STUDIES IN DEMOCRATIC HISTORY By JOSEPH CLAYTON ❦ ❦ WITH A FRONTISPIECE IN PHOTOGRAVURE AND NUMEROUS OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK:  MITCHELL KENNERLEY TWO EAST TWENTY-NINTH STREET · MCMXI To the Memory of FREDERICK YORK POWELL Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford 1894–1904 “I loved him in life and I love him none the less in death: for what I loved in him is not dead.”...

But with all the differences of character, one common quality binds these men whose stories are here retold—a resolute hatred of oppression. And one common work, successful or unsuccessful, was theirs—to labour for the liberties of England and the health of its people. The value of each man’s work can only be stated approximately: it is difficult to make full allowance for the vastly different parts our heroes, statesmen and rebels alike, were called to play. The great thing is, that whatever th

The first real check to the absolutism of Norman rule in England was given by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. The turbulent ambition of Norman barons threatened the sovereignity of William the Conqueror and of his son, the Red King, often enough, but these outbreaks promised no liberty for England. The fires of English revolt were stamped out utterly five years after Senlac, and the great Conqueror at his death left England crushed; but he left it under the discipline of religion, and he left

Fifty years after the death of Anselm the struggle with absolute monarchy had to be renewed in England, and again the Archbishop of Canterbury was the antagonist of the crown, standing alone for the most part, as Anselm stood, in his resistance to autocracy. The contrast is great between the upbringing and character of Anselm and of Thomas; but both men gave valiant service in the cause of liberty in England, and both are placed in the calendar of the saints. For Thomas and Anselm alike the choi

When Richard I., on his accession, picked out Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he chose a prelate whom he could rely upon as his representative. Hubert had been a crusader; he was the nephew of Ralph Glanville—who sold the justiciarship to William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, for £3,000, and followed Richard to Palestine, dying of the plague at Acre in 1191—and though a man of little learning he was a capital lawyer, a strong administrator and expert at raising mo

On Hubert’s death John meant to have for archbishop a creature of his will, and he was defeated by Pope Innocent III., who, dismissing the appeal of the monks of Canterbury for Reginald, their subprior, and John’s appeal for his nominee, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, proposed the English-born Cardinal, Stephen Langton, “than whom there was no man greater in the Roman court, nor was there any equal to him in character and in learning.” The monks consented to Stephen’s appointment, but John’s r

Here is the character of Bishop Grosseteste as his contemporary, Matthew Paris, saw it, and Matthew was a monk, and the champion of the monks, and hated Grosseteste’s stern interference with monastic life:— “He was an open confuter of both pope and king, the corrector of monks, the director of priests, the instructor of clerks, the support of scholars, a preacher to the people, a persecutor of the incontinent, the tireless student of the Scriptures, the hammer and despiser of the Romans. At the

Thus Matthew Paris, when Earl Simon, then a man about thirty-seven, and “tall and handsome,” enjoyed the royal favour and stood godfather to the infant Prince Edward. Simon had only done homage as Earl of Leicester in 1232; his boyhood was passed in France, and his father was the great soldier who led the French crusade against the Albigenses. Earl Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother—soon to become King of the Romans—objected to the marriage, regarding it as one more victory for the foreigners

The Peasant Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler, was not only the first great national movement towards democracy, it was the first uprising of the English people in opposition to all their hitherto recognised rulers in Church and State, and it was the first outburst in this land against social injustice. 59 The Black Death in 1349 and the pestilence that ravaged the country in 1361 and 1369 upset the old feudal order. The land was in many places utterly bereft of labour, and neither king nor parli

The rising of the commons of Kent in 1450 under their captain, Jack Cade, was the protest of people—sick of the misrule at home and of the mismanagement of affairs abroad—driven to take up arms against an incapable government that would not heed gentler measures. It was not such a peasant revolt as Wat Tyler had led, this rising of the fifteenth century. It was largely the work of men of some local importance, and country squires were active in enrolling men, employing the parish constable for t

“Did Nature ever frame a sweeter, happier character than that of More?”—so Erasmus wrote in 1498, when Thomas More was twenty, and Erasmus, recently come to England, some ten years older. It was at the beginning of their friendship, a friendship that was to last unbroken till death, 82 and More had then passed from the household of Cardinal Morton to Oxford, and from Oxford to Lincoln’s Inn, to take up his father’s calling and follow the law as a barrister. Twenty years later Erasmus, writing at

The landowners finding greater profit in breeding sheep and cattle than in the small holdings of peasants, began, about 1470, to seize the fields which from time immemorial had been cultivated by the country people in common, and to evict whole parishes by pulling down all the dwelling places. For eighty years these clearances were going on. Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515 to prohibit the “pulling down of towns” and to order the rebuilding of such towns, and the restoration of pa

John Eliot , John Hampden, John Pym—by the work of these men comes the supremacy of the House of Commons in the government of England. All three are country gentlemen of good estate, of high principle and of some learning. 105 They are men of religious convictions, of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Two of them—Eliot and Hampden—are content to die for the cause of good government. The strong rule of Elizabeth left a difficult legacy of government to James I. The desp

He came of pugnacious stock, for John Lilburne’s father, a well-to-do Durham squire, was the last man to demand the settlement of a lawsuit by the ordeal of battle, and came into court armed accordingly—only to be disappointed by an order from the crown, forbidding the proposed return to such ancient and obsolete methods of deciding the differences of neighbours. Apprenticed to a wholesale cloth-merchant in London, John Lilburne soon became acquainted with Bastwick and Prynne, then busy over ant

Gerrard Winstanley was the leader at the sudden outbreak of social discontent, and his “Digger” movement was to end this discontent and all other miseries of the time by getting rid of enclosures of common lands, and allowing people to plough these common lands and waste spaces, “that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed.” Little is known of Winstanley, and the movement is shortlived. The “Diggers” never threatened the safety of the Commonwealth governme

The substance of Major Cartwright’s life is told on the pedestal beneath his statue in the dingy garden of Burton Crescent, to the south of Euston Road, in London. JOHN CARTWRIGHT, Born 28th September, 1740. Died 23rd September, 1824. The Firm, Consistent and Persevering Advocate of Universal Suffrage , Equal Representation, Vote by Ballot and Annual Parliaments. He was the first English Writer who openly maintained the Independence of the United States of America, and although his distinguished

The failure of the great Reform Act of 1832 to accomplish any particular improvement in the lot of the mass of working people brought the Chartist movement to life, 131 and roused the politically minded leaders of the workmen to agitate for changes in the constitution that would place political power in the hands of the whole people. The six points of the Charter, embodied in the “People’s Charter” drawn up by Francis Place and Lovett in 1838, revived the old programme of Major Cartwright and, i

Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women , published in 1792, struck the first note of this movement. In the latter half of the nineteenth century it received the support of John Stuart Mill and a certain number of parliamentary radicals, and Women’s Suffrage societies were formed. Then, five years ago, the Women’s Social and Political Union was started at Manchester by Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Miss Christabel Pankhurst, and the extraordinary energy and activity of t