was the figurehead of a group of Tories who set about fulfilling the fine if fanciful scheme for a democratic monarchy sketched by Bolingbroke in “The Patriot King.”  It was bent in all sincerity on bringing men’s minds back to what are called domestic affairs, affairs as domestic as George iii.  It might have arrested the advancing corruption of Parliaments and enclosure of country-sides, by turning men’s minds from the foreign glories of the great Whigs like Churchill and Chatham; and one of its first acts was to terminate the alliance with Prussia.  Unfortunately, whatever was picturesque in the piracy of Potsdam was beyond the imagination of Windsor.  But whatever was prosaic in Potsdam was already established at Windsor; the economy of cold mutton, the heavy-handed taste in the arts, and the strange northern blend of boorishness with etiquette.  If Bolingbroke’s ideas had been applied by a spirited person, by a Stuart, for example, or even by Queen Elizabeth (who had real spirit along with her extraordinary vulgarity), the national soul might have broken free from its new northern chains.  But it was the irony of the situation that the King to whom Tories appealed as a refuge from Germanism was himself a German.

We have thus to refer the origins of the German influence in England back to the beginning of the Hanoverian Succession; and thence back to the quarrel between the King and the lawyers which had issue at Naseby; and thence again to the angry exit of Henry VIII. from the mediaeval council of Europe.  It is easy to exaggerate the part played in the matter by that great and human, though very pagan person, Martin Luther.  Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred for the heresies of the German monk, for in speculative opinions Henry was wholly Catholic; and the two wrote against each other innumerable pages, largely consisting of terms of abuse, which were pretty well deserved on both sides.  But Luther was not a Lutheran.  He was a sign of the break-up of Catholicism; but he was not a builder of Protestantism.  The countries which became corporately and democratically Protestant, Scotland, for instance, and Holland, followed Calvin and not Luther.  And Calvin was a Frenchman; an unpleasant Frenchman, it is true, but one full of that French capacity for creating official entities which can really act, and have a kind of impersonal personality, such as the French Monarchy or the Terror.  Luther was an anarchist, and therefore a dreamer.  He made that which is, perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and most shining manifestation of failure; he made a name.  Calvin made an active, governing, persecuting thing, called the Kirk.  There is something expressive of him in the fact that he called even his work of abstract theology “The Institutes.”