History for ready reference, Volume 2, El Dorado to Greaves

by J. N. Larned

regaining of it was the principal object of the exertions of
the popes for a long subsequent period.
The Two Sicilies.
In Southern Italy and Sicily, since the fall of the
Hohenstaufens (1268), the times had been continuously evil.
The rule of the French conqueror, Charles of Anjou, was hard
and unmerciful, and the power he established became
threatening to the Papacy, which gave the kingdom to him. In
1282, Sicily freed itself, by the savage massacre of Frenchmen
which bears the name of the Sicilian Vespers. The King of
Aragon, Peter III., whose queen was the Hohenstaufen heiress,
supported the insurrection promptly and vigorously, took
possession of the island, and was recognized by the people as
their king. A war of twenty years' duration ensued. Both
Charles and Peter died and their sons continued the battle. In
the end, the Angevin house held the mainland, as a separate
kingdom, with Naples for its capital, and a younger branch of
the royal family of Aragon reigned in the island. But both
sovereigns called themselves Kings of Sicily, so that History,
ever since, has been forced to speak puzzlingly of "Two
Sicilies." For convenience it seems best to distinguish them
by calling one the kingdom of Naples and the other the kingdom
of Sicily. On the Neapolitan throne there came one estimable
prince, in Robert, who reigned from 1309 to 1343, and who was
a friend of peace and a patron of arts and letters. But after
him the throne was befouled by crimes and vices, and the
kingdom was made miserable by civil wars. His grand-daughter
Joanna, or Jane, succeeded him. Robert's elder brother
Caribert had become King of Hungary, and Joanna now married
one of that king's sons--her cousin Andrew. At the end of two
years he was murdered (1345) and the queen, a notoriously
vicious woman, was accused of the crime. Andrew's brother,
Louis, who had succeeded to the throne in Hungary, invaded
Naples to avenge his death, and Joanna was driven to flight.
The country then suffered from the worst form of civil war--a
war carried on by the hireling ruffians of the "free
companies" who roamed about Italy in that age, selling their
swords to the highest bidders. In 1351 a peace was brought
about which restored Joanna to the throne. The Hungarian
King's son, known as Charles of Durazzo, was her recognized
heir, but she saw fit to disinherit him and adopt Louis, of
the Second House of Anjou, brother of Charles V. in France.
Charles of Durazzo invaded Naples, took the queen prisoner and
put her to death. Louis of Anjou attempted to displace him, but
failed. In 1383 Louis died, leaving his claims to his son.
Charles of Durazzo was called to Hungary, after a time, to
take the crown of that kingdom, and left his young son,
Ladislaus, on the Neapolitan throne. The Angevin claimant,
Louis II., was then called in by his partisans, and civil war
was renewed for years. When Ladislaus reached manhood he
succeeded in expelling Louis, and he held the kingdom until
his death, in 1414. He was succeeded by his sister, Joanna
II., who proved to be as wicked and dissolute a woman as her
predecessor of the same name. She incurred the enmity of the
Pope, who persuaded Louis III., son of Louis II., to renew the
claims of his house. The most renowned "condottiere" (or
military contractor, as the term might be translated), of the
day, Atteridolo Sforza, was engaged to make war on Queen
Joanna in the interest of Louis. On her side she obtained a
champion by promising her dominions to Alfonso V., of Aragon
and Sicily. The struggle went on for years, with varying
fortunes. The fickle and treacherous Joanna revoked her
adoption of Alfonso, after a time, and made Louis her heir.
When Louis died, she bequeathed her crown to his brother René,
Duke of Lorraine. Her death occurred in 1435, but still the
war continued, and nearly all Italy was involved in it, taking
one side or the other. Alfonso succeeded at last (1442) in
establishing himself at Naples, and René practically gave up
the contest, although he kept the title of King of Naples. He
was the father of the famous English Queen Margaret of Anjou,
who fought for her weak-minded husband and her son in the Wars
of the Roses.
While the Neapolitan kingdom was passing through these endless
miseries of anarchy, civil war, and evil government, the
Sicilian kingdom enjoyed a more peaceful and prosperous
existence. The crown, briefly held by a cadet branch of the
House of Aragon, was soon reunited to that of Aragon; and
under Alfonso, as we have seen, it was once more joined with
that of Naples, in a "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies." But both
these unions were dissolved on the death of Alfonso, who
bequeathed Aragon and Sicily to his legitimate heir, and
Naples to a bastard son.
The Despots of Northern Italy.
In Northern Italy a great change in the political state of
many among the formerly free commonwealths had been going on
since the thirteenth century. The experience of the Greek
city-republics had been repeated in them. In one way and
another, they had fallen under the domination of powerful
families, who had established a despotic rule over them,
sometimes gathering several cities and their surrounding
territory into a considerable dominion, and obtaining from the
Emperor or the Pope a formally conferred and hereditary title.
Thus the Visconti had established themselves at Milan, and had
become a ducal house. After a few generations they gave way to
the military adventurer, Francesco Sforza, son of the Sforza
who made war for Louis III. of Anjou on Joanna II. of Naples.
In Verona, the Della Scala family reigned for a time, until
Venice overcame them; at Modena and Ferrara, the Estes; at
Mantua, the Gonzagas; at Padua, the Carraras.
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The Italian Republics.
In other cities, the political changes were of a different
character. Venice, which grew rich and powerful with
extraordinary rapidity, was tyrannically governed by a haughty
and exclusive aristocracy. In commerce and in wealth she
surpassed all her rivals, and her affairs were more shrewdly
conducted. She held large possessions in the East, and she was
acquiring an extensive dominion on the Italian mainland. The
Genoese, who were the most formidable competitors of Venice in
commerce, preserved their democracy, but at some serious
expense to the administrative efficiency of their government.
They were troubled by a nobility which could only be turbulent
and could not control. They fought a desperate but losing
fight with the Venetians, and were several times in subjection
to the dukes of Milan and the kings of France. Pisa, which had
led both Venice and Genoa in the commercial race at the
beginning, was ruined by her wars with the latter, and with
Florence, and sank, in the fourteenth century, under the rule
of the Visconti, who sold their rights to the Florentines.
Florence.
The wonderful Florentine republic was the one which preserved
its independence under popular institutions the longest, and
in which they bore the most splendid fruit. For a period that
began in the later part of the thirteenth century, the
government of Florence was so radically democratic that the
nobles (grandi) were made ineligible to office, and could only
qualify themselves for election to any place in the magistracy
by abandoning their order and engaging in the labor of some
craft or art. The vocations of skilled industry were all
organized in gilds, called Arti, and were divided into two
classes, one representing what were recognized as the superior
arts (Arti Major, embracing professional and mercantile callings,
with some others); the other including the commoner
industries, known as the Arti Minori. From the heads, or
Priors, of the Arti were chosen a Signory, changed every two
months, which was entrusted with the government of the
republic. This popular constitution was maintained in its
essential features through the better part of a century, but
with continual resistance and disturbance from the excluded
nobles, on one side, and from the common laboring people, on
the other, who belonged to no art-gild and who, therefore,
were excluded likewise from participation in political
affairs. Between these two upper and lower discontents, the
bourgeois constitution gave way at last. The mob got control
for a time; but only, as always happens, to bring about a
reactionary revolution, which placed an oligarchy in power;
and the oligarchy made smooth the way for a single family of
great wealth and popular gifts and graces to rise to supremacy
in the state. This was the renowned family which began to rule
in Florence in 1435, when Cosimo de' Medici entered on the
office of Gonfaloniere. The Medici were not despots, of the
class of the Visconti, or the Sforzas, or the Estes. They
governed under the old constitutional forms, with not much
violation of anything except the spirit of them. They acquired
no princely title, until the late, declining days of the
house. Their power rested on influence and prestige, at first,
and finally on habit. They developed, and enlisted in their
own support, as something reflected from themselves, the pride
of the city in itself,--in its magnificence,--in its great and
liberal wealth,--in its patronage of letters and art,--in its
fame abroad and the admiration with which men looked upon it.
Through all the political changes in Florence there ran an
unending war of factions, the bitterest and most inveterate in
history. The control of the city belonged naturally to the
Guelfs, for it was the head and front of the Guelfic party in
Italy. "Without Florence," says one historian, "there would
have been no Guelfs." But neither party scrupled to call armed
help from the outside into its quarrels, and the Ghibellines
were able, nearly as often as the Guelfs, to drive their
opponents from the city. For the ascendancy of one faction
meant commonly the flight or expulsion of every man in the
other who had importance enough to be noticed. It was thus
that Dante, an ardent Ghibelline, became an exile from his
beloved Florence during the later years of his life. But the
strife of Guelfs with Ghibellines did not suffice for the
partisan rancor of the Florentines, and they complicated it
with another split of factions, which bore the names of the
Bianchi and the Neri, 01' the Whites and the Blacks.
For two or three centuries the annals of Florence are naught,
one thinks in reading them, but an unbroken tale of strife
within, or war without--of tumult, riot, revolution,
disorder. And yet, underneath, there is an amazing story to be
found, of thrift, industry, commerce, prosperity, wealth, on
one side, and of the sublimest genius, on another, giving
itself, in pure devotion, to poetry and art. The contradiction
of circumstances seems irreconcilable to our modern
experience, and we have to seek an explanation of it in the
very different conditions of mediæval life. It is with
certainty a fact that Florence, in its democratic time, was
phenomenal in genius, and in richness of life,--in prosperity
both material and intellectual; and it is reasonable to credit
to that time the planting and the growing of fruits which
ripened surpassingly in the Medicean age.
The Ottomans and the Eastern Empire.
So little occasion has arisen for any mention of the lingering
Eastern Empire, since Michael Palæologus, the Greek, recovered
Constantinople from the Franks (1261), that its existence
might easily be forgotten. It had no importance until it fell,
and then it loomed large again, in history, not only by the
tragic impression of its fall upon the imaginations of men,
but by the potent consequences of it.
For nearly two hundred years, the successors of Palæologus,
still calling themselves "Emperors of the Romans," and ruling
a little Thracian and Macedonian corner of the old dominion of
the Eastern Cæsars, struggled with a new race of Turks, who
had followed the Seljuk horde out of the same Central Asian
region. One of the first known leaders of this tribe was
Osman, or Othman, after whom they are sometimes called
Osmanlis, but more frequently Ottoman Turks. They appeared in
Asia Minor about the middle of the thirteenth century,
attacking both Christian and Mahometan states, and gradually
extending their conquest over the whole. About the end of the
first century of their career, they passed the straits and won
a footing in Europe. In 1361, they took Hadrianople and made
it their capital. Their sultan at this time was Amurath.
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As yet, they did not attack Constantinople. The city itself
was too strong in its fortifications; but beyond the walls of
the capital there was no strength in the little fragment of
Empire that remained. It appealed vainly to Western Europe for
help. It sought to make terms with the Church of Rome. Nothing
saved it for the moment but the evident disposition of the
Turk to regard it as fruit which would drop to his hand in due
time, and which he might safely leave waiting while he turned
his arms against its more formidable neighbors. He contented
himself with exacting tribute from the emperors, and
humiliating them by commands which they dared not disobey. In
the Servians, the Bosnians, and the Bulgarians, Amurath found
worthier foes. He took Sophia, their principal city, from the
latter, in 1382; in 1389 he defeated the two former nations in
the great battle of Kossova. At the moment of victory he was
assassinated, and his son Bajazet mounted the Ottoman throne.
The latter, at Nicopolis (1396), overwhelmed and destroyed the
one army which Western Europe sent to oppose the conquering
march of his terrible race. Six years later, he himself was
vanquished and taken prisoner in Asia by a still more terrible
conqueror,--the fiendish Timour or Tamerlane, then scourging
the eastern Continent. For some years the Turks were paralyzed
by a disputed succession; but under Amurath II., who came to
the throne in 1421, their advance was resumed, and in a few
years more their long combat with the Hungarians began.
Hungary and the Turks.
The original line of kings of Hungary having died out in 1301,
the influence of the Pope, who claimed the kingdom as a fief
of the papal see, secured the election to the throne of
Charles Robert, or Caribert, of the Naples branch of the House
of Anjou. He and his son Louis, called the Great, raised the
kingdom to notable importance and power. Louis added the crown
of Poland to that of Hungary, and on his death, leaving two
daughters, the Polish crown passed to the husband of one and
the Hungarian crown to the husband of the other. This latter
was Sigismund of Luxemburg, who afterwards became Emperor, and
also King of Bohemia. Under Sigismund, Hungary was threatened
on one side by the Turks, and ravaged on the other by the
Hussites of Bohemia. He was succeeded (1437) by his
son-in-law, Albert of Austria, who lived only two years, and
the latter was followed by Wladislaus, King of Poland; who
again united the two crowns, though at the cost of a
distracting civil war with partisans of the infant son of
Albert. It was in the reign of this prince that the Turks
began their obstinate attacks on Hungary, and thenceforth, for
two centuries and more, that afflicted country served
Christendom as a battered bulwark which the new warriors of
Islam could beat and disfigure but could not break down. The
hero of these first Hungarian wars with the Turks was John
Huniades, or Hunyady, a Wallachian, who fought them with
success until a peace was concluded in 1444. But King
Wladislaus was persuaded the same year by a papal agent to
break the treaty and to lead an expedition against the enemy's
lines. The result was a calamitous defeat, the death of the
king, and the almost total destruction of his army. Huniades
now became regent of the kingdom, during the minority of the
late King Albert's young son, Ladislaus.
He suffered one serious defeat at the hands of the Turks, but
avenged it again and again, with help from an army of
volunteers raised in all parts of Europe by the exertions of a
zealous monk named Capistrano. When Huniades died, in 1456,
his enemies already controlled the worthless young king,
Ladislaus, and the latter pursued him in his grave with
denunciations as a traitor and a villain. In 1458, Ladislaus
died, and Mathias, a son of Huniades, was elected king. After
he had settled himself securely upon the throne, Mathias
turned his arms, not against the Turks, but against the
Hussites of Bohemia, in an attempt to wrest the crown of that
kingdom from George Podiebrad.
The Fall of Constantinople.
Meantime, the Turkish Sultan, Mohammed II., had accomplished
the capture of Constantinople and brought the venerable Empire
of the East--Roman, Greek, or Byzantine, as we choose to name
it--to an end. He was challenged to the undertaking by the
folly of the last Emperor, Constantine Palæologus, who
threatened to support a pretender to Mohammed's throne. The
latter began serious preparations at once for a siege of the
long coveted city, and opened his attack in April, 1453. The
Greeks, even in that hour of common danger, were too hotly
engaged in a religious quarrel to act defensively together.
Their last preceding emperor had gone personally to the
Council of the Western Church, at Florence, in 1439, with some
of the bishops of the Greek Church, and had arranged for the
submission of the latter to Rome, as a means of procuring help
from Catholic Europe against the Turks. His successor,
Constantine, adhered to this engagement, professed the
Catholic faith and observed the Catholic ritual. His subjects
in general repudiated the imperial contract with scorn, and
avowedly preferred a Turkish master to a Roman shepherd. Hence
they took little part in the defense of the city. Constantine,
with the small force at his command, fought the host of
besiegers with noble courage and obstinacy for seven weeks,
receiving a little succor from the Genoese, but from no other
quarter. On the 29th of May the walls were carried by storm;
the Emperor fell, fighting bravely to the last; and the Turks
became masters of the city of Constantine. There was no
extensive massacre of the inhabitants; the city was given up
to pillage, but not to destruction, for the conqueror intended
to make it his capital. A number of fugitives had escaped,
before, or during the siege, and made their way into Italy and
other parts of Europe, carrying an influence which was
importantly felt, as we shall presently see; but 60,000
captives, men, women and children, were sold into slavery and
scattered throughout the Ottoman Empire.
Greece and most of the islands of the Ægean soon shared the
fate of Constantinople, and the subjugation of Servia and
Bosnia was made complete. Mohammed was even threatening Italy
when he died, in 1481.
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Renaissance.
We have now come, in our hasty survey of European history, to
the stretch of time within which historians have quite
generally agreed to place the ending of the state of things
characteristic of the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the
changed conditions and the different spirit that belong to the
modern life of the civilized world. The transition in European
society from mediæval to modern ways, feelings, and thoughts
has been called Renaissance, or new birth; but the figure
under which this places the conception before one's mind does
not seem to be really a happy one. There was no birth of
anything new in the nature of the generations of men who
passed through that change, nor in the societies which they
formed. What occurred to make changes in both was an
expansion, a liberation, an enlightenment--an opening of eyes,
and of ears, and of inner senses and sensibilities. There was no
time and no place that can be marked at which this began; and
there is no cause nor chain of causes to which it can be
traced. We have found signs of its coming, here and there, in
one token of movement and another, all the way through later
mediæval times--at least since the first Crusades. In the
thirteenth century there was a wonderful quickening of all the
many processes which made it up. In the fourteenth century
they were checked; but still they went on. In the fifteenth
they revived with greater energy than before; and in the
sixteenth they rose to their climax in intensity and effect.
That which took place in European society was not a
re-naissance so much as the re-wakening of men to a day-light
existence, after a thousand years of sunless
night,--moonlighted at the best. The truest descriptive figure
is that which represents these preludes to our modern age as a
morning dawn and daybreak.
Probably foremost among the causes of the change in Western
Europe from the mediæval to the modern state, we must place
those influences that extinguished the disorganizing forces in
feudalism. Habits and forms of the feudal arrangement remained
troublesome in society, as they do in some measure to the
present day; but feudalism as a system of social disorder and
disintegration was by this time cleared away. We have noted in
passing some of the undermining agencies by which it was
destroyed: the crusading movements; the growth and
enfranchisement of cities; the spread of commerce; the rise of
a middle class; the study of Roman law; the consequent increase
of royal authority in France,--all these were among the causes
of its decline. But possibly none among them wrought such
quick and deadly harm to feudalism as the introduction of
gunpowder and fire-arms in war, which occurred in the
fourteenth century. When his new weapons placed the
foot-soldier on a fairly even footing in battle with the
mailed and mounted knight, the feudal military organization of
society was ruined beyond remedy. The changed conditions of
warfare made trained armies, and therefore standing armies, a
necessity; standing armies implied centralized authority; with
centralized authority the feudal condition disappeared.
If these agencies in the generating of the new movement of
civilization which we call Modern are placed before the
subtler and more powerful influence of the printing press, it
is because they had to do a certain work in the world before
the printing press could be an efficient educator. Some
beginning of a public, in our modern sense, required to be
created, for letters to act upon. Until that came about, the
copyists of the monasteries and of the few palace libraries
existing were more than sufficient to satisfy all demands for
the multiplication of ancient writings or the publication of
new ones. The printer, if he had existed, would have starved
for want of employment. He would have lacked material,
moreover, to work upon; for it was the rediscovery of a great
ancient literature which made him busy when he came.
Invention of Printing.
The preparation of Europe for an effective use of the art of
printing may be said to have begun in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, when the great universities of Paris,
Bologna, Naples, Padua, Modena, and others, came into
existence, to be centers of intellectual
irritation--disputation--challenge--groping inquiry. But it
was not until the fourteenth century, when the labors and the
influence of Petrarch and other scholars and men of genius
roused interest in the forgotten literature of ancient Rome
and Greece, that the craving and seeking for books grew
considerable. Scholars and pretended scholars from the Greek
Empire then began to find employment, in Italy more
especially, as teachers of the Greek language, and a market
was opened for manuscripts of the older Greek writings, which
brought many precious ones to light, after long burial, and
multiplied copies of them. From Italy, this revival of classic
learning crept westward and northward somewhat slowly, but it
went steadily on, and the book as a commodity in the commerce
of the world rose year by year in importance, until the
printer came forward, about the middle of the fifteenth
century, to make it abundant and cheap.
Whether John Gutenberg, at Mentz, in 1454, or Laurent Coster,
at Haarlem, twenty years earlier, executed the first printing
with movable types, is a question of small importance, except
as a question of justice between the two possible inventors,
in awarding a great fame which belongs to one or both. The
grand fact is, that thought and knowledge took wings from that
sublime invention, and ideas were spread among men with a
swift diffusion that the world had never dreamed of before.
The slow wakening that had gone on for two centuries became
suddenly so quick that scarcely more than fifty years, from
the printing of the first Bible, sufficed to inoculate half of
Europe with the independent thinking of a few boldly
enlightened men.
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The Greek Revival.
If Gutenberg's printing of Pope Nicholas' letter of
indulgence, in 1454, was really the first achievement of the
new-born art, then it followed by a single year the event
commonly fixed upon for the dating of our Modern Era, and it
derived much of its earliest importance indirectly from that
event. For the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, was preceded
and followed by a flight of Greeks to Western Europe, bearing
such treasures as they could save from the Turks. Happily
those treasures included precious manuscripts; and among the
fugitives was no small number of educated Greeks, who became
teachers of their language in the West. Thus teaching and text
were offered at the moment when the printing press stood ready
to make a common gift of them to every hungering student. This
opened the second of the three stages which the late John
Addington Symonds defined in the history of scholarship during
the Renaissance: "The first is the age of passionate desire;
Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and
Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he
might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the
heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a
thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition
and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican Library
in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a
little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolani, who ransacked all the
cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with
the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth
century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of
classic literature, are the heroes of this second period."
"Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the
critics, philologers, and printers. ... Florence, Venice,
Basle, and Paris groaned with printing presses. The Aldi, the
Stephani, and Froben, toiled by night and day, employing
scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty
brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of
sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the
press, and to place beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of
envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists
in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of
scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labours of
these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of
Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil
was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato
in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind.
... This third age in the history of the Renaissance
Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus
[1465-1536]; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch
of learning to the northern nations" (Symonds).
Art had already had its new birth in Italy; but it shared with
everything spiritual and intellectual the wonderful quickening
of the age, and produced the great masters of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries: Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci,
Raphael, Titian, in Italy, the Brothers Van Eyck in Flanders,
Holbein and Dürer, in Germany, and the host of their compeers
in that astonishing age of artistic genius.
Portuguese Explorations.
A ruder and more practical direction in which the spirit of
the age manifested itself conspicuously and with prodigious
results was that of exploring navigation, to penetrate the
unknown regions of the globe and find their secrets out. But,
strangely, it was none of the older maritime and commercial
peoples who led the way in this: neither the Venetians, nor
the Genoese, nor the Catalans, nor the Flemings, nor the Hansa
Leaguers, nor the English, were early in the search for new
countries and new routes of trade. The grand exploit of
"business enterprise" in the fifteenth century, which changed
the face of commerce throughout the world, was left to be
performed by the Portuguese, whose prior commercial experience
was as slight as that of any people in Europe. And it was one
great man among them, a younger son in their royal family,
Prince Henry, known to later times as "the Navigator," who
woke the spirit of exploration in them and pushed them to the
achievement which placed Portugal, for a time, at the head of
the maritime states. Beginning in 1434, Prince Henry sent
expedition following expedition down the western coast of
Africa, searching for the southern extremity of the continent,
and a way round it to the eastward--to the Indies, the goal of
commercial ambition then and long after. In our own day it
seems an easy thing to sail down the African coast to the
Cape; but it was not easy in the middle of the fifteenth
century; and when Prince Henry died, in 1460, his ships had
only reached the mouth of the Gambia, or a little way beyond
it. His countrymen had grown interested, however, in the
pursuit which he began, and expeditions were continued, not
eagerly but at intervals, until Bartolomew Diaz, in 1486,
rounded the southern point of the continent without knowing
it, and Vasco da Gama, in 1497, passed beyond, and sailed to
the coast of India.
