13 APRIL 1861, Page 23

ENGLAND AND FRANCE UNDER THE HOUSE OF LANCASTER.* FirrEnn years

ago Lord Brougham published the first portion of the work which we propose to make the subject of general commentary, leaving it to others to criticize the style of his narrative, or institute that scrutiny into its fidelity, and freedom from prejudice and par- tiality, which the veteran author so fearlessly challenges. Originally, England and France under the House of Lancaster appeared without any acknowledgment of parentage, but the number of those friendly to the views inculcated in its pages has proved so considerable that the distinguished writer, in due deference to these amicable critics, quits the sweet sequestered shade of anonymity, and ventures forth into the noontide resplendence which belongs to the recognized style and state of "Henry Lord Brougham." In the execution of the literary task which Lord Brougham voluntarily undertook, he was actuated by no motive of mere intellectual vanity. It was less in the capacity of an historian than in that of a moral experimentalist that he "whose life has been passed in the Senate and the Forum," was induced to make his voice heard in the lecture-room and the library. This work, he tells us, was undertaken with the design of ascertaining how far the feelings of national pride are beyond the reach of reason, and how far the habit of admiring only genius success- ful in war, or in state intrigue, is inveterate. We have really nothing to object to in Lord Brougham's ethical prescription. "A war waged only for plunder is the disgrace, not the glory of a people ;" "Unjust aggression is as shameful as it is wicked ;" with a great many more aphorisms of the same profound and original character, seem to us to be unexceptionable sentences for copybooks or mottoes for fourth-form boys. It is impossibte to deny anything so true or so trite as that war in the abstract is a bad thing; and peace in the abstract a good thing. Who of the more thoughtful of Lord Brougham's countrymen needs to be reminded of the horrors and atro- cities which degrade the "pomp and circumstance of a brilliant military career." And are the mass of men, without education and without thought, accessible to a moral lesson of this kind, read from a not very lively, though in some respects a sufficiently meritorious text-book, such as the present ? The model type of the British pedagogue, the "old original" shoolmaster abroad, comes forward in praprid persond to inculcate platitudes about "the guilt of conquerors, the enemies of the human race!" Is such a five hundred horse-power of didactic utterance really necessary or really available, in the instance before us?

There are two sides to most questions. Some questions have more than two sides. War is one of those phenomena which have many Phases, and it is only a philosophiesl prig that will select its dark and overlook its brighter aspects. Without having a word to say against Lord Brougham's morality of war, so far as it goes, we yet remain dissatisfied with his presentment, because it is one-sided. It is probably true enough that some conquerors have been the enemies of the human race ; but it is equally true that some conquerors have been the friends of the human 'race. We are not even prepared to limit this attribution to defensive or purely patriotic warriors. Aggressive conquest has, perhaps, been quite as beneficial to man- kind in the long run, as all the stump oratory of the Ciceros of Peace has ever been, or ever will be. It is not our fault that the epic of humanity begins with "Anna virtunque cano." However we may eoudemn the lust for dominion, when we examine it in the light of ideal right, we must not forget that there have been periods when, to use the language of a thinker very superior to Lord Brougham, as a fact it was most beneficial to the world, when "with all the

