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Typos — p. 106: Ueber Padogogik [= Ueber Pädogogik]; p. 107: reccognised [= recognised]
- p. 105 - XVI Royalty's Sins Against Itself To defend the active role of Royalty in a National Government now provokes little more than a compassionate smile. More especially is this so among the ignorant and those who, although alleged to be educated, have studied history divorced from psychology. Yet where else than on the Throne could we hope to find an umpire able to display the virtues, judgment and other qualities described in the previous chapter? Need the errors perpetrated by Royal Houses in the past commit those who may now be called upon to perform kingly functions to stumble into the same pitfalls — repeat the same old blunder of primogeniture; contract the same unwise and dysgenic marriages; fail in the time-honoured way to provide a unique education for the heirs who are destined to become unique public servants; and finally omit to provide some disciplinary rules and sanctions like those devised by the ancient Egyptians to maintain the quality and the efficiency of their Pharaohs? For we have seen how the Mediaeval Church tried for a while to exercise this Super-Monarchical function, and how, after the loss of its power, there was no Authority left to control Royalty. It may sound unrealistic to suggest at this moment in European history that a wisely controlled line of Kings might still be a possibility if the proper means were devised for the maintenance of their quality and their regal behaviour. But the many arguments in favour of such a step still remain unanswered and unrefuted, and with the pessimism common to all Liberals, such methods of control calculated to maintain the quality and efficiency of a public service, are left to such organisations as the Medical Profession, the Bar and the Law Society. It may also sound romantic to speak to-day of the unique functions of a genuinely ruling monarch, and therefore to insist
The slip-shod thought that enabled a Keir Hardie to say, as he did in the House of Commons in May 1901, that he could not "see the uses of the Royal Family", might be condoned on the score of his use of the definite article before "Royal". But let us not exceed his benightedness by using the indefinite article in its stead. It is however romantic to pose as a royalist if we fail to recognise that, owing to the fundamental iniquity of Man, Royalties are just as much in need of disciplinary control as are the members of any other calling; and that the ultimate cause of their discredit has always been the sins they have committed against themselves and their good repute. And of these sins, the only two peculiar to themselves alone and not shared by the Aristocracy, are, first of all that of failing to give their heirs a unique education and training, and secondly that of recklessly adulterating their blood. It is true that all over Europe, Royalty suffered from a disadvantage from which the Aristocracy were to a great extent, and the common people wholly, free, and as this disadvantage may be regarded as the peculiar bane of Kingship in our Western civilisation, it is important to understand exactly what it was. In the first place we have to remember that conditions in the Middle Ages and even much later, conspired to bring about an enormous amount of local endogamy or in-breeding in the general population. The difficulties of transport alone would have sufficed to encourage this practice; for, by exposing the majority of young people to the influence of propinquity, which is among the most frequent causes of choice in mating even in our much more fluid Age, the masses tended everywhere to be very much inbred and therefore more homogeneous than they
Thus, Dr. Franz Boas, the inveterate opponent of Racial Discrimination and defender of miscegenation, assures us that "the long stability of European populations which set in with the beginning of the Middle Ages and continued, at least in rural districts, until very recent times, has brought about a large amount of inbreeding in every limited district." (Race, Language and Culture, p. 313). But true as this is of European populations as a whole, it is particularly true of an insular people like the English. And as we have no reason to doubt that the homogeneity resulting from this state of affairs, protected the populace from all those conflicts and disharmonies, both mental and physical, which tend to afflict people in whom the clash of disparate types and family strains is, through a mixed heritage, a constant source of instability, ugliness and even ill-health, we are justified in assuming from their homogeneity alone that they were a saner and happier population than that of modern Europe, including of course, modern England. The notorious beauty and health of the inbred English, reccognised by such foreign witnesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the Venetians Savorgnano and Nicolo de Favri, the German traveller, Keichel, and Erasmus and Cardinal Bentivoglio, soon disappeared when, owing to the increased travelling facilities, the population became more fluid and more miscegenated. But the prevalent plainness and even ugliness, accompanied by mediocre health and stamina, which we now see about us to-day, and which an American observer like Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the first to record in the years 1853–57, has since been commented upon by many writers, among them, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Bernard Shaw. (See on this whole subject Chap. VIII of my Quest of Human Quality). The fact that the English were originally g the blend of a few different races should not blind us to the fact that their initial heterogeneity had, owing to their insular position, ample time to become corrected so as to produce a more or less homogeneous stock in the generations preceding the Industrial Revolution.