Discovery of America.
Five years before this, Columbus, in the service of Ferdinand
and Isabella of Spain, had made the more venturesome voyage
westward, and had found the New World of America. That the
fruits of that surpassing discovery fell to Spain, is one of
the happenings of history which one need not try to explain;
since (if we except the Catalans among them) there were no
people in Europe less inclined to ocean adventure than the
Spaniards. But they had just finished the conquest of the
Moors; their energies, long exercised in that struggle,
demanded some new outlet, and the Genoese navigator, seeking
money and ships, and baffled in all more promising lands, came
to them at the right moment for a favorable hearing. So
Castile won the amazing prize of adventure, which seems to
have belonged by more natural right to Genoa, or Venice, or
Bruges, or Lubeck, or Bristol.
The immediate material effects of the finding of the new way
to the Asiatic side of the world were far more important than
the effects of the discovery of America, and they were
promptly felt. No sooner had the Portuguese secured their
footing in the eastern seas, and on the route thither, which
they proceeded vigorously to do, than the commerce of Europe
with that rich region of spices and silks, and curious
luxuries which Europe loved, abandoned its ancient channels
and ran quickly into the new one. There were several strong
reasons for this: (1) the carriage of goods by the longer
ocean route was cheaper than by caravan routes to the
Mediterranean; (2) the pestilent Moorish pirates of the
Barbary Coast were escaped; (3) European merchants found heavy
advantages in dealing directly with the East instead of
trading at second hand through Arabs and Turks. So the
commerce of the Indies fled suddenly away from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic; fled from Venice, from Genoa,
from Marseilles, from Barcelona, from Constantinople, from
Alexandria; fled, too, from many cities of the arrogant Hanse
league in the North, which had learned the old ways of traffic
and were slow to catch the idea of a possible change. At the
outset of the rearrangement of trade, the Portuguese won and
held, for a time, the first handling of East Indian
commodities, while Dutch, English and German
traders--especially the first named--met them at Lisbon and
took their wares for distribution through central and northern
Europe. But, in no long time, the Dutch and English went to
India on their own account, and ousted the Portuguese from
their profitable monopoly.
{1051}
Commercially, the discovery of America had little effect on
Europe for a century or two. Politically, it had vast
consequences in the sixteenth century, which came, in the
main, from the power and prestige that accrued to Spain. But
perhaps its most important effects were those moral and
intellectual ones which may be attributed to the sudden,
surprising enlargement of the geographical horizon of men. The
lifting of the curtain of mystery which had hung so long
between two halves of the world must have compelled every man,
who thought at all, to suspect that other curtains of mystery
might be hiding facts as simple and substantial, waiting for
their Columbus to disclose them; and so the bondage of the
mediæval mind to that cowardice of superstition which fears
inquiry, must surely have been greatly loosened by the
startling event. But the Spaniards, who rushed to the
possession of the new-found world, showed small signs of any
such effect upon their minds; and perhaps it was the greedy
thought of their possession which excluded it.
Nationalization of Spain.
The Spaniards were one of half-a-dozen peoples in Western
Europe who had just arrived, in this fifteenth century, at a
fairly consolidated nationality, and were prepared, for the
first time in their history, to act with something like
organic unity in the affairs of the world. It was one of the
singular birth-marks of the new era in history, that so many
nations passed from the inchoate to the definite form at so
nearly the same time. The marriage of Isabella of Castile to
Ferdinand of Aragon, in 1469, effected a permanent union of
the two crowns, and a substantial incorporation of the greater
part of the Spanish peninsula into a single strong kingdom,
made yet stronger in 1491 by the conquest of Grenada and
subjugation of the last of the Spanish Moors.
Louis XI. and the Nationalizing of France.
The nationalizing of France had been a simultaneous but quite
different process. From the miserably downfallen and divided
state in which it was left by the Hundred Years War, it was
raised by a singular king, who employed strange, ignoble
methods, but employed them with remarkable success. This was
Louis XI., who owes to Sir Walter Scott's romance of "Quentin
Durward" an introduction to common fame which he could hardly
have secured otherwise; since popular attention is not often
drawn to the kind of cunning and hidden work in politics which
he did.
Louis XI., on coming to the throne in 1461, found himself
surrounded by a state of things which seemed much like a
revival of the feudal state at its worst, when Philip Augustus
and Louis IX. had to deal with great vassals who rivalled or
overtopped them in power. The reckless granting of appanages
to children of the royal family had raised up a new group of
nobles, too powerful and too proud to be loyal and obedient
subjects of the monarchy. At the head of them was the Duke of
Burgundy, whose splendid dominion, extended by marriage over
most of the Netherlands, raised him to a place among the
greater princes of Europe, and who quite outshone the King of
France in everything but the royal title. It was impossible,
under the circumstances, for the crown to establish its
supremacy over these powerful lords by means direct and open.
The craft and dishonesty of Louis found methods more
effectual. He cajoled, beguiled, betrayed and cheated his
antagonists, one by one. He played the selfishness and
ambitions of each against the others, and he skilfully evoked
something like a public opinion in his kingdom against the
whole. At the outset of his reign the nobles formed a
combination against him which they called the League of the
Public Weal, but which aimed at nothing but fresh gains to the
privileged class and advantages to its chiefs. Of alliance with
the people against the crown, as in England, there was no
thought. Louis yielded to the League in appearance, and
cunningly went beyond its demands in his concessions, making
it odious to the kingdom at large, and securing to himself the
strong support of the States-General of France, when he
appealed to it.
The tortuous policy of Louis was aided by many favoring
circumstances and happenings. It was favored not least,
perhaps, by the hot-headed character of Charles the Bold, who
succeeded his father, Philip, in the Duchy of Burgundy, in
1467. Charles was inspired with a great and not unreasonable
ambition, to make his realm a kingdom, holding a middle place
between France and Germany. He had abilities, but he was of a
passionate and haughty temper, and no match for the cool,
perfidious, plotting King of France. The latter, by skilful
intrigue, involved him in a war with the Swiss, which he
conducted imprudently, and in which he was defeated and killed
(1477). His death cleared Louis' path to complete mastery in
France, and he made the most of his opportunity. Charles left
only a daughter, Mary of Burgundy, and her situation was
helpless. Louis lost no time in seizing the Duchy of Burgundy,
as a fief of France, and in the pretended exercise of his
rights as godfather of the Duchess Mary. He also took
possession of Franche Comté, which was a fief of the Empire,
and he put forward claims in Flanders, Artois, and elsewhere.
But the Netherlanders, while they took advantage of the young
duchess' situation, and exacted large concessions of chartered
privileges from her, yet maintained her rights; and before the
first year of her orphanage closed, she obtained a champion by
marriage with the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of the
Emperor, Frederick III. Maximilian was successful in war with
Louis; but the latter succeeded, after all, in holding
Burgundy, which was thenceforth absorbed in the royal domain
of France and gave no further trouble to the monarchy, while
he won some important extensions of the northwestern frontiers
of his kingdom.
Before the death of Louis XI. the French crown regained Anjou,
Maine, and Provence, by inheritance from the last
representative of the great second House of Anjou. Thus the
kingdom which he left to his son, Charles VIII. (1483), was a
consolidated nation, containing in its centralized government
the germs of the absolute monarchy of a later day.
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Italian Expedition of Charles VIII.
Charles VIII. was a loutish and uneducated boy of eight years
when his father died. His capable sister Anne carried on the
government for some years, and continued her father's work by
defeating a revolt of the nobles, and by marrying the young
king to the heiress of Brittany--thereby uniting to the crown
the last of the great semi-independent fiefs. When Charles
came of age, he conceived the idea of recovering the kingdom
of Naples, which the House of Anjou claimed, and which he
looked upon as part of his inheritance from that House. He was
incited to the enterprise, moreover, by Ludovico il Moro, or
Louis the Moor, an intriguing uncle of the young Duke of
Milan, who conspired to displace his nephew. In 1494 Charles
crossed the Alps with a large and well-disciplined army, and
met with no effectual opposition. The Medici of Florence and
the Pope had agreed together to resist this French intrusion,
which they feared; but the invading force proved too
formidable, and the Florentines, then under the influence of
Savonarola, looked to it for their liberation from the
Medicean rule, already oppressive. Accordingly Charles marched
triumphantly through the peninsula, making some stay at Rome.
On his approach to Naples, the Aragonese King, Alfonso,
abdicated in favor of his son, Ferdinand II., and died soon
after. Ferdinand, shut out of Naples by an insurrection, fled
to Sicily, and Charles entered the city, where the populace
welcomed him with warmth. Most of the kingdom submitted within
a few weeks, and the conquest seemed complete, as it had been
easy.
But what they had won so easily the French held with a
careless hand, and they lost it with equal ease. While they
revelled and caroused in Naples, abusing the hospitality of
their new subjects, and gathering plunder with reckless greed,
a dangerous combination was formed against them, throughout
the peninsula. Before they were aware, it had put them in
peril, and Charles was forced to retreat with haste, in the
spring of 1495, leaving an inadequate garrison to hold the
Neapolitan capital. In Lombardy, he had to fight with the
Venetians, and with his protege, Louis the Moor, now Duke of
Milan. He defeated them, and regained France in November. Long
before that time, the small force he left at Naples had been
overcome, and Ferdinand had recovered his kingdom.
In one sense, the French had nothing to show for this their
first expedition of conquest. In another sense they had much
to show and their gain was great. They had made their first
acquaintance with the superior culture of Italy. They had
breathed the air beyond the Alps, which was then surcharged
with the inspirations of the Renaissance. Both the ideas and
the spoil they brought back were of more value to France than
can be easily estimated. They had returned laden with booty,
and much of it was in treasures of art, every sight of which
was a lesson to the sense of beauty and the taste of the
people among whom they were shown. The experience and the
influence of the Italian expedition were undoubtedly very
great, and the Renaissance in France, as an artistic and a
literary birth, is reasonably dated from it.
Italian Wars of Louis XII.
Charles VIII. died suddenly in 1498 and was succeeded by his
cousin, of the Orleans branch of the Valois family, Louis XII.
The new king was weak in character, but not wicked. His first
thought on mounting the throne was of the claims of his family
to other thrones, in Italy. Besides the standing Angevin claim
to the kingdom of Naples, he asserted rights of his own to the
duchy of Milan, as a descendant of Valentina Visconti, heiress
of the ducal house which the Sforzas supplanted. In 1499 he sent
an army against Louis the Moor, and the latter fled from Milan
without an attempt at resistance. Louis took possession of the
duchy with the greatest good will of the people; but, before
half a year had passed, French taxes, French government, and
French manners had disgusted them, and they made an attempt to
restore their former tyrant. The attempt failed, and Louis the
Moor was imprisoned in France for the remainder of his life.
Milan secured, Louis XII. began preparations to repeat the
undertaking of Charles VIII. against Naples. The Neapolitan
crown had now passed to an able and popular king, Frederick,
and Frederick had every reason to suppose that he would be
supported and helped by his kinsman, Ferdinand of Aragon, the
well-known consort of Isabella of Castile. Ferdinand had the
power to hold the French king in check; but instead of using
it for the defense of the Neapolitan branch of his house, he
secretly and treacherously agreed with Louis to divide the
kingdom of Naples with him. Under these circumstances, the
conquest was easily accomplished (1501). The betrayed
Frederick surrendered to Louis, and lived as a pensionary in
France until his death. The Neapolitan branch of the House of
Aragon came to an end.
Louis and Ferdinand speedily quarreled over the division of
their joint conquest. The treacherous Spaniard cheated the
French king in treaty negotiations, gaining time to send
forces into Italy which expelled the French. It was in this
war that the Spanish general, Gonsalvo di Cordova, won the
reputation which gave him the name of "the Great Captain"; and
it was likewise in this war that the chivalric French knight,
Bayard, began the winning of his fame.
The League of Cambrai and the Holy League.
Naples had again slipped from the grasp of France, and this
time it had passed to Spain. Louis XII. abandoned the tempting
kingdom to his rival, and applied himself to the establishing
of his sovereignty over Milan and its domain. Some territory
formerly belonging to the Milaness had been ceded to Venice by
the Sforzas. He himself had ceded another district or two to
the republic in payment for services rendered. Ferdinand of
Spain had made payments in the same kind of coin, from his
Neapolitan realm, for Venetian help to secure it.
{1053}
The warlike Pope Julius II. saw Rimini and other towns
formerly belonging to the States of the Church now counted
among the possessions of the proud mistress of the Adriatic.
All of these disputants in Italy resented the gains which
Venice had gathered at their expense, and envied and feared
her somewhat insolent prosperity. They accordingly suspended
their quarrels with one another, to form a league for breaking
her down and for despoiling her. The Emperor Maximilian, who had
grievances of his own against the Venetians, joined the
combination, and Florence was bribed to become a party to it
by the betrayal of Pisa into her hands. Thus was formed the
shameful League of Cambrai (1508). The French did most of the
fighting in the war that ensued, though Pope Julius, who took
the field in person, easily proved himself a better soldier
than priest. The Venetians were driven for a time from the
greater part of the dominion they had acquired on the
mainland, and were sorely pressed. But they made terms with
the Pope, and it then became his interest, not merely to stop
the conquests of his allies, but to press them out of Italy,
if possible. He began accordingly to intrigue against the
French, and presently had a new league in operation, making
war upon them. It was called a Holy League, because the head
of the Church was its promoter, and it embraced the Emperor,
King Ferdinand of Spain, King Henry VIII. of England, and the
Republic of Venice. As the result of the ruthless and
destructive war which they waged, Louis XII., before he died,
in 1515, saw all that he had won in Lombardy stripped from him
and restored to the Sforzas--the old family of the Dukes of
Milan; Venice recovered most of her possessions, but never
regained her former power, since the discovery of the ocean
route to India, round the Cape of Good Hope, was now turning
the rich trade of the East, the great source of her wealth,
into the hands of the Portuguese; the temporal dominion of the
Popes was enlarged by the recovery of Bologna and Perugia and by
the addition of Parma and Piacenza; and Florence, which had
been a republic since the death of Savonarola, was forced to
submit anew to the Medici.
The Age of Infamous Popes.
The fighting Pope, Julius II., who made war and led armies,
while professing to be the vicar of Him who brought the
message of good-will and peace to mankind, was very far from
being the worst of the popes of his age. He was only worldly,
thinking much of his political place as a temporal sovereign
in Italy, and little of his spiritual office as the head of
the Church of Christ. As the sovereign of Rome and the Papal
States, Julius II. ran a brilliant career, and is one of the
splendid figures of the Italian renaissance. Patron of Michael
Angelo and Raphael, projector of St. Peter's, there is a
certain grandeur in his character to be admired, if we could
forget the pretended apostolic robe which he smirched with
perfidious politics and stained with blood.
But the immediate predecessors of Julius II., Sixtus IV. and
Alexander VI., had had nothing in their characters to lure
attention from the hideous examples of bestial wickedness
which they set before the world. Alexander, especially, the
infamous Borgia,--systematic murderer and robber, liar and
libertine,--accomplished practitioner of every crime and every
vice that was known to the worst society of a depraved
generation, and shamelessly open in the foulest of his
doings,--there is scarcely a pagan monster of antiquity that
is not whitened by comparison with him. Yet he sat in the
supposed seat of St. Peter for eleven years, to be venerated
as the Vicar of Christ, the "Holy Father" of the Christian
Church; his declarations and decrees in matters of faith to be
accepted as infallible inspirations; his absolution to be
craved as a passport to Heaven; his anathema to be dreaded as
a condemnation to Hell!
This evil and malignant being died in 1503. poisoned by one of
his own cups, which he had brewed for another. Julius II.
reigned until 1513; and after him came the Medicean Pope, Leo
X., son of Lorenzo the Magnificent,--princely and worldly as
Julius, but in gentler fashion; loving ease, pleasure, luxury,
art, and careless of all that belonged to religion beyond its
ceremonies and its comfortable establishment of clerical
estates. Is it strange that Christendom was prepared to give
ear to Luther?
Luther and the Reformation.
When Luther raised his voice, he did but renew a protest which
many pure and pious and courageous men before him had uttered,
against evils in the Church and falsities and impostures in
the Papacy. But some of them, like Arnold of Brescia, like
Peter Waldo, and the Albigenses, had been too far in advance
of their time, and their revolt was hopeless from the
beginning. Wyclif's movement had been timed unfortunately in
an age of great commotions, which swallowed it up. That of
Huss had roused an ignorant peasantry, too uncivilized to
represent a reformed Christianity, and had been ruined by the
fierceness of their misguided zeal. The Reformation of
Savonarola, at Florence, had been nobly begun, but not wisely
led, and it had spent its influence at the end on aims less
religious than political.
But there occurred a combination, when Luther arose, of
character in himself, of circumstances in his country, and of
temper in his generation, which made his protest more
lastingly effective. He had high courage, without rashness. He
had earnestness and ardor, without fanaticism. He had the
plain good sense and sound judgment which win public
confidence. His substantial learning put him on terms with the
scholars of his day, and he was not so much refined by it as
to lose touch with the common people. A certain coarseness in
his nature was not offensive to the time in which he lived,
but rather belonged among the elements of power in him. His
spirituality was not fine, but it was strong. He was sincere,
and men believed in him. He was open, straightforward, manly,
commanding respect. His qualities showed themselves in his
speech, which went straight to its mark, in the simplest
words, moulding the forms and phrases of the German language
with more lasting effect than the speech of any other man who
ever used it. Not many have lived in any age or any country
who possessed the gift of so persuasive a tongue, with so
powerful a character to command the hearing for it.
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And the generation to which Luther spoke really waited for a
bold voice to break into the secret of its thoughts concerning
the Church. It had inherited a century of alienation from
quarreling popes and greedy, corrupted priests and now there
had been added in its feeling the deep abhorrence roused by
such villains as the Borgia in the papal chair, and by their
creatures and minions in the priesthood of the Church. If it
is crediting too much to the common multitude of the time to
suppose them greatly sickened by the vices and corruptions of
their priests, we may be sure, at least, that they were
wearied and angered by the exactions from them, which a
vicious hierarchy continually increased. The extravagance of
the Papacy kept pace with its degradation, and Christendom
groaned under the burden of the taxes that were wrung from it
in the name of the lowly Saviour of mankind.
Nowhere in Europe were the extortions of the Church felt more
severely than in Germany, where the serfdom of the peasants
was still real and hard, and where the depressing weight of
the feudal system had scarcely been lifted from society at
all. Feudalism had given way in that country less than in any
other. Central authority remained as weak, and national
solidification as far away, as ever. Of organic unity in the
heterogeneous bundle of electoral principalities, duchies,
margravates and free cities which made up the nominal realm of
the King of the Romans, there was no more at the beginning of
the sixteenth century than there had been in the twelfth. But
that very brokenness and division in the political state of
Germany proved to be one of the circumstances which favored
the Protestant Reformation of the Church. Had monarchical
authority established itself there as in France, then the
Austro-Spanish family which wielded it, with the concentrated
bigotry of their narrow-minded race, would have crushed the
religious revolt as completely in Saxony as they did in
Austria and Bohemia.
The Ninety-five Theses.
The main events of the Reformation in Germany are so commonly
known that no more than the slightest sketching of them is
needed here. Letters of indulgence, purporting to grant a
remission of the temporal and purgatorial penalties of sin,
had been sold by the Church for centuries; but none before
Pope Leo X. had made merchandize of them in so peddlar-like
and shameful a fashion as that which scandalized the
intelligent piety of Europe in 1517. Luther, then a professor
in the new University of Wittenberg, Saxony, could not hide
his indignation, as most men did. He stood forth boldly and
challenged the impious fraud, in a series of propositions or
theses, which, after the manner of the time, he nailed to the
door of Wittenberg Church. Just that bold action was needed to
let loose the pent-up feeling of the German people. The
ninety-five theses were printed and went broadcast through the
land, to be read and to be listened to, and to stir every
class with independent ideas. It was the first great appeal
made to the public opinion of the world, after the invention
of printing had put a trumpet to the mouths of eloquent men,
and the effect was too amazing to be believed by the careless
Pope and his courtiers.
Political Circumstances.
But more than possibly--probably, indeed--the popular feeling
stirred up would never have accomplished the rupture with Rome
and the religious independence to which North Germany attained
in the end, if political motives had not coincided with
religious feelings to bring certain princes and great nobles

into sympathy with the Monk of Wittenberg. The Elector of
Saxony, Luther's immediate sovereign, had long been in
opposition to the Papacy on the subject of its enormous
collections of money from his subjects, and he was well
pleased to have the hawking of indulgences checked in his
dominions. Partly for this reason, partly because of the pride
and interest with which he cherished his new University,
partly from personal liking and admiration of Luther, and
partly, too, no doubt, in recognition of the need of Church
reforms, he gave Luther a quiet protection and a concealed
support. He was the strongest and most influential of the
princes of the Empire, and his obvious favor to the movement
advanced it powerfully and rapidly.
At first, there was no intention to break with the Papacy and
the Papal Church,--certainly none in Luther's mind. His
attitude towards both was conciliatory in every way, except as
concerned the falsities and iniquities which he had protested
against. It was not until the Pope, in June, 1520, launched
against him the famous Bull, "Exurge Domine," which left no
alternative between abject submission and open war, that
Luther and his followers cast off the authority of the Roman
Church and its head, and grounded their faith upon Holy
Scripture alone. By formally burning the Bull, Luther accepted
the papal challenge, and those who believed with him were
ready for the contest.
The Diet of Worms.
In 1521, the reformer was summoned before a Diet of the
Empire, at Worms, where a hearing was given him. The influence
of the Church, and of the young Austro-Spanish Emperor,
Charles V., who adhered to it, was still great enough to
procure his condemnation; but they did not dare to deal with
him as Huss had been dealt with. He was suffered to depart
safely, pursued by an imperial edict which placed the ban of
the Empire on all who should give him countenance or support.
His friends among the nobles spirited him away and concealed
him in a castle, the Wartburg, where he remained for several
months, employed in making his translation of the Bible.
Meantime, the Emperor had been called away from Germany by his
multifarious affairs, in the Netherlands and Spain, and had
little attention to give to Luther and the questions of
religion for half-a-dozen years. He was represented in Germany
by a Council of Regency, with the Elector of Saxony at the
head of, it; and the movement of reformation, if not
encouraged in his absence, was at least considerably
protected. It soon showed threatening signs of wildness and
fanaticism in many quarters; but Luther proved himself as
powerful in leadership as he had been in agitation, and the
religious passion of the time was controlled effectively, on
the whole.
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Organization of the Lutheran Church.
