The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or suppose he had witnessed our own recent fields of Pharsalus, in Henry VI’s time, between the houses of Lancaster and York: one writer says a hundred thousand people were killed; another, that ten thousand families were wiped out. No one can help marvelling, says Commynes, at the barbarous brutality and savage madness practised between people of the same nation, language, and religion. “What madness is this, citizens?” “Why do the nations rage so furiously?” asks the prophet David, Psalm 2:1. But we may ask: why do Christians rage so furiously? Why do the young men want weapons, demand them, and seize them?

Such tyranny is unfit for non-Christians, still less for us: consider the Spaniards in the Americas, who in forty-two years killed twelve million people with appalling, elaborate tortures, if we may believe their own bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas. Nor would I be lying, he said, if I put the number at fifty million. I pass over the French massacres, the Sicilian Vespers, the Duke of Alba’s tyrannies, our Gunpowder Plot, and that fourth Fury, as one writer calls it, the Spanish Inquisition, which quite overshadows those ten persecutions: Impious Mars rages throughout the world.

Is this not “a world gone mad”, as he calls it—a mad world, “insane war”? Are these not madmen, as Scaliger concludes, “who, by a bitter death in battle, leave to posterity the memory of their madness as an everlasting witness”—who leave so many battles as lasting memorials of their madness to every succeeding age? Would this, do you think, have driven our Democritus to laughter? Or would it have made him change his tune, alter his tone, and weep with Heraclitus—or rather howl, roar, tear his hair in pity, and stand appalled; or, as the poets imagine of Niobe, become utterly numb with grief and turn to stone?

I have not yet said the worst, what is more absurd and mad: in their tumults, rebellions, civil and unjust wars—“what is foolishly undertaken, impiously conducted, and miserably ended.” Those are the wars I mean, for we should not condemn them all, as those deluded Anabaptists foolishly imagine. Our Christian military formations are every bit as necessary as the Roman battle line or the Greek phalanx. Soldiering is a most noble and honourable profession, given the state of the world, and we cannot do without it. Soldiers are our best walls and defences.