Pt. 1 - "The War of the Usurpers" by G.K. Chesterton

Hi, All -



G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a British writer, Christian apologist, etc.
etc. etc. I've always thought of him as Catholic, but the Wikipedia page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton



indicates that he converted to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. He
is most famous for writing the "Father Brown" series of mysteries. I haven't
been able to find any publication data for the book; at least there is none
in the kindle version of the book, but it must have been written no later
than Mr. Chesterton's death year of 1936.



He calls the WotR "The War of the Usurpers," which forms Chap. 10 of the
book. I am not going to reproduce all of the chapter prior to his assumption
of RIII, but I may quote a few interesting bits, just to give the flavor of
the whole.



X



THE WAR OF THE USURPERS



The poet Pope, though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats,
Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism was
Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his political point more
clearly than in Pope's line which ran: "The right divine of kings to govern
wrong." It will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that I do not
palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some of the
pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible ideal of
"non-resistance" to a foreign and lawless power. But the seventeenth century
was an age of sects, that is of fads; and the Filmerites made a fad of
divine right. Its roots were older, equally religious but much more
realistic; and though tangled with many other and even opposite things of
the Middle Ages, ramify through all the changes we have now to consider. The
connection can hardly be stated better than by taking Pope's easy epigram
and pointing out that it is, after all, very weak in philosophy. "The right
divine of kings to govern wrong," considered as a sneer, really evades what
we mean by "a right." To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same
as to be right in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a divine right
is what we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a man has a right
to vote, has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right to choose
his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? I have a right to express the
opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitate to make the
controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be right.



Now medieval monarchy, though only one aspect of medieval rule, was roughly
represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a voter has
the right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governed horribly
and extravagantly wrong, he retained his position as of right; as a private
man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he goes horribly and
extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so simple as this; for
the Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashion to fancy, under a
single and steely discipline. They were very controversial and therefore
very complex; and it is easy, by isolating items whether about _jus divinum_
or _primus inter pares_, to maintain that the medieval were almost anything;
it has been seriously maintained that they were all Germans. But it is true
that the influence of the Church, though by no means of all the great
churchmen, encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which
was meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the man
tyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism is obvious enough. The
precise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is, not
for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell.



The advantage of "divine right," or irremovable legitimacy, is this; that
there is a limit to the ambitions of the right. "_Roi ne puis_"; the royal
power, whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in one respect
like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional moralists have
often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It has perhaps
been less notices that a tyrant and a rabble most emphatically have the same
virtues. And one virtue which they very markedly share is that neither
tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do not care a button what they do to
wealthy people. It is true that tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from
the heavens almost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the
sky; a man no more expected to be king than to be the west wind or the
morning star. But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only
his own mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own
reading-lamp. Yet something very like this is what really happened to
England in the later Middle Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy, was the
fall of Richard II.



Shakespeare's historical plays are something truer than historical; they are
traditional; the living memory of many things lingered, though the memory of
others was lost. He is right in making Richard II incarnate the claim to
divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronial ambition which ultimately broke
up the old medieval order. But divine right had become at once drier and
more fantastic by the time of the Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the
fresh and popular part of the thing; for he came at a later stage in a
process of stiffening which is the main thing to be studied in later
medievalism. Richard himself was possibly a wayward and exasperating prince;
it might well be the weak link that snapped in the strong chain of the
Plantagenets.

. . . .

The point is that by the removal of Richard, a step above the parliament
became possible for the first time. The transition was tremendous; the crown
became an object of ambition. That which one could snatch another could
snatch from him; that which the House of Lancaster held merely by force the
House of York could take from it by force. The spell of an undethronable
thing seated out of reach was broken, and for three unhappy generations
adventurers strove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood, above
which was something new in the medieval imagination; an empty throne.

. . . .

Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the old religious system,
and which afterwards became a true national tradition against Mary, was
doubtless started by the diseased energy of these fifteenth-century bishops.
Persecution can be a philosophy, and a defensible philosophy, but with some
of these men persecution was rather a perversion. Across the channel, one of
them was presiding at the trial of Joan of Arc.



But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in all the epoch
that follows the fall of Richard II, and especially in those feuds that
found so ironic an imagery in English rose - and thorns. The foreshortening
of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim to be, forbids any
entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York and Lancaster, or any
attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and revenges which filled the
lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlife widow of Henry V. The rivals
were not, indeed, as is sometimes exaggeratively implied, fighting for
nothing, or even (like the lion and the unicorn) merely fighting for the
crown. The shadow of a moral difference can still be traced even in that
stormy twilight of a heroic time. But when we have said that Lancaster
stood, on the whole, for the new notion of a king propped by parliaments and
powerful bishops, and York, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea
of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his people, we have
said everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by
counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. But this
truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be called Tory about
the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a justifiable romance
to the last and most remarkable figure of the fighting House of York, with
whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended.



- End Part 1





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Johanne L. Tournier



Email - jltournier60@...

or jltournier@...



"With God, all things are possible."