Before the close of the year 1521, Pope Leo X. died, and his
successor, Adrian, while insisting upon the enforcement of the
Edict of Worms against Luther and his supporters, yet
acknowledged the corruptions of the Church and promised a
reformation of them. His promises came too late; his
confessions only gave testimony to the independent reformers
which their opponents could not impeach. There was no longer
any thought of cleansing the Church of Rome, to abide in it. A
separated--a restored Church--was clearly determined on, and
Luther framed a system of faith and discipline which was
adopted in Saxony, and then accepted very generally by the
reformed Churches throughout Germany. In 1525, the Elector
Frederick of Saxony died. He had quietly befriended the
Lutherans and tolerated the reform, but never identified
himself with them. His brother, John, who succeeded him, made
public profession of his belief in the Lutheran doctrines, and
authoritatively established the church system which Luther had
introduced. The Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, the Margrave of
Brandenburg, and the Dukes of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Zell,
followed his example; while the imperial cities of Frankfort,
Nuremberg, Bremen, Strasburg, Brunswick, Nordhausen, and
others, formally ranged themselves on the same side. By the
year 1526, when a diet at Spires declared the freedom of each
state in the Empire to deal with the religious reform
according to its own will, the Reformation in Germany was a
solidly organized fact. But those of the reform had not yet
received their name, of "Protestants." That came to them three
years later, when the Roman party had rallied its forces in a
new diet at Spires, to undo the declaration of 1526, and the
leaders of the Lutheran party recorded their solemn protest.
The Austro-Burgundian Marriage.
To understand the situation politically, during the period of
struggle for and against the Reformation, it will be necessary
to turn back a little, for the noting of important occurrences
which have not been mentioned.
When Albert II., who was King of Hungary and Bohemia, as well
as King of the Romans (Emperor-elect, as the title came to be,
soon afterwards), died, in 1439, he was succeeded by his
second cousin Frederick III., Duke of Styria, and from that
time the Roman or imperial crown was held continuously in the
Austrian family, becoming practically hereditary. But
Frederick did not succeed to the duchy of Austria, and he
failed of election to the throne in Hungary and Bohemia. Hence
his position as Emperor was peculiarly weak and greatly
impoverished, through want of revenue from any considerable
possessions of his own. During his whole long reign, of nearly
fifty-four years, Frederick was humiliated and hampered by his
poverty; the imperial authority was brought very low, and
Germany was in a greatly disordered state. There were frequent
wars between its members, and between Austria and Bohemia, with
rebellions in Vienna and elsewhere; while the Hungarians were
left to contend with the aggressive Turks, almost unhelped.
But in 1477 a remarkable change in the circumstances and
prospects of the family of the Emperor Frederick III. was made
by the marriage of his son and heir, Maximilian, to Mary, the
daughter and heiress of the wealthy and powerful Duke of
Burgundy, Charles the Bold. The bridegroom was so poor that
the bride is said to have loaned him the money which enabled
him to make a fit appearance at the wedding. She had lost, as
we saw, the duchy of Burgundy, but the valiant arm of
Maximilian enabled her to hold the Burgundian county, Franche
Comté, and the rich provinces of the Netherlands, which formed
at that time, perhaps, the most valuable principality in
Europe. The Duchess Mary lived only five years after her
marriage; but she left a son, Philip, who inherited the
Netherlands and Franche Comté, and Maximilian ruled them as
his guardian.
In 1493, the Emperor Frederick died, and Maximilian, who had
been elected King of the Romans some years before, succeeded
him in the imperial office. He was never crowned at Rome, and
he took the title, not used before, of King of Germany and
Emperor-elect. He was Archduke of Austria, Duke of Styria,
Carinthia and Carniola, and Count of Tyrol; and, with his
guardianship in the Low Countries, he rose greatly in
importance and power above his father. But he accomplished
less than might possibly have been done by a ruler of more
sureness of judgment and fixity in purpose. His plans were
generally beyond his means, and the failures in his
undertakings were numerous. He was eager to interfere with the
doings of Charles VIII. and Louis XIII. in Italy; but the
Germanic diet gave him so little support that he could do
nothing effective. He joined the League of Cambrai against
Venice, and the Holy League against France, but bore no
important part in either. His reign was signalized in Germany
by the division of the nation into six administrative
"Circles," afterwards increased to ten, and by the creation of
a supreme court of appeal, called the Imperial Chamber,--both
of which measures did something towards the diminution of
private wars and disorders.
The Austro-Spanish Marriage.--Charles V.
But Maximilian figures most conspicuously in history as the
immediate ancestor of the two great sovereign dynasties--the
Austrian and the Austro-Spanish--which sprang from his
marriage with Mary of Burgundy and which dominated Europe for
a century after his death. His son Philip, heir to the
Burgundian sovereignty of the Netherlands, married (1496)
Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Two
children, Charles and Ferdinand, were the fruit of this
marriage. Charles, the elder, inherited more crowns and
coronets than were ever gathered, in reality, by one
sovereign, before or since. Ferdinand and Isabella had united
by their marriage the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, and, by
the conquest of Granada and the partial conquest of Navarre,
the entire peninsula, except Portugal, was subsequently added
to their joint dominion. Joanna inherited the whole, on the
death of Isabella, in 1504, and the death of Ferdinand, in
1516. She also inherited from her father, Ferdinand, the
kingdom of the Two Sicilies--which he had reunited--and the
island of Sardinia. Philip, on his side, already in possession
of the Netherlands and Franche Comté, was heir to the domain of
the House of Austria. Both of these great inheritances
descended in due course to Charles, and he had not long to
wait for them. His father, Philip, died in 1506, and his
mother, Joanna, lost her mind, through grief at that event.
The death of his Spanish grandfather, Ferdinand, occurred in
1516, and that of his Austrian grandfather, the Emperor
Maximilian, followed three years later.
{1056}
At the age of twenty years (representing his mother in her
incapacity) Charles found himself sovereign of Spain, and
America, of Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Low Countries,
Franche Comté, Austria, and the duchies associated with it.
The same year (1519) he was chosen King of Germany and
Emperor-elect, after a keen contest over the imperial crown,
in which Francis I. of France and Henry VIII. of England were
his competitors. On attaining this dignity, he conferred the
Austrian possessions on his brother Ferdinand. But he remained
the most potent and imposing monarch that Europe had seen
since Charlemagne. He came upon the stage just as Luther had
marshalled, in Germany, the reforming forces of the new era,
against intolerable iniquities in the Papal Church.
Unfortunately, he came, with his vast armament of powers, to
resist the demands of his age, and to be the champion of old
falsities and wrongs, both in Church and State. There was
nothing in the nature of the man, nor in his education, nor in
the influences which bore upon him, from either the Spanish or
the Austrian side of his family, to put him in sympathy with
lifting movements or with liberal ideas. He never formed a
conception of the world in which it looked larger to his eyes,
or signified more to him, than the globe upon his scepter. So,
naturally enough, this Cæsar of the Renaissance (Charles V. in
Germany and Charles I. in Spain) did his utmost, from the day
he climbed the throne, to thrust Europe back into the murk of
the fourteenth century, which he found it pretty nearly
escaped from. He did not succeed; but he gave years of misery
to several countries by his exertions, and he resigned the
task to a successor whom the world is never likely to tire of
abhorring and despising.
The end of popular freedom in Spain.
The affairs which called Charles V. away from Germany, after
launching his ineffectual edict of Worms against Luther and
Luther's supporters, grew in part out of disturbances in his
kingdom of Spain. His election to the imperial office had not
been pleasing to the Spaniards, who anticipated the
complications they would be dragged into by it, the foreign
character which their sovereign (already foreign in mind by
his education in the Netherlands) would be confirmed in, and
the indifference with which their grievances would be
regarded. For their grievances against the monarchy had been
growing serious in the last years of Ferdinand, and since his
death. The crown had gained power in the process of political
centralization, and its aggrandizement from the possession of
America began to loom startlingly in the light of the conquest
of Mexico, just achieved. During the absence of Charles in
Germany, his former preceptor, Cardinal Adrian, of Utrecht,
being in charge of the government as regent, a revolt broke
out at Toledo which spread widely and became alarming. The
insurgents organized their movement under the name of the
Santa Junta, or Holy League, and having obtained possession of
the demented Queen, Joanna, they assumed to act for her and
with her authority. This rebellion was suppressed with
difficulty; but the suppression was accomplished (1521-1522),
and it proved to be the last struggle for popular freedom in
Spain. The government used its victory with an unsparing
determination to establish absolute powers, and it succeeded.
The conditions needed for absolutism were already created, in
fact, by the deadly blight which the Inquisition had been
casting upon Spain for forty years. Since the beginning of the
frightful work of Torquemada, in 1483, it had been diligently
searching out and destroying every germ of free thought and
manly character that gave the smallest sign of fruitfulness in
the kingdom; and the crushing of the Santa Junta may be said
to have left few in Spain who deserved a better fate than the
political, the religious and the intellectual servitude under
which the nation sank.
Persecution of the Spanish Moriscoes.
Charles, whose mind was dense in its bigotry, urged on the
Inquisition, and pointed its dreadful engines of destruction
against the unfortunate Moriscoes, or Moors, who had been
forced to submit to Christian baptism after their subjugation.
Many of these followers of Mahomet had afterwards taken up
again the prayers and practices of their own faith, either
secretly or in quiet ways, and their relapse appears to have
been winked at, more or less. For they were a most useful
people, far surpassing the Spaniards in industry, in thrift
and knowledge of agriculture, and in mechanical skill. Many of
the arts and manufactures of the kingdom were entirely in
their hands. It was ruinous to interfere with their peaceful
labors. But Charles, as heathenish as the Grand Turk when it
suited his ends to be so, could look on these well-behaved and
useful Moors with no eyes but the eyes of an orthodox piety, and
could take account of nothing but their infidel faith. He
began, therefore, in 1524, the heartless, senseless and
suicidal persecution of the Moriscoes which exterminated them
or drove them from the land, and which contributed signally to
the making of Spain an exemplary pauper among the nations.
Despotism of Charles V. in the Netherlands.
In his provinces of the Low Countries, Charles found more than
in Spain to provoke his despotic bigotry. The Flemings and the
Dutch had been tasting of freedom too much for his liking, in
recent years, and ideas, both political and religious, had
been spreading among them, which were not the ideas of his
august mind, and must therefore, of necessity, be false. They
had already become infected with the rebellious anti-papal
doctrines of Luther. Indeed, they had been even riper than
Luther's countrymen for a religious revolution, when he
sounded the signal note which echoed through all northern
Europe. In Germany, the elected emperor could fulminate an
edict against the audacious reformers, but he had small power
to give force to it. In the Netherlands, he possessed a
sovereignty more potent, and he took instant measures to
exercise the utmost arbitrariness of which he could make it
capable. The Duchess Margaret, his aunt, who had been
governess of the provinces, was confirmed by him in that
office, and he enlarged the powers in her commission. His
commands practically superseded the regular courts, and
subjected the whole administration of justice to his arbitrary
will and that of his representative. At the same time they
stripped the States of their legislative functions and reduced
them to insignificance.
{1057}
Having thus trampled on the civil liberties of the provinces,
he borrowed the infernal enginery of the Inquisition, and
introduced it for the destruction of religious freedom. Its
first victims were two Augustine monks, convicted of
Lutheranism, who were burned at Brussels, in July, 1523. The
first martyr in Holland was a priest who suffered impalement
as well as burning, at the Hague, in 1525. From these
beginnings the persecution grew crueler as the alienation of
the stubborn Netherlanders from the Church of Rome widened;
and Charles did not cease to fan its fires with successive
proclamations or "placards," which denounced and forbade every
reading of Scripture, every act of devotion, every
conversation of religion, in public or private, which the
priests of the Church did not conduct. "The number of
Netherlanders who were burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried
alive, in obedience to his edicts, ... have been placed as
high as 100,000 by distinguished authorities, and have never
been put at a lower mark than 50,000."
Charles V. and Francis I. in Italy.
These exercises of an autocratic piety in Spain and the Low
Countries may be counted, perhaps, among the pleasures of the
young Emperor during the earlier years of his reign. His more
serious affairs were connected mainly with his interests or
ambitions in Italy, which seemed to be threatened by the King
of France. The throne in that country was now occupied by
Francis I., a cousin of Louis XII., who had succeeded the
latter in 1515, and who had taken up anew the Italian projects
in which Louis failed. In the first year of his reign, he
crossed the Alps with an army, defeated the Swiss whom the
Duke of Milan employed against him, and won the whole duchy by
that single fight. This re-establishment of the French at
Milan was regarded with exceeding jealousy by the Austrian
interest, and by the Pope. Maximilian, shortly before his
death, had made a futile effort to dislodge them, and Charles
V., on coming to the throne, lost no time in organizing plans
to the same end. He entered into an alliance with Pope Leo X.,
by a treaty which bears the same date as the Edict of Worms
against Luther, and there can be little doubt that the two
instruments were part of one understanding. Both parties
courted the friendship of Henry VIII. of England, whose power
and importance had risen to a high mark, and Henry's able
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, figured notably in the diplomatic
intrigues which went on during many years.
War began in 1521, and in three months the French were
expelled from nearly every part of the Milanese territory.
Pope Leo X. lived just long enough to receive the news. His
successor was Adrian VI., former tutor of the Emperor, who
made vain attempts to arrange a peace. Wolsey had brought
Henry VIII. of England into the alliance against Francis,
expecting to win the papal tiara through the Emperor's
influence; but he was disappointed.
Francis made an effort in 1523 to recover Milan; but was
crippled at the moment of sending his expedition across the
Alps by the treason of the most powerful noble of France, the
Constable, Charles, Duke of Bourbon. The Constable had been
wronged and affronted by the King's mother, and by intriguers
at court, and he revenged himself basely by going over to the
enemies of his country. In the campaigns which followed
(1523-1524), the French had ill-success, and lost their
chivalrous and famous knight, Bayard, in one of the last
skirmishes of their retreat. Another change now occurred in
the occupancy of the papal throne, and Wolsey's ambitious
schemes were foiled again. The new Pope was Giulio de'Medici,
who took the name of Clement VII.
Once more the King of France, in October, 1524, led his forces
personally into Italy and laid siege to Pavia. It was a
ruinous undertaking. He was defeated overwhelmingly in a
battle fought before Pavia (February 24, 1525) and taken
prisoner. After a captivity in Spain of nearly a year, he
regained his freedom disgracefully, by signing and solemnly
swearing to a treaty which he never intended to observe. By
this treaty he not only renounced all claims to Milan, Naples,
Genoa, and other Italian territory, but he gave up the duchy
of Burgundy. Released in good faith on these terms, in the
early part of 1526, he perfidiously repudiated the treaty, and
began fresh preparations for war. He found the Italians now as
ready to oust the Spaniards from their peninsula with French
help, as they had been ready before to expel the French with
help from Spain. The papal interest was in great alarm at the
power acquired by the Emperor, and Venice and Milan shared the
feeling. A new "Holy Alliance" was accordingly formed, with
the Pope at its head, and with Henry VIII. of England for its
"Protector." But before this League took the field with its
forces, Rome and Italy were stricken and trampled, as though
by a fresh invasion of Goths.
Sack of Rome, by the army of the Constable.
The imperial army, quartered in the duchy of Milan, under the
command of the Constable Bourbon, was scantily paid and fed.
The soldiers were forced to plunder the city and country for
their subsistence, and, of course, under those circumstances,
there was little discipline among them. The region which they
terrorized was soon exhausted, by their robberies and by the
stoppage of industries and trade. It then became necessary for
the Constable to lead them to new fields, and he moved
southwards. His forces were made up in part of Spaniards and
in part of Germans--the latter under a Lutheran commander, and
enlisted for war with the Pope and for pillage in Italy. He
directed the march to Rome, constrained, perhaps, by the
demands of his soldiery, but expecting, likewise, to crush the
League by seizing its apostolic head. On the 5th of May, 1527,
his 40,000 brigands arrived before the city. At daybreak, the
next morning, they assaulted the walls irresistibly and
swarmed over them. Bourbon was killed in the assault, and his
men were left uncontrolled masters of the venerable capital of
the world. They held it for seven months, pillaging and
destroying, committing every possible excess and every
imaginable sacrilege. Rome is believed to have suffered at
their hands more lasting defacement and loss of the splendors
of its art than from the sacking of Vandals or Goths.
The Pope held out in Castle St. Angelo for a month and then
surrendered. The hypocritical Charles V., when he learned what
his imperially commissioned bandits had done, made haste to
express horror and grief, but did not hasten to check or
repair the outrage in the least. Pope Clement was not released
from captivity until a great money-payment had been extorted
from him, with the promise of a general council of the Church
to reform abuses and to eradicate Lutheranism.
{1058}
Spanish Domination in Italy.
Europe was shocked by the barbarity of the capture of Rome,
and the enemies leagued against Charles were stimulated to
more vigorous exertions. Assisted with money from England,
Francis sent another army into Italy, which took Genoa and
Pavia and marched to Naples, blockading the city by sea and
land. But the siege proved fatal to the French army. So many
perished of disease that the survivors were left at the mercy
of the enemy, and capitulated in September, 1528.
The great Genoese Admiral, Andrea Doria, had been offended,
meantime, by King Francis, and had excited his fellow citizens
to a revolution, which made Genoa, once more, an independent
republic, with Doria at its head. Shortly before this
occurred, Florence had expelled the Medici and reorganized her
government upon the old republican basis. But the defeat of
the French before Naples ended all hope of Italian liberty;
since the Pope resigned himself after that event to the will
of the Emperor, and the papal and imperial despotisms became
united as one, to exterminate freedom from the peninsula.
Florence was the first victim of the combination. The city was
besieged and taken by the Emperor's troops, in compliance with
the wishes of the Pope, and the Medici, his relatives, were
restored. Francis continued war feebly until 1529, when a
peace called the "Ladies Peace" was brought about, by
negotiations between the French King's mother and the
Emperor's aunt. This was practically the end of the long
French wars in Italy.
Germany.
Such were the events which, in different quarters of the
world, diverted the attention of the Emperor during several
years from Luther and the Reformation in Germany. The
religious movement in those years had been making a steady
advance. Yet its enemies gained control of another Diet held
at Spires in 1529 and reversed the ordinance of the Diet of
1526, by which each state had been left free to deal in its
own manner with the edict of Worms. Against this action of the
Diet, the Lutheran princes and the representatives of the
Lutheran towns entered their solemn protest, and so acquired
the name, "Protestants," which became in time the accepted and
adopted name of all, in most parts of the world, who withdrew
from the Roman communion.
The Peasants' War and the Anabaptists.
Before this time, the Reform had passed through serious
trials, coming from excesses in the very spirit out of which
itself had risen and to which it gave encouragement. The long
suffering, much oppressed peasantry of Germany, who had found
bishops as pitiless extortioners as lords, caught eagerly at a
hope of relief from the overthrow of the ancient Church.
Several times within the preceding half-century they had risen
in formidable revolts, with a peasants' clog, or bundschuh for
their banner. In 1525 fresh risings occurred in Swabia,
Franconia, Alsace, Lorraine, Bavaria, Thuringia and elsewhere,
and a great Peasants' War raged for months, with ferocity and
brutality on both sides. The number who perished in the war is
estimated at 100,000. The demands made by the peasants were for
measures of the simplest justice--for the poorest rights and
privileges in life. But their cause was taken up by
half-crazed religious fanatics, who became in some parts their
leaders, and such a character was given to it that reasonable
reformers were justified, perhaps, in setting themselves
sternly against it. The wildest prophet of the outbreak was
one Thomas Münzer, a precursor of the frenzied sect of the
Anabaptists. Münzer perished in the wreck of the peasants'
revolt; but some of his disciples, who fled into Westphalia
and the Netherlands, made converts so rapidly in the town of
Münster that in 1535 they controlled the city, expelled every
inhabitant who would not join their communion, elected and
crowned a king, and exhibited a madness in their proceedings
that is hardly equalled in history. The experience at Münster
may reasonably be thought to have proved the soundness of
Luther's judgment in refusing countenance to the cause of the
oppressed peasants when they rebelled.
At all events, his opposition to them was hard and bitter. And
it has been remarked that what may be called Luther's
political position in Germany had become by this time quite
changed. "Instead of the man of the people, Luther became the
man of the princes; the mutual confidence between him and the
masses, which had supported the first faltering steps of the
movement, was broken; the democratic element was supplanted by
the aristocratic; and the Reformation, which at first had
promised to lead to a great national democracy, ended in
establishing the territorial supremacy of the German princes.
... The Reformation was gradually assuming a more secular
character, and leading to great political combinations"
(Dyer).
Progress of Lutheranism in Germany.
By the year 1530, the Emperor Charles was prepared to give
more attention to affairs in Germany and to gratify his
animosity towards the movement of Reformation. He had
effectually beaten his rival, the King of France, had
established his supremacy in Italy, had humbled the Pope, and
was quite willing to be the zealous champion of a submissive
Church. His brother Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, had
secured, against much opposition, both the Hungarian and the
Bohemian crowns, and so firmly that neither was ever again
wrested from his family, though they continued for some time
to be nominally elective. The dominions of Ferdinand had
suffered a great Turkish invasion, in 1529, under the Sultan
Solyman, who penetrated even to Vienna and besieged the city,
but without success, losing heavily in his retreat.
In May, 1530, Charles re-entered Germany from Italy. The
following month he opened the sitting of the Diet, which had
been convened at Augsburg. His first act at Augsburg was to
summon the protesting princes, of Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg,
and other states, before him and to signify to them his
imperial command that the toleration of Lutheranism in their
dominions must cease. He expected the mandate to suffice; when
he found it ineffectual, he required an abstract of the new
religions doctrines to be laid before him. This was prepared
by Melancthon, and, afterwards known as the Confession of
Augsburg, became the Lutheran standard of faith.
{1059}
The Catholic theologians prepared a reply to it, and both were
submitted to the Emperor. He made some attempt to bring about
a compromise of the differences, but he demanded of the
Protestants that they should submit themselves to the Pope,
pending the final decisions of a proposed general Council of
the Church. When this was refused, the Diet formally condemned
their doctrines and required them to reunite themselves with
the Catholic Church before the 15th of April following. The
Emperor, in November, issued a decree accordingly, renewing
the Edict of Worms and commanding its enforcement.
The Protestant princes, thus threatened, assembled in
conference at Schmalkald at Christmas, 1530, and there
organized their famous armed league. But fresh preparations
for war by the Turk now compelled Charles to make terms with
his Lutheran subjects. They refused to give any assistance to
Austria or Hungary against the Sultan, while threatened by the
Augsburg decree. The gravity of the danger forced a concession
to them, and by the Peace of Nuremberg (1532) it was agreed
that the Protestants should have freedom of worship until the
next Diet should meet, or a General Council should be held.
This peace was several times renewed, and there were ten years
of quiet under it, in Germany, during which time the cause of
Protestantism made rapid advances. By the year 1540, it had
established an ascendancy in Würtemberg, among the states of
the South, and in the imperial cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg,
Ulm, Constance, and Strasburg. Its doctrines had been adopted
by "the whole of central Germany, Thuringia, Saxony, Hesse,
part of Brunswick, and the territory of the Guelphs; in the
north by the bishoprics of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and
Naumburg ... ; by East Friesland, the Hanse Towns, Holstein
and Schleswig, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Anhalt, Silesia, the
Saxon states, Brandenburg, and Prussia. Of the larger states
that were closed against it there remained only Austria,
Bavaria, the Palatinate and the Rhenish Electorates"
(Hausser). In 1542, Duke Henry of Brunswick, the last of the
North German princes who adhered to the Papal Church, was
expelled from his duchy and Protestantism established. About
the same time the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne announced his
conviction of the truth of the Protestant doctrines.
