The Years of Endurance Page 6

  '" It is the Church of England that has made England what she is— a nation of honest men."

  In the pages of John Nyren's The Cricketers of My Time, published in 1833, the author recalled the men of Hambledon with whom he had grown up in the seventies and eighties of the previous century. In his gallery of cricketing heroes we see the fathers of the men who tended the guns at Trafalgar and manned the squares at Waterloo. We can watch them over his old shoulders, making their way with curved bat and eager eye up the woodland road from Hambledon village to the downland pitch at Broad-Halfpenny on the first Tuesday in May. The dew is still on the grass and the sun is shining high over " Old Winchester " as they take the field against All England. Here is little George Lear, the famous long-stop, so sure that he might have been a sand-bank, and his friend, Tom Sueter, the wicket-keeper who loved to join him in a glee at the " Bat and Ball "; Lambert, " the little farmer " whose teasing art, so fatal to the Kent and Surrey men, had been mastered in solitude by bowling away hours together at a hurdle while tending his father's sheep; and "those anointed clod-stumpers, the Walkers, Tom and Harry" with their wilted, apple-john faces and long spidery legs as thick at the ankles as at the hips. " Tom was the driest and most rigid-limbed chap; . . . his skin was like the rind of an old oak, and as sapless. . . . He moved like the rude machinery of a steam-engine in the infancy of construction, and when he ran, every member seemed, ready to fly to the four winds. He toiled like a tar on horseback."

  What Wellington became to his Peninsula veterans and "Daddy" Hill to Wellington, Richard Nyren was to the Hambledon cricketers and John Small to Nyren. " I never saw," his son recorded, " a finer specimen of the thoroughbred old English yeoman than Richard Nyren. He was a good face-to-face, unflinching, uncompromising independent man. He placed a full and just value upon the station he held in society and maintained it without insolence or assumption. He could differ with a superior, without trenching upon his dignity or losing his own." And his fidus Achates, yeoman Small, was worthy of him. He loved music, was an adept at the fiddle and taught himself the double bass. He once calmed a bull by taking out his instrument and playing it in the middle of a field. His fellow-cricketer, the Duke of Dorset, hearing of his musical talent, sent him a handsome violin and paid the carriage. " Small, like a true and simple-hearted Englishman, returned the compliment by sending his Grace two bats and balls, also paying the carriage.5'

  In the English memory there are few lovelier scenes than that famous pitch on the Hampshire down. When " Silver Billy " Beldham—the first bat of the age—was in or runs were hard to get and the finish close, Sir Horace Mann, that stalwart patron of the game, would pace about outside the ground cutting down the daisies with his stick in his agitation and the old farmers under the trees would lean forward upon their tall staves, silent. " Oh! it was a heart-stirring sight to witness the multitude forming a complete and dense circle round that noble green. Half the county would be present, and all their hearts with us.—Little Hambledon, pitted against All England, was a proud thought for the Hampshire men. Defeat was glory in such a struggle—Victory, indeed, made us only ' a little lower than angels.' How those fine brawn-faced fellows of farmers would drink to our success! And then what stuff they had to drink! Punch!—not your new Ponche a la Romaine, or Ponche a la Groseille, or your modern cat-lap milk punch—punch be-deviled; but good, unsophisticated, John Bull stuff—stark! that would stand on end—punch that would make a cat speak! . . . Ale that would flare like turpentine—genuine Boniface! "

  " There would this company, consisting most likely of some thousands, remain patiently and anxiously watching every turn of fate in the game, as if the event had been the meeting of two armies to decide their liberty. And whenever a Hambledon man made a good hit, worth four or five runs, you would hear the deep mouths of the whole multitude baying away in pure Hampshire— ‘Go hard! —Go hard!—Tick and turn!—tick and turn! ' To the honour of my countrymen ... I cannot call to recollection an instance of their wilfully stopping a ball that had been hit out among them by one of our opponents. Like true Englishmen, they would give an enemy fair play. How strongly are all those scenes, of fifty years by-gone,, painted in my memory !—and the smell of that ale comes upon me as freshly as the new May flowers."

