The English Crown provided its own ruin by its ecclesiastical policy. It could no longer obtain the revenue necessary for running the country; the Squires and the great merchants had become much richer than it. Only by expedients could the King struggle on for a few years at a time by trying to put more land into the hands of the Government (resumption of the King’s rights over the forests), by selling monopolies, by reviving quaint old forgotten taxes, and (in one case and for several years) by accepting support from a foreign Government. The victory of the gentry over the Crown (which Mr. Wells seems to regard as a popular victory!) was the consequence of an economic revolution which had preceded it, and that economic revolution in its turn was a consequence of the Reformation. Mr. Wells, whose tendency being materialism is all for exaggerating of the economic factor in history, should have spotted this; he has an acute and an original power of observation in such things. But he can well be excused through this fact that none of the ordinary official textbooks such as he would come across would put the truth before him. In the same way, he evidently does not know who and what Oliver Cromwell was. To give us an idea of the man, he quotes one sentence about his “country cut clothes,” giving the impression (which is certainly Mr. Wells’s own) that Cromwell was a bluff “man of the people.” But the whole point of Cromwell was that he was a cadet of one of the very wealthiest of the new millionaire families. The “Cromwells” (an assumed name) had built up their enormous and ill-gotten fortune on the loot of religion. Cromwell’s real name was Williams. The original Williams, his great-grandfather, was the favourite nephew of that Thomas Cromwell, the moneylender, who was the author of the policy of looting religion, and who heavily endowed that favourite nephew with monastic lands. No fewer than five great foundations—apart from lesser pickings—swelled the gigantic wealth of the family. It is symbolic and typical of the whole affair that Oliver Cromwell should come from those traditions of wealth acquired at the expense of the Catholic Church. It is true he was only the son of a cadet and therefore enjoyed but a small part of the family fortunes—a few thousand a year as we should say nowadays. But he came out of the very heart of the new millionaires. When he is represented as some rough fellow sprung from the core of the populace it is history of the very worst sort; not only baldly wrong in fact, but in tendency and motive.