The Schmalkaldic War.
Charles was still too much involved in foreign wars to venture
upon a struggle with the Lutherans; but a few years more
sufficed to free his hands. The Treaty of Crespy, in 1544,
ended his last conflict with Francis I. In the same year, Pope
Paul III. summoned the long promised General Council of the
Church to meet at Trent the following spring--by which
appointment a term was put to the toleration conceded in the
Peace of Nuremberg. The Protestants, though greatly increased
in numbers, were now less united than at the time of the
formation of the Schmalkaldic League. There was much division
among the leading princes. They yielded no longer to the
influence of their wisest and ablest chief, Philip of Hesse.
Luther, whose counsels had always been for peace, approached
his end, and died in 1546. The circumstances were favorable to
the Emperor, when he determined to put a stop to the
Reformation by force. He secured an important ally in the very
heart of Protestant Germany, winning over to his side the
selfish schemer, Duke Maurice of Saxony--now the head of the
Albertine branch of the Saxon house. In 1546 he felt prepared
and war began. The successes were all on the imperial side.
There was no energy, no unity, no forethoughtfulness of plan,
among the Lutherans. The Elector, John Frederick, of Saxony,
and Philip of Hesse, both fell into the Emperor's hands and
were barbarously imprisoned. The former was compelled to
resign his Electorate, and it was conferred upon the renegade
Duke Maurice. Philip was kept in vile places of confinement
and inhumanly treated for years. The Protestants of Germany
were entirely beaten down, for the time being, and the Emperor
imposed upon them in 1548 a confession of faith called "the
Interim," the chief missionaries of which were the Spanish
soldiers whom he had brought into the country. But if the
Lutherans had suffered themselves to be overcome, they were
not ready to be trodden upon in so despotic a manner. Even
Maurice, now Elector of Saxony, recoiled from the tyranny
which Charles sought to establish, while he resented the
inhuman treatment of Philip of Hesse, who was his
father-in-law. He headed a new league, therefore, which was
formed against the Emperor, and which entered into a secret
alliance with Henry II. of France (Francis I. having died in
1547). Charles was taken by surprise when the revolt broke
out, in 1552, and barely escaped capture. The operations of
Maurice were vigorous and ably conducted, and in a few weeks
the Protestants had recovered all the ground lost in 1546-7;
while the French had improved the opportunity to seize the
three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun. The ultimate result
was the so-called "Religious Peace of Augsburg," concluded in
1555, which gave religious freedom to the ruling princes of
Germany, but none whatever to the people. It put the two
religions on the same footing, but it was simply a footing of
equal intolerance. Each ruler had the right to choose his own
creed, and to impose it arbitrarily upon his subjects if he
saw fit to do so. As a practical consequence, the final
division of Germany between Protestantism and Catholicism was
substantially determined by the princes and not by the people.
The humiliating failure of Charles V. to crush the Reformation
in Germany was no doubt prominent among the experiences which
sickened him of the imperial office and determined him to
abdicate the throne, which he did in the autumn of 1556.
Reformation in Switzerland.
A generation had now passed since the Lutheran movement of
Reformation was begun in Germany, and, within that time, not
only had the wave of influence from Wittenberg swept over all
western Europe, but other reformers had risen independently
and contemporaneously, or nearly so, in other countries, and
had co-operated powerfully in making the movement general. The
earliest of these was the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, who
began preaching against indulgences and other flagrant abuses
in the Church, at Zurich, in 1519, the same year in which
Luther opened his attack. The effect of his preaching was so
great that Zurich, four years later, had practically separated
itself from the Roman Church.
{1060}
From that beginning the Reformation spread so rapidly that in
half-a-dozen years it had mastered most of the Cantons of
Switzerland outside of the five Forest Cantons, where
Catholicism held its ground with stubbornness. The two
religions were then represented by two parties, which absorbed
in themselves all the political as well as the religious
questions of the day, and which speedily came to blows. The
Catholics allied themselves with Ferdinand of Austria, and the
Protestants with several of the imperial cities of Germany.
But such an union between the Swiss and the German Protestants
as seemed plainly desirable was prevented; mainly, by the
dictatorial obstinacy of Luther. Zwingli's reforming ideas
were broader, and at the same time more radical, than
Luther's, and the latter opposed them with irreconcilable
hostility. He still held with the Catholics to the doctrine of
transubstantiation, which the Swiss reformer rejected. Hence
Zwingli was no less a heretic in Luther's eyes than in the
eyes of the pope, and the anathemas launched against him from
Wittenberg were hardly less thunderous than those from Rome.
So the two contemporaneous reformation movements, German and
Swiss, were held apart from one another, and went on side by
side, with little help or sympathy from one another. In 1531
the Forest Cantons attacked and defeated the men of Zurich,
and Zwingli was slain in the battle. Peace was then concluded
on terms which left each canton free to establish its own
creed, and each congregation free to do the same in the common
territories of the confederation.
Reformation in France.
In France, the freer ideas of Christianity--the ideas less
servile to tradition and to Rome--that were in the upper air
of European culture when the sixteenth century began, had
found some expression even before Luther spoke. The influence
of the new classical learning, and of the "humanists" who
imbibed its spirit, tended to that liberation of the mind, and
was felt in the greatest center of the learning of the time,
the University of Paris. But not sufficiently to overcome the
conservatism of the Sorbonne--the theological faculty of the
University; for Luther's writings were solemnly condemned and
burned by it in 1521, and a persecution of those inclined
toward the new doctrines was early begun. Francis I., in whose
careless and coarse nature there was some taste for letters and
learning, as well as for art, and who patronized in an idle
way the Renaissance movements of his reign, seemed disposed at
the beginning to be friendly to the religious Reformers. But
he was too shallow a creature, and too profoundly unprincipled
and false, to stand firmly in any cause of righteousness, and
face such a power as that of Rome. His nobler sister, Margaret
of Angoulême, who embraced the reformed doctrines with
conviction, exerted a strong influence upon the king in their
favor while she was by his side; but after her marriage to
Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, and after Francis had
suffered defeat and shame in his war with Charles V., he was
ready to make himself the servant of the Papacy for whatever
it willed against his Protestant subjects, in order to have
its alliance and support. So the persecution grew steadily
more fierce, more systematic, and more determined, as the
spirit of the Reformation spread more widely through the
kingdom.
Calvin at Geneva.
One of the consequences of the persecution was the flight from
France, in 1534, of John Calvin, who subsequently became the
founder and the exponent of a system of Protestant theology
which obtained wider acceptance in Europe than that of Luther.
All minor differences were practically merged in the great
division between these two theologies--the Lutheran and the
Calvinistic--which split the Reformation in twain. After two
years of wandering, Calvin settled in the free city of Geneva,
where his influence very soon rose to so extraordinary a
height that he transformed the commonwealth and ruled it,
unselfishly, and in perfect piety, but with iron-handed
despotism, for a quarter of a century.
The French Court.
The reign of Francis I. has one other mark in history, besides
that of his persecution of the Reformers, his careless
patronage of arts and letters, and his unsuccessful wars with
the Emperor. He gave to the French Court--at least more than
his predecessors had done--the character which made it in
later French history so evil and mischievous a center of
dissoluteness, of base intrigue, of national demoralization.
It was invested in his time with the fascinations which drew
into it the nobles of France and its men of genius, to corrupt
them and to destroy their independence. It was in his time that
the Court began to seem to be, in its own eyes, a kind of
self-centered society, containing all of the French nation
which needed or deserved consideration, and holding its place
in the order of things quite apart from the kingdom which it
helped its royal master to rule. Not to be of the Court was to
be non-existent in its view; and thus every ambition in France
was invited to push at its fatal doors.
Catherine de' Medici and the Guises.
Francis I. died in 1547, and was followed on the throne by his
son Henry II., whose marriage to Catherine de' Medici, of the
renowned Florentine family, was the most important personal
act of his life. It was important in the malign fruits which
it bore; since Catherine, after his death, gave an evil
Italian bend-sinister to French politics, which had no lack of
crookedness before. Henry continued the war with Charles V.,
and was afterwards at war with Philip II., Charles' son, and
with England, the latter country losing Calais in the
contest,--its last French possession. Peace was made in 1559,
and celebrated with splendid tournaments, at one of which the
French king received a wound that caused his death.
He left three sons, all weaklings in body and character, who
reigned successively. The elder, Francis II., died the year
following his accession. Although aged but seventeen when he
died, he had been married some two years to Mary Stuart, the
young queen of Scots. This marriage had helped to raise to
great power in the kingdom a family known as the Guises. They
were a branch of the ducal House of Lorraine, whose duchy was
at that time independent of France, and, although the father
of the family, made Duke of Guise by Francis I., had become
naturalized in France in 1505, his sons were looked upon as
foreigners by the jealous Frenchmen whom they supplanted at
Court.
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Of the six sons, there were two of eminence, one (the second
duke of Guise) a famous general in his day, the other a
powerful cardinal. Five sisters completed the family in its
second generation. The elder of these, Mary, had married James
V. of Scotland (whose mother was the English princess,
Margaret, sister of Henry VIII.), and Mary Stuart, queen of
Scots, born of that marriage, was therefore a niece of the
Guises. They had brought about her marriage to Francis II.,
while he was dauphin, and they mounted with her to supreme
influence in the kingdom when she ascended the throne with her
husband. The queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, was as eager
as the Guises to control the government, in what appeared to
her eyes the interest of her children; but during the short
reign of Francis II. she was quite thrust aside, and the
queen's uncles ruled the state.
The death of Francis II. (1560) brought a change, and with the
accession of Charles IX., a boy of ten years, there began a
bitter contest for ascendancy between Catherine and the
Guises; and this struggle became mixed and strangely
complicated with a deadly conflict of religions, which the
steady advance of the Reformation in France had brought at
this time to a crisis.
The Huguenots.
Under the powerful leadership which Calvin assumed, at Geneva,
the reformed religion in France had acquired an organized
firmness and strength which not only resisted the most cruel
persecution, but made rapid headway against it. "Protestantism
had become a party which did not, like Lutheranism in Germany,
spring up from the depths." "It numbered its chief adherents
among the middle and upper grades of society, spread its roots
rather among the nobles than the citizens, and among learned
men and families of distinction rather than among the people."
"Some of the highest aristocracy, who were discontented, and
submitted unwillingly to the supremacy of the Guises, had
joined the Calvinistic opposition--some undoubtedly from
policy, others from conviction. The Turennes, the Rohans, and
Soubises, pure nobles, who addressed the king as 'mon cousin,'
especially the Bourbons, the agnates of the royal house, had
adopted the new faith" (Hausser). One branch of the Bourbons
had lately acquired the crown of Navarre. The Spanish part of
the old Navarrese kingdom had been subjugated and absorbed by
Ferdinand of Aragon; but its territory on the French side of
the Pyrenees--Béarn and other counties--still maintained a
half independent national existence, with the dignity of a
regal government. When Margaret of Angoulême, sister of
Francis I., married Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, as
mentioned before, she carried to that small court an earnest
inclination towards the doctrines of the Reform. Under her
protection Navarre became largely Protestant, and a place of
refuge for the persecuted of France. Margaret's daughter, the
famous Jeanne d'Albret, espoused the reformed faith fully, and
her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, as well as Antoine's brother,
Louis de Condé, found it politic to profess the same belief.
For the Protestants (who were now acquiring, in some unknown
way, the name of Huguenots) had become so numerous and so
compactly organized as to form a party capable of being
wielded with great effect, in the strife of court factions
which the rivalry of Catherine and the Guises produced. Hence
politics and religion were inextricably confused in the civil
wars which broke out shortly after the death of Francis II.
(1560), and the accession of the boy king, Charles IX. These
wars belong to a different movement in the general current of
European events, and we will return to them after a glance at
the religious Reformation, and at the political circumstances
connected with it, in England and elsewhere.
England.
Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, made king of England by his
victory at Bosworth, established himself so firmly in the seat
of power that three successive rebellions failed to disturb
him. In one of these (1487) a pretender, Lambert Simnel, was
put forward, who claimed to be the Earl of Warwick. In another
(1491-1497) a second pretender, Perkin Warbeck, personated one
of the young princes whom Richard III. had caused to be
murdered in the tower. Neither of the impostures had much
success in the kingdom. Henry VII. was not a popular king, but
he was able and strong, and he solidified all the bases of
monarchical independence which circumstances had enabled
Edward IV. to begin laying down.
It was in the reign of Henry that America was discovered, and
he might have been the patron of Columbus, the beneficiary of
the great voyage, and the proprietor and lord of the grand
realm which Isabella and Ferdinand secured. But he lacked the
funds or the faith--apparently both--and put aside his
unequaled opportunity. When the field of westward exploration
had been opened, however, he was early in entering it, and
sent the Cabots upon those voyages which gave England her
claim to the North American coasts.
During the reign of Henry VII. there were two quiet marriages
in his family which strangely influenced subsequent history.
One was the marriage, in 1501, of the king's eldest son,
Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon, youngest daughter of Ferdinand
and Isabella. The other, in 1503, united the king's daughter,
Margaret, to James IV., King of Scotland. It was through this
latter marriage that the inheritance of the English crown
passed to the Scottish House of Stuart, exactly one hundred
years later, upon the failure of the direct line of descent in
the Tudor family. The first marriage, of Prince Arthur to
Catherine of Aragon, was soon dissolved by the death of the
prince, in 1502. Seven years afterwards the widowed Catherine
married her late husband's brother, just after he became Henry
VIII., King of England, upon the death of his father, in 1509.
Whence followed notable consequences which will presently
appear.
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Henry VIII. and his breach with Rome.
It was the ambition of Henry VIII. to play a conspicuous part
in European affairs; and as England was rich and strong, and
as the king had obtained nearly the absoluteness of the crown
in France, the parties to the great contests then going on
were all eagerly courting his alliance. His ambitions ran
parallel, too, with those of the able minister, Thomas Wolsey,
who rose to high influence at his side soon after his reign
began. Wolsey aspired to the Papal crown, with the cardinal's
cap as a preparatory adornment, and he drew England, as we
have seen, into the stormy politics of the sixteenth century
in Europe, with no gain, of glory or otherwise, to the nation,
and not much result of any kind. When the Emperor Maximilian
died, in 1519, Henry entered the lists against Maximilian's
grandson, Charles of Spain, and Francis I. of France, as a
candidate for the imperial crown. In the subsequent wars which
broke out between his two rivals, he took the side of the
successful Charles, now Emperor, and helped him to climb to
supremacy in Europe over the prostrate French king. He had
dreams of conquering France again, and casting the glories of
Henry V. in the shade; but he carried his enterprise little
beyond the dreaming. When it was too late to check the growth
of Charles' overshadowing power, he changed his side and took
Francis into alliance.
But Henry's motives were always selfish and personal--never
political; and the personal motives had now taken on a most
despicable character. He had tired of his wife, the Spanish
Catherine, who was six years older than himself. He had two
pretexts for discontent with his marriage: 1, that his queen
had borne him only a daughter, whereas England needed a male
heir to the throne; 2, that he was troubled with scruples as
to the lawfulness of wedlock with his brother's widow. On this
latter ground he began intrigues to win from the Pope, not a
divorce in the ordinary sense of the term, but a declaration
of the nullity of his marriage. This challenged the opposition
of the Emperor, Catherine's nephew, and Henry's alliances were
naturally changed.
The Pope, Clement VII., refused to annul the marriage, and
Henry turned his unreasoning wrath upon Cardinal Wolsey, who
had conducted negotiations with the Pope and failed in them.
Wolsey was driven from the Court in disgrace and died soon
afterwards. He was succeeded in the king's favor by a more
unscrupulous man, Thomas Cromwell. Henry had not yet despaired
of bringing the Pope to compliance with his wishes; and he
began attacks upon the Church and upon the papal revenues
which might shake, as he hoped, the firmness of the powers at
Rome. With the help of a pliant minister and a subservient
Parliament, he forced the clergy (1531-1532) in Convocation
to acknowledge him to be the Supreme Head of the English
Church, and to submit themselves entirely to his authority. At
the same time he grasped the "annates," or first year's income
of bishoprics, which had been the richest perquisite of the papal
treasury. In all these proceedings, the English king was
acting on a line parallel to that of the continental rising
against Rome; but it was not in friendliness toward it nor in
sympathy with it that he did so. He had been among the
bitterest enemies of the Reformation, and he never ceased to
be so. He had won from the Pope the empty title of "Defender
of the Faith," by a foolish book against Luther, and the faith
which he defended in 1521 was the faith in which he died. But
when he found that the influence of Charles V. at Rome was too
great to be overcome, and that the Pope could be neither
bribed, persuaded nor coerced to sanction the putting away of
his wife, he resolved to make the English Church sufficient in
authority to satisfy his demand, by establishing its
ecclesiastical independence, with a pontiff of its own, in
himself. He purposed nothing more than this. He contemplated
no change of doctrine, no cleansing of abuses. He permitted no
one whose services he commanded in the undertaking to bring
such changes into contemplation. So far as concerned Henry's
initiative, there was absolutely nothing of religious
Reformation in the movement which separated the Church of
England from the Church of Rome. It accomplished its sole
original end when it gave finality to the decree of an English
ecclesiastical court, on the question of the king's marriage,
and barred queen Catherine's appeal from it. It was the
intention of Henry VIII. that the Church under his papacy
should remain precisely what it had been under the Pope at
Rome, and he spared neither stake nor gibbet in his
persecuting zeal against impudent reformers.
But the spirit of Reformation which was in the atmosphere of
that time lent itself, nevertheless, to King Henry's project,
and made that practicable which could hardly have been so a
generation before. The influence of Wyclif had never wholly
died out; the new learning was making its way in England and
broadening men's minds; the voice of Luther and his fellow
workers on the continent had been heard, and not vainly.
England was ripe for the religious revolution, and her king
promoted it, without intention. But while his reign lasted,
and his despotism was heavy on the land, there was nothing
accomplished but the breaking of the old Church fetters, and
the binding of the nation anew with green withes, which,
presently, it would burst asunder.
The conspicuous events of Henry's reign are familiarly known.
Most of them bear the stamp of his monstrous egotism and
selfishness. He was the incomparable tyrant of English
history. The monarch who repudiated two wives, sent two to the
block, and shared his bed with yet two more; who made a whole
national church the servant of his lusts, and who took the
lives of the purest men of his kingdom when they would not
bend their consciences to say that he did well--has a pedestal
quite his own in the gallery of infamous kings.
Edward VI. and the Reformation.
Dying in 1547, Henry left three children: Mary, daughter of
Catherine of Aragon, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, and
Edward, son of Jane Seymour. The latter, in his tenth year,
became King (Edward VI.), and his uncle, the Duke of Somerset,
acquired the control of the government, with the title of
Protector. Somerset headed a party which had begun before the

death of the king to press for more changes in the character
of the new Church of England and less adherence to the pattern
of Rome. There seems to be little reason to suppose that the
court leaders of this party were much moved in the matter by
any interest of a religious kind; but the growth of thinking
and feeling in England tended that way, and the side of
Reformation had become the stronger. They simply gave way to
it, and, abandoned the repression which Henry had persisted
in. At the same time, their new policy gave them more freedom
to grasp the spoils of the old Church, which Henry VIII. had
begun to lay hands on, by suppression of monasteries and
confiscation of their estates. The wealth thus sequestered
went largely into private hands.
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It was in the short reign of Edward VI. that the Church of
England really took on its organic form as one of the Churches
of the Reformation, by the composition of its first
prayer-books, and by the framing of a definite creed.
Lady Jane Grey.
In 1553, the young king died. Somerset had fallen from power
the previous year and had suffered death. He had been
supplanted by Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of
Northumberland, and that minister had persuaded Edward to
bequeath his crown to Lady Jane Grey, grand-daughter of the
younger sister of Henry VIII. But Northumberland was hated by
the people, and few could recognize the right of a boy on the
throne to change the order of regal succession by his will.
Parliament had formally legitimated both Catherine's daughter,
Mary, and Anne Boleyn's daughter, Elizabeth, and had placed
them in the line of inheritance. Mary's legal title to the
crown was clear. She had adhered with her mother to the Roman
Church, and her advent upon the throne would mean the
subjection of the English Church to the Papacy anew; since the
constitution of the Church armed the sovereign with supreme
and indisputable power over it. The Protestants of the kingdom
knew what to expect, and were in great fear; but they submitted.
Lady Jane Grey was recommended to them by her Protestant
belief, and by her beautiful character; but her title was too
defective and her supporters too much distrusted. There were
few to stand by the poor young girl when Northumberland
proclaimed her queen, and she was easily dethroned by the
partisans of Mary. A year later she was sent to the block.
Catholicism was now ascendant again, and England was brought
to share in the great reaction against the Reformation which
prevailed generally through Europe and which we shall
presently consider. Before doing so, let us glance briefly at
the religious state of some other countries not yet touched
upon.
The Reformation in Scotland.
In Scotland, a deep undercurrent of feeling against the
corruptions of the Church had been repressed by resolute
persecutions, until after the middle of the sixteenth century.
Wars with England, and the close connection of the Scottish
Court with the Guises of France, had both tended to retard the
progress of a reform sentiment, or to delay the manifestation
of it. But when the pent-up feeling began to respond to the
voice of the great Calvinistic evangelist and organizer, John
Knox, it swept the nation like a storm. Knox's first
preaching, after his captivity in France and exile to Geneva,
was in 1555. In 1560, the authority of the Pope was renounced,
the mass prohibited, and the Geneva confession of faith
adopted, by the Scottish Estates. After that time the Reformed
Church in Scotland--the Church of Presbyterianism--had only
to resist the futile hostility of Mary Stuart for a few years,
until it came to its great struggle against English
Episcopacy, under Mary's son and grandson, James and Charles.
The Reformation in the North.
In the three Scandinavian nations the ideas of the
Reformation, diffused from Germany, had won early favor, both
from kings and people, and had soon secured an enduring
foothold. They owed their reception quite as much, perhaps, to
the political situation as to the religious feeling of the
northern peoples.
When the ferment of the Reformation movement began, the three
crowns were worn by one king, as they had been since the
"Union of Calmar," in 1397, and the King of Denmark was the
sovereign of the Union. His actual power in Sweden and Norway
was slight; his theoretical authority was sufficient to
irritate both. In Sweden, especially, the nobles chafed under
the yoke of the profitless federation. Christian II., the last
Danish king of the three kingdoms, crushed their disaffection
by a harsh conquest of the country (1520), and by savage
executions, so perfidious and so numerous that they are known
in Swedish history as the Massacre of Stockholm. But this
brutal and faithless king became so hateful in his own proper
kingdom that the Danish nobles rose against him in 1523 and he
was driven from the land. The crown was given to his uncle,
Frederick, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. In that German Duchy,
Lutheranism had already made its way, and Frederick was in
accord with it. On coming to the throne of Denmark, where
Catholicism still prevailed, he pledged himself to attempt no
interference with it; but he felt no obligation, on the other
hand, to protect it. He demanded and established a toleration
for both doctrines, and gave to the reformers a freedom of
opportunity which speedily undermined the old faith and
overthrew it.
In the meantime, Sweden had undergone the important revolution
of her history, which placed the national hero, Gustavus Vasa,
on the throne. Gustavus was a young noble whose title to the
crown was not derived from his lineage, but from his genius.
