"Stand upon that elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye, and brings things to the true point of comparison, which obscures little names and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can ascend, but the spirit and moral quality of human actions." BURKE. THE attention of the present age is not easily attracted to the records of past times: eager to enjoy the luxuries which commerce and science are yearly multiplying for their use, few are disposed to turn back to a distant period of British History, when a very different state of things prevailed; when the seeds of those blessings, now so habitual, were cast upon an unfriendly soil, requiring the watchful guard of a bold mind, and an armed hand for their growth and maturity. The fierce struggles for freedom or power, and the miseries of civil war, once necessary to secure the rights of the community, are now read with a traditional assent, indeed, to the verdict of history, but with little scrutiny into the justice which has thus stamped some transactions with honour, and branded others with disgrace; has considered some conspicuous characters as patriots, others as rebels. This has been remarkably true as to the great events of the thirteenth century, which established the main prin B ciples of liberty in this land. Magna Charta now passes current everywhere as a household word, the hallowed type of a successful assertion of political rights; while the Barons' war and the battle of Lewes, though also great moral lessons of permanent influence occasionally forced upon monarchs, have dropped away as if unimportant from general remembrance. There are, indeed, too many battlefields strewed over the face of England, where no really national interest was at stake, where blood flowed only to gratify or thwart the ambition of an individual, or where some point of a disputed pedigree trembled in the balance. From such selfish contests, if they could have been decided by personal combat without involving the welfare of a whole nation, the mind would shrink with less regret; but the Barons' war, of which the Battle of Lewes was a main incident, does not deserve to be forgotten or confused with such. It occurred in stirring times, when every man readily took his side, the proud noble and the half-enfranchised commoner uniting their strength with zealous earnestness; the contest was of a nature which we now consider the most awful and irreconcilable, a war of principles. The conflicting claims of royal prerogative, and of popular control, there met at length in active hostility, after the fruitless trial, for many years, of more pacific means. There would have been no need to revive this remote subject, which, as Drayton' said of his own story of some later wars, "is surely fit matter for trump or tragedy," had it fortunately attracted the electric spark of Shakspeare's genius. Such alchemy would long since have transmuted it into current gold, and would have fixed in the popular mind the sterling worth of the personages and facts, undisturbed by the doubts of philosophers or historians. The silence of the dramatist, however, having prevented them becoming so familiar to us as the events he has handled, we can only feel 1 Preface to his poem Barons' War. sure that he would have depicted the chief actors in the reign of Henry III., if at all, with their usual mixture of good and evil qualities, as he has done all his characters, whether historical or self-created'. It is not from men of the thirteenth century that we could expect the performance of great actions from pure and unmixed motives; it is not so in the nineteenth. Great and gross vices then prevailed in every class, and public opinion did not require even that decorous homage to virtue, which modern vice is content to render. United with the genuine patriotism of one party, no doubt ambition, self-interest, and revenge played their part, while the conscientious maintenance of long used prerogative on the other side, was embittered by love of despotic power and by personal resentment; and though the warm incentives of religion were called in aid by both parties, each at times displayed an almost ostentations perjury. A modern hand cannot presume to trace out all the various influences then at work in the breast of individuals: all was not pure, for the agents were human; but nothing can evince more strikingly the soundness of the views adopted by the party victorious at Lewes, than the fact that during their short year of triumph, English freedom rose to so vigorous a manhood, and acquired so confirmed a development, as to enable the spirit of their principles long to survive the downfall of their promoters, and to this day we are enjoying the full maturity of their effects. There were some powerful engines of agitation to ruffle the surface of society in the thirteenth century. The 1 Gibbon (see Miscell. Works, Vol. 1. p. 106) at one time selected the Barons' War for an historical subject, but soon abandoned it. In a letter (April, 1761) he writes that he had fixed upon the expedition of Charles VIII. into Italy; but in another letter, dated Beriton, Aug. 4, 1761, he states that he had "renounced Charles VIII. I succes sively chose and rejected the Crusade of Richard I., the Barons' Wars against John and Henry III., the History of the Black Prince, the lives .and companions of Henry V., the Emperor Titus, Sir Philip Sydney, the Marquis of Montrose: at length I have fixed on Sir Walter Raleigh for my hero." In July, 1762, he drops Raleigh for the Swiss, and the Medici. Crusades, those furious efforts of wild credulity, the glory of their own age, though now its reproach and scorn, furnished allurements yet sufficient to assemble hosts too vast for use or restraint; and the Popes of Rome, besides exciting these outbursts of foreign adventure, put forward also at this period their most extravagant pretensions. A war preached in the name of God is indeed an awful matter; but not content with sending crowds of zealots to destruction in Pagan Syria, they wielded the same weapon against all nearer opposition, and repeatedly exhibited the strange anomaly of organizing Crusades against the disciples of the Cross'. The simpler faith of the Albigenses was thus crushed by fire and sword; dethronement and a holy war were decreed against our own King John and other monarchs; the political disputes with the Empire were decided in a similar way, although the Popes met occasionally with a stout resistance. Gregory IX. was thus in 1227 publicly denounced by the excommunicated Emperor Frederick as "the Great Dragon and the Antichrist," although, indeed, he retorted on him as "the beast of blasphemy, and the king of plagues." When this Emperor found himself, in 1243, excommunicated for the third time, and his crown declared to be forfeited, he desired his attendants to see if his crown were really lost from his jewel chest, and on its being produced, put it firmly on his head, and stood erect, saying, "I have neither lost it, nor will I do so with impunity for any Pope or Council. As to the Pope presuming to depose me, his superior, so much the better; I was before bound to obey him in some measure, or at least to respect him, but now I am absolved from any sort of love, veneration, or peace towards him." This practical refutation of 1 Lo principe dè nuovi Farisei, Close to the Lateran his war to wage: Not against Saracens or Jews he fights; On Christians only he vents all his rage. 2 M. Paris. the Pope's power forms a strong contrast to the abject spirit of King John. The head of the Church insisted not only on the independence but the supremacy of its members, for as the soul is superior to the body (they sophistically' argued) so should spiritual authority govern and punish secular power. No civil court being allowed to interfere for the punishment of their most heinous offences, it is said that Henry II. found that one hundred murders had been committed by the clergy unpunished. These and other monstrous abuses might well justify King Richard's satirical bequest of his favourite vices to the different orders of clergy; and the long enduring submission to such arrogance is the strongest proof of prostrate intellect during the dark, or, what modern courtesy terms, the middle ages. From such prevailing influence, even the French King Louis IX., though eminently distinguished for strength of mind, and resolutely maintaining the rights of his national Church, was unable wholly to free himself. Coming to the throne in early youth, he retained such a lofty purity of conscience and such a mixed spirit of piety and enterprize, that he attracted the universal respect of his contemporaries, who frequently referred their disputes to his arbitration, as we shall have occasion to notice in connexion with the battle of Lewes. The love of distant adventure, and the spirit of priestly ambition, were felt in England, as well as elsewhere, during the reign of Henry III., while the social condition of the country not only exhibited a civilization inferior to many parts of the continent (for an insular position, until commerce becomes general, necessarily retards its progress), but was still powerfully influenced by the great Norman conquest. The heaviness of a foreign yoke had not yet ceased to gall the conquered, whose debasement had been complete. The Conqueror had seized the estates not only of all who 1 Thomas Aquinas (who died 1274) quoted in Hallam's Hist. Lit. |