- Jesus of Nazareth

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Off Topic...Johanne ...there is a new series of "Father Brown' mysteries coming out next year here in England. A lot of it was filmed in my village...It was great fun to watch it all...Eileen

--- In , Johanne Tournier <jltournier60@...> wrote:
>
> Hi, All -
>
>
>
> G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a British writer, Christian apologist, etc.
> etc. etc. I've always thought of him as Catholic, but the Wikipedia page
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
>
>
>
> indicates that he converted to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. He
> is most famous for writing the "Father Brown" series of mysteries. I haven't
> been able to find any publication data for the book; at least there is none
> in the kindle version of the book, but it must have been written no later
> than Mr. Chesterton's death year of 1936.
>
>
>
> He calls the WotR "The War of the Usurpers," which forms Chap. 10 of the
> book. I am not going to reproduce all of the chapter prior to his assumption
> of RIII, but I may quote a few interesting bits, just to give the flavor of
> the whole.
>
>
>
> X
>
>
>
> THE WAR OF THE USURPERS
>
>
>
> The poet Pope, though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats,
> Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism was
> Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his political point more
> clearly than in Pope's line which ran: "The right divine of kings to govern
> wrong." It will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that I do not
> palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some of the
> pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible ideal of
> "non-resistance" to a foreign and lawless power. But the seventeenth century
> was an age of sects, that is of fads; and the Filmerites made a fad of
> divine right. Its roots were older, equally religious but much more
> realistic; and though tangled with many other and even opposite things of
> the Middle Ages, ramify through all the changes we have now to consider. The
> connection can hardly be stated better than by taking Pope's easy epigram
> and pointing out that it is, after all, very weak in philosophy. "The right
> divine of kings to govern wrong," considered as a sneer, really evades what
> we mean by "a right." To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same
> as to be right in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a divine right
> is what we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a man has a right
> to vote, has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right to choose
> his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? I have a right to express the
> opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitate to make the
> controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be right.
>
>
>
> Now medieval monarchy, though only one aspect of medieval rule, was roughly
> represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a voter has
> the right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governed horribly
> and extravagantly wrong, he retained his position as of right; as a private
> man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he goes horribly and
> extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so simple as this; for
> the Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashion to fancy, under a
> single and steely discipline. They were very controversial and therefore
> very complex; and it is easy, by isolating items whether about _jus divinum_
> or _primus inter pares_, to maintain that the medieval were almost anything;
> it has been seriously maintained that they were all Germans. But it is true
> that the influence of the Church, though by no means of all the great
> churchmen, encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which
> was meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the man
> tyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism is obvious enough. The
> precise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is, not
> for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell.
>
>
>
> The advantage of "divine right," or irremovable legitimacy, is this; that
> there is a limit to the ambitions of the right. "_Roi ne puis_"; the royal
> power, whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in one respect
> like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional moralists have
> often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It has perhaps
> been less notices that a tyrant and a rabble most emphatically have the same
> virtues. And one virtue which they very markedly share is that neither
> tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do not care a button what they do to
> wealthy people. It is true that tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from
> the heavens almost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the
> sky; a man no more expected to be king than to be the west wind or the
> morning star. But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only
> his own mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own
> reading-lamp. Yet something very like this is what really happened to
> England in the later Middle Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy, was the
> fall of Richard II.
>
>
>
> Shakespeare's historical plays are something truer than historical; they are
> traditional; the living memory of many things lingered, though the memory of
> others was lost. He is right in making Richard II incarnate the claim to
> divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronial ambition which ultimately broke
> up the old medieval order. But divine right had become at once drier and
> more fantastic by the time of the Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the
> fresh and popular part of the thing; for he came at a later stage in a
> process of stiffening which is the main thing to be studied in later
> medievalism. Richard himself was possibly a wayward and exasperating prince;
> it might well be the weak link that snapped in the strong chain of the
> Plantagenets.
>
> . . . .
>
> The point is that by the removal of Richard, a step above the parliament
> became possible for the first time. The transition was tremendous; the crown
> became an object of ambition. That which one could snatch another could
> snatch from him; that which the House of Lancaster held merely by force the
> House of York could take from it by force. The spell of an undethronable
> thing seated out of reach was broken, and for three unhappy generations
> adventurers strove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood, above
> which was something new in the medieval imagination; an empty throne.
>
> . . . .
>
> Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the old religious system,
> and which afterwards became a true national tradition against Mary, was
> doubtless started by the diseased energy of these fifteenth-century bishops.
> Persecution can be a philosophy, and a defensible philosophy, but with some
> of these men persecution was rather a perversion. Across the channel, one of
> them was presiding at the trial of Joan of Arc.
>
>
>
> But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in all the epoch
> that follows the fall of Richard II, and especially in those feuds that
> found so ironic an imagery in English rose - and thorns. The foreshortening
> of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim to be, forbids any
> entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York and Lancaster, or any
> attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and revenges which filled the
> lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlife widow of Henry V. The rivals
> were not, indeed, as is sometimes exaggeratively implied, fighting for
> nothing, or even (like the lion and the unicorn) merely fighting for the
> crown. The shadow of a moral difference can still be traced even in that
> stormy twilight of a heroic time. But when we have said that Lancaster
> stood, on the whole, for the new notion of a king propped by parliaments and
> powerful bishops, and York, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea
> of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his people, we have
> said everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by
> counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. But this
> truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be called Tory about
> the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a justifiable romance
> to the last and most remarkable figure of the fighting House of York, with
> whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended.
>
>
>
> - End Part 1
>
>
>
>
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Johanne L. Tournier
>
>
>
> Email - jltournier60@...
>
> or jltournier@...
>
>
>
> "With God, all things are possible."
>
> - Jesus of Nazareth
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>
>
>
>
>
>