After Christian II. had bloodily exterminated the elder
leaders of the Swedish state, this young lord, then a hostage
and prisoner in the tyrant's hands, made his escape and took
upon himself the mission of setting his country free. For
three years Gustavus lived a life like that of Alfred the
Great in England, when he, too, struggled with the Danes. His
heroic adventures were crowned with success, and Sweden, led
to independence by its natural king, bestowed the regal title
upon him (1523) and seated him upon its ancient throne. The
new Danish king, Frederick, acknowledged the revolution, and
the Union of Calmar was dissolved. Sweden under Gustavus Vasa
recovered from the state of great disorder into which it had
fallen, and grew to be a nation of important strength. As a
measure of policy, he encouraged the introduction of
Lutheranism and promoted the spread of it, in order to break
the power of the Catholic clergy, and also, in order, without
doubt, to obtain possession of the property of the Church,
which secured to the Crown the substantial revenues it
required.
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Italy.
In Italy, the reformed doctrines obtained no popular footing
at any time, though many among the cultivated people regarded
them with favor, and would gladly have witnessed, not only a
practical purging of the Church, but a revision of those
Catholic dogmas most offensive to a rational mind. But such
little movement as stirred in that direction was soon stopped
by the success of the Emperor, Charles V., in his Italian wars
with Francis I., and by the Spanish domination in the
peninsula which ensued thereon. The Spain of that age was like
the bloodless octopus which paralyzes the victim in its
clutch, and Italy, gripped in half of its many principalities
by the deadly tentacles thrust out from Madrid, showed no
consciousness for the next two centuries.
The Council of Trent.
The long demanded, long promised General Council, for
considering the alleged abuses in the Church and the alleged
falsities in its doctrine, and generally for discussion and
action upon the questions raised by the Reformation, assembled
at Trent in December, 1545. The Emperor seems to have desired
with sincerity that the Council might be one which the
Protestants would have confidence in, and in which they might
be represented, for a full discussion of their differences
with Rome. But this was made impossible from the beginning.
The Protestants demanded that "final appeal on all debated
points should be made to the sole authority of Holy
Scripture," and this being refused by the Pope (Paul III.),
there remained no ground on which the two parties could meet.
The Italian prelates who composed the majority of the Council
made haste, it would seem, to take action which closed the
doors of conciliation against the Reformers. "First, they
declared that divine revelation was continuous in the Church
of which the Pope was the head; and that the chief written
depository of this revelation--namely, the Scriptures--had no
authority except in the version of the Vulgate. Secondly, they
condemned the doctrine of justification by Faith. ... Thirdly,
they confirmed the efficacy and the binding authority of the
Seven Sacraments." "The Council terminated in December [1563]
with an act of submission, which placed all its decrees at the
pleasure of the Papal sanction. Pius [Pius IV. became Pope in
1560] was wise enough to pass and ratify the decrees of the
Tridentine fathers by a Bull dated on December 26, 1563,
reserving to the Papal sovereign the sole right of
interpreting them in doubtful or disputed cases. This he could
well afford to do; for not an article had been penned without
his concurrence, and not a stipulation had been made without a
previous understanding with the Catholic powers. The very terms,
moreover, by which his ratification was conveyed, secured his
supremacy, and conferred upon his successors and himself the
privileges of a court of ultimate appeal. At no previous
period in the history of the Church had so wide, so undefined,
and so unlimited an authority been accorded to the See of
Rome" (Symonds).
Some practical reforms in the Church were wrought by the
Council of Trent, but its disciplinary decrees were less
important than the dogmatic. From beginning to end of its
sessions, which, broken by many suspensions and adjournments,
dragged through eighteen years, it addressed itself to the
task of solidifying the Church of Rome, as left by the
Protestant schism,--not of healing the schism itself or of
removing the provocations to it. The work which the Council
did in that direction was of vast importance, and profoundly
affected the future of the Papacy and of its spiritual realm.
It gave a firm dogmatic footing to the great reactionary new
forces which now came into play, with aggressive enthusiasm
and zeal, to arrest the advance of the Reformation and roll it
back.
The Catholic reaction.
The extraordinary revival of Catholicism and thrusting back of
Protestantism which occurred in the later half of the
sixteenth century had several causes behind it and within it.
1. The spiritual impulse from which the Reformation started
had considerably spent itself, or had become debased by a
gross admixture of political and mercenary aims. In Germany,
the spoils derived from the suppressing of monastic
establishments and the secularizing of ecclesiastical fiefs
and estates, appeared very early among the potent inducements
by which mercenary princes were drawn to the side of the
Lutheran reform. Later, as the opposing leagues, Protestant
and Catholic, settled into chronic opposition and hostility,
the struggle between them took on more and more the character
of a great political game, and lost more and more the spirit
of a battle for free conscience and a free mind. In France, as
we have noticed, the political entanglements of the Huguenot
party were such, by this time, that it could not fail to be
lowered by them in its religious tone. In England, every
breath of spirituality in the movement had so far (to the
death of Henry VIII.) been stifled, and it showed nothing but
a brazen political front to the world. In the Netherlands, the
struggle for religious freedom was about to merge itself in a
fight of forty years for self-government, and the fortitude
and valor of the citizen were more surely developed in that
long war than the faith and fervor of the Christian. And so,
generally throughout Europe, Protestantism, in its conflict
with the powers of the ancient Church, had descended, ere the
sixteenth century ran far into its second half, to a
distinctly lower plane than it occupied at first. On that
lower plane Rome fronted it more formidably, with stronger
arms, than on the higher.
2. Broadly stating the fact, it may be said that Protestantism
made all its great inroads upon the Church of Rome before
partisanship came to the rescue of the latter, and closed the
open mind with which Luther, and Zwingli, and Farel, and
Calvin were listened to at first. It happens always, when new
ideas, combative of old ones, whether religious or political,
are first put forward in the world, they are listened to for a
time with a certain disinterestedness of attention--a certain
native candor in the mind--which gives them a fair hearing. If
they seem reasonable, they obtain ready acceptance, and spread
rapidly,--until the conservatism of the beliefs assailed
takes serious alarm, and the radicalism of the innovating
beliefs becomes ambitious and rampant; until the for and the
against stiffen themselves in opposing ranks, and the voice of
argument is drowned by the cries of party. That ends all
shifting of masses from the old to the new ground. That ends
conversion as an epidemic and dwindles it to the sporadic
character.
3. Protestantism became bitterly divided within itself at an
early stage of its career by doctrinal differences, first
between Zwinglians and Lutherans, and then between Lutherans
and Calvinists, while Catholicism, under attack, settled into
more unity and solidity than before.
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4. The tremendous power in Europe to which the Spanish
monarchy, with its subject dominions, and its dynastic
relations, had now risen, passed, in 1556, to a dull-brained
and soulless bigot, who saw but one use for it, namely, the
extinction of all dissent from his own beliefs, and all
opposition to his own will. Philip II. differed from his
father, Charles V., not in the enormity of his bigoted
egotism--they were equals, perhaps, in that--but in the
exclusiveness of it. There was something else in Charles,
something sometimes faintly admirable. He did have some
interests in life that were not purely malignant. But his
horrid vampire of a son, the most repulsive creature of his
kind in all history, had nothing in him that was not as deadly
to mankind as the venom secreted behind the fang of a cobra. It
was a frightful day for the world when a despotism which
shadowed Spain, Sicily, Italy and the Low Countries, and which
had begun to drag unbounded treasure from America, fell to the
possession of such a being as this. Nothing substantial was
taken away from the potent malevolence of Philip by his
failure of election in Germany to the Imperial throne. On the
contrary, he was the stronger for it, because all his dominion
was real and all his authority might assume to be absolute.
His father had been more handicapped than helped by his German
responsibilities and embarrassments, which Philip escaped. It
is not strange that his concentration of the vast enginery
under his hands to one limited aim, of exterminating what his
dull and ignorant mind conceived to be irreligion and treason,
had its large measure of success. The stranger thing is, that
there was fortitude and courage to resist such power, in even
one corner of his realm.
5. The Papacy was restored at this time to the purer and
higher character of its best ages, by well-guided elections,
which raised in succession to the throne a number of men, very
different in ability, and quite different, too, in the spirit
of their piety, but generally alike in dignity and decency of
life, and in qualities which command respect. The fiery
Neapolitan zealot, Caraffa, who became Pope in 1555 as Paul
IV.; his cool-tempered diplomatic successor, Pius IV., who
manipulated the closing labors of the Council of Trent; the
austere inquisitor, Pius V.; the more commonplace Gregory
XIII., and the powerful Sixtus V., were pontiffs who gave new
strength to Catholicism, in their different ways, both by what
they did and by what they were.
6. The revival of zeal in the Roman Church, naturally
following the attacks upon it, gave rise to many new religious
organizations within its elastic fold, some reformatory, some
missionary and militant, but all bringing an effectual
reinforcement to it, at the time when its assailants began to
show faltering signs. Among these was one--Loyola's Society of
Jesus--which marched promptly to the front of the battle, and
which contributed more than any other single force in the
field to the rallying of the Church, to the stopping of
retreat, and to the facing of its stubborn columns forward for
a fresh advance. The Jesuits took such a lead and accomplished
such results by virtue of the military precision of discipline
under which they had been placed and to which they were
singularly trained by the rules of the founder; and also by
effect of a certain subtle sophistry that runs through their
ethical maxims and their counsels of piety. They fought for
their faith with a sublime courage, with a devotion almost
unparalleled, with an earnestness of belief that cannot be
questioned; but they used weapons and modes of warfare which
the higher moral feeling of civilized mankind, whether
Christian or Pagan, has always condemned. It is not Protestant
enemies alone who say this. It is the accusation that has been
brought against them again and again in their own Church, and
which has expelled them from Catholic countries, again and
again. In the first century or more of their career, this
plastic conscience, moulded by a passionate zeal, and
surrendered, with every gift of mind and body, to a service of
obedience which tolerated no evasion on one side nor bending
on the other, made the Jesuits the most invincible and
dangerous body of men that was ever organized for defense and
aggression in any cause.
The order was founded in 1540, by a bull of Pope Paul III. At
the time of Loyola's death, in 1556, it numbered about one
thousand members, and under Lainez, the second general of the
order, who succeeded Loyola at the head, it advanced rapidly,
in numbers, in efficiency of organization, and in wide-spread
influence.
Briefly stated, these are the incidents and circumstances
which help to explain--not fully, perhaps, but almost
sufficiently--the check to Protestantism and the restored
energy and aggressiveness of the Catholic Church, in the later
half of the sixteenth century.
The Ruin of Spain.
In his kingdoms of Spain, Philip II. may be said to have
finished the work of death which his father and his father's
grand-parents committed to him. They began it, and appointed
the lines on which it was to be done. The Spain of their day
had the fairest opportunity of any nation in Europe for a
great and noble career. The golden gates of her opportunity
were unlocked and opened by good Queen Isabella; but the pure
hands of the same pious queen threw over the neck of her
country the noose of a strangler, and tightened it
prayerfully. Her grandson, who was neither pious nor good,
flung his vast weight of power upon it. But the strangling
halter of the Spanish Inquisition did not extinguish signs of
life in his kingdom fast enough to satisfy his royal
impatience, and he tightened other cords upon the suffering
body and all its limbs. Philip, when he came to take up the
murderous task, found every equipment for it that he could
desire. He had only to gather the strands of the infernal mesh
into his hands, and bring the strain of his awful sovereignty
to bear upon them: then sit and watch the palsy of death creep
over his dominions.
Of political life, Charles really left nothing for his son to
kill. Of positive religious life, there can have been no
important survival, for he and his Inquisition had been keenly
vigilant; but Philip made much of the little he could
discover. As to the industrial life of Spain, father and son
were alike active in the murdering of it, and alike ingenious.
They paralyzed manufactures, in the first instance, by
persecuting and expelling the thrifty and skilful Moriscoes;
then they made their work complete by heavy duties on raw
materials. To extinguish the agricultural industries of the
kingdom, they had happy inspirations.
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They prohibited the exportation of one commodity after
another--corn, cattle, wool, cloth, leather, and the
like--until they had brought Spain practically to the point of
being dependent on other countries for many products of skill,
and yet of having nothing to offer in exchange, except the
treasure of precious metals which she drew from America. Hence
it happened that the silver and gold of the Peruvian and
Mexican mines ran like quicksand through her fingers, into the
coffers of the merchants of the Low Countries and of England;
and, probably, no other country in Europe saw so little of
them, had so little of benefit from them, as the country they
were supposed to enrich.
If the killing of Spain needed to be made complete by anything
more, Philip supplied the need, in the deadliness of his
taxation. Spending vast sums in his attempt to repeat upon the
Netherlands the work of national murder he had accomplished in
Spain; losing, by the same act, the rich revenues of the
thrifty provinces; launching into new expenditures as he
pursued, by clumsy warfare, his mission of death into fresh
fields, aiming now at the life of France, and now at the life
of England,--he squeezed the cost of his armies and armadas
from a country in which he had strangled production already,
and made poverty the common estate. It was the last draining
of the life-blood of a nation which ought to have been strong
and great, but which suffered murder most foul and unnatural.
We hardly exaggerate even in figure when we say that Spain was
a dead nation whim Philip quitted the scene of his arduous
labors. It is true that his successors still found something
for their hands to do, in the ways that were pleasant to their
race, and burned and bled and crushed the unhappy kingdom with
indefatigable persistency; but it was really the corpse of a
nation which they practised on. The life of Spain, as a
breathing, sentient state, came to an end under the hands of
Philip II., first of the Thugs.
Philip II. and the Netherlands.
The hand of Charles V. had been heavy on the Netherlands; but
resistance to such a power as that of Spain in his day was
hardly dreamed of. It was not easy for Philip to outdo his
father's despotism; less easy to drive the laborious
Hollanders and Flemings to desperation and force them into
rebellious war. But he accomplished it. He filled the country
with Spanish troops. He reorganized and stimulated the
Inquisition. He multiplied bishoprics in the Provinces,
against the wish of even the Catholic population. He scorned
the counsels of the great nobles, and gave foreign advisers to
the Regent, his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, illegitimate
daughter of Charles V., whom he placed at the head of the
government. His oppressions were endured, with increasing
signs of hidden passion, for ten years. Then, in 1566, the
first movement of patriotic combination appeared. It was a
league among certain of the nobles; its objects were peaceful,
its plans were legal; but it was not countenanced by the wiser
of the patriots, who saw that events were not ripe. The
members of the league went in solemn procession to the Regent
with a petition; whereupon one of her councillors denounced
them as "a troop of beggars." They promptly seized the epithet
and appropriated it. A beggar's wallet became their emblem;
the idea was caught up and carried through the country, and a
visible party rose quickly into existence.
The religious feeling now gained boldness. Enormous
field-meetings began to be held, under arms, in every part of
the open country, defying edicts and Inquisition. There
followed a little later some fanatical and riotous outbreaks
in several cities, breaking images and desecrating churches.
Upon these occurrences, Philip despatched to the Netherlands,
in the summer of 1567, a fresh army of Spanish troops,
commanded by a man who was after his own heart--as mean, as
false, as merciless, as little in soul and mind, as
himself,--the Duke of Alva. Alva brought with him authority
which practically superseded that of the Regent, and secret
instructions which doomed every man of worth in the Provinces.
At the head of the nobility of the country; by eminence of
character, no less than by precedence in rank, stood William
of Nassau, Prince of Orange, who derived his higher title from
a petty and remote principality, but whose large family
possessions were in Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Luxemburg.
Associated closely with him, in friendship and in political
action, were Count Egmont, and the Admiral Count Horn, the
latter of a family related to the Montmorencies of France.
These three conspicuous nobles Philip had marked with special
malice for the headsman, though their solitary crime had been
the giving of advice against his tyrannies. William of
Orange-"the Silent," as he came to be known--far-seeing in
his wisdom, and well-advised by trusty agents in Spain,
withdrew into Germany before Alva arrived. He warned his
friends of their danger and implored them to save themselves;
but they were blinded and would not listen. The perfidious
Spaniard lured them with flatteries to Brussels and thrust
them into prison. They were to be the first victims of the
appalling sacrifice required to appease the dull rage of the
king. Within three months they had eighteen hundred
companions, condemned like themselves to the scaffold, by a
council in which Alva presided and which the people called
"the Council of Blood." In June, 1568, they were brought to
the block.
Meantime Prince William and his brother, Louis of Nassau, had
raised forces in Germany and attempted the rescue of the
terrorized Provinces; but their troops were ill-paid and
mutinous and they suffered defeat. For the time being, the
Netherlands were crushed. As many of the people as could
escape had fled; commerce was at a standstill; workshops were
idle; the cities, once so wealthy, were impoverished; death,
mourning, and terror, were everywhere. Alva had done very
perfectly what he was sent to do.
The first break in the blackness of the clouds appeared in
April, 1572, when a fleet, manned by refugee adventurers who
called themselves Sea-Beggars, attacked and captured the town
of Brill. From that day the revolt had its right footing, on
the decks of the ships of the best sailors in the world. It
faced Philip from that day as a maritime power, which would
grow by the very feeding of its war with him, until it had
consumed everything Spanish within its reach. The taking of
Brill soon gave the patriots control of so many places in
Holland and Zealand that a meeting of deputies was held at
Dort, in July, 1572, which declared William of Orange to be
"the King's legal Stadtholder in Holland, Zealand, Friesland
and Utrecht," and recommended to the other Provinces that he
be appointed Protector of all the Netherlands during the
King's absence.
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Alva's reign of terror had failed so signally that even he was
discouraged and asked to be recalled. It was his boast when he
retired that he had put eighteen thousand and six hundred of
the Netherlanders to death since they were delivered into his
hands, above and beyond the horrible massacres by which he had
half depopulated every captured town. Under Alva's successor,
Don Louis de Requesens, a man of more justice and humanity,
the struggle went on, adversely, upon the whole, to the
patriots, though they triumphed gloriously in the famous
defense of Leyden. To win help from England, they offered the
sovereignty of their country to Queen Elizabeth; but in vain.
They made no headway in the southern provinces, where
Catholicism prevailed, and where the religious difference drew
people more to the Spanish side. But when Requesens died
suddenly, in the spring of 1576, and the Spanish soldiery
broke into a furious mutiny, sacking Antwerp and other cities,
then the nobles of Flanders and Brabant applied to the northern
provinces for help. The result was a treaty, called the
Pacification of Ghent, which contemplated a general effort to
drive the Spaniards from the whole land. But not much came of
this confederacy; the Catholic provinces never co-operated
with the Protestant provinces, and the latter went their own
way to freedom and prosperity, while the former sank back,
submissive, to their chains.
For a short time after the death of Requesens, Philip was
represented in the Netherlands by his illegitimate
half-brother, Don John of Austria; but Don John died in
October, 1578, and then came the great general, Alexander
Farnese, Prince of Parma, who was to try the patriots sorely
by his military skill. In 1579, the Prince of Orange drew them
more closely together, in the Union of Utrecht, which Holland,
Zealand, Gelderland, Zutphen, Utrecht, Overyssel, and
Groningen, subscribed, and which was practically the
foundation of the Dutch republic, though allegiance to Philip
was not yet renounced. This followed two years later, in July,
1581, when the States General, assembled at the Hague, passed a
solemn Act of Abjuration, which deposed Philip from his
sovereignty and transferred it to the Duke of Anjou, a prince
of the royal family of France, who did nothing for the
Provinces, and who died soon after. At the same time, the
immediate sovereignty of Holland and Zealand was conferred on
the Prince of Orange.
In March, 1582, Philip made his first deliberate attempt to
procure the assassination of the Prince. He had entered into a
contract for the purpose, and signed it with his own hand. The
assassin employed failed only because the savage pistol wound
he inflicted, in the neck and jaw of his victim, did not kill.
The master-murderer, at Madrid, was not discouraged. He
launched his assassins, one following the other, until six had
made their trial in two years. The sixth, one Balthazar
Gerard, accomplished that for which he was sent, and William
the Silent, wise statesman and admirable patriot, fell under
his hand (July 10, 1584). Philip was so immeasurably delighted
at this success that he conferred three lordships on the
parents of the murderer.
William's son, Maurice, though but eighteen years old, was
immediately chosen Stadtholder of Holland, Zealand and
Utrecht, and High Admiral of the Union. In the subsequent
years of the war, he proved himself a general of great
capacity. Of the details of the war it is impossible to speak.
Its most notable event was the siege of Antwerp, whose
citizens defended themselves against the Duke of Parma, with
astonishing courage and obstinacy, for many months. They
capitulated in the end on honorable terms; but the prosperity
of their city had received a blow from which it never revived.
Once more the sovereignty of the Provinces was offered to
Queen Elizabeth of England, and once more declined; but the
queen sent her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, with a few
thousand men, to help the struggling Hollanders (1585). This
was done, not in sympathy with them or their cause, but purely
as a self-defensive measure against Spain. The niggardliness
and the vacillations of Elizabeth, combined with the
incompetency of Leicester, caused troubles to the Provinces
nearly equal to the benefit of the forces lent them. Philip of
Spain was now involved in his undertakings with the Guises and
the League in France, and in his plans against England, and
was weakened in the Netherlands for some years. Parma died in
1592, and Count Mansfield took his place, succeeded in his
turn by the Marquis Spinola. The latter, at last, made an
honest report, that the subjugation of the United Provinces
was impracticable, and, Philip II. being now dead, the Spanish
government was induced in 1607 to agree to a suspension of
arms. A truce for twelve years was arranged; practically it
was the termination of the war of independence, and
practically it placed the United Provinces among the nations,
although the formal acknowledgment of their independence was
not yielded by Spain until 1648.
England under Mary.
While the Netherlands had offered to Philip of Spain a special
field for his malice, there were others thrown open to him
which he did not neglect. He may be said, in fact, to have
whetted his appetite for blood and for burned human flesh in
England, whither he went, as a young prince, in 1554, to marry
his elderly second cousin, Queen Mary. We may be sure that he
did not check the ardor of his consort, when she hastened to
re-establish the supremacy of the Pope, and to rekindle the
fires of religious persecution. The two-hundred and
seventy-seven heretics whom she is reckoned to have burned may
have seemed to him, even then, an insignificant handful. He
quickly tired of her, if not of her congenial work, and left
her in 1555. In 1558 she died, and the Church of Rome fell
once more, never to regain its old footing of authority.
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England under Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, who now came to the
throne, was Protestant by the necessities of her position,
whether doctrinally convinced or no. The Catholics denied her
legitimacy of birth, and disputed, therefore, her right to the
crown. She depended upon the Protestants for her support, and
Protestantism, either active or passive, had become, without
doubt, the dominant faith of the nation. But the mild schism
which formerly took most of its direction from Luther, had now
been powerfully acted upon by the influence of Calvin. Geneva
had been the refuge of many ministers and teachers who fled
from Mary's fires, and they returned to spread and deepen in
England the stern, strong, formidable piety which Calvin
evoked. These Calvinistic Protestants now made themselves felt
as a party in the state, and were known ere long by that name
which the next century rendered famous in English and American
history--the great name of the Puritans. They were not
satisfied with the stately, decorous, ceremonious Church which
Elizabeth reconstructed on the pattern of the Church of Edward
VI. At the same time, no party could be counted on more surely
for the support of the queen, since the hope of Protestantism
in England depended upon her, even as she was dependent upon
it.
