Page:Chesterton - A Short History of England.djvu/167

SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS ones. In a later generation Cromwell exhibited the same error reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eye on Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our own time the Jingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought already to have had it on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention Mary nevertheless got herself into an anti-national position towards the most tremendous international problem of her people. It is the second of the coincidences that confirmed the sixteenth-century change and the name of it was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen she married a Spanish prince and probably saw no more in such an alliance than her father had done. But by the time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth who was more cut off from the old religion (though very tenuously attached to the new one), and by the time the project of a similar Spanish marriage for Elizabeth herself had fallen through, something had matured which was wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already felt falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.

Wooden clichés about the birth of the British Empire and the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured but contradicted the crucial truth. From such phrases one would fancy that England, in some imperial fashion now first realized that she was great. It would be far truer to say that she now first realized that she was small. The great poet of the spacious 155