The Crimes of England | Page 7

to be
turned out of Silesia as they knew why he had ever been allowed in it.
In Poland, like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he
inhabited; but it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected
limbs could live again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian
tradition confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide
generalisation is very true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a
long view, he scattered the seeds of war all over the world, his own last
days were passed in a long and comparatively prosperous peace; a
peace which received and perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace
with which many European peoples were content. For though he did
not understand justice, he could understand moderation. He was the
most genuine and the most wicked of pacifists. He did not want any
more wars. He had tortured and beggared all his neighbours; but he
bore them no malice for it.
The immediate cause of that spirited disaster, the intervention of
England on behalf of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course,
to the national policy of the first William Pitt. He was the kind of man
whose vanity and simplicity are too easily overwhelmed by the obvious.
He saw nothing in a European crisis except a war with France; and
nothing in a war with France except a repetition of the rather fruitless
glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet. He was of the Erastian Whigs,
sceptical but still healthy-minded, and neither good enough nor bad
enough to understand that even the war of that irreligious age was
ultimately a religious war. He had not a shade of irony in his whole
being; and beside Frederick, already as old as sin, he was like a rather
brilliant schoolboy.
But the direct causes were not the only causes, nor the true ones. The

true causes were connected with the triumph of one of the two
traditions which had long been struggling in England. And it is pathetic
to record that the foreign tradition was then represented by two of the
ablest men of that age, Frederick of Prussia and Pitt; while what was
really the old English tradition was represented by two of the stupidest
men that mankind ever tolerated in any age, George III. and Lord Bute.
Bute was the figurehead of a group of Tories who set about fulfilling
the fine if fanciful scheme for a democratic monarchy sketched by
Bolingbroke in "The Patriot King." It was bent in all sincerity on
bringing men's minds back to what are called domestic affairs, affairs
as domestic as George III. It might have arrested the advancing
corruption of Parliaments and enclosure of country-sides, by turning
men's minds from the foreign glories of the great Whigs like Churchill
and Chatham; and one of its first acts was to terminate the alliance with
Prussia. Unfortunately, whatever was picturesque in the piracy of
Potsdam was beyond the imagination of Windsor. But whatever was
prosaic in Potsdam was already established at Windsor; the economy of
cold mutton, the heavy-handed taste in the arts, and the strange
northern blend of boorishness with etiquette. If Bolingbroke's ideas had
been applied by a spirited person, by a Stuart, for example, or even by
Queen Elizabeth (who had real spirit along with her extraordinary
vulgarity), the national soul might have broken free from its new
northern chains. But it was the irony of the situation that the King to
whom Tories appealed as a refuge from Germanism was himself a
German.
We have thus to refer the origins of the German influence in England
back to the beginning of the Hanoverian Succession; and thence back to
the quarrel between the King and the lawyers which had issue at
Naseby; and thence again to the angry exit of Henry VIII. from the
mediaeval council of Europe. It is easy to exaggerate the part played in
the matter by that great and human, though very pagan person, Martin
Luther. Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred for the heresies of the
German monk, for in speculative opinions Henry was wholly Catholic;
and the two wrote against each other innumerable pages, largely
consisting of terms of abuse, which were pretty well deserved on both
sides. But Luther was not a Lutheran. He was a sign of the break-up of

Catholicism; but he was not a builder of Protestantism. The countries
which became corporately and democratically Protestant, Scotland, for
instance, and Holland, followed Calvin and not Luther. And Calvin was
a Frenchman; an unpleasant Frenchman, it is true, but one full of that
French capacity for creating official entities which can really act, and
have a kind of impersonal personality, such as the French Monarchy or
the Terror. Luther was an anarchist, and therefore a