The Catholics, denying legitimacy to Elizabeth, recognized
Mary Queen of Scots as the lawful sovereign of England. And
Mary was, in fact, the next in succession, tracing her
lineage, as stated before, to the elder sister of Henry VIII.
If Elizabeth had been willing to frankly acknowledge Mary's
heirship, failing heirs of her own body, it seems probable
that the partisans of the Scottish queen would have been
quieted, to a great extent. But Mary had angered her by
assuming, while in France, the arms and style of Queen of
England. She distrusted and disliked her Stuart cousin, and,
moreover, the whole idea of a settlement of the succession was
repugnant to her mind. At the same time, she could not be
brought to marry, as her Protestant subjects wished. She
coquetted with the notion of marriage through half her reign,
but never to any purpose.
Such were the elements of agitation and trouble in England
under Elizabeth. The history of well-nigh half-a-century was
shaped in almost all its events by the threatening attitude of
Catholicism and its supporters, domestic and foreign, toward
the English queen. She was supported by the majority of her
subjects with staunch loyalty and fidelity, even though she
treated them none too well, and troubled them in their very
defense of her by her whims and caprices. They identified her
cause with themselves, and took such pride in her courage that
they shut their eyes to the many weaknesses that went with it.
She never grasped the affairs she dealt with in a broadly
capable way. She never acted on them with well considered
judgment. Her ministers, it is clear, were never able to
depend upon a reasonable action of her mind. Her vanity or her
jealousy might put reason in eclipse at any moment, and a skilful
flatterer could make the queen as foolish as a milkmaid. But
she had a royal courage and a royal pride of country, and she
did make the good and glory of England her aim. So she won the
affection of all Englishmen whose hearts were not in the
keeping of the Pope, and no monarch so arbitrary was ever more
ardently admired.
Mary, Queen of Scots.
In 1567, Mary Stuart was deposed by her own subjects, or
forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son, James. She had
alienated the Scottish people, first by her religion, and then
by her suspected personal crimes. Having married her second
cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, she was accused of being
false to him. Darnley revenged his supposed wrongs as a
husband by murdering her secretary, David Rizzio. In the next
year (1567) Darnley was killed; the hand of the Earl of
Bothwell appeared quite plainly in the crime, and the queen's
complicity was believed. She confirmed the suspicions against
herself by marrying Bothwell soon afterwards. Then her
subjects rose against her, imprisoned her in Loch Leven
Castle, and made the Earl of Murray regent of the Kingdom. In
1568 Mary escaped from her Scottish prison and entered
England. From that time until her death, in 1587, she was a
captive in the hands of her rival, Queen Elizabeth, and was
treated with slender magnanimity. More than before, she became
the focus of intrigues and conspiracies which threatened both
the throne and the life of Elizabeth, and a growing feeling of
hostility to the wretched woman was inevitable.
In 1570, Pope Pius V. issued against Elizabeth his formal bull
of excommunication, absolving her subjects from their
allegiance. This quickened, of course, the activity of the
plotters against the queen and set treason astir. Priests from
the English Catholic Seminary at Douai, afterwards at Rheims,
began to make their appearance in the country; a few Jesuits
came over; and both were active agents of the schemes on foot
which contemplated the seating of Mary Stuart on the throne of
Elizabeth Tudor. Some of these emissaries were executed, and
they are counted among the martyrs of the Catholic Church,
which is a serious mistake. The Protestantism of the sixteenth
century was quite capable of religious persecution, even to
death; but it has no responsibilities of that nature in these
Elizabethan cases. As a matter of fact, the religion of the
Jesuit sufferers in the reign of Elizabeth was a mere incident
attaching itself to a high political crime, which no nation
has ever forgiven.
The plotting went on for twenty years, keeping the nation in
unrest; while beyond it there were thickening signs of a great
project of invasion in the sinister mind of Philip II. At
last, in 1586, the coolest councillors of Elizabeth persuaded
her to bring Mary Stuart to trial for alleged complicity in a
conspiracy of assassination which had lately come to light.
Convicted, and condemned to death, Mary ended her sad life on
the scaffold, at Fotheringay, on the 8th of February, 1587.
Whether guilty or guiltless of any knowledge of what had been
done in her name, against the peace of England and against the
life of the English queen, it cannot be thought strange that
Protestant England took her life.
The Spanish Armada.
A great burst of wrath in Catholic Europe was caused by the
execution of Mary, and Philip of Spain hastened forward his
vast preparations for the invasion and conquest of England. In
1588, the "invincible armada," as it was believed to be,
sailed out of the harbors of Portugal and Spain, and wrecked
itself with clumsy imbecility on the British and Irish coasts.
It scarcely did more than give sport to the eager English
sailors who scattered its helpless ships and hunted them down.
Philip troubled England no more, and conspiracy ceased.
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England at Sea.
But the undeclared, half-piratical warfare which private
adventurers had been carrying on against Spanish commerce for
many years now acquired fresh energy. Drake, Hawkins,
Frobisher, Grenvil, Raleigh, were the heroic spirits of this
enterprising warfare; but they had many fellows. It was the
school of the future navy of England, and the foundations of
the British Empire were laid down by those who carried it on.
Otherwise, Elizabeth had little war upon her hands, except in
Ireland, where the state of misery and disorder had already
been long chronic. The first really complete conquest of the
island was accomplished by Lord Mountjoy between 1600 and
1603.
Intellectual England.
But neither the political troubles nor the naval and military
triumphs of England during the reign of Elizabeth are of much
importance, after all, compared with the wonderful flowering
of the genius of the nation which took place in that age.
Shakespeare, Spenser, Bacon, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Hooker,
Raleigh, Sidney, are the great facts of Elizabeth's time, and
it shines with the luster of their names, the period most
glorious in English history.
The Religious Wars in France.
Wherever the stealthy arm of the influence of Philip II. of
Spain could reach, there the Catholic reaction of his time
took on a malignant form. In France, it is quite probable that
the Catholics and the Huguenots, if left to themselves, would
have come to blows; but it is certain that the meddling
fingers of the Spanish king put fierceness and fury into the
wars of religion, which raged from 1562 to 1596, and that they
were prolonged by his encouragement and help.
Catherine de' Medici, to strengthen herself against the
Guises, after the death of Francis II., offered attentions for
a time to the Huguenot nobles, and encouraged them to expect a
large and lasting measure of toleration. She went so far that
the Huguenot influence at court, surrounding the young king,
became very seriously alarming to Catholic onlookers, both at
home and abroad. Among the many remonstrances addressed to the
queen-regent, the one which appears to have been decisive in
its effect came from Philip. He coldly sent her word that he
intended to interfere in France and to establish the supremacy
of the Catholic Church; that he should give his support for that
purpose to any true friend of the Church who might request it.
Whether Catherine had entertained an honest purpose or not, in
her dealing with the Huguenots, this threat, with what lay
behind it, put an end to the hope of justice for them. It is
true that an assembly of notables, in January, 1562, did
propose a law which the queen put forth, in what is known as
the "Edict of January," whereby the Huguenots were given, for
the first time, a legal recognition, ceasing to be outlaws,
and were permitted to hold meetings, in the daytime, in open
places, outside of walled cities; but their churches were
taken away from them, they were forbidden to build more, and
they could hold no meetings in walled towns. It was a measure
of toleration very different from that which they had been led
to expect; and even the little meted out by this Edict of January
was soon shown to have no guarantee. Within three months, the
Duke of Guise had found an opportunity for exhibiting his
contempt of the new law, by ordering his armed followers to
attack a congregation at Vassy, killing fifty and wounding two
hundred of the peaceful worshippers. This outrage drove the
Huguenots to arms and the civil wars began.
The frivolous Anthony, King of Navarre, had been won back to
the Catholic side. His staunch wife, Jeanne d'Albret, with her
young son, the future Henry IV., and his brother, Louis,
Prince of Condé, remained true to their faith. Condé was the
chief of the party. Next to him in rank, and first in real
worth and weight, was the noble Admiral Coligny. The first war
was brief, though long enough to end the careers of Anthony of
Navarre, killed in battle, and the Duke of Guise,
assassinated. Peace was made in 1563 through a compromise,
which conceded certain places to the Huguenots, wherein they
might worship God in their own way. But it was a hollow peace,
and the malicious finger of the great master of assassins at
Madrid never ceased picking at it. In 1566, civil war broke
out a second time, continuing until 1570. Its principal
battles were that of Jarnac, in which Condé was taken prisoner
and basely assassinated by his captors, and that of
Moncontour. The Huguenots were defeated in both. After the
death of Condé, young Henry of Navarre, who had reached his
fifteenth year, was chosen to be the chief of the party, with
Coligny for his instructor in war.
Again peace was made, on a basis of slight concessions. Henry
of Navarre married the King's sister, Margaret of Valois;
prior to which he and his mother took up their residence with
the court, at Paris, where Jeanne d'Albret soon sickened and
died. The Admiral Coligny acquired, apparently, a marked
influence over the mind of the young king; and once more there
seemed to be a smiling future for the Reformed. But damnable
treacheries were hidden underneath this fair showing. The most
hideous conspiracy of modern times was being planned, at the
very moment of the ostentatious peace-marriage of the King of
Navarre, and the chief parties to it were Catherine de' Medici
and the Guises, whose evil inclinations in common had brought
them together at last. On the 22d of August, 1572, Coligny was
wounded by an assassin, employed by the widow and son of the
late Duke of Guise, whose death they charged against him,
notwithstanding his protestations of innocence. Two days
later, the monstrous and almost incredible massacre of St.
Bartholomew's Day was begun. Paris was full of Huguenots--the
heads of the party--its men of weight and influence--who had
been drawn to the capital by the King of Navarre's marriage
and by the supposed new era of favor in which they stood. To
cut these off was to decapitate Protestantism in France, and
that was the purpose of the infernal scheme. The weak-minded
young king was not an original party to the plot. When
everything had been planned, he was easily excited by a tale
of pretended Huguenot conspiracies, and his assent to summary
measures of prevention was secured. A little after midnight,
on the morning of Sunday, August 24, the signal was given, by
Catherine's order, which let loose a waiting swarm of
assassins, throughout Paris, on the victims who had been
marked for them. The Huguenots had had no warning; they were
taken everywhere by surprise, and they were easily murdered in
their beds, or hunted down in their hopeless flight.
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The noble Coligny, prostrated by the wound he had received two
days before, was killed in his chamber, and his body flung out
of the window. The young Duke of Guise stood waiting in the
court below, to gloat on the corpse and to basely spurn it
with his foot.
The massacre in Paris was carried on through two nights and
two days; and, for more than a month following, the example of
the capital was imitated in other cities of France, as the
news of what were called "the Paris Matins" reached them. The
total number of victims in the kingdom is estimated variously
to have been between twenty thousand and one hundred thousand.
Henry of Navarre and the young Prince of Condé escaped the
massacre, but they saved their lives by a hypocritical
abjuration of their religion.
The strongest town in the possession of the Huguenots was La
Rochelle, and great numbers of their ministers and people of
mark who survived the massacre now took refuge in that city,
with a considerable body of armed men. The royal forces laid
siege to the city, but made no impression on its defences.
Peace was conceded in the end on terms which again promised
the Huguenots some liberty of worship. But there was no
sincerity in it.
In 1574, Charles IX. died, and his brother, the Duke of Anjou,
who had lately been elected King of Poland, ran away from his
Polish capital with disgraceful haste and secrecy, to secure
the French crown. He was the most worthless of the
Valois-Medicean brood, and the French court in his reign
attained its lowest depth of degradation. The contending
religions were soon at war again, with the accustomed result,
in 1576, of another short-lived peace. The Catholics were
divided into two factions, one fanatical, following the
Guises, the other composed of moderate men, calling themselves
the Politiques, who hated the Spanish influence under which
the Guises were always acting, and who were willing to make
terms with the Huguenots. The Guises and the ultra-Catholics
now organized throughout France a great oath-bound "Holy
League", which became so formidable in power that the king
took fright, put himself at the head of it, and reopened war
with the Reformed.
More and more, the conflict of religions became confused with
questions of politics and mixed with personal quarrels. At one
time, the king's younger brother, the Duke of Alençon, had
gone over to the Huguenot side; but stayed only long enough to
extort from the court some appointments which he desired. The
king, more despised by his subjects than any king of France
before him had ever been, grew increasingly jealous and afraid
of the popularity and strength of the Duke of Guise, who was
proving to be a man quite superior to his father in
capability. Guise, on his side, was made arrogant by his sense
of power, and his ambition soared high. There were reasons for
believing that he did not look upon the throne itself as
beyond his reach.
After 1584, when the Duke of Alençon (Duke of Anjou under his
later title) died, a new political question, vastly
disturbing, was brought into affairs. That death left no heir
to the crown in the Valois line, and the King of Navarre, of
the House of Bourbon, was now nearer in birth to the throne
than any other living person. Henry had, long ere this,
retracted his abjuration of 1572, had rejoined the Huguenots
and taken his place as their chief. The head of the Huguenots
was now the heir presumptive to the crown, and the wretched,
incapable king was being impelled by his fear of Guise to look
to his Huguenot heir for support. It was a strange situation.
In 1588 it underwent a sinister change. Guise and his brother,
the Cardinal, were both assassinated by the king's body-guard,
acting under the king's orders, in the royal residence at the
Castle of Blois. When the murder had been done, the cowardly
king spurned his dead enemy with his foot, as Guise, sixteen
years before, had spurned the murdered Coligny, and said "I am
King at last." He was mistaken. His authority vanished with
the vile deed by which he expected to reinvigorate it. Paris
broke into open rebellion. The League renewed its activity
throughout France. The king, abandoned and cursed on all
sides, had now no course open to him but an alliance with
Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots. The alliance was effected,
and the two Henrys joined forces to subdue insurgent Paris.
While the siege of the city was in progress (1589), Henry III.
fell a victim, in his turn, to the murderous mania of his
depraved age and court. He was assassinated by a fanatical
monk.
Henry of Navarre.
Henry of Navarre now steps into the foreground of French
history, as Henry IV., lawful King of France as well as of
Navarre, and ready to prove his royal title by a more useful
reign than the French nation had known since it buried St.
Louis, his last ancestor on the throne. But his title was
recognized at first by few outside the party of the Huguenots.
The League went openly into alliance with Philip of Spain, who
even half-stopped his war in the Netherlands to send money and
troops into France. The energies of his insignificant soul
were all concentrated on the desire to keep the heretical
Béarnese from the throne of France. But happily his powers
were no longer equal to his malice; he was still staggering
under the blow which destroyed his great Armada.
Henry received some help in money from Queen Elizabeth, and
5,000 English and Scotch came over to join his army. He was an
abler general than any among his opponents, and he made
headway against them. His splendid victory at Ivry, on the
14th of March, 1590, inspirited his followers and took heart
from the League. He was driven from his subsequent siege of
Paris by a Spanish army, under the Duke of Parma; but the very
interference of the Spanish king helped to turn French feeling
in Henry's favor. On the 25th of July, 1593, he practically
extinguished the opposition to himself by his final submission
to the Church of Rome. It was an easy thing for him to do. His
religion sat lightly on him. He had accepted it from his
mother; he had adhered to it--not faithfully--as the creed of
a party. He could give it up, in exchange for the crown of
France, and feel no trouble of conscience. But the Reformed
religion in France was really benefited by his apostacy. Peace
came to the kingdom, as the consequence,--a peace of many
years,--and the Huguenots were sheltered in considerable
religious freedom by the peace. Henry secured it to them in
1598 by the famous Edict of Nantes, which remained in force
for nearly a hundred years.
{1071}
The reign of Henry IV. was one of the satisfactory periods in
the life of France, so far as concerns the material prosperity
of the nation. He was a man of strong, keen intellect, with
firmness of will and elasticity of temper, but weak on the
moral side. He was of those who win admiration and friendship
easily, and he remains traditionally the most popular of
French kings. He had the genius for government which so rarely
coincides with royal birth. A wise minister, the Duke of
Sully, gave stability to his measures, and between them they
succeeded in remarkably improving and promoting the
agricultural and the manufacturing industries of France,
effacing the destructive effects of the long civil wars, and
bringing economy and order into the finances of the
overburdened nation. His useful career was ended by an
assassin in 1610.

Germany and the Thirty Years War.
The reactionary wars of religion in Germany came
half-a-century later than in France. While the latter country
was being torn by the long civil conflicts which Henry IV.
brought to an end, the former was as nearly in the enjoyment
of religious peace as the miserable contentions in the bosom
of Protestantism, between Lutherans and Calvinists (the latter
more commonly called "the Reformed"), would permit. On the
abdication of Charles V., in 1556, he had fortunately failed
to bring about the election of his son Philip to the imperial
throne. His brother Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and King of
Bohemia and Hungary, was chosen Emperor, and that sovereign
had too many troubles in his immediate dominions to be willing
to invite a collision with the Protestant princes of Germany
at large. The Turks had overrun Hungary and established
themselves in possession of considerable parts of the country.
Ferdinand obtained peace with the redoubtable Sultan Suleiman,
but only by payments of money which bore a strong likeness to
tribute. He succeeded, through his prudent and skilful policy,
in making both the Hungarian and the Bohemian crowns practically
hereditary in the House of Austria.
Dying in 1564, Ferdinand transmitted both those kingdoms, with
the Austrian Archduchy and the imperial office, to his son,
Maximilian II., the broadest and most liberal minded of his
race. Though educated in Spain, and in companionship with his
cousin, Philip II., Maximilian exhibited the most tolerant
spirit that appears anywhere in his age. Perhaps it was the
hatefulness of orthodox zeal as exemplified in Philip which
drove the more generous nature of Maximilian to revolt. He
adhered to the Roman communion; but he manifested so much
respect for the doctrines of the Lutheran that his father felt
called upon at one time to make apologies for him to the Pope.
Throughout his reign he held himself aloof from religious
disputes, setting an example of tolerance and spiritual
intelligence to all his subjects, Lutherans, Calvinists and
Catholics alike, which ought to have influenced them more for
their good than it did. Under the shelter of the toleration
which Maximilian gave it, Protestantism spread quickly over
Austria, where it had had no opportunity before; revived the
old Hussite reform in Bohemia; made great gains in Hungary,
and advanced in all parts of his dominions except the Tyrol.
The time permitted to it for this progress was short, since
Maximilian reigned but twelve years. He died in 1576, and his
son Rudolph, who followed him, brought evil changes upon the
country in all things. He, too, had been educated in Spain,
but with a very different result. He came back a creature of
the Jesuits; but so weakly wilful a creature that even they
could do little with him. Authority of government went to
pieces in his incompetent hands, and at last, in 1606, a
family conclave of princes of the Austrian house began
measures which aimed at dispossessing Rudolph of his various
sovereignties, so far as possible, in favor of his brother
Matthias. Rudolph resisted with some effect, and in the
contests which ensued the Protestants of Austria and Bohemia
improved their opportunity for securing an enlargement of
their rights. Matthias made the concession of complete
toleration in Austria, while Rudolph, in Bohemia, granted the
celebrated charter, called the Letter of Majesty (1609), which
gave entire religious liberty to all sects.
These concessions were offensive to two princes, the Archduke
Ferdinand of Styria, and Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, who had
already taken the lead in a vigorous movement of Catholic
reaction. Some proceedings on the part of Maximilian, which
the Emperor sanctioned, against the Protestant free city of
Donauwörth, had caused certain Protestant princes and cities,
in 1608, to form a defensive Union. But the Elector Palatine,
who attached himself to the Reformed or Calvinist Church, was
at the head of this Union, and the bigoted Lutherans,
especially the Elector of Saxony, looked with coldness upon
it. On the other hand, the Catholic states formed a
counter-organization--a Holy League--which was more compact
and effective. The two parties being thus set in array, there
rose suddenly between them a political question of the most
disturbing character. It related to the right of succession to
an important duchy, that of Juliers, Clèves, and Berg. There
were several powerful claimants, in both of the Saxon
families, and including also the Elector of Brandenburg and
the Palsgrave of Neuberg, two members of the Union. As usual,
the political question took possession of the religious issue
and used it for its own purposes. The Protestant Union opened
negotiations with Henry IV. of France, who saw an opportunity
to weaken the House of Austria and to make some gains for
France at the expense of Germany. A treaty was concluded, and
Henry began active preparations for campaigns in both Germany
and Italy, with serious intent to humble and diminish the
Austrian power. The Dutch came into the alliance, likewise,
and James I. of England promised his co-operation. The
combination was formidable, and might have changed very
extensively the course of events that awaited unhappy Germany,
if the whole plan had not been frustrated by the assassination
of Henry IV., in 1610. All the parties to the alliance drew
back after that event, and both sides waited.
{1072}
In 1611, Rudolph was deposed in Bohemia, and the following
year he died. Matthias, already King of Hungary, succeeded
Rudolph in Bohemia and in the Empire. But Matthias was
scarcely stronger in mind or body than his brother, and the
same family pressure which had pushed Rudolph aside now forced
Matthias to accept a coadjutor, in the person of the vigorous
Ferdinand, Archduke of Styria. For the remainder of his reign
Matthias was a cipher, and all power in the government was
exercised by Ferdinand. His bitter opposition to the tolerant
policy which had prevailed generally for half-a-century was
well understood. Hence, his rise to supremacy in the Empire
gave notice that the days of religious peace were ended. The
outbreak of civil war was not long in coming.
Beginning of the war in Bohemia.
It began in Bohemia. A violation of the Protestant rights
guaranteed by the Letter of Majesty provoked a rising under
Count Thurn. Two of the king's councilors, with their
secretary, were flung from a high window of the royal castle,
and this act of violence was followed by more revolutionary
measures. A provisional government of thirty Directors was set
up and the king's authority set wholly aside. The Protestant
Union gave prompt support to the Bohemian insurrection and
sent Count Mansfield with three thousand soldiers to its aid.
The Thirty Years War was begun (1618).
Early in these disturbances, Matthias died (1619). Ferdinand
had already made his succession secure, in Austria, Bohemia
and Hungary, and the imperial crown was presently conferred on
him. But the Bohemians repudiated his kingship and offered
their crown to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, lately married
to the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I. of England.
The Elector, persuaded, it is said, by his ambitious young
wife, unwisely accepted the tempting bauble, and went to
Prague to receive it. But he had neither prudence nor energy
to justify his bold undertaking. Instead of strengthening
himself for his contest with Ferdinand, he began immediately
to enrage his new subjects by pressing Calvinistic forms and
doctrines upon them, and by arrogantly interfering with their
modes of worship. His reign was so brief that he is known in
Bohemian annals as "the winter king." A single battle, won by
Count Tilly, in the service of the Catholic League and of its
chief, Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, ended his sovereignty. He
lost his Electorate as well as his kingdom, and was a
wandering fugitive for the remainder of his life. Bohemia was
mercilessly dealt with by the victorious Ferdinand. Not only
was Protestantism crushed, and Catholicism established as the
exclusive religion, but the very life of the country,
intellectually and materially, was extinguished; so that
Bohemia never again stood related to the civilization of
Europe as it had stood before, when Prague was an important
center of learning and thought. To a less extent, Austria
suffered the same repression, and its Protestantism was
uprooted.
In this sketch it is unnecessary to follow the details of the
frightful Thirty Years War, which began as here described.
