Hills and the Sea Part 5

They dated from the very beginning. Ely was founded within sight of our conversion, 672. Croyland came even before that, before civilisation and religion were truly re-established in Britain; Penda's great-nephew gave it its charter; St Augustine had been dead for little more than a century when the charter was signed. Even as the monks came to claim their land they discovered hermits long settled there. Thorney--Ancarig it was then--was even fifty years older than Croyland. The roots of all these go back to the beginning of the nation.

Ramsay and Charteris cannot be traced beyond the gulf of the Danish invasion, but they are members of the group or ring of houses which cl.u.s.tered round the edge of the dry land and sent out its industry towards the Wash, making new land; for this ring sent out feelers eastward, draining the land and recovering it every way, founding cells, establis.h.i.+ng villages. Holbeach, Spalding, Freiston, Holland, and I know not how much more was their land.

When the monasteries were destroyed their lords.h.i.+p fell into the hands of that high cla.s.s--now old, then new--the Cromwells and Russells and the rest, upon whom has since depended the greatness of the country. The intensive spirit proper to a teeming but humble population was forgotten. The extensive economics of the great owners, their love of distances and of isolation took the place of the old agriculture. Within a generation the whole land was drowned.

The isolated villages forgot the general civilisation of England; they came to depend for their living upon the wildfowl of the marshes; here and there was a little summer pasturing, more rarely a little ploughing of the rare patches of dry land; but the whole place soon ran wild, and there Englishmen soon grew to cause an endless trouble to the new landlords. These, all the while on from the death of Henry to that of Elizabeth, pursued their vigilance and their acc.u.mulations. Their power rose above the marshes like a slow sun and dried them up at last.

In every inch of England you can find the history of England. You find it very typically here. The growth of that leisured cla.s.s which we still enjoy--the cla.s.s that in the seventeenth century destroyed the central government of the Crown, penetrated and refreshed the universities, acquired for its use and reformed the endowed primary education of the English, and began a thorough occupation of our public land--the growth of that leisured cla.s.s is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in the history of the Fens, since the Fens had their faith removed from them.

Here is the story of one such family, a family without whose privileges and public services it would be difficult to conceive modern England.

Their wealth is rooted in the Fens; the growth of that wealth is parallel to the growth of every fortune by which we are governed.

When the monasteries were despoiled and their farms thrown open to a gamble, when the water ran in again, the countryside and all its generations of human effort were drowned, there was raised up for the restoration of this land the family of Russell.

The Abbey of Thorney had been given to these little squires. They were in possession when, towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, in 1600, was pa.s.sed the General Draining Act. It was a generous and a broad Act: it was to apply not only to the Great Level, but to all the marshes of the realm. It was soon bent to apply to the family.

Seven years later a Dutchman of the name of Cornelius Vermuyden was sent for, that the work might be begun. For fifty years this man dug and intrigued. He was called in to be the engineer; he had the temerity to compete with the new landlords; he boasted a desire--less legitimate in an alien than in a courtier--to make a great fortune rapidly. He was ruined.

All the adventurers who first attempted the draining of the Fens were ruined--but not that permanent Russell-Francis, the Earl of Bedford, surnamed "the Incomparable."

The story of Vermuyden by him is intricate, but every Englishman now living on another man's land should study it. Vermuyden was to drain the Great Level and to have 95,000 acres for his pains. These acres were in the occupation--for the matter of that, in great part the owners.h.i.+p--of a number of English families. It is true the land had lain derelict for seventy years, bereft of capital since the Reformation, and swamped. It is true that the occupiers (and owners) were very poor. It is true, therefore, that they could not properly comprehend a policy that was designed for the general advantage of the country. They only understood that the hunting and fis.h.i.+ng by which they lived were to stop; that their land was to be very considerably improved and taken from them. In their ignorance of ultimate political good they began to show some considerable impatience.

The cry of the mult.i.tude has a way of taking on the forms of stupidity.

The mult.i.tude in this case cried out against Vermuyden. They objected to a foreigner being given so much freehold. "In an anguish of despair"--to use one chronicler's words--they threw themselves under the protection of a leader. "That leader was, of course, Francis, Earl of Bedford, surnamed 'the Incomparable.' He could not hear unmoved the cry of his fellow-citizens. He yielded to their pet.i.tion, took means to oust the Dutchmen, and immediately obtained for himself the grant of the 95,000 acres, by a royal order of 13 January, 1630/1, known as 'the Lynn Law.'"

When he saw the extent of the land and of the water upon it, even his tenacious spirit was alarmed. He therefore a.s.sociated with himself in the expenses thirteen others, all persons of rank and fortune, as was fitting: alone of the fourteen he preserved his fortune.

The fourteen, then, began the digging of nine drains (if we include the repair of Morton's Leam); the largest was that fine twenty-one miles called the old Bedford River, and Charles I, though all in favour of so great a work, was all in dread of the power it might give to the cla.s.s which--as his prophetic conscience told him--was destined to be his ruin.

