The cause contested upon these noble hills to the north-west of Lewes
is one which continually recurs all through English history; the cause
of the Aristocracy against the Crown. The monarchies of western
Europe, which slowly emerged from the anarchy of the Dark Ages and
helped to make the Middle Age the glorious and noble thing it was,
are, if we consider them spiritually at least, democratic weapons, or
rather, politically, they seem to sum up the national energy and to
express it. In them was vested, and this as of divine right, the
executive. Without the Crown nothing could be done, no writ issued, no
fortress garrisoned. In the Crown was gathered all the national ends,
it was a symbol at once of unity and of power. Against this glorious
thing in England we see a constant and unremitting rebellion on the
part of the aristocracy. It was so in the time of King John when the
rascal barons curbed and broke the central government; it was so in
the time of Henry III. when Simon de Montfort led, and for a time
successfully, the rebellion. It has been so always and not least in
the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century so falsely represented
as a democratic movement, when the parvenu aristocracy founded upon
the lands and wealth of the raped Church in the sixteenth century,
broke the Crown up and finally established in England a puppet king, a
mere Venetian Doge incapable, as we have seen in the last few years,
of defending the people against an unscrupulous and treasonous
plutocracy led by a lawyer as certainly on the make as Thomas
Cromwell.
Pages:
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231