1831.]

REVIEW.-D'Israeli's Life of Charles the First.

have created no convulsion; but the very existence of a protracted civil war shows that he had qualities which, in the minds of the people, never did exist in regard to less virtuous sovereigns. But what has character to do, as to influence with revolutionists? it is merely trying to enforce the Riot Act without constables or soldiers. Subordination must be effected, or fear excited, before impression can be operative; and moreover, the very murder of the King is another proof of his character. He was massacred, because his political reanimation was dreaded; and the traitors under that event must have been the substituted victims. The unfortunate sovereign was moreover never

a monarch-only a supplicant; and when (as Mr. D'Israeli says, p. 143) "the people possess the power, the most insolent are those only which obtain consideration;" and if such persons are not hanged, in limine, as they would have been under the Tudor dynasty, "then matters go on, till the sword settles all questions, and the Conqueror reaps all the advantages." (Ibid).

We do not acquit Charles of imprudence and impolicy, because the circumstances required prospective military security, and rebels and mad dogs should be shot before they spread the hydrophobia.

But of Charles it is known "That his martyrdom was a civil and political one.

He need not have ascended the scaffold would he have betrayed the liberties and plundered the wealth of the nation. The King alluded to this extraordinary fact on his trial. Once turning himself to Bradshaw, and fixing his eyes on some persons near him, Charles said, there are some sitting here that well know that if I would have forfeited or betrayed the liberties and rights of the people, I need not have come hither.'"-p. 443.

Charles was therefore unquestionably a man of principles; but falling among people of no principles, we think of his enemies as we do of the thieves who robbed the wounded traveller, viz. that they would not have spared the good Samaritan also, if they had opportunely returned, and intercepted

him.

One fact further tells the exculpation of Charles. It appears, that the mass of the people considered the war as a mere duel, not a national concern.

"In the journal of a Yorkshire squire, who lived in the immediate neighbourhood

517

of Marston Moor, it appears that he went out hunting on the very day of that memorable engagement, but our sportsman, in the details of his chase, has not made even an allusion to the battle, though the roar of the cannon must have echoed to his Tallyho. The huntsman of De Foe's grandfa father called his pack by the names of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, Goring and Waller; so that the Generals of both armies were hounds in his pack."—pp. 49, 50.

To explain this, Mr. D'Israeli shows, bout, as they called it, between the that in the opinion of the people a King and the subject, would settle the

civil war (see p. 51), and had the conmatter in a battle or two without a tention been between two disciplined regular armies, the opinion of the people would have been conformable litary of the day were mere citizens to history and experience; but the miplaying at soldiers (see p. 51), and broke heads to no eventual result.

Hard must be the heart which is not affected by the following picturesque narrative:

exhibited a singular series of personal ex"The military life of Charles the First tion, hardly to be paralleled in the history ertions, often in a state of miserable deprivamarches, and his fugitive life, were a tribuof any other monarch or man. His painful lation of nearly four laborious aud afflicted years-and his two last were passed in the awful repose of his imprisonment. A curious record, kept by one who had been his daily attendant, has the following entries:

The King and his party sometimes lodged in a Bishop's palace, or at the seat of a Lord, or a country gentleman, and at a merchant's abode, but not unusually at a yeoman's house,' and a very poor man's

house.'-Dinner in the field' is an usual entry, but the melancholy one of 'no dinner this day' is repeated for successive days.

Sunday no dinner, supper at Worcester, a cruel day,' this march lasted from six in the morning till midnight, a long march the field all night, in his coach, on Bonover the mountains.' His Majesty lay in nock down.' drink dressed at a poor widow's.'" The King had his meat and

When Charles, with his tired troops, Wales, Sir Henry Slingsby has told a was a fugitive among the mountains of simple narrative of this kind, which the naïveté of his own style will best represent.

pullet and a piece of cheese, the room with-
When the King was at supper eating a

out was full, but the men's stomachs were
empty for want of meat.
troubled with the continual calling upon
The good wife,
her for victuals, and having, it seems, but

518

REVIEW.-Palgrave's History of England.

that one cheese, comes into the room where the King was, and very soberly asks, if the King had done with the cheese, for that the gentlemen without desired it."