There was a contract that the work should be finished in six years: when the six years were ended it was very far from finished. The King grumbled; but Francis, Earl of Bedford, belonged to a clique already half as powerful as the Crown. He threatened, and a new royal order gave him an extension of time. It was the second of his many victories.

The King refused to forget his defeat, and Francis, Earl of Bedford, began to show that hatred of absolute government which has made of his kind the leaders of a happy England. The King did a Stuart thing--he lost his temper. He said, "You may keep your 95,000 acres, but I shall tax them"; and he did. Francis, Earl of Bedford, felt in him a growing pa.s.sion for just government. He already spoke of freedom; but he had no leisure wherein to enjoy it, for within two years he departed this life, of the smallpox, leaving to his son William the legacy of the great battle for liberty and for the public land.

This change in the Bedford dynasty coincided with the Civil Wars.

William Russell, having led some of the Parliamentary forces at Edge Hill, was so uncertain which side might ultimately be victorious as to open secret negotiations with the King. Nothing happened to him, nor even to his brother, who intrigued later against Cromwell's life. He was at liberty to return once more and to survey from the walls of the old abbey the drowned land upon which he had set his heart.

The work of digging could not be carried on during the turmoil of the time; William, Earl of Bedford, filled his leisure in the framing of an elaborate bill of costs. It was dated 20 May, 1646, and showed the sums which he had spent and which had been wasted in the failure to reclaim the Fens. He stated them at over 90,000, and to this he added, like a good business man, interest at the rate of 8 per cent, for so many years as to amount to more than another 30,000.

As against the King, the trick was a good one; but, like many another financier, William, Earl of Bedford, was shortsighted. The more anxious the King grew to pay out public money to the Russells, the less able he grew to do so, till at last he lost not only the shadow of power over the treasury, but life itself; and William, Earl of Bedford, brought in his bill to the Commonwealth.

Cromwell was of the same cla.s.s, and knew the trick too well. He gave the family leave to prosecute their digging to forget their demand for money. The Act was pa.s.sed at noon. Bedford was sent for at seven o'clock the next morning and ordered to attend upon Cromwell, "and make thankful acknowledgments." He did so.

The works began once more. The common people, in their simplicity, rose as they had so often risen before, against a benefit they could not comprehend; but they no longer had a Stuart to deal with. To their extreme surprise they were put down "with the aid of the military."

Then, for all the world as in the promotion of a modern company, the consulting engineer of the original promotors reappears. The Russells had patched it up with Vermuyden, and the work was resumed a third time.

There was, however, this difficulty, that though Englishmen might properly be constrained at this moment to love an orderly and G.o.dly life, and to relinquish their property when it was to the public good that they should do so, yet it would have been abhorrent to the whole spirit of the Commonwealth to enslave them even for a work of national advantage. A labour difficulty arose, and the works were in grave peril.

Those whose petty envy may be pleased at the entanglement of William, Earl of Bedford, have forgotten the destiny which maintains our great families. In the worst of the crisis the battle of Dunbar was fought; 166 Scotch prisoners (and later 500 more) were indentured out to dig the ditches, and it was printed and posted in the end of 1651 that it was "death without mercy" for any to attempt to escape.

The respite was not for long. Heaven, as though to try the patience of its chosen agent, raised up a new obstacle before the great patriot.

Peace was made, and the Scotch prisoners were sent home. It was but the pa.s.sing frown which makes the succeeding smiles of the Deity more gracious. At that very moment Blake was defeating the Dutch upon the seas, and these excellent prisoners, laborious, and (by an accident which clearly shows the finger of Divine providence) especially acquainted with the digging of ditches, arrived in considerable numbers, chained, and were handed over to the Premier House. At the same time it was ordered by the Lord Protector that when the 95,000 acres should at last be dry, any Protestant, even though he were a foreigner, might buy. Two years later an unfortunate peace compelled the return of the Dutch prisoners; but the work was done, and the Earl of Bedford returned thanks in his cathedral.

Restored to the leisure which is necessary for political action, the Russells actively intrigued for the return of the Stuarts, and pointed out (when Charles II was well upon his throne) how necessary it was for the Fens that their old, if irregular, privileges should be confirmed.

It was argued for the Crown that 10,000 acres of land had been quietly absorbed by the Family while there was no king in England: but there happened in this case what happened in every other since the upper cla.s.s, the natural leaders of the people, had curbed the tyranny of the King--Charles capitulated. Then followed (of course) popular rising; it was quelled. Before their long struggle for freedom against the Stuart dynasty was ended, the peasants had been taught their place, Vermuyden was out of the way, the ditches were all dug, the land acquired.

All the world knows the great part played by the House in the emanc.i.p.ation of England from the yoke of James II. The martyrdom of Lord William may have cast upon the Family a pa.s.sing cloud; but whatever compensation the perishable things of this world can afford, they received and accepted. In 1694, having a.s.sisted at the destruction of yet another form of government, the Earl of Bedford was made Duke, and on 7 September, 1700, his great work now entirely accomplished, he departed this life peacefully in his eighty-seventh year. It was once more in their cathedral that the funeral service was preached by a Dr.