  The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. From the high hill which rose out of the woods beyond the pitch one could see on clear days half southern England—valley and down and forest. Over that wide countryside the sea winds never ceased to blow from every point of the compass, free as the hearts of oak the land bred. Waving trees and smoke fluttering like a ragged banner, feathery heath, lonely cottages at the edge of moor and forest, ragged cows and geese and ponies pasturing in the wild by ancient prescribed rights. Tidal rivers flowing through marshes to the ocean with black cattle grazing at their salt edges and wooden cobles and crab-boats tossing on their silver bosom, land of semi-nomads, gatherers of shellfish, fowlers, longshore fishermen and armed smugglers—of Slip-jibbet and Moonshine Buck tip-trotting by in the dark with tubs of Geneva for the parson and " baccy for the Clerk." Sometimes travellers and shepherds near the coast would see the fleet of England riding at Spithead in one of the broad bays of the Channel shore; " pleasant and wonderful was the sight as seen from Ridgeway Hill, with the West Bay and the Isle of Portland and Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, all lying in the calm sunshine," wrote Elizabeth Ham in after years, " I see it now." 1

  Further inland were the familiar objects of the country scene: the reapers in the golden field, the cottages of wattle and timber with their massive brick chimneys and deep-abiding thatch, the mill with its weather-boarded walls and throbbing wheel amid willows and alders, the saw pit with sweating craftsmen and stacked timber, the leafy lane with the great hairy-footed horses drawing home the wain laden with hay and laughing children. Along the high roads bright liveried postilions glinted like jewels before swaying post-chaises, and postmen riding or mounted high on coaches passed in the scarlet livery of England. With infinite slowness, soon overtaken by these fast-moving ones, a vast tilted stage-waggon crawled like a snail behind its eight horses, their neck bells making discordant music while the carrier trudged beside idly cracking his whip in the air. Along the road were haymakers at their work, mansions with ancient trees and cropping deer, and at every village the blacksmith's forge with old Vulcan looking out from his open door, " grey and hairy as any badger." And perhaps as it grew dark and the lights were lit on the coaches, the traveller might overtake a neighbouring gentleman's hounds, as John Byng did one May evening, coming home from an airing.

  Within the candle-lit windows of the wayside cottage and the farmhouse on the hill, old John Bull would sit dozing with his pot 1

  1 MS. Diary of Elizabeth Ham.

  beside the kitchen fire, the dog and cat asleep at his feet, the good wife at her wheel, the pretty maid his daughter coming in with her pail, the children playing with the caged bird, the tinder-box on the shelf, the onions and flitches hanging from the ceiling. From this home he was presently to go out to face and tame a world in arms. For the moment he was content and at his ease, perhaps more so than was good for his continuing soul. In the tavern down in the village old England still lived on where over their pipes and bowls, gathered round the bare rude table, the local worthies with russet, weather-beaten faces cracked their joke and trolled their song. Though their summer was brief, before winter aches and penury encompassed them, they knew how to be merry. Cricket matches and fives playing, the crowd at the fair gathered round the cudgellers high wooden stage, the squeak of a fiddle or the shrill cry of a mountebank with his Merry Andrew on the village green on a warm summer evening, the carolers and the mumming players coming out of the Christmas snows, these were the outward symbols of a race of freemen taking their pleasures in their own way as their fathers had done before them. It seemed a far cry from these peaceful scenes to the rough humours and turbulent racket of London—the butchers of Sheppards* Market and May Fa
ir elbowing their way through the dirty streets to a hanging at Tyburn, the footpads in the shadows of Park Lane, the foetid cells of Newgate—or the restless, sullen money-making of Manchester and Birmingham. Yet all were part of an English whole whose meaning it was hard to compass in a word, but whose people were in a greater or lesser degree adherents of two dominant ideals—justice and their own freedom.

  " 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 wonder 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 understood. 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 t
o 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.