As the King's messengers had frequently to pass through the enemy's quarters, the modes contrived for conveying secret intelligence were as extraordinary as any recorded among the stratagems of war by the ancients.

"Bruno Ryves details the corporal persecution, which a Dr. Cox, a Royalist, with a King's trumpeter, who had waited on the Doctor, endured from the Earl of Stamford at Exeter. Among other personal injuries, they were not only most narrowly searched, then stripped naked, and the fists of a serjeant-major crammed into their mouths, and even down their throats-but the Ear! turned Physician on this occasion, and forced the Doctor and the Trumpeter to swallow two powerful emetics, the Earl standing sentinel by the two bowls, in expectation of getting at the secret intelligence which it was imagined one of them had swallowed. Inhuman as this treatment appeared to Bruno Ryves, it is not improbable that the Earl of Stamford was well aware of this novel mode of conveying secret intelligence. During the siege of Newark, the King neglected not to inform Lord Bellasis of his condition, and wrote with his own hand some of these short dispatches. The last of these was brought to his Lordship in a man's belly, written in cyphers and put in lead, which the man swallowed, lest he should be taken in attempting to pass the Scots' army."-p. 105.

We have perused with pleasure an excellent disquisition concerning the effects of civil war (32-41), the XIXth chapter concerning the trial and decapitation, and numerous other passages worthy of Mr. D'Israeli's archetype (as we presume) Tacitus. Patience is a virtue which few reasonable persons expect to find in any body, and assuredly it requires no small portion of it to travel through the interminable long lanes of the civil war histories. But this work is not only profound, but as interesting as a novel. In the present times it is peculiarly instructive, because while they abound with demagogues jigging up and down like the jacks of a harpsichord, an improved control of them, as in the keys of a piano, is absolutely requisite. Mr. D'Israeli truly observes, that the people should be enlightened rather than flattered; Diogenes says, because they are governed not by reason but passions; Tacitus, because they are

[June,

66 rerum novarum avidi ;" and because not the wisest and best, but the most arrogant, become oracles, and produce factions which with their very birth generate other opposing factions, and the nation is endangered, if not inflamed, by fire-works, rockets, wheels, squibs, and crackers, all going off together, and spoiling the rejoicing intention of the show.

History of England, Vol. I. Anglo-Saxon
Period. By Francis Palgrave, F.R.S. and
F.S.A. 16mo, pp. 391.

IN times of remote antiquity, piracy
and robbery were deemed honourable;1
and when freemen followed no other
profession but that of arms, and agri-
culture and commerce were conducted
by enslaved natives, successful con-
quest was the acquisition of a good
Law was so feeble that it had not
West India estate. In days too when
even the influence of the most absurd
superstition, and property could only
be protected by power, victory was,
from its obvious advantage, most highly
appreciated as the best of title-deeds.
It was an apothegm, that men should
resemble fighting cocks, not because
these birds contended pro aris et focis,
but only because it was base to be con-
quered. We have stated these co-
existent ideas, because no more moral
censure attaches to our ancestors, than
to all their contemporaries. The first
notice we have of them is their inva-
sions of the British shores, against
which the Romans erected castles, two
of which, Richborough and Burgh
(oddly enough not ascribed to the Nor-
mans), Mr. Palgrave has engraved.
Ammianus Marcellinus informs us,
that with their neighbours the Franks,
they used to infest the maritime towns
of Gaul; and Rutupia was the re-
spondent station to Boulogne; and
Garianonum (Burgh) is mentioned in
the Notitia. The same author says,
that they were constantly annoying the
Britons, and that they could not be
guarded against, because they landed
wherever the wind carried them,
"Quam ob causam præ ceteris hosti-
bus timentur ut repentini." As this
however occasioned incursions without