Freeman, chaplain of no less than the King himself. I have read the sermon in its entirety. It closes with the fine phrase that William the fifth Earl and the first Duke of Bedford had sought throughout the whole of a laborious and patriotic life a crown not corruptible but incorruptible.

It was precisely a century since the Family had set out in its quest for that hundred square miles of land. Through four reigns, a b.l.o.o.d.y civil war, three revolutions and innumerable treasons, it had maintained its purpose, and at last it reached its goal.

"_Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem_."

THE ELECTION

The other day as I was going out upon my travels, I came upon a plain so broad that it greatly wearied me. This plain was grown in parts with barley, but as it stood high in foreign mountains and was arid, very little was grown. Small runnels, long run dry under the heat, made the place look like a desert--almost like Africa; nor was there anything to relieve my gaze except a huddle of small grey houses far away; but when I reached them I found, to my inexpressible joy, a railway running by and a station to receive me.

For those who complain of railways talk folly, and prove themselves either rich or, more probably, the hangers-on of the rich. A railway is an excellent thing; it takes one quickly through the world for next to nothing, and if in many countries the people it takes are brutes, and disfigure all they visit, that is not the fault of the railway, but of the Government and religion of these people, which, between them, have ruined the citizens of the State.

So was it not in this place of which I speak, for all the people were industrious, wealthy, kind, amenable, and free.

I took a ticket for the only town on the railway list whose history I knew, and then in a third-cla.s.s carriage made entirely of wood I settled down to a conversation with my kind; for though these people were not of my blood--indeed, I am certain that for some hundreds of years not a drop of their blood has mingled with my own--yet we understood each other by a common tongue called Lingua Franca, of which I have spoken in another place and am a past master.

As all the people round began their talk of cattle, land, and weather, two men next me, or rather the one next me and the other opposite me, began to talk of the election which had been held in that delightful plain: by which, as I learnt, a dealer in herds had been defeated by a somewhat usurious and perhaps insignificant attorney. In this election more than half the voters--that is, a good third of the families in the plain--had gone up to the little huts of wood and had made a mark upon a bit of paper, some on one part, some on the other. About a sixth of the families had desired the dealer in herds to make their laws, and about a sixth the attorney. Of the rest some could not, some would not, go and make the little mark of which I speak. Many more could by law make it, and would have made it, if they had thought it useful to any possible purpose under the sun. One-sixth, I say, had made their mark for the aged and money-lending attorney, and one-sixth for the venerable but avaricious dealer in herds, and since the first sixth was imperceptibly larger than the second it was the lawyer, not the merchant, who stood to make the laws for the people. But not only to make laws: he was also in some mystic way the Persona and Representative of all the plain. The long sun-lit fields; the infinite past--Carolingian, enormous; the delicate fronds of young trees; the distant sight of the mountains, which is the note of all that land; the invasions it had suffered, the conquests it might yet achieve; its soul and its material self, were all summed up in the solicitor, not in the farmer, and he was to vote on peace or war, on wine or water, on G.o.d or no G.o.d in the schools. For the people of the plain were self-governing; they had no lords.

Of my two companions, the one had voted for the cow-buyer, but the other for the scribbler upon parchment, and they discussed their action without heat, gently and with many reasons.

The one said: "It cannot be doubted that the solidarity of society demands that the h.o.m.ogeneity of economic interests should be recognised by the magistrate." The other said: "The first need is rather that the historic continuity of society should be affirmed by the momentary depositaries of the executive."

For these two men were of some education, and saw things from a higher standpoint than the peasants around us, who continued to discourse, now angrily, now merrily, but always loudly and rapidly, upon the insignificant matter of their lives: that is, strong, red, bubbling wine, healthy and well-fed beef, rich land and housing, the marriage of daughters, and the putting forward of sons.

Then one of the two, who had long guessed by my dress and face from what country I came, said to me: "And you, how is it in your country?" I told him we met from time to time, upon occasions not less often than seven years apart, and did just as they had done. That one-sixth of us voted one way and one-sixth the other; the first, let us say, for a moneylender, and the second for a man remarkable for motor-cars or famous for the wealth of his mother; and whichever sixth was imperceptibly larger than the other, that sixth carried its man, and he stood for the flats of the Wash or for the clear hills of c.u.mberland, or for Devon, which is all one great and lonely hill.

"This man," said I, "in some very mystic way is _Ourselves_--he is our past and our great national memory. By his vote he decides what shall be done; but he is controlled."

"By what is he controlled?" said my companions eagerly. Evidently they had a sneaking love of seeing representatives controlled.

"By a committee of the rich," said I promptly.

At this they shrugged their shoulders and said: "It is a bad system!"

"And by what are yours?" said I.

At this the gravest and oldest of them, looking as it were far away with his eyes, answered: "By the name of our country and a wholesome terror of the people."

"Your system," said I, shrugging my shoulders in turn, but a little awkwardly, "is different from ours."