land's ultimate aim. "The desire to secure intellectual liberty from spiritual tyranny was," he writes, "the ruling principle of his mind. His claim to our reverence lies in the fact that his mind was as thoroughly saturated as Milton's was with the love of freedom, as the nurse of high thought and high morality, while his gentle nature made him incapable of the harsh austerities of Milton's combative career." But few have judged more hardly his failure as a practical politician, the failure of one who was called against his will to the responsibilities of high office when he was barely thirty, who was plunged two years later into a civil war which he loathed, and who died broken-hearted at thirtythree. "As an efficient statesman Falkland has little claim to notice. He knew what he did not want, but he had no clear conception of what he did want; no constructive imagination to become a founder of institutions in which his noble conception should be embodied. It was this deficiency which made him . . . choose the royalist side not because he counted it worthy of his attachment, but because the parliamentary side seemed to him to be less worthy, and to accept a political system from his friend Hyde as he had accepted a system of thought from his friend Chillingworth. Falkland's mind in its beautiful strength as well as in its weakness was essentially of a feminine cast."1 Mr. Gardiner does not, in set phrase, prefer against Falkland any of those charges of political inconstancy which come so glibly from the facile pen of Lord Macaulay, but the insinuations against his political character are hardly less damaging. It would be interesting to inquire what scope there was for the display of administrative efficiency between 1641 and 1643, but it is an inquiry which must be deferred. If the following pages do not disclose the positive objects at which Falkland aimed, not less than the abuses which he sought to amend and IG. (ap. D.N.B.).

1

the evils which he strove to avert, they will have been written in vain.

One thing at least is certain. However much critics may continue to differ as to the value of Falkland's political example, there is no longer any danger that it will be ignored. That he should have had to wait until the nineteenth century for recognition, or at least for appreciation, was not unnatural. Many of his contemporaries-with less reason -had to do the same. Not until the nineteenth century did the English people begin to look steadfastly or seriously to the rocks-political and ecclesiastical-whence they were hewn, or begin adequately to praise their famous men and the fathers that begat them. Historical research was stimulated by a widening of political interest and a deepening of religious zeal. The two great movements within the English Church: the evangelical revival and the Oxford movement; the long series of Parliamentary enactments: the Acts of 1832, of 1835, of 1867, of 1885, of 1888, and of 1894, Acts by which ever-increasing numbers were admitted to the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, imperial and local; the development of the habit of political discussion upon the platform and in the Press; the diffusion of education, and the growth of wealth-all these things tended to awaken political interest and therefore to quicken historical research. Many of them, moreover, combined to concentrate attention upon the times of Strafford and Clarendon, of Pym and Hampden, of Vane and Cromwell, of Andrewes and Laud, of Milton and Bunyan, of Baillie and Baxter, of Hales and Chillingworth and Falkland. Of all these names that of Falkland has, perhaps, been least "had in remembrance". But the period of oblivion is past; the ultimate vindication is assured. The reasons for both have been already adumbrated, and will be developed in detail in chapters to come. For the present we may content our

selves with the succinct but sufficient summary in the closing passage of Dr. Tulloch's noble tribute to Falkland's memory: "His mind like all higher minds saw not so much outward as inward change. He shrank from revolution in Church or State; but he would have liberalised both, in a higher and nobler sense than his contemporary revolutionists, ecclesiastical or political. His ideas were born out of due time; and the extremes, first of destruction and then of reaction, were destined to run their course. In all times of excitement this is more or less likely to be the case. The voice of reason is unheard amongst the clamours of party, and a Falkland dies broken-hearted when a Cromwell and a Clarendon take their turns of success. But the seed of wise thought never perishes; and Falkland's ideal of the Church no less than of the State may yet be realised."1

1 Rational Theology in the Seventeenth Century.