During the first years it was carried on mainly by the troops
of the Catholic League, under Tilly, acting against Protestant
forces which had very little coherence or unity, and which
were led by Count Mansfield, Christian of Anhalt, and other
nobles, in considerable independence of one another. In 1625
the first intervention from outside occurred. Christian IV. of
Denmark took up the cause of threatened Protestantism. As Duke
of Schleswig-Holstein, he was a prince of the Empire, and he
joined with other Protestant princes in condemning the
deposition of the Elector-Palatine, whose electorate had been
conferred on Maximilian of Bavaria. King Christian entered
into an alliance with England and Holland, which powers
promised help for the reinstatement of the Elector. But the
aid given was trifling, and slight successes which Christian
and his German allies obtained against Tilly were soon changed
to serious reverses.
Wallenstein.
For the first time during the war, the Emperor now brought
into the field an army acting in his own name, and not in that
of the League. It was done in a singular manner--by contract,
so to speak, with a great soldier and wealthy nobleman, the
famous Wallenstein. Wallenstein offered to the Emperor the
services of an army of 50,000 men, which he would raise and
equip at his own expense, and which should be maintained
without public cost--that is, by plunder. His proposal was
accepted, and the formidable body of trained and powerfully
handled brigands was launched upon Germany, for the torture
and destruction of every region in which it moved. It was the
last appearance in European warfare of the "condottiere" of
the Middle Ages. Wallenstein and Tilly swept all before them.
The former failed only before the stubborn town of Stralsund,
which defied his siege. Mansfield and Christian of Anhalt both
died in 1627. Peace was forced upon the Danish king. The
Protestant cause was prostrate, and the Emperor despised its
weakness so far that he issued an "Edict of Restitution,"
commanding the surrender of certain bishoprics and
ecclesiastical estates which had fallen into Protestant hands
since the Treaty of Passau. At the same time, he yielded to
the jealousy which Wallenstein's power had excited, by
dismissing that commander from his service.
Gustavus Adolphus.
The time was an unfavorable one for such an experiment. A new
and redoubtable champion of Protestantism had just appeared on
the scene and was about to revive the war. This was Gustavus
Adolphus, King of Sweden, who had ambitions, grievances and
religious sympathies, all urging him to rescue the Protestant
states of Germany from the Austrian-Catholic despotism which
seemed to be impending over them. His interference was
jealously resented at first by the greater Protestant princes.
The Elector of Brandenburg submitted to an alliance with him
only under compulsion. The Elector of Saxony did not join the
Swedish king until (1631) Tilly had ravaged his territories
with ferocity, burning 200 villages. When Gustavus had made
his footing in the country secure, he quickly proved himself
the greatest soldier of his age. Tilly was overwhelmed in a
battle fought on the Breitenfeld, at Leipsic. The following
spring he was again beaten, on the Lech, in Bavaria, and died
of wounds received in the battle. Meantime, the greater part
of Germany was at the feet of the Swedish king; and a sincere
co-operation between him and the German princes would probably
have ended the war. But small confidence existed between these
allies, and Richelieu, the shrewd Cardinal who was ruling
France, had begun intrigues which made the Thirty Years War
profitable in the end to France. The victories of Gustavus
seemed to bear little fruit. Wallenstein was summoned once
more to save the Emperor's cause, and reappeared in the field
with 40,000 men. The heroic Swede fought him at Lützen, on the
16th of November, 1632, and routed him, but fell in the battle
among the slain.
{1073}
With the death of Gustavus Adolphus, the possibility of a
satisfactory conclusion of the war vanished. The Swedish army
remained in Germany, under the military command of Duke
Bernhard of Saxe Weimar and General Horn, but under the
political direction of Axel Oxenstiern, the able Swedish
Chancellor. On the Imperial side, Wallenstein again incurred
distrust and suspicion. His power was so formidable that his
enemies were afraid to let him live. They plotted his death by
assassination, and he was murdered on the 25th of February,
1634. The Emperor's son Ferdinand now took the command of the
Imperial forces, and, a few months later, having received
reinforcements from Spain, he had the good fortune to defeat
the Swedes at Nördlingen.
The French in the War.
The Elector of Saxony, and other Protestant princes, then made
peace with the Emperor, and the war was only prolonged by the
intrigues of Richelieu and for the aggrandizement of France.
In this final stage of it, when the original elements of
contention, and most of the original contestants, had
disappeared, it lasted for yet fourteen years. Ferdinand II.
died in 1637, and was succeeded by his son Ferdinand III. Duke
Bernhard died in 1639. In the later years of the war,
Piccolomini on the Imperial side, Baner, Torstenson and
Wrangel at the head of the Swedes, and Turenne and Condé in
command of the French, were the soldiers who made great names.
Destructiveness of the War.
In 1648, the long suffering of Germany was eased by the Peace
of Westphalia. Years of quiet, and of order fairly restored,
would be needed to heal the bleeding wounds of the country and
revive its strength. From end to end, it had been trampled
upon for a generation by armies which plundered and destroyed
as they passed. There is nothing more sickening in the annals
of war than the descriptions which eye-witnesses have left of
the misery, the horror, the desolation of that frightful
period in German history. "Especially in the south and west,
Germany was a wilderness of ruins; places that were formerly
the seats of prosperity were the haunts of wolves and robbers
for many a long year. It is estimated that the population was
diminished by twenty, by some even by fifty, per cent. The
population of Augsburg was reduced from 80,000 to 18,000; of
Frankenthal, from 18,000 to 324 inhabitants. In Würtemberg, in
1641, of 400,000 inhabitants, 48,000 remained; in the
Palatinate, in 1636, there were 201 peasant farmers; and in
1648, but a fiftieth part of the population remained"
(Häusser).
The Peace of Westphalia.
By the treaties of Westphalia, the religious question was
settled with finality. Catholics, Lutherans, and the Reformed
(Calvinists), were put on an equal footing of religious
liberty. Politically, the effects of the Peace were radical
and lasting in their injury to the German people. The few
bonds of Germanic unity which had survived the reign of
feudalism were dissolved. The last vestige of authority in the
Empire was destroyed. "From this time Germany long remained a
mere lax confederation of petty despotisms and oligarchies
with hardly any national feeling. Its boundaries too were cut
short in various ways. The independence of the two free
Confederations at the two ends of the Empire, those of
Switzerland and the United Provinces, which had long been
practically cut off from the Empire, was now formally
acknowledged. And, what was far more important, the two
foreign kingdoms which had had the chief share in the war,
France and Sweden, obtained possessions within the Empire, and
moreover, as guarantors or sureties of the peace, they
obtained a general right of meddling in its affairs." "The
right of France to the 'Three Lotharingian Bishoprics,' which
had been seized nearly a hundred years before, was now
formally acknowledged, and, besides this, the possessions and
rights of the House of Austria in Elsass, the German land
between the Rhine and the Vosges, called in France Alsace,
were given to France. The free city of Strasburg and other
places in Elsass still remained independent, but the whole of
South Germany now lay open to France. This was the greatest
advance that France had yet made at the expense of the Empire.
Within Germany itself the Elector of Brandenburg also received
a large increase of territory" (Freeman).
Among the treaties which made up the Peace of Westphalia was
one signed by Spain, acknowledging the independence of the
United Provinces, and renouncing all claims to them.
France under Richelieu.
The great gains of France from the Thirty Years War were part
of the fruit of bold and cunning statesmanship which Richelieu
had ripened and plucked for that now rising nation. For a time
after the death of Henry IV., chaos had seemed likely to
return again in France. His son, Louis XIII., was but nine
years old. The mother, Marie de' Medici, who secured the
regency, was a foolish woman, ruled by Italian favorites, who
made themselves odious to the French people. As soon as the
young king approached manhood, he put himself in opposition to
his mother and her favorites, under the influence of a set of
rivals no more worthy, and France was carried to the verge of
civil war by their puerile hostilities. Happily there was
something in the weak character of Louis XIII. which bent him
under the influence of a really great mind when circumstances
had brought him within its reach. Richelieu entered the King's
council in 1624. The king was soon an instrument in his hands,
and he ruled France, as though the scepter was his own, for
eighteen years. He was as pitiless a despot as ever set heel
on a nation's neck; but the power which he grasped with what
seemed to be a miserly and commonplace greed, was all gathered
for the aggrandizement of the monarchy that he served. He
believed that the nation needed to have one master, sole and
unquestioned in his sovereignty. That he enjoyed being that
one master, in reality, while he lived, is hardly doubtful;
but his whole ambition is not so explained. He wrought
according to his belief for France, and the king, in his eyes,
was the embodiment of France. He erected the pedestal on which
"the grand monarch" of the next generation posed with
theatrical effect.
{1074}
Three things Richelieu did;
1. He enforced the royal authority, with inexorable rigor,
against the great families and personages, who had not
learned, even under Henry IV., that they were subjects in the
absolute sense.
2. He struck the Huguenots, not as a religious sect, but as a
political party, and peremptorily stopped their growth of
strength in that character, which had clearly become
threatening to the state.
3. He organized hostility in Europe to the overbearing and
dangerous Austro-Spanish power, put France at the head of it,
and took for her the lion's share of the conquests by which
the Hapsburgs were reduced.
Mazarin and the Fronde.
The great Cardinal died near the close of the year 1642; and
Louis XIII. followed him to the grave in the succeeding May,
leaving a son, Louis XIV., not yet five years of age, under
the regency of his mother, Anne of Austria. The minister,
Cardinal Mazarin, who enjoyed the confidence of the
queen-regent, and who was supposed to enjoy her affections as
well, had been Richelieu's disciple, and took the helm of
government on Richelieu's recommendation. He was an adroit
politician, with some statesmanlike sagacity, but he lacked
the potent spirit by which his master had awed and ruled every
circle into which he came, great or small. Mazarin had the
Thirty Years War to bring to a close, and he managed the
difficult business with success, wasting nothing of the effect
of the brilliant victories of Condé and Turenne. But the war had
been very costly. Mazarin was no better financier than
Richelieu had been before him, and the burdens of taxation
were greater than wise management would have made them. There
was inevitable discontent, and Mazarin, as a foreigner, was
inevitably unpopular. With public feeling in this state, the
Court involved itself in a foolish conflict with the
Parliament of Paris, and presently there was a Paris
revolution and a civil war afoot (1649). It was a strange
affair of froth and empty rages--this war of "The Fronde," as
it was called--having no depth of earnestness in it and no
honesty of purpose anywhere visible in its complications. The
men and women who sprang to a lead in it--the women more
actively and rancorously than the men--were mere actors of
parts in a great play of court intrigue, for the performance
of which unhappy France had lent its grand stage. There seems
to have been never, in any other civil conflict which history
describes, so extraordinary a mixture of treason and
libertinism, of political and amorous intrigue, of
heartlessness and frivolity, of hot passion and cool
selfishness. The people who fought most and suffered most
hardly appear as noticeable factors in the contest. The court
performers amused themselves with the stratagems and bloody
doings of the war as they might have done with the tricks of a
masquerade.
It was in keeping with the character of the Frondeurs that
they went into alliance, at last, with Spain, and that, even
after peace within the nation had been restored, "the Great
Condé" remained in the Spanish service and fought against his
own countrymen. Mazarin regained control of affairs, and
managed them on the whole ably and well. He brought about an
alliance with England, under Cromwell, and humbled Spain to
the acceptance of a treaty which considerably raised the
position of France among the European Powers. By this Treaty
of the Pyrenees (1659), the northwestern frontier of the
kingdom was both strengthened and advanced; Lorraine was shorn
of some of its territory and prepared for the absorption which
followed after no long time; there were gains made on the side
of the Pyrenees; and, finally, Louis XIV. was wedded to the
infanta of Spain, with solemn renunciations on her part, for
herself and her descendants, of all claims upon the Spanish
crown, or upon Flanders, or Burgundy, or Charolais. Not a
claim was extinguished by these solemn renunciations, and the
Treaty of the Pyrenees is made remarkable by the number of
serious wars and important events to which it gave rise.
Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661 and the government was assumed
personally by Louis XIV., then twenty-three years old.
England Under the Stuarts.
While Germany and France had, each in turn, been disordered by
extremely unlike civil wars, one to the unmitigated
devastation and prostration of the land, the other to the
plain putting in proof of the nothingness of the nation at
large, as against its monarchy and court, the domestic peace
of England had been ruffled in a very different way, and with
very different effects.
The death of Queen Elizabeth united the crown of England with
that of Scotland, on the head of James, son of the unhappy
Mary Stuart. In England he was James I., in Scotland James VI.
His character combined shrewdness in some directions with the
most foolish simplicity in others. He was not vicious, he was
not in any particular a bad man; but he was exasperating in
his opinionated self-conceit, and in his gaucheries of mind
and body. The Englishmen of those days did not love the Scots;
and, all things considered, we may wonder, perhaps, that James
got on so well as he did with his English subjects. He had
high notions of kingship, and a superlative opinion of his own
king-craft, as he termed the art of government. He scarcely
deviated from the arbitrary lines which Elizabeth had laid
down, though he had nothing of Elizabeth's popularity. He
offended the nation by truckling to its old enemy, the King of
Spain, and pressing almost shamefully for a marriage of his
elder son to the Spanish infanta. The favorites he enriched
and lavished honors upon were insolent upstarts. His treatment
of the growing Puritanism in English religious feeling was
contemptuous. There was scarcely a point on which any
considerable number of his subjects could feel in agreement
with him, or entertain towards him a cordial sentiment of
loyalty or respect. Yet his reign of twenty-two years was
disturbed by nothing more serious than the fatuous "gunpowder
plot" (1605) of a few discontented Catholics. But his son had
to suffer the retarded consequences of a loyalty growing weak,
on one side, while royalty strained its prerogatives on the
other.
The reign of James I. witnessed the effective beginnings of
English colonization in America,--the planting of a durable
settlement in Virginia and the migration of the Pilgrim
Fathers to New England. The latter movement (1620) was one of
voluntary exile, produced by the hard treatment inflicted on
those "Separatists" or "Independents" who could not reconcile
themselves to a state-established Church. Ten years later, the
Pilgrim movement, of Independents, was followed by the greater
migration of Puritans--quite different in class, in character
and in spirit.
{1075}
Charles. I.
James died in 1625, and the troubled reign of his son, Charles
I., began. Charles took over from his father a full measure of
popular discontent, along with numerous active springs in
operation for increasing it. The most productive of these was
the favorite, Buckingham, who continued to be the sole
counselor and minister of the young king, as he had been of
the older one, and who was utterly hateful to England, for
good reasons of incapacity and general worthlessness. In the
king himself, though he had virtues, there was a coldness and
a falsity of nature which were sure to widen the breach
between him and his people.
Failing the Spanish marriage, Charles had wedded (1624) a
French princess, Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII. The
previous subserviency to Spain had then been followed by a war
with that country, which came to Charles among his
inheritances, and which Buckingham mismanaged, to the shame of
England. In 1627 another war began, but this time with France,
on account of the Huguenots besieged at La Rochelle. Again the
meddlesome hand of Buckingham wrought disaster and national
disgrace, and public indignation was greatly stirred. When
Parliament endeavored to call the incapable minister to
account, and to obtain some security for a better management
of affairs, the king dissolved it. Twice was this done, and
Charles and his favorite employed every arbitrary and
questionable device that could be contrived for them, to raise
money without need of the representatives of the people. At
length, in 1628, they were driven to face a third Parliament,
in order to obtain supplies. By this time the Commons of
England were wrought up to a high and determined assertion of
their rights, as against the Crown, and the Puritans had
gained a majority in the popular representation. In the lower
House of Parliament, therefore, the demands of the king for
money were met by a counter-demand for guarantees to protect
the people from royal encroachments on their liberties. The
Commons were resolute, and Charles gave way to them, signing
with much reluctance the famous instrument known as the
"Petition of Right," which pledged the Crown to abstain in
future from forced loans, from taxes imposed without
Parliamentary grant, from arbitrary imprisonments, without
cause shown, and from other despotic proceedings. In return
for his signature to the Petition of Right, Charles received a
grant of money; but the Commons refused to authorize his
collection of certain customs duties, called Tonnage and
Poundage, beyond a single year, and it began attacks on
Buckingham,--whereupon the king prorogued it. Shortly
afterwards Buckingham was assassinated; a second expedition to
relieve Rochelle failed miserably; and early in 1629
Parliament was assembled again. This time the Puritan temper
of the House began to show itself in measures to put a stop to
some revivals of ancient ceremony which had appeared in
certain churches. At the same time officers of the king, who
had seized goods belonging to a member of the House, for
non-payment of Tonnage and Poundage, were summoned to the bar
to answer for it. The king protected them, and a direct
conflict of authority arose. On the 2d of March, the king sent
an order to the Speaker of the House of Commons for
adjournment; but the Speaker was forcibly held in his chair,
and not permitted to announce the adjournment, until three
resolutions had been read and adopted, denouncing as an enemy
to the kingdom every person who brought in innovations in
religion, or who advised the levying of Tonnage and Poundage
without parliamentary grant, or who voluntarily paid such
duties, so levied. This done, the members dispersed; the king
dissolved Parliament immediately, and his resolution was taken
to govern England thenceforth on his own authority, with no
assembly of the representatives of the people to question or
criticise him. He held to that determination for eleven years,
during which long time no Parliament sat in England, and the
Constitution was practically obliterated.
The leaders of the Commons in their recent proceedings were
arrested and imprisoned. Sir John Eliot, the foremost of them,
died in harsh confinement within the Tower, and others were
held in long custody, refusing to recognize the jurisdiction
of the king's judges over things done in Parliament.
Wentworth and Laud.
One man, of great ability, who had stood at the beginning with
Sir John Eliot, and acted with the party which opposed the
king, now went over to the side of the latter and rose high in
royal favor, until he came in the end to be held chiefly
responsible for the extreme absolutism to which the government
of Charles was pushed. This was Sir Thomas Wentworth, made
Earl of Strafford at a later day, in the tardy rewarding of
his services. But William Laud, Bishop of London, and
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was the evil counselor of
the king, much more than Wentworth, in the earlier years of
the decade of tyranny. It was Laud's part to organize the
system of despotic monarchy on its ecclesiastical side; to
uproot Puritanism and all dissent, and to cast religion for
England and for Scotland in one mould, as rigid as that of
Rome.
For some years, the English nation seemed terrorized or
stupefied by the audacity of the complete overthrow of its
Constitution. The king and his servants might easily imagine
that the day of troublesome Parliaments and of inconvenient
laws was passed. At least in those early years of their
success, it can scarcely have occurred to their minds that a
time of accounting for broken laws, and for the violated
pledges of the Petition of Right, might come at the end. At
all events they went their way with seeming satisfaction, and
tested, year by year, the patient endurance of a people which
has always been slow to move. Their courts of Star Chamber and
of High Commission, finding a paramount law in the will and
pleasure of the king, imprisoned, fined, pilloried, flogged
and mutilated in quite the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition,
though they did not burn.
{1076}
They collected Tonnage and Poundage without parliamentary
consent, and servile judges enforced the payment. They
invented a claim for "ship-money" (in commutation of an
ancient demand for ships to serve in the King's navy) from
inland towns and counties, as well as from the commercial
ports; and when John Hampden, a squire in Buckinghamshire,
refused payment of the unlawful tax, their obedient judges
gave judgment against him. And still the people endured; but
they were laying up in memory many things, and gathering a
store of reasons for the action that would by and by begin.
Rebellion in Scotland.
At last, it was Scotland, not England, that moved to rebel.
Laud and the king had determined to break down Presbyterianism
in the northern kingdom and to force a Prayer Book on the
Scottish Church. There was a consequent riot at St. Giles, in
Edinburgh (1637); Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the bishop,
and Scotland presently was in revolt, signing a National
Covenant and defying the king. Charles, attempting to frighten
the resolute Scots with an army which he could not pay, was
soon driven to a treaty with them (1639) which he had not
honesty enough to keep. Wentworth, who had been Lord Deputy of
Ireland since 1632, and who had framed a model of absolutism
in that island, for the admiration of his colleagues in
England, now returned to the king's side and became his chief
adviser. He counselled the calling of a Parliament, as the
only means by which English help could be got for the
restoring of royal authority in Scotland. The Parliament was
summoned and met in April, 1640. At once, it showed a temper
which alarmed the king and he dissolved it in three weeks.
Again Charles made the attempt to put down his Scottish
subjects without help from an English Parliament, and again
the attempt failed.
The Long Parliament.
Then the desperate king summoned another Parliament, which
concentrated in itself, when it came together, the suppressed
rebellion that had been in the heart of England for ten years,
and which broke his flimsy fabric of absolutism, almost at a
single blow. It was the famous Long Parliament of English
history, which met in November, 1640, and which ruled England
for a dozen years, until it gave way to the Cromwellian
dictatorship. It sent Laud and Strafford to the Tower,
impeached the latter and brought him to the block, within six
months from the beginning of its session; and the king gave up
his minister to the vengeance of the angry Commons with hardly
one honest attempt to protect him. Laud waited in prison five
years before he suffered the same fate. The Parliament
declared itself to be indissoluble by any royal command; and
the king assented. It abolished the Star Chamber and the Court
of High Commission; and the king approved. It swept
ship-money, and forest claims, and all of Charles' lawless
money-getting devices into the limbo; and he put his signature
to its bills. But all the time he was intriguing with the
Scots for armed help to overthrow his masterful English
Parliament, and he was listening to Irish emissaries who
offered an army for the same purpose, on condition that
Ireland' should be surrendered to the Catholics.
Civil War.
Charles had arranged nothing on either of these treacherous
plans, nor had he gained anything yet from the division
between radicals and moderates that was beginning to show
itself in the popular party, when he suddenly brought the
strained situation to a crisis, in January, 1642, by his most
foolish and arrogant act. He invaded the House of Commons in
person, with a large body of armed men, for the purpose of
arresting five members--Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazlerigg and
Strode--whom he accused of having negotiated treasonably with
the Scots in 1640. The five members escaped; the House
appealed to the citizens of London for protection; king and
Parliament began immediately to raise troops; the nation
divided and arrayed itself on the two sides,--most of the
gentry, the Cavaliers, supporting the king, and most of the
Puritan middle-class, wearing close-cut hair and receiving the
name Roundheads, being ranged in the party of Parliament. They
came to blows in October, when the first battle was fought, at
Edgehill.
In the early period of the war, the parliamentary forces were
commanded by the Earl of Essex; and Sir Thomas Fairfax was
their general at a later stage; but the true leader on that
side, for war and for politics alike, was soon found in Oliver
Cromwell, a member of Parliament, whose extraordinary capacity
was first shown in the military organization of the Eastern
Counties, from which he came. After 1645, when the army was
remodeled, with Cromwell as second in rank, his real
chieftainship was scarcely disguised. The decisive battle of
the war was fought that year at Naseby, where the king's cause
suffered an irrecoverable defeat.
The Presbyterians of Scotland had now allied themselves with
the English Roundheads, on condition that the Church of
England should be remodeled in the Presbyterian form. The
Puritan majority in Parliament being favorable to that form, a
Solemn League and Covenant between the two nations had been
entered into, in 1643, and an Assembly of Divines was convened
at Westminster to frame the contemplated system of the Church.