1 Dodwell's Greece, i. 74.

2 Lycosthen. Apophthegm. p. 1017.
3 Hist. Ang. ii. 462, ed. Sylb.
4 Id. 448.
5 Id. 472.

1831.]' REVIEW-Palgrave's History of England.

previous exploration of the country, they were often surprised and beaten by stratagem; the best apparent method-for Zosimus says that the Saxons were οἱ παντων δη καρτερωτατοι των εκείσε νεμομένων βαρβαρων, θυμω, και pwμŋ, kaι kaρтepia; i. e. the bravest of all the barbarians of the vicinity, in spirit, strength, and courage. At the same time that they subdued the Britons, the Franks, their neighbours and coadjutors in arms, conquered the Gauls. In the appellation Saxons there is great ambiguity; for in the Augustan history the term is used as synonymous with the Galli Senones; by Jornandes, as brothers in arms with the Burgundians; and the "Old Saxons" seem, in the Roman imperial history, to have been the same as the Galli Senones; as the Chronicles make some of the reinforcements of Hengist (ao ccccxlix), and Mr. Palgrave from Ptolemy (see p. 33), habitants of the Cimbric Chersonesus.

Mr. Palgrave's book is written upon the entertaining plan, i. e. of intermixing historical with archæological and picturesque embellishment.

Very few of our ancestors could write, and we find, from p. 150, that it was because business could be transacted without that accomplishment. At the same time, it shows that the people were not intellectual, and were it not for the translation of the Bible, and the luxury of Newspapers, would not have been so to this day. To these two circumstances we owe the creation of a reading public.

"The laity or people who were not clerks, did not feel any urgent necessity for the use of letters. Commerce was carried on principally by truck or barter, or by payments in ready money; and sums were cast up, as amongst the Romans, upon an abacus or accounting table, the amount being denoted by counters or similar tokens. From there being no post-office, people had seldom an opportunity of conveying intelligence to absent friends. Important transactions, which now require writing, were effected orally, as a man buys a horse, pays down the money, and he rides or fetches it away. When land was sold, the owner cut a turf from the green sward, and cast it in the lap of the purchaser, as a token that the possession of the soil was transferred; or he tore off the branch of a tree and put it in the hand of the grantee, to show that the latter was to be entitled to all the products

519

of the soil. And when the purchaser of a house received seizin or possession, the key of the door, or a bundle of thatch, plucked from the roof, signified that the dwelling had been yielded up to him. These symbols were sometimes varied by the faucy of the grantor. One delivered a knife with a hair of his beard; another a glove; a third a curry comb; a fourth his drinking horn. The intent of these visible symbols was to supply the place of writing, by impressing the transaction upon the recollection of the witnesses, who were called together upon the occasion."-p. 151.

It is known that all poetry was originally intended for singing, and accompanied, where possible, by music

and that the originals of Ossian, or of Homer before him, were preserved through transmission by memory. Accordingly, says Mr. Palgrave,

"Verse amongst the Northern nations was often composed extemporaneously; and according to the practice of the improvisatori in Italy, either to the sound of an instrument, or at least in song. Some little was reduced into writing; more was recol

lected, or as we say, learnt by heart;—by

heart because it was liked and loved-because it accorded with the feelings of the hearer. Most of all was forgotten because it was not learnt by heart."-p. 152.

But these things were tokens of barbarism. True. But by what means, under the existence of manuscript only, can books be circulated, or a people be rendered intellectual? The Greeks and Romans were so, you will say. True again. But then the agricultural and mechanical business being conducted by slaves, the freemen patronized masters and philosophers to elevate their children, by intellectuality of character and taste. The noblemen and gentry of the middle age left these things to clerks, as professional affairs, and regarded only arms and agriculture. If gunpowder had not been invented, and mathematics studied, things would have been much the same at the present day.

