Time Itself Will Ruin Us
Sir John Eliot told the Commons that what worried him wasn’t the sabre-rattling of foreign leaders, it was incompetence and corruption at home.
1628
King Charles I 1625-1649
Sir John Eliot told the Commons that what worried him wasn’t the sabre-rattling of foreign leaders, it was incompetence and corruption at home.
1628
King Charles I 1625-1649
Soon after King Charles I came to the throne in 1625, relations with his Parliament became strained over taxation, foreign affairs and the Church. In 1627, Sir John Eliot (1592-1632) was sent to prison for leading the outcry at the King’s bungled campaign against Spain in the Thirty Years’ War. Following his release, Eliot warned the Commons that the threat was as great as ever.
FOR I believe I shall make it clear to you, that as at first the causes of those dangers were our disorders, our disorders still remain our greatest dangers. It is not now so much the potency of our enemies, as the weakness of ourselves, that threatens us; and that saying of the father may be assumed by us, Not so much by his power, as by our negligence.*
Our want of true devotion to Heaven, our insincerity and doubling* in religion, our want of councils, our precipitate actions, the insufficiency or unfaithfulness of our generals abroad, the ignorance or corruption of our ministers at home, the impoverishing of the sovereign, the oppression and depression of the subject, the exhausting of our treasures, the waste of our provisions, consumption of our ships, destruction of our men — these make the advantage to our enemies, not the reputation of their arms. And if in these there be not reformation, we need no foes abroad! Time itself will ruin us.
* Given originally in Latin: Non tam potentia sua quam negligentia nostra. By ‘father’ Eliot means one of the Church Fathers, early Christian bishops and holy men who even in the English Reformation were still regarded as definitive guides to the authentic interpretation of Scripture. In this case, he is recalling the words of St John Chrysostom (?347-407), who in speaking of Adam’s sin in Eden wrote that “the shipwreck was quite unpardonable; for this tempest was due entirely not to the force of the winds, but to the carelessness of the sailor”. See De diabolo tentatore I.2, and Quod nemo laeditur nisi a se ipso 17.
* That is, hesitation, wavering. Eliot objected to the way Charles’s favoured clergy were (in his opinion) backtracking on the English Reformation, putting at risk the clean break made in 1534 under Henry VIII from Rome’s political, judicial and ecclesiastical meddling. On being ‘double-minded’ see James 1:8 and James 4:8.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.