Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/353

 the minds of those who, without such employment, might have continued the roll of ancient scholars.

It was not history alone, but theology and science also, that languished under the sudden revival of classical learning; men lost themselves in the history of early Rome who might have told us something worth knowing about their own England; or satisfied themselves with simple attempts to write fine Latin, not troubling themselves much as to whether they had anything to say; or with pronouncing eulogistic orations fit for kings and chancellors to read. But you will be thinking that is just what I am doing now; it is too obvious that a public statutory lecture is not a labour of love.

It is clear, then, not from the distinct enunciations of the time, but from the lessons of preceding and following reigns, what England wanted, and what it got in Henry VII. England did not want to become territorially one, as France, Spain, and Germany did before the new drama of politics began. England had long been territorially one; but it required constitutional and governmental consistency. It required an equability of the execution of law, the abolition of local partisanships, the abeyance of political questionings and controversies, thorough concentration in the hands of strong kings and able ministers. Such a king Henry VII was; such a king Henry VIII was during the better part of his reign, and to some extent Elizabeth was a successor of the same kind; strong in will, strong in wealth, strong in definite personal aims, but even stronger in the way in which their absolute power could be manipulated. It wanted too such things as, first, the vindication of a dynastic title to the throne by the victory of the king over the Yorkist party, by the union of family titles in his marriage, by the securing of every possible lawful guarantee to the succession, so that there might be no more Wars of the Roses; and consequent upon this, the enriching of the crown to such an extent as to make the King almost, if not entirely, independent of taxation for purposes of ordinary expenditure: or, secondly, the humiliation of the baronage by exhaustion, impoverishment, and reduction of numbers, leaving scarcely a trace of the divisions of party