many respectable
people who would do so still. This is not an exaggerated truth, but an
established lie. Cranmer was not such a monstrosity of meanness as
Cobbett implies; but he was mean. But there is no question of his being
less saintly than the parsonages believed; he was not a saint at all;
and not very attractive even as a sinner. He was no more a martyr for
being burned than Crippen for being hanged.

Cobbett was defeated because the English people was defeated. After the
frame-breaking riots, men, as men, were beaten: and machines, as
machines, had beaten them. Peterloo was as much the defeat of the
English as Waterloo was the defeat of the French. Ireland did not get
Home Rule because England did not get it. Cobbett would not forcibly
incorporate Ireland, least of all the corpse of Ireland. But before his
defeat Cobbett had an enormous following; his "Register" was what the
serial novels of Dickens were afterwards to be. Dickens, by the way,
inherited the same instinct for abrupt diction, and probably enjoyed
writing "gas and gaiters" more than any two other words in his works.
But Dickens was narrower than Cobbett, not by any fault of his own, but
because in the intervening epoch of the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind
the link with our Christian past had been lost, save in the single
matter of Christmas, which Dickens rescued romantically and by a
hair's-breadth escape. Cobbett was a yeoman; that is, a man free and
farming a small estate. By Dickens's time, yeomen seemed as antiquated
as bowmen. Cobbett was mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every way
the opposite of what that word means to-day. He was as egalitarian as
St. Francis, and as independent as Robin Hood. Like that other yeoman in
the ballad, he bore in hand a mighty bow; what some of his enemies would
have called a long bow. But though he sometimes overshot the mark of
truth, he never shot away from it, like Froude. His account of that
sixteenth century in which the mediaeval civilisation ended, is not more
and not less picturesque than Froude's: the difference is in the dull
detail of truth. That crisis was _not_ the foundling of a strong Tudor
monarchy, for the monarchy almost immediately perished; it _was_ the
founding of a strong class holding all the capital and land, for it
holds them to this day. Cobbett would have asked nothing better than to
bend his mediaeval bow to the cry of "St. George for Merry England," for
though he pointed to t