The Years of Endurance (9 page)

" The nations not so blessed as thee, Must in their turn to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish great and free, The dread and envy of them all."

So sang the islanders in their favourite " Rule Britannia," and the words expressed their firm, unalterable conviction. Their very versatility was part of their heritage of liberty. " Now in as hot a climate as that of the East or West Indies and sometimes in winter feel the cold of Greenland," wrote John Byng, "up and down; hence we are precarious, uncertain, wild, enduring mortals. And may we so endowed continue, the wonde
r and balance of the universe."

CHAPTER
TWO

The Gates of Brass
1789

" Liberty, Hke happiness, is most perfect when least remarked. As most misery is caused by the pursuit of an abstract happiness, distinct from the occupations that make men happy, so most tyranny springs from the struggle for an abstract liberty, distinct from the laws and institutions that make men free
."

Christopher Hobhouse,
Fox.

On
Tuesday, 14th July, 1789—more than three years before the event described at the beginning of this book—a great multitude of men and women assembled in front of the Bastille, the old royal fortress of Paris. They were in a state of intense excitement. They demanded that the governor, de Launey, who held the place for the young King of France, should hand it over to the representatives of the people. The governor, whose command consisted of eighty old pensioners and thirty Swiss Guards, did his best to appease them: showed them the emptiness of the fortress and had the ancient guns, long used only for ceremonial purposes, pulled back from the embrasures. But the crowd was in no mood for reason. Behind it all Paris, surging through narrow, cobbled streets, was in revolution, the tocsin was tinging from every tower and a great flag, which was not the flag of the French monarchy, was being borne above a raging, shouting, trampling human river.

As the pressure grew the governor, who had admitted the crowd into the outer courtyard, had the drawbridge leading to the inner court raised. Then someone severed the chains of the bridge with an axe and it dropped, letting the mob into the heart of the castle. Firing began, and for four hours the people, delirious with rage and excitement, hurled themselves at the walls. During these hours the Bastille, with its high antique towers flickering crimson, became the symbol of a dying society: its
death throes the commemoration
of the birth of a new force in the world, terrible to all who opposed it, full of mysterious hope to those who accepted it.

A few minutes before the great clock of the Bastille tolled five someone in the garrison raised a white flag. There was some parleying through a porthole, a hasty promise of parole by an unofficial spokesman and then as the doors were unbolted all Hell let loose. For an hour the multitude from the medieval streets swarmed through the fortress howling for blood. Old de Launey and his officers were torn to pieces and their heads mounted on pikes. The dazed prisoners—four coiners, a sadistic debauchee and two madmen—were let out into the glare and sulphurous air of the new freedom. Then the mob poured back into the city, bearing aloft the dripping heads like banners, to murder the chief magistrate in the Hotel-de-Ville.

The storming of the Bastille told the world that the greatest nation in Europe was in revolution. It shattered the stagnant calm of the eighteenth century. It announced that Frenchmen were no longer prepared to accept the social beliefs on which public order depended.

For the foundation which supported those beliefs had ceased to exist. The basis of the feudal polity of Christian Europe, evolved gradually out of the anarchy that followed the fall of Rome, was that the enjoyment of property and privilege involved the fulfilment of social duty. The Knight and Baron held their lands by tenure of caring for them and those who lived on them: of affording to the cultivator the protection of law and order and defence against aggressor, robber and wild beast. The lord fought, hunted and gave law for all and the peasant ploughed for all, and in a primitive age when all occupation was hereditary both transmitted their obligations to their children. This compact of mutual security ran in an ascending scale through all the stages of society, each petty lord securing his peace and property by vassalage to some more powerful lord. Kings and princes paid fealty to a supreme " Emperor," elected for life from their number and wielding in theory the vanished authority of the Roman Empire and Charlemagne. Binding them all in one faith and morality was the universal or Catholic Church with its great underlying principle that all men's souls were equal in the fatherhood of God. While the lord fought for all and the husbandman ploughed for all, the priest prayed for all. The tithes and endowments of the medieval Church were the price paid by the community for this service.

The grandeur of its Gothic cathedrals, its achievements in agriculture and the arts, its triumphs in arms testified Europe's debt to the system of Christian feudalism. But save in isolated corners its practice had long ceased to bear any relation to its theory. Those in whose hands the sword was placed used it not as a trust but as
a
means of aggrandisement, those who held land by tenure of service treated it as their absolute property, those who administered pious endowments converted them to their own use. And though everywhere men still confessed and called themselves Christians, the unity and faith had gone out of Christendom. Instead of an indivisible Catholic Church there was an anarchy of warring sects and dogmas. Instead of a united Christian polity there was a discord of national States—France, Spain, Austria, Russia, Prussia— whose rulers seemed absorbed in outwitting one another and adding to their territories. The smaller units of Christendom were everywhere threatened by the lack of principle of the powerful. They only survived at all through Britain's age-long opposition to unbalanced power and because of the chronic financial embarrassment of their larger neighbours.

For from one end of the Continent to the other, bankruptcy impended. To the monarchies of the eighteenth century it was what unemployment became to the democracies of the twentieth. Behind the costly splendour of their palladian palaces, gilded clothes and aristocratic elegance leered the same shocking spectre. The trim, butterfly-coloured, goose-stepping armies, the crowded, resounding Courts, the picturesque schemes of public improvement with which enlightened monarchs endeavoured to immortalise their names wanted paying for. And despite crushing taxation and every ingenious expedient known to spendthrifts and borrowers, there was never enough to balance accounts. The higher the taxation, the poorer became everybody but a few. So desperate was the task of raising the wind, that many statesmen pinned their hopes on alchemy and the mystical researches of the Rosicrucians. In the whole of Europe only Pitt's England and the great banking republic of Holland remained solvent.