Philosophy may comment upon His. tory, and beautifully exhibit (as Dr. Lardner does) the steam action of nature. This most useful and best exhibition of the divine gift of reason (for poetical power is not a deductive faculty, only a fine perception) can alone form wisdom and judginent. We are glad to add our testimony to the philosophical merit of the following passage, because it is a solemn warning against

520

REVIEW.-Palgrave's History of England. [June,

the possible consequences of suffering popular ignorance to influence legislation. God forbid that the people should not have that protection and consideration, and influence, which places them, as to life, property, and well-being, upon the best possible state of privileges; but dictation by them may be absolute ruin. Let them then remember that the printing press cannot defy time or circumstances.

his cavalry and archers, both of whom could retreat from the phalanx, and annoy it with missiles. The object of William was so to distress the solid body with his archery, as to irritate them till they broke, and then he could charge them successfully. Now mark the opposite tactics of Henry the Fifth, at Agincourt. The French force, like the Norman, consisted of overpowering cavalry. The King took "Learning and science are wholly susa position in a defile, by which means he presented a narrow front and great tained by our artificial and perishable state of society. If, in consequence of a total depth. His flanks were protected by subversion of our laws and institutions, prowood and ground; and the enemy perty should be so divided, that instead of could not attack but between disthat gradation of ranks which is now esta- charges of archery, which galled the blished, there should be only a working men, and wounded the horses. Haclass degraded by poverty, debased by infirold's phalanx was like the squares at delity, without wealth to reward learning, or Waterloo, a dead mark; and had he leisure to enjoy inquiry, all the attainments had another phalanx, armed with the upon which we pride ourselves may ulti-framea (a spear used in the day), actmately disappear. Those who are now stimulated to study by the hopes of worldly advancement, would fall off; and that class by whom learning is pursued only for its own sake, would cease to exist. With the decline of public prosperity, with the destruction of private capital, all the arts which are directly or indirectly connected with commerce or manufactures, would decay. The abstract sciences would be neglected or forgotten. And though some branches might be pursued by a solitary sage, still they would be as null to a world in which he

would find none able and willing to profit by his knowledge."-p. 158.

Now, at the present time, there is a publication in numbers at the humble price of two pence, entitled the "Poor Man's Guardian," and circulated successfully, in which their Majesties themselves are deemed entitled to no more than their earnings as day labourers. People may think lightly of such opinions, as impracticable and absurd; but let the recent incendiarisms, assassinations in Ireland, &c. convince them that they have a most mischievous operation. We mention this circumstance only because we wish to observe a philosophical neutrality upon the great political subjects under agitation.

Mr. Palgrave has given an excellent account of the battle of Hastings; but the tactics seem not to have been perfectly comprehended. The AngloSaxon armies, as those of the French at that time, consisted of a phalanx of infantry, with a few cavalry in the wings, little used but to escort the General and carry orders. (See Malliot, iii. p. 11.) William depended upon

ing upon the rear of the Normans, he would have shown himself, what he was not, a General. But he left the decision of the battle to close action

and hard knocks, which his enemy could and did decline at option. That William was an expert tactician, is evident from his opposing arms to his enemy, which the latter was not prepared to encounter.

As to the question, whether Harold and became an anchoret, the story was actually killed, or survived the battle rests upon the authorities of Giraldus Cambrensis, and Alfred of Rievesby, who derived it from a tradition then existent at Chester; but the History of Ramsey states that after his wound in the eye, he was struck with a sword (XV. Scriptor. 462); and other writers state, that William rebuked a rascally soldier for wounding him, while alive, in the thigh (Lel. Collect. i. 262); nor is it at all probable, that his mother would have solicited for interment the body of an impostor, or that William would have sent her one. Knighton says (X. Scriptor. 2342) that he lived, though letaliter (mortally) vulneratus, nine months after the battle. Brompton (id 961), after detailing the story, says, that the verior sententia is, that he was killed in battle, and the probability is, that some person named Harold did escape in the manner described, from the battle, and was buried at St. John's, Chester, where his tomb was shown. Brompton says of the story, that it was only quorundam opinio, and despised with that facility with which it was

REVIEW.-Life of Lord Chancellor Northington.

affirmed. In all questions of that kind, we are biassed by the old historians; and, if a story was doubted in their day, it requires stronger evidence than that adduced to confirm it.