* History of England and France under the House of Lancaster: with an Introduc- tory view of the Early Reformation. By Henry Lord Brougham. New edition. Published by Griffin, Bohn, and Co. barbarous part of the species pressing in all round to crush every early germ of improvement, all would have been lost if there had not also been an instinct in the better and more gifted portions of mankind to push for dominion over the duller and coarser.' It may be replied, however, that the period of Henry V., the favourite hero, perhaps, of Shakspeare, the pet aversion of Lord Brougham, was not one of those periods, thus briefly characterized. We do not know that it was. We cannot re the attempted subjugation of France as a justifiable act ; but we can at least believe it possible that Henry V. may have persuaded himself that his title to the French crown was good, and may have conscientiously entered on that war of aggression which Lord Brougham as conscientiously denounces. In a rough soldiery age claims are not nicely examined, and Henry's fault may be in some degree palliated by the character and exigen- cies of the times in wIlich his lot was cast. But this is not all. Admitting his criminality in this, as in every other instance which Lord Brougham adduces, it remains not the less tree, that Henry V. had qualities which were deserving of admiration. It is for these qualities, we suppose, and not for his faults or his crimes, that the English people regard him with favour' though we were scarcely aware that he was the subject of such a dangerous moral furore as his new biographer's declamation leads us to infer. Lord Brougham himself very justly observes that while forbidden to extenuate crimes we are alike forbidden to conceal merits ; and in practical conformity to this principle he indicates, in perhaps the most masterly passage of the whole narrative, the merits no less than the demerits of the victor of Agincourt. If he was ambitious, if he was cruel, if he was unjust, he seems to have originally possessed kindly and well directed feeling, and in England to have tempered the caution of the politician with the occasional frankness of a man. Dignified and graceful, lie never failed deeply to impress those whom he addressed. "Entire self-possession," says Lord Brougham, in really fine lan- guage, "came to him from the consciousness of desert and of power, as entire self-confidence was not unnaturally begotten by a course of success in circumstances that might well have engendered despair." Henry, moreover, was a person of brilliant accomplishments. Not without learning himself, he was fond of encouraging learned men. Waldensis, the most voluminous writer of the times, was his con- fessor; Lynwode, the famous canonist, his ambassador ; "he made Rocleve, an astronomer of note, Bishop of St. David's, and projected the foundation of a college at Oxford for teaching the seven sciences. Firm of purpose and steady of mind, he possessed in an eminent degree all the qualities which constitute a great commander and a skilful ruler. Among his virtues were included patience, fortitude, temperance. "His domestic administration was mord excellent than that of Edward III., and betokened a disposition to check malversation and to reform abuses which no prince since the days of Alfred had ever shown." Surely, after a large deduction from Henry's claims on English admiration, on the ground of his many demerits, in mitigation of which Lord Brougham himself pleads the spirit of the times, there still remains a large margin of character that really deserves, and not only excuses, the enlightened gratitude and even the moderated enthusiasm of the English nation. Our historian, of course, takes advantage of the opportunity afforded by his subject to rebuke Shakspeare for his gross perversion of Sir J. Oldcastle in Falstaff, and remarks, with a kind of ludicrous solemnity : "Perhaps it may not be thought much to the honour of our national taste, or our refined ideas of the dramatic art, that in our most popular comedies we still have one of the most brave, virtuous, and pious men of his day figuring on the stage as a buffoon, a coward, and a thief ;" as if Shakspeare designed to burlesque a saint and a hero, or Shakspeare's readers, when they laugh over the strange humanities of that marvellous creation, wise Jack Falstaff, witty Jack Falstaff, sweet Jack Falstaff, did conscious and premedi- tated wrong to the memory of the ill-starred Lord Cobham. Not- withstanding Lord Brougham's reclamations, we are inclined to think that Shakspeare does give us, with some allowance for popular and traditionary exaggerations, a true portrait of the Fifth Henry, idealized certainly, but still suggesting, with a vivid approach to reality, the man behind the picture. At any rate it is labour lost to attempt to scold us into such superfine good manners as Lord Brougham seems to desiderate. We are afraid the national taste is too strongly Shakspearean to be lectured down; and though Shak- speare himself was Birched, by a prodigious wiseacre with the appro- priate name, in one heavy volume, some years ago, the example made of him has not deterred us from reading and loving this "lard of Passion and of Mirth," nor shall we ever cease to read and admire, not even though "the only true and original" schoolmaster join the literary Orbilius already indicated, in orderto furnish a birch-broova to chastise Shakspeare for his poetic, or rather ethical delinquencies. The truth is, men love character. Not only charity, but valour, generosity, intelligence, manhood, in every kind and degree, covers a multitude of sins. We can acknowledge the justice of Lord Brougham's strictures; we quite agree with him in all that he would say of the cruelties and the false glories of war, but as long as man is man, we shall ever sympathize with what is great in action, what is adventurous, what is ingenious, what is boldly hoped, splendidly con- ceived, magnificently dared. We dislike war and its atrocities as mach as Lord Brougham can dislike them : we (speaking individually) are fools enough to believe in the possibility of war's ultimate elimination from the programme of human enterprise and human existence ; but as long as we believed war necessary for our country's true honour, or mankind's eventual welfare, we would fight, as we are told we ought to love God, with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength. To return to the History of England and France under the House of Lancaster. The author, so far as we can judge, is not an historian but a student of history. He is not a Comte, or even a Guizot ; he is not a Prescott, or a Macaulay, or, far better, a Grote. He has no intense, mystical, motherly sympathy, so to speak, with humanity, in the age of Henry V., or Victoria I., like Michele% and we have not the slightest confidence in Lord Brougham's prophetical, or religious, or philosophical insight into the open secret of the universe. But his work has a merit of its own, and one-sided as is his estimate of war' it is very far from being untrue. We hate being lectured, and we don't like half-men, and Lord Brougham, with all his achiev- ments, which are not inconsiderable, and all his attainments, half of which perhaps not one of his reviewers possesses, is, to our thinking, a very incomplete man, limited in his range of view, and imperfect in his logical method, or, at least, in the audacity to follow it up. The volume before us is, however, a good, partly because a provo- cative, study, and partly because it really shows research, as well as elucidates history. As the House of Lancaster is its subject it na- turally ranges over the reigns of the usurping Bolingbroke (Henry V), his enterprising son, and his ineffectual grandson. "The Introduc- tion'sketches the rise of the Wycliffe reformation, Wycliffe having anticipated Luther, as, according to some authorities, Dr. Thirlwall has anticipated Temple, Patteson, and Co., without having the con- sistency, or perhaps the eonrage, to stand by his colours. Some of the remarks on the Pioneer of the Great Reformation are valuable. To this rapid sketch succeeds one scarcely less rapid—of Henry IV., on whom Lord Brougham, many will think with justice, bears very hard. Has our historian any right to say positively that Henry mur- dered Richard II.? whose conduct, by the way, Lord Brougham describes as despotic and illegal, and whose reign he stigmatizes as wicked, weak, and unhappy. Perhaps a man who was assured that he could govern England wisely, was excusable, in his own eyes, when he sought to appropriate a rule nnrighteously exercised. However this be, England gained in constitutionalism under the Lancaster dynasty. At the beginning of the reign of Henry IV., a recognition of the principle that no act should ever pass without the authority of the Commons, nearly as full as that made by his still more popular son, was conceded by the crown; an act which, accord- ing to our historian, had not only never been admitted, but had con- stantly been violated under the Edwards. The whole career of Henry V. is traced by Lord Brougham, with some research, though with little art or grace. The disastrous reign of Henry VI., in which the ill-gained spoils of his father were recovered by the fearless Maid of Orleans, is ponrtrayed with the diligence, and the same ab- sence of esthetic power. These sections of the narrative are fol- lowed by notes and illustrations, many of which have both value and interest. Among these we may particularize those relating to Wy- cliffe and the Lollards, to Lord Cobham, the French and English constitution, and the States-General before Henry V. The History 49/ England and .France will not, in our opinion, add much to the re- putation of its author ; it is, as already intimated, somewhat pedantic, "tall" in its morality, and ostentatiously inclined to the recommen- dation of a political good-bay-iam ; against which, however, one has little to say, except that it is good-boy-ism.