. The manner of the book is, on the whole, not unworthy of the matter. The language, even where most faulty, is weighty and massive, and indicates strong sense in every line. It often rises to an eloquence, not florid or impassioned, but high, grave, and sober; such as would become a state paper, or a judgment delivered by a great magistrate, a Somers, or a D'Aguesseau. In this respect the character of Mr. Hallam's mind corresponds strikingly with that of his style. His work is eminently judicial. Its whole spirit is that of the bench, not of the bar. He sums up with a calm, steady impartiality, turning neither to the right nor to the left, glossing over nothing, exaggerating nothing, while the advocates on both sides are alternately biting their lips to hear their conflicting mis-statements and sophisms exposed. On a general survey, we do not scruple to pronounce the Constitutional History the most impartial book that we ever read. We think it the more incumbent on us to bear this testimony strongly at first setting out, because, in the course of our remarks, we shall think it right to dwell principally on those parts of it from which we dissent. hend the meaning latent under the emblems of their faith, can resist the contagion of the popular superstition. Often, when they flatter themselves that they are merely feigning a compliance with the prejudices of the vulgar, they are themselves under the influence of. those very prejudices. It probably was not altogether on grounds of expediency, that Socrates taught his followers to honour the gods whom the state honoured, and bequeathed a cock to Esculapius with his dying breath. So there is often a portion of willing credulity and enthusiasm in the veneration which the most discerning men pay to their political idols. From the very nature of man it must be so. The faculty by which we inseparably associate ideas which have often been presented to us in conjunction, is not under the absolute control of the will. It may be quickened into morbid activity. It may be reasoned into sluggishness. But in a certain degree it will always exist. The almost absolute mastery He which Mr. Hallam has obtained over feelings of this class, is perfectly astonishing to us; and will, we believe, be not only astonishing, but offensive to many of his readers. It must particularly disgust those people who, in their speculations on politics, are not reasoners, but fanciers; whose opinions, even when sincere, are not produced, according to the ordinary law of intellectual births, by induction and inference, but are equivocally generated by the heat of fervid tempers out of the overflowings of tumid imaginations. A man of this class is always in extremes. He cannot be a friend to liberty without calling for a community of goods, or a friend to order without taking under There is one peculiarity about Mr. Hallam, his protection the foulest excesses of tyranny. which, while it adds to the value of his writings, His admiration oscillates between the most will, we fear, take away something from their worthless of rebels and the most worthless of popularity. He is less of a worshipper than oppressors; between Marten, the scandal of any historian whom we can call to mind. the High Court of Justice, and Laud, the scanEvery political sect has its esoteric and its dal of the Star-Chamber. He can forgive any exoteric school; its abstract doctrines for the thing but temperance and impartiality. initiated, its visible symbols, its imposing has a certain sympathy with the violence of forms, its mythological fables for the vulgar. his opponents, as well as with that of his asIt assists the devotion of those who are unable sociates. In every furious partisan he sees to raise themselves to the contemplation of either his present self or his former self, the pure truths, by all the devices of Pagan or pensioner that is or the Jacobin that has been. Papal superstition. It has its altars and its But he is unable to comprehend a writer who, deified heroes, its relics and pilgrimages, its steadily attached to principles, is indifferent canonized martyrs and confessors, its festivals about names and badges; who judges of chaand its legendary miracles. Our pious ances-racters with equable severity, not altogether tors, we are told, deserted the High Altar of untinctured with cynicism, but free from the Canterbury, to lay all their oblations on the slightest touch of passion, party spirit, or cashrine of St. Thomas. In the same manner the price. great and comfortable doctrines of the Tory creed, those particularly which relate to restrictions on worship and on trade, are adored by squires and rectors, in Pitt Clubs, under the name of a minister, who was as bad a representative of the system which has been christened after him, as Becket of the spirit of the Gospel. And, on the other hand, the cause for which Hampden bled on the field, and Sidney on the scaffold, is enthusiastically toasted by many an honest radical, who would be puzzled to explain the difference between Ship-money and the Habeas Corpus act. It may be added, that, as in religion, so in politics, few, even of Choas who are enlightened enough to compre We should probably like Mr. Hallam's book more, if instead of pointing out, with strict fidelity, the bright points and the dark spots of both parties, he had exerted himself to whitewash the one and to blacken the other. But we should certainly prize it far less. Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking. But for cold rigid justice-the one weight and the one measure-we know not where else we can look. No portion of our annals has been more per plexed and misrepresented by writers of dif ferent parties, than the history of the Reforma tion. In this labyrinth of falsehood and so. phistry, the guidance of Mr. Hallam is pecu liarly valuable. It is impossible not to admire the evenhanded justice with which he deals out castigation to right and left on the rival persecutors. It is vehemently maintained by some writers of the present day, that the government of Elizabeth persecuted neither Papists nor Puritans as such; and occasionally that the severe measures which it adopted were dictated, not by religious intolerance, but by political necessity. Even the excellent account of those times, which Mr. Hallam has given, has not altogether imposed silence on the authors of this fallacy. The title of the Queen, they say, was annulled by the Pope; her throne was given to another; her subjects were incited to rebellion; her life was menaced; every Catholic was bound in conscience to be a traitor; it was therefore against traitors, not against Catholics, that the penal laws were enacted. That our readers may be the better able to appreciate the merits of this defence, we will state, as concisely as possible, the substance of some of these laws. As soon as Elizabeth ascended the throne, and before the least hostility to her government had been shown by the Catholic population, an act passed, prohibiting the celebration of the rites of the Romish church, on pain of forfeiture for the first offence, a year's imprisonment for the second, and perpetual imprisonment for the third. that if any Catholic shall convert a Protestant to the Romish church, they shall both suffer death, as for high treason. We believe that we might safely content ourselves with stating the fact, and leaving it to the judgment of every plain Englishman. Recent controversies have, however, given so much importance to this subject, that we will offer a few remarks on it. In the first place, the arguments which are urged in favour of Elizabeth, apply with much greater force to the case of her sister Mary. The Catholics did not, at the time of Elizabeth's accession, rise in arms to seat a Pretender on her throne. But before Mary had given, or could give provocation, the most distinguished Protestants attempted to set aside her rights in favour of the Lady Jane. That attempt, and the subsequent insurrection of Wyatt, furnished at least as good a plea for the burning of Protestants as the conspiracies against Elizabeth furnish for the hanging and embowelling of Papists. The fact is, that both pleas are worthless alike. If such arguments are to pass current, it will be easy to prove that there was never such a thing as religious persecution since the creation. For there never was a religious persecution, in which some odious crime was not justly or unjustly said to be obviously deducible from the doctrines of the persecuted party. We might say that the Cæsars did not A law was next made, in 1562, enacting, that persecute the Christians; that they only puall who had ever graduated at the Universities, nished men who were charged, rightly or or received holy orders, all lawyers, and all ma- wrongly, with burning Rome, and with com gistrates, should take the oath of supremacy mitting the foulest abominations in their aswhen tendered to them, on pain of forfeiture, semblies; that the refusal to throw frankinand imprisonment during the royal pleasure. cence on the altar of Jupiter was not the After the lapse of three months, it might again be crime, but only evidence of the crime. We tendered to them; and, if it were again refused, might say that the massacre of St. Bartholemew the recusant was guilty of high treason. A was intended to extirpate, not a religious sect, prospective law, however severe, framed to but a political party. For, beyond all doubt, exclude Catholics from the liberal professions, the proceedings of the Huguenots, from the would have been mercy itself compared with conspiracy of Amboise to the battle of Monthis odious act. It is a retrospective statute; coutour, had given much more trouble to the it is a retrospective penal statute; it is a retro- French monarchy than the Catholics have spective penal statute against a large class. ever given to England since the Reformation; We will not positively affirm that a law of this and that too with much less excuse. description must always, and under all circum- The true distinction is perfectly obvious. stances, be unjustifiable. But the presumption To punish a man because he has committed a against it is most violent; nor do we remem-crime, or is believed, though unjustly, to have ber any crisis, either in our own history, or in the history of any other country, which would have rendered such a provision necessary. But in the present, what circumstances called for extraordinary rigour? There might be disaffection among the Catholics. The prohibition of their worship would naturally pro-and wicked. duce it. But it is from their situation, not from their conduct; from the wrongs which they had suffered, not from those which they had committed, that the existence of discontent among them must be inferred. There were libels, no doubt, and prophecies, and rumours, and suspicions; strange grounds for a law inflicting capital penalties, ex post facto, on a large order of men. Eight years later, the bull of Pius deposing Elizabeth produced a third law. This law, to which alone, as we conceive, the defence now under our consideration can apply, provides, I committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution; and is, in every case, foolish When Elizabeth put Ballard and Babington to death, she was not persecuting. Nor should we have accused her government of persecution for passing any law, however severe, against overt acts of sedition. But to argue that because a man is a Catholic he must think it right to murder an heretical sovereign, and that because he thinks it right he will attempt to do it, and then to found on this conclusion a law for punishing him as if he had done it, is plain persecution. If, indeed, all men reasoned in the same manner on the same data, and always did what they thought it their duty to do, this mode of dispensing punishment might be extremely judicious. But as people who agree about premises often disagree about conclusions, and as no man in the world acts up to his own standard of right, there