The causes of this were not und
erstood. Men saw clearly enough
that the old system for initiating and directing human enterprise had ceased to work. What they failed to comprehend was that a new economic power had risen in its place whose machinery, unable to operate in the outworn conditions of a fundamentally different society, only aggravated the situation. The original basis of the feudal system was Christian responsibility. The original basis of medieval creative art was the glory of God. When these ceased to provide motive power for economic activity, their place was taken by usury. But usury could not keep the wheels of society turning if the continuous material development, which was essential to pay perpetual interest on capital, was impeded by a static system of law and status.

But though the professional financier was forthcoming to advance capital to earth's titular rulers, the latter, hampered by restrictive laws and customs devised for an opposite ideal of hfe, were unable to increase the productivity of their domains fast enough to pay the interest. Borrowing lavishly to meet the requirements of an increasingly complex and luxurious civilisation, they were constantly on the verge of default, and were driven to ever fresh borrowings at still more exorbitant rates. To meet these commitments and finance their costly wars they sought to exact more in taxes from their subjects—or from such of them as they could legally tax—than the latter were able to pay. In Brandenburg eight out of nine and three-quarter crowns—the annual yield of a thirty-acre peasant holding—were taken by the State. The contradiction between two conflicting conceptions of society created a mathematical impossibility. The new freedom of finance, loosed from the fetters of Canon law, was not matched by freedom of trade, labour and contract. The result was universal frustration. Britain and Holland —though it cost the former her American empire—escaped disaster because in both countries with their more elastic constitutions the feudal system had been gradually modified in the interests of commerce. Here alone a system of cheap State borrowing had been erected on a popular basis of funded property and rationally-appropriated taxation.

Such were the causes of the poverty which, despite splendid Courts, noble culture and skilful journeymen, hung like a miasma over a rich continent. The peasants, ground down by State taxes, feudal dues and tithes, lived scarcely better than the beasts they tended. Throughout Germany, Italy, Spain and eastern Europe they were still serfs, tied by status to the land and without equality of legal rights. The mutual services
they
should have received from their feudal overlords were no longer paid. Their bowed backs bore the burden of an ever-growing number of idle nobles and clerics endowed by their ancestors and the pious benefactors of past ages with the fruits of the soil for all time.

The evil was cumulative. The rights exacted from society by the aristocrat, like those of the usurer, were perpetual. On the Continent, not only the eldest son but the entire family of the man ennobled became hereditary nobles down to the last generation. There was no moderation in this conception of aristocracy. These privileged creatures, themselves mo
stly
impecunious on account of their expanding numbers, were exempted from every new burden of a more complicated social life, including taxation. They existed pa
rtly
by scrambling for
the
public sinecures which were reserved for their kind and pa
rtly
by the feudal dues levied on
the
cultivator.

The state of the cities was little better. The larger kind of merchant, with the capital to finance the bad debts of his noble clients, could make fortunes out of their extravagance and ineptitude. But the journeyman, who bore the ultimate shock of unpaid bills, chaotic finances and recurrent wars, was desperate. The streets of every Continental town swarmed with beggars. " The people of this place," wrote an English girl of Piave, " have a frightful aspect:, they looked more like beasts than men, and they were so nasty and dirty that I could not stay a moment without being tormented with the idea of catching some nastiness or other." A traveller in 1768 noted that, compared with the inns between Naples and Rome, the worst Highland alehouse was a palace.

The absurdity of the universal contrast between poverty and plenty stared the thinker and philosopher in the face. The system on which the life of Europe depended was outworn, its underlying thesis become ridiculous. It was absurd for the working part of mankind which lived in hovels and had not enough to eat to pay for the maintenance of an aristocracy which had ceased to perform any of the duties for which it was designed. It was equally absurd for men to scrape and starve in order to support in un-Christian ostentation bishops and abbots who n
eglected their spiritual charge
for dicing and love-making. Society could only be freed by shak
ing off its ancient shackles. A
new social contract was needed.

So writers and philosophers preached throughout the eighteenth century, ridiculing the absurdities of the old system and extolling the virtues of an Utopian age of reason which would presently succeed it. Human reason, they felt, when released from outworn prejudice, was capable of solving every terrestrial problem. In France a succession of brilliant men led the revolt of the mind against the tyranny of custom. They claimed that the universe was governed by certain simple and logical laws: that on their observance human happiness depended and that it was within thei power of reason to discover and apply them. Some—the Physiocrats— confined their efforts to seeking a natural economic law and found it in the removal of the unnatural barriers that feudal moralists had erected to regulate the flow of commerce. "
Laissez faire et laissez passer,"
was their open sesame. Others sought a political solution: a revolutionary law or constitution true for all ages and countries.

The philosophers, who were only expressing what every one felt, won supporters even among kings and princes. Struggling to govern in a tangle of dead wood and irrational aristocratic and clerical privilege and immunity, many of them welcomed these heralds of a simpler and—as it was hoped—more solvent order. Catherine the Great of Russia, Charles III of Spain, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria and Leopold of Tuscany were all enlightened rulers who patronised the fashionable French philosophers and Encyclopaedists and endeavoured to put their theories into practice. In doing so they fell, to a greater or lesser degree, foul of the rights of the old order. Aristocrats, clerics, lawyers and city fathers and conservative folk generally united against them to defend their privileges. Thus the liberal-minded Joseph of Austria had to face a rebellion of his Belgian subjects; and even the autocrat of all the Russias discovered the necessity of going slow in enforcing the rule of reason on an unreasonable realm.