The Italian statecraft, which the influence of the Renaissance rendered paramount, for the moment increased the tendency to absolutism; and in the reign of Henry VIII., though a shadow of popular government yet remained, the will of the king was little short of absolute. What may be called the fourth period of our history is occupied by the establishment of this arbitrary power, and the gradual awakening of national life, under the influences of the Renaissance, and of the circumstances which accompanied the Reformation, which tended to modify it in the reign of Elizabeth. When Protestantism and the vigorous young thought of the reawakened nation became linked indissolubly with the fortunes of the sovereign in her national war against Spain, the mere necessity of the union tended much to put a practical limit to the arbitrary character of the new monarchy. It was the miscomprehension of the necessity of this union between king and people which produced the contests which occupy our history during the reign of the Stuarts.

Bred in the theory of monarchy by Divine right, the logical offspring of feudalism, when separated from the Empire and the Church, the Stuarts were willing to accept the arbitrary power of their predecessors, but would not acknowledge the necessity of harmonious action with the people, on which alone, as things then were, such arbitrary authority could rest. The middle class of gentry had been increasing in power and influence till they were now in a position to assume that leadership in the nation which the destruction of the nobles had left vacant. And behind them there was the bulk of the people, whose Protestantism, the religious character of the late national struggle, and the love of truth engendered by the Renaissance, had raised to enthusiastic Puritanism. The constitutional life, checked for a time by the Tudor monarchy, again sprang into existence. In the struggle which ensued it was the enthusiastic party which ultimately triumphed, and its leader, Cromwell, is seen mingling his conscientious efforts at the establishment of constitutional government with a religious fervour too great to be sustained.

But his rule, freed from those parts for which, as yet, the gentry at all events were unprepared, established, definitely and for ever, the necessity of recurring sooner or later to the constitutional principles of the fourteenth century. In the Revolution of 1688 those principles triumphed. But they triumphed in the hands no longer of a great enthusiastic leader, but of a party, which found its chief supporters in a limited number of noble houses, whose aristocratic pride was injured by the arbitrary power of the sovereign, and whose influence in the formation of Parliament promised them political superiority under the establishment of parliamentary government. From that time till the present the scene of the contest has been changed. A party struggle of some thirty years gave place to the unchecked predominance of parliamentary rule. And the last period of our history has been occupied by the efforts of the excluded nation to make their voice heard above that of a nominal representation, consisting in reality of the representatives of a dominant class, under the influence either of the great Whig families or of the Crown.


GENEALOGIES OF THE LEADING FAMILIES

(The founder of the family a kinsman of William I.)

DE BOHUNS (Hereford, Essex, Northampton).

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