There is no doubt about this strange fact, although historians fail to remark on its importance, both as a cause of the decline of Royal houses and as a feature of Royal marriages which differentiated them from the matings of the common people. For whilst among the populace there were considerable chances of preserving family and stock qualities, Royalty were usually subjected to all the rigours of reckless cross-breeding. Thus, the very people for whom the preservation of the lineal virtues and abilities were a matter of the utmost importance, were repeatedly abandoned to the biological havoc of cross-breeding, and thereby to the constant adulteration, dilution and squandering of their patrimony of ruler and other attributes. To a people as prescient and deeply conscious of the lofty endowments required for good rulership as were the ancient Egyptians, such methods of mating as were practised by the governing houses of Europe, would have seemed hardly sane. What then had happened since their day to bury in oblivion their measures for the conservation of character and virtu in human family lines? For it was chiefly in princely houses that this squandermania of carefully garnered attributes was practised, owing to the persistent miscegenation which characterised their marriages. Thus European Royalty's determined search for so-called "blue-blood" culminated in consequences the reverse of those envisaged by the original improvisers of the term. For the "Sangre azul" known to the Spaniards, related only to the blood of those proud families of Castile who could justly claim that they had allowed no contamination of their stock through Moorish, Jewish or other foreign admixture. Can we therefore wonder that whilst in most cases sanity, health, beauty and homogeneity were attained and preserved by the common people, debility, ugliness and dementia soon appeared in most of Europe's Royal Houses and became noticeable to historians as early as the fourteenth century?
Similarly afflicted were the French Valois (Charles VI, 1368–1422 and Henri III, 1551–1612); the Holy Roman Emperors (Rudolph II, 1728–1762), and the Romanoffs of Russia (Peter III, 1728–1762). These are among the extreme examples; but in other European Royal families, border-line cases were plentiful. Ludwig II of Bavaria was one of them. His brother, Otto, was however quite mad, and this family's blood in the veins of the later Hapsburgs may account for some of the strange behaviour recorded of them. Dr. J. A. Williamson maintains that in England the decline of royal ability began with Edward II (1284–1327) who was an abnormal character (The Evolution of England, Chap. IV, iv). Edward III's mind is certainly known to have been deranged in later life, whilst his grandson, Henry IV, was an epileptic who, worn out by fits, died at the early age of 46. His grandson, Henry VI is known to have become hopelessly insane. But it would have been surprising had he escaped this fate; for, in addition to his much confused ancestry (in itself a cause of aberrations which, as we have seen, afflicted his forebears) there was actually grave mental disease in his maternal grandfather and maternal great grandmother. Although the son of a man who, had he long survived his 35th year might have proved one of England's greatest monarchs, his mother Catherine of France was the daughter of the mad king Charles VI, and the granddaughter of Jeanne de Bourbon who herself suffered from repeated attacks of insanity and had, according to Funck Brentano, transmitted the infirmity to her son. (The Middle Ages, Chap. XIX). The fact that, although the French King's and his mother's insanity was well known, Henry V never wavered in his determination to win Catherine of Valois' hand so as to strengthen his claim to the French throne, is one further indication, if such were needed, of the frivolous disregard of bio-
In view of his ancestors' record, the relative excellence of Henry V may occasion some wonder. But it is probable that here we simply have the example of an exceptional and a lucky escape from the risks entailed by atrocious breeding methods. It just happened that Henry V managed to collect in his constitution the best, rather than the least desirable hereditary factors in his stock. But, in the long line of English sovereigns, the examples of failure, misrule, disease and mental aberration, which may justly be ascribed in some measure to the reckless miscegenation to which European rulers, in their search for "blue blood" have been addicted, are so numerous that many chapters would be needed to cover the whole of the ground. I have therefore decided to round off this part of my argument by attempting to explain, in accordance with the principles already outlined, how, as a descendant of his great ancestor Henry IV, Louis XVI of France, executed in 1793, came to be such a will-less, feckless, incapable ruler. As a concrete example of much that has been maintained in these chapters, and as a further illustration of my suggestion that the charges brought by Liberals against hereditary rulership, whether regal or aristocratic, have little to do with either monarchy or aristocracy as political institutions, but derive from the failure of both kings and nobles to understand the means by which their quality and superior endowments might be preserved, if not enhanced, the history of the Bourbon dynasty is particularly instructive. For its total decline in 240 years from greatness to complete nonentity, is one of the most dramatic lessons we have had on how the flouting of the laws which alone can maintain the quality and ascendancy of a family, animal or human, has led to the widespread delusion that the hereditary transmission of ability and other lofty traits of character is but a snobbish myth. |
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