But the Independents, who disliked Presbyterianism, and who
were more tolerantly inclined in their views, had greatly
increased in numbers, and some of the stronger men on the
Parliament side, including Cromwell, the strongest of all,
were among them. This difference brought about a sharp
struggle within the popular party for the control of the
fruits of the triumph now beginning to seem secure. Under
Cromwell, the Army became a powerful organization of religious
Independency, while Parliament sustained Presbyterianism, and
the two stood against each other as rival powers in the state.
{1077}
At the beginning of the year 1646 the fortunes of Charles had
fallen very low. His partisan, Montrose, in Scotland, had been
beaten; his intrigues in Ireland, for the raising of a
Catholic army, had only alarmed and disgusted his English
friends; he was at the end of his resources, and he gave
himself up to the Scots. The latter, in conjunction with the
Presbyterian majority in Parliament, were willing to make
terms with him, and restore him to his throne; on conditions
which included the signing of the Covenant and the
establishing of Presbyterianism in the Churches of both
kingdoms. He refused the proposal, being deluded by a belief
that the quarrel of Independents and Presbyterians would open
his way to the recovery of power without any concessions at
all. The Scots then surrendered him to the English, and he was
held in confinement by the latter for the next two years,
scheming and pursuing intrigues in many directions, and
convincing all who dealt with him that his purposes were never
straightforward--that he was faithless and false to the core.
Ill-will and suspicion, meanwhile, were widening the breach
between Parliament and the Army. Political and religious
agitators were gaining influence in the latter and republican
ideas were spreading fast. At length (December, 1648), the
Army took matters into its own hands; expelled from Parliament
those members who favored a reconciliation with the king, on
the basis of a Presbyterian establishment of the Church, and
England passed under military rule. The "purged" Parliament
(or rather the purged House of Commons, which now set the
House of Lords aside, declaring itself to be the sole and
supreme power in the state) brought King Charles to trial in
the following month, before a High Court of Justice created
for the occasion. He was convicted of treason, in making war
upon his subjects, and was beheaded on the 30th of January,
1649.
The Commonwealth and the Protectorate.
The king being thus disposed of, the House of Commons
proclaimed England a Commonwealth, "without a King or House of
Lords," took to itself the name of Parliament, and appointed
an executive Council of State, forty-one in number. The new
government, in its first year, had a rebellion in Ireland to
deal with, and sent Cromwell to the scene. He crushed it with
a merciless hand. The next year Scotland was in arms, for the
late king's son, now called Charles II., who had entered the
country, accepted Presbyterianism, and signed the Covenant.
Again Cromwell was the man for the occasion, and in a campaign
of two months he ended the Scottish war, with such decision that
he had no more fighting to do on English or Scottish soil
while he lived. There was war with the Dutch in 1652, 1653 and
1654, over questions of trade, and the long roll of English naval
victories was opened by the great soldier-seaman, Robert
Blake.
But the power which upheld and carried forward all things at
this time was the power of Oliver Cromwell, master of the
Army, and, therefore, master of the Commonwealth. The
surviving fragment of the Long Parliament was an anomaly, a
fiction; men called it "the Rump." In April, 1653, Cromwell
drove the members of it from their chamber and formally took
to himself the reins of government which in fact he had been
holding before. A few months later he received from his
immediate supporters the title of Lord Protector, and an
Instrument of Government was framed, which served as a
constitution during the next three years. Cromwell was as
unwilling as Charles had been to share the government with a
freely elected and representative Parliament. The first House
which he called together was dissolved at the end of five
months (1655), because it persisted in discussing a revision
of the constitution. His second Parliament, which he summoned
the following year, required to be purged by the arbitrary
exclusion of about a hundred members before it could be
brought to due submission. This tractable body then made
certain important changes in the constitution, by an enactment
called the "Humble Petition and Advice." It created a second
house, to take the place of the House of Lords, and gave to
the Lord Protector the naming of persons to be life-members of
such upper house. It also gave to the Protector the right of
appointing his own successor, a right which Cromwell exercised
on his death-bed, in 1658, by designating his son Richard.
The responsible rule of Cromwell, from the expulsion of the
Rump and his assumption of the dignity of Lord Protector,
covered only the period of five years. But in that brief time
he made the world respect the power of England as it had never
been respected before. His government at home was as absolute
and arbitrary as the government of the Stuarts, but it was
infinitely wiser and more just. Cromwell was a statesman of
the higher order; a man of vast power, in intellect and will.
That he did not belong to the yet higher order of commanding
men, whose statesmanship is pure in patriotism and uncolored
by selfish aims, is proved by his failure to even plan a more
promising settlement of the government of England than that
which left it, an anomalous Protectorate, to a man without
governing qualities, who happened to be his son.
Restoration of the Stuarts.
Richard Cromwell was brushed aside after eight months of an
absurd attempt to play the part of Lord Protector. The
officers of the Army and the resuscitated Rump Parliament,
between them, managed affairs, in a fashion, for almost a
year, and then they too were pushed out of the way by the army
which had been stationed in Scotland, under General George
Monk. By the action of Monk, with the consent, and with more
than the consent, of England at large, the Stuart monarchy was
restored. Charles II. was invited to return, and in May, 1660,
he took his seat on the re-erected throne.
The nation, speaking generally, was tired of a military
despotism; tired of Puritan austerity; tired of revolution and
political uncertainty;--so tired that it threw itself down at
the feet of the most worthless member of the most worthless
royal family in its history, and gave itself up to him without
a condition or a guarantee. For twenty-five years it endured
both oppression and disgrace at his hands. It suffered him to
make a brothel of his Court; to empty the national purse into
the pockets of his shameless mistresses and debauched
companions; to revive the ecclesiastical tyranny of Laud; to
make a crime of the religious creeds and the worship of more
than half his subjects; to sell himself and sell the honor of
England to the king of France for a secret pension, and to be
in every possible way as ignoble and despicable as his father
had been arrogant and false. When he died, in 1685, the
prospects of the English nation were not improved by the
accession of his brother, the Duke of York, who became James
II.
{1078}
James had more honesty than his brother or his father; but the
narrowness and meanness of the Stuart race were in his blood.
He had made himself intolerable; to his subjects, both English
and Scotch, by entering the Catholic Church, openly, while
Charles was believed to have done the same in secret. His
religion was necessarily bigotry, because of the smallness of
his nature, and he opposed it to the Protestantism of the
kingdom with a kind of brutal aggressiveness. In the first
year of his reign there was a rebellion undertaken, in the
interest of a bastard son of Charles II., called Duke of
Monmouth; but it was savagely put down, first by force of
arms, at Sedgemoor, and afterwards by the "bloody assizes" of
the ruthless Judge Jeffreys. Encouraged by this success
against his enemies James began to ignore the "Test Act,"
which excluded Catholics from office, and to surround himself
by men of his own religion. The Test Act was an unrighteous
law, and the "Declaration of Indulgence" which James issued,
for the toleration of Catholics and Dissenters, was just in
principle, according to the ideas of later times; but the
action of the king with respect to both was, nevertheless, a
gross and threatening violation of law. England had submitted
to worse conduct from Charles II., but its Protestant temper
was now roused, and the loyalty of the subject was consumed by
the fierceness of the Churchman's wrath. James' daughter,
Mary, and her husband, William, Prince of Orange, were invited
from Holland to come over and displace the obnoxious father
from his throne. They accepted the invitation, November, 1688;
the nation rose to welcome them; James fled,--and the great
Revolution, which ended arbitrary monarchy in England forever,
and established constitutional government on clearly defined
and lasting bases, was accomplished without the shedding of a
drop of blood.
The House of Orange and the Dutch Republic.
William of Orange, who thus acquired a place in the line of
English kings, held, at the same time, the nearly regal office
of Stadtholder of Holland; but the office had not remained
continuously in his family since William the Silent, whose
great-grandson he was. Maurice, the son of the murdered
William the Silent, had been chosen to the stadtholdership
after his father's death, and had carried forward his father's
work with success, so far as concerned the liberation of the
United Provinces from the Spanish yoke. He was an abler
soldier than William, but not his equal as a statesman, nor as
a man. The greater statesman of the period was John of
Barneveldt, between whom and the Stadtholder an opposition
grew up which produced jealousy and hostility, more especially
on the part of the latter. A shameful religious conflict had
arisen at this time between the Calvinists, who numbered most
of the clergy in their ranks, and a dissenting body, led by
Jacob Hermann, or Arminius, which protested against the
doctrine of predestination. Barneveldt favored the Arminians.
The Stadtholder, Maurice, without any apparent theological
conviction in the matter, threw his whole weight of influence
on the side of the Calvinists; and was able, with the help of
the Calvinist preachers, to carry the greater part of the
common people into that faction. The Arminians were everywhere
put down as heretics, barred from preaching or teaching, and
otherwise silenced and ill treated. It is a singular fact
that, at the very time of this outburst of Calvinistic fury,
the Dutch were exhibiting otherwise a far more tolerant temper
in religion than any other people in Europe, and had thrown
open their country as a place of shelter for the persecuted of
other lands,--both Christian sectaries and Jews. We infer,
necessarily, that the bitterness of the Calvinists against the
Arminians was more political than religious in its source, and
that the source is really traceable to the fierce ambition of
Prince Maurice, and the passion of the party which supported
his suspicious political aims.
Barneveldt lost influence as the consequence of the
Calvinistic triumph, and was exposed helplessly to the
vindictive hatred of Prince Maurice, who did not scruple to
cause his arrest, his trial and execution (1619), on charges
which none believed. Maurice, whose memory is blackened by
this great crime, died in 1625, and was succeeded by his
half-brother, Frederic Henry. The war with Spain had been
renewed in 1621, at the end of the twelve years truce, and
more than willingly renewed; for the merchant class, and the
maritime interest in the cities which felt secure, preferred
war to peace. Under a hostile flag they pushed their commerce
into Spanish and Portuguese seas from which a treaty of peace
would undoubtedly exclude them; and, so long as Spanish
American silver fleets were afloat, the spoils of ocean war
were vastly enriching. It was during these years of war that
the Dutch got their footing on the farther sides of the world,
and nearly won the mastery of the sea which their slower but
stronger English rivals wrested from them in the end. Not
until the general Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, was a final
settlement of issues between Spain and the United Provinces
brought about. The freedom and independence of the Provinces,
as sovereign states, was then acknowledged by the humbled
Spaniard, and favorable arrangements of trade were conceded to
them. The southern, Catholic Provinces, which Spain had held,
were retained in their subjection to her.
Frederic Henry, the third Stadtholder, was succeeded in 1647
by his son, William II. The latter wasted his short career of
less than four years in foolish plotting to revolutionize the
government and transform the stadtholdership into a monarchy,
supported by France, for the help of which country he seemed
willing to pay any base and treasonable price. Dying suddenly
in the midst of his scheming, he left an unborn son--the
future William III. of England--who came into the world a week
after his father had left it. Under these circumstances the
stadtholdership was suspended, with strong feelings against
the revival of it, resulting from the conduct of William II.
The lesser provinces then fell under the domination of
Holland--so much so that the name of Holland began soon to be
applied to the confederation at large, and is very commonly
used with that meaning for a long subsequent time. The chief
minister of the Estates of Holland, known as the Grand
Pensionary, became the practical head of the federal
government. After 1653 the office of Grand Pensionary was
filled by a statesman of high ability, John de Witt, the chief
end of whose policy appears to have been the prevention of the
return of the House of Orange to power. The government thus
administered, and controlled by the commercial class, was
successful in promoting the general prosperity of the
provinces, and in advancing their maritime importance and
power.
{1079}
It conducted two wars with England--one with the Commonwealth
and one with the restored monarchy--and could claim at least
an equal share of the naval glory won in each. But it
neglected the land defense of the country, and was found
shamefully unprepared in 1672, when the Provinces were
attacked by a villainous combination, formed between Louis
XIV. of France and his servile pensioner, Charles II. of
England. The republic, humbled and distressed by the rushing
conquests of the French, fixed its hopes upon the young Prince
of Orange, heir to the prestige of a great historic name, and
turned its wrath against the party of De Witt. The Prince was
made Stadtholder, despite the opposition of John de Witt, and
the latter, with his brother Cornelius, was murdered by a mob
at Amsterdam. William of Orange proved both wise and heroic as
a leader, and the people were roused to a new energy of
resistance by his appeals and his example. They cut their
dykes and flooded the land, subjecting themselves to
unmeasured loss and distress, but peremptorily stopping the
French advance, until time was gained for awakening public
feeling in Europe against the aggressions of the unscrupulous
French king. Then William of Orange began that which was to be
his great and important mission in life,--the organizing of
resistance to Louis XIV. Without the foresight and penetration
of French designs which he evinced,--without his unflagging
exertions for the next thirty years,--without his diplomatic
tact, his skill of management, his patience in war, his
obstinate perseverance,--it seems to be a certainty that the
ambitious "grand monarch," concentrating the whole power of
France in himself, would have been able to break the
surrounding nations one by one, and they would not have
combined their strength for an effective self-protection. The
revolution of 1688-9 in England, which gave the crown of that
kingdom to William, and his wife Mary, contributed greatly to
his success, and was an event nearly as important in European
politics at large as it was in the constitutional history of
Great Britain.
Germany after the Thirty Years War.
In a natural order of things, Germany should have supplied the
main resistance to Louis XIV. and held his unscrupulous
ambition in check. But Germany had fallen to its lowest state
of political demoralization and disorder. The very idea of
nationality had disappeared. The Empire, even collapsed to the
Germanic sense, and even reduced to a frame and a form, had
almost vanished from practical affairs. The numerous petty
states which divided the German people stood apart from one
another, in substantial independence, and were sundered by
small jealousies and distrusts. Little absolute principalities
they were, each having its little court, which aped, in a
little way, the grand court of the grand monarch of
France--central object of the admiration and the envy of all
small souls in its time. Half of them were ready to bow down
to the splendid being at Versailles, and to be his creatures,
if he condescended to bestow a nod of patronage and attention
upon them. The French king had more influence among them than
their nominal Emperor. More and more distinctly the latter
drew apart in his immediate dominions as an Austrian

sovereign; and more and more completely Austrian interests and
Austrian policy became removed and estranged from the interests
of the Germanic people. The ambitions and the cares of the
House of Hapsburg were increasingly in directions most
opposite to the German side of its relations, tending towards
Italy and the southeast; while, at the same time, the narrow
church influence which depressed the Austrian states widened a
hopeless intellectual difference between them and the northern
German people.
Brandenburg.--Prussia.
The most notable movements in dull German affairs after the
Peace of Westphalia were those which connected themselves with
the settling and centering in Brandenburg of a nucleus of
growing power, around which the nationalizing of Germany has
been a crystalizing process ever since. The Mark of
Brandenburg was one of the earliest conquests (tenth century)
of the Germans from the Wends. Prussia, afterwards united with
Brandenburg, was a later conquest (thirteenth century) from
Wendish or Slavonic and other pagan inhabitants, and its
subjugation was a missionary enterprise, accomplished by the
crusading Order of Teutonic Knights, under the authority and
direction of the Pope. The Order, which held the country for
more than two centuries, and ruled it badly, became
degenerate, and about the middle of the fifteenth century it
was overcome in war by Casimir IV. of Poland, who took away
from it the western part of its territory, and forced it to do
homage to him for the eastern part, as a fief of the Polish
crown. Sixty years later, the Reformation movement in Germany
brought about the extinguishment of the Teutonic Order as a
political power. The Grand Master of the Order at that time
was Albert, a Hohenzollern prince, belonging to a younger
branch of the Brandenburg family. He became a Lutheran, and
succeeded in persuading the Polish king, Sigismund I., to
transfer the sovereignty of the East Prussian fief to him
personally, as a duchy. He transmitted it to his descendants,
who held it for a few generations; but the line became extinct
in 1618, and the Duchy of Prussia then passed to the elder
branch of the family and was united with Brandenburg. The Mark
of Brandenburg had been raised to the rank of an Electorate in
1356 and had been acquired by the Hohenzollern family in 1417.
The superior weight of the Brandenburg electors in northern
Germany may be dated from their acquisition of the important
Duchy of Prussia; but they made no mark on affairs until the
time of Frederick William I., called the Great Elector, who
succeeded to the Electorate in 1640, near the close of the
Thirty Years War. In the arrangements of the Peace of
Westphalia he secured East Pomerania and other considerable
additions of territory. In 1657 he made his Duchy of Prussia
independent of Poland, by treaty with the Polish king. In 1672
and 1674 he had the courage and the independence to join the
allies against Louis XIV., and when the Swedes, in alliance
with Louis, invaded his dominions, he defeated and humbled
them at Fehrbellen, and took from them the greater part of
their Pomeranian territory. When the Great Elector died, in
1688, Brandenburg was the commanding North-German power, and
the Hohenzollern family had fully entered on the great career
it has since pursued.
{1080}
Frederick William's son Frederick, with none of his father's
talent, had a pushing but shallow ambition. He aspired to be a
king, and circumstances made his friendship so important to
the Emperor Leopold I. that the latter, exercising the
theoretical super-sovereignty of the Cæsars, endowed him with
the regal title. He was made King of Prussia, not of
Brandenburg, because Brandenburg stood in vassalage to the
Empire, while Prussia was an independent state.
Poland and Russia.
When Brandenburg and Prussia united began to rise to
importance, the neighboring kingdom of Poland had already
passed the climax of its career. Under the Jagellon dynasty,
sprung from the Duke Jagellon of Lithuania, who married
Hedwig, Queen of Poland, in 1386, and united the two states,
Poland was a great power for two centuries, and seemed more
likely than Russia to dominate the Slavonic peoples of Europe.
The Russians at that time were under the feet of the Mongols
or Tartars, whose terrific sweep westwards, from the steppes
of Asia, had overwhelmed them completely and seemed to bring
their independent history to an end. Slowly a Russian duchy
had emerged, having its seat of doubtful sovereignty at
Moscow, and being subject quite humbly to the Mongol Khan.
About 1477 the Muscovite duke of that time, Ivan Vasilovitch,
broke the Tartar yoke and acquired independence. But his
dominion was limited. The Poles and Lithuanians, now united,
had taken possession of large and important territories
formerly Russian, and the Muscovite state was entirely cut off
from the Baltic. It began, however, in the next century, under
Ivan the Terrible, first of the Czars, to make conquests
southward and south-eastward, from the Tartars, until it had
reached the Caspian Sea. The dominion of the Czar stretched
northward, at the same time, to the White Sea, at the single
port of which trade was opened with the Russian country by
English merchant adventurers in the reign of Elizabeth. Late
in the sixteenth century the old line of rulers, descended
from the Scandinavian Ruric, came to an end, and after a few
years Michael Romanoff established the dynasty which has
reigned since his time.
As between the two principal Slavonic nations, Russia was now
gaining stability and weight, while Poland had begun to lose
both. It was a fatal day for the Poles when, in 1573, on the
death of the last of the Jagellons, they made their monarchy
purely elective, abolishing the restriction to one family
which had previously prevailed. The election was by the
suffrage of the nobles, not the people at large (who were
generally serfs), and the government became an oligarchy of
the most unregulated kind known in history. The crown was
stripped of power, and the unwillingness of the nobility to
submit to any national authority, even that of its own
assembly, reached a point, about the middle of the seventeenth
century, at which anarchy was virtually agreed upon as the
desirable political state. The extraordinary "liberum veto,"
then made part of the Polish constitution, gave to each single
member of the assemblies of the nobles, or of the deputies
representing them, a right to forbid any enactment, or to
arrest the whole proceedings of the body, by his unsupported
negative. This amazing prerogative appears to have been
exercised very rarely in its fullness; but its theoretical
existence effectually extinguished public spirit and paralyzed
all rational legislation. Linked with the singular feebleness
of the monarchy, it leaves small room for surprise at the
ultimate shipwreck of the Polish state.
The royal elections at Warsaw came to be prize contests at
which all Europe assisted. Every Court set up its candidate
for the paltry titular place; every candidate emptied his
purse into the Polish capital, and bribed, intrigued,
corrupted, to the best of his ability. Once, at least (1674),
when the game was on, a sudden breeze of patriotic feeling
swept the traffickers out of the diet, and inspired the
election of a national hero, John Sobieski, to whom Europe
owes much; for it was he who drove back the Turks, in 1683,
when their last bold push into central Europe was made, and
when they were storming at the gates of Vienna. But when
Sobieski died, in 1696, the old scandalous vendue of a crown
was re-opened, and the Elector of Saxony was the buyer. During
most of the last two centuries of its history, Poland sold its
throne to one alien after another, and allowed foreign states
to mix and meddle with its affairs. Of real nationality there
was not much left to extinguish when the time of extinction
came. There were patriots, and very noble patriots, among the
Poles, at all periods of their history; but it seems to have
been the very hopelessness of the state into which their
country had drifted which intensified their patriotic feeling.
Russia had acquired magnitude and strength as a barbaric
power, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but it was
not until the reign of Peter the Great, which opened in 1682,
that the great Slavonic empire began to take on a European
character, with European interests and influences, and to
assimilate the civilization of the West. Peter may be said to
have knotted Russia to Europe at both extremities, by pushing
his dominions to the Baltic on the north and to the Black Sea
on the south, and by putting his own ships afloat in both.
From his day, Russia has been steadily gathering weight in
each of the two continents over which her vast bulk of empire
is stretched, and moving to a mysterious great destiny in time
to come.
The Turks.
The Turks, natural enemies of all the Christian races of
eastern and southeastern Europe, came practically to the end
of their threatening career of conquest about the middle of
the sixteenth century, when Suleiman the Magnificent died
(1566). He had occupied a great part of Hungary; seated a
pasha in Buda; laid siege to Vienna; taken Rhodes from the
Knights of St. John; attacked them in Malta; made an alliance
with the King of France; brought a Turkish fleet into the
western Mediterranean, and held Europe in positive terror of
an Ottoman domination for half a century. His son Selim added
Cyprus to the Turkish conquests; but was humbled in the
Mediterranean by the great Christian victory of Lepanto, won
by the combined fleets of Spain, Venice and the Pope, under
Don John of Austria. After that time Europe had no great fear
of the Turk; though he still fought hard with the Venetians,
the Poles, the Russians, the Hungarians, and, once more,
carried his arms even to Vienna. But, on the whole, it was a
losing fight; the crescent was on the wane.
{1081}
Last glories of Venice.
In the whole struggle with the Ottomans, through the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the republic
of Venice bore a noble part. She contested with them foot by
foot the Greek islands, Peloponnesus, and the eastern shores
of the Adriatic. Even after her commerce began to slip from
her control, and the strength which came from it sank rapidly,
she gave up her eastern possessions but slowly, one by one,
and after stout resistance. Crete cost the Turks a war of
twenty-four years (1645-1669). Fifteen years afterwards the
Venetians gathered their energies afresh, assumed the
aggressive, and conquered the whole Peloponnesus, which they
held for a quarter of a century. Then it was lost again, and
the Ionian Islands alone remained Venetian territory in the
East.
Rise of the House of Savoy.
Of Italy at large, in the seventeenth century, lying prostrate
under the heavy hand of Spain, there is no history to claim
attention in so brief a sketch as this. One sovereign family
in the northwest, long balanced on the Alps, in uncertainty
between a cis-Alpine and a trans-Alpine destiny, but now
clearly committed to Italian fortunes, had