ngland something like a universal
enthusiasm on this subject. We have seen a great English critic write a
book about this heroine, in opposition to a great French critic, solely
in order to blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do not
believe there lives an Englishman now, who if he had the offer of being
an Englishman then, would not discard his chance of riding as the
crowned conqueror at the head of all the spears of Agincourt, if he
could be that English common soldier of whom tradition tells that he
broke his spear asunder to bind it into a cross for Joan of Arc.

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 any national and legitimate power; though I
cannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the more
modern ideal of "non-resistance" even 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 all that 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 mediaeval monarchy, though only one aspect of mediaeval rule, was
r