THE GREAT CHURCHMEN

We are far from any thoughts of democracy in the early struggles against
the absolutism of the Crown. The old love of personal liberty that is said
to have characterised the Anglo-Saxon had no political outlet under Norman
feudalism. What we note is that three Archbishops of Canterbury were strong
enough and brave enough to stand up against the unchecked rule of kings,
and the names of these great Archbishops--Anselm, Thomas a Becket, and
Stephen Langton--are to be honoured for all time for the services they
rendered in the making of English liberties. Not one of the three was in
any sense a democrat. It is not till the latter part of the fourteenth
century that we find John Ball, a wandering, revolutionary priest, uttering
for the first time in England a democratic doctrine. Anselm, Becket, and
Langton did their work, as Simon of Montfort, and as Eliot and Hampden
worked later, not for the sake of a democracy, but for the restriction of
an intolerable autocracy. All along in English history liberties have been
gained and enlarged by this process of restriction, and it was only when
the powers of the Crown had been made subject to Parliament that it was
possible, at the close of the nineteenth century, for Parliament itself to
become converted from an assembly of aristocrats to a governing body that
really represented the nation.

But in considering the rise of democracy we can no more omit the early
struggles against the absolutism of the Crown than we can pass over Simon
of Montfort's Parliament, or the unsuccessful popular revolts, or the war
with Charles I., or the Whig revolution of 1688. They are all incidents of
pre-democratic days, but they are all events of significance. Democracy is
no new order of society, conceived in the fertile mind of man; it has been
slowly evolved and brought to birth after centuries of struggle, to be
tried as a form of government only when other forms are outgrown, and cease
to be acceptable.

All the great men--heroic and faulty--who withstood the tyranny of their
day, not only wrested charters from kings, they left a tradition of
resistance; and this tradition has been of incalculable service to a nation
seeking self-government. It is easy to dismiss the work of Anselm and
Becket as mere disputes between monarch and Churchman, to treat lightly the
battle for the Great Charter as a strife between king and barons. Just as
easy is it to regard the Peasant Revo