are two enormous gaps in the logic by which alone penalties for opinions can be defended. The doctrine of reprobation, in the judgment of many very able men, follows by syllogistic necessity from the doctrine of election. Others conceive that the Antinomian and Manichean heresies directly follow from the doctrine of reprobation; and it is very generally thought that licentiousness and cruelty of the worst description are likely to be the fruits, as they often have been the fruits, of Antinomian and Manichean opinions. This chain of reasoning, we think, is as perfect in all its parts as that which makes out a Papist to be necessarily a traitor. Yet it would be rather a strong measure to hang the Calvinists, on the ground that if they were spared they would infallibly commit all the atrocities of Matthias and Knipperdoling. For, reason the matter as we may, experience shows us that a man may believe in election without believing in reprobation, that he may believe in reprobation without being an Antinomian, and that he may be an Antinomian without being a bad citizen. Man, in short, is so inconsistent a creature, that it is impossible to reason from his belief to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another. who would have admitted in theory the depos ing power of the Pope, but who would not have been ambitious to be stretched on the rack, even though it were to be used, according to the benevolent proviso of Lord Burleigh, "as charitably as such a thing can be;" or to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, even though, by that rare indulgence which the queen, of her especial grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion, sometimes extended to very mitigated cases, he were allowed a fair time to choke before the hangman began to grabble in his entrails. She had not even the wretched excuse which we But the laws passed against the Puritans have been considering. In their case the cruelty was equal, the danger infinitely less. In fact the danger was created solely by the cruelty. But it is superfluous to press the argument. By/ no artifice of ingenuity can the stigma of perse cution, the worst blemish of the English church, be effaced or patched over. Her doctrines we well know do not tend to intolerance. admits the possibility of salvation out of her own pale. But this circumstance, in itself honourable to her, aggravates the sin and the shame of those who persecuted in her name. Dominic and De Monfort did not at least murder and torture for differences of opinion which they considered as trifling. It was to stop an infection which, as they believed, hurried to perdition every soul which it seized that they We do not believe that every Englishman of the English government with respect to the employed their fire and steel. The measures who was reconciled to the Catholic church Papists and Puritans sprang from a widely would, as a necessary consequence, have different principle. If those who deny that the thought himself justified in deposing or assas-supporters of the Established Church were sinating Elizabeth. It is not sufficient to say guilty of religious persecution mean only that that the convert must have acknowledged the they were not influenced by religious motives, authority of the Pope, and that the Pope had we perfectly agree with them. issued a bull against the queen. We know penal code of Elizabeth, nor the more hateful Neither the through what strange loopholes the human system by which Charles the Second attemptmind contrives to escape, when it wishes to ed to force Episcopacy on the Scotch, had an avoid a disagreeable inference from an admit-origin so noble. Their cause is to be sought ted proposition. We know how long the Jansenists contrived to believe the Pope infallible in matters of doctrine, and at the same time to believe doctrines which he pronounced to be heretical. Let it pass, however, that every Catholic in the kingdom thought that Elizabeth might be lawfully murdered. Still the old maxim, that what is the business of every body is the business of nobody, is particularly likely to hold good in a case in which a cruel death is the almost inevitable consequence of making any attempt. Of the ten thousand clergymen of the Church of England, there is scarcely one who would not say that a man who should leave his country and friends to preach the gospel among savages, and who should, after labouring indefatigably without any hope of reward, terminate his life by martyrdom, would deserve the warmest admiration. Yet we doubt whether ten of the ten thousand ever thought of going on such an expedition. Why should we suppose that conscientious motives, feeble as they | are constantly found to be in a good cause, should be omnipotent for evil? there was many a jolly Popish priest in the Doubtless old manor-houses of the northern counties, in some circumstances which attended the Reformation in England-circumstances of which the effects long continued to be felt, and may in some degree be traced even at the present day. in Scotland, the contest against the Papal In Germany, in France, in Switzerland, and power was essentially a religious contest. In all these countries, indeed, the cause of the Reformation, like every other great cause, attracted to itself many supporters influenced by the Established Church only because they no conscientious principle, many who quitted thought her in danger, many who were weary of her restraints, and many who were greedy for her spoils. But it was not by these adherents that the separation was there conducted. They were welcome auxiliaries; their support was too often purchased by unworthy compliances; but, however exalted in rank or power, they were not the leaders in the enterprise. Men of a widely different description, men who redeemed great infirmities and errors by sincerity, disinterestedness, energy, and couvolutionary chiefs and of polemic divines, unitrage; men who, with many of the vices of reed some of the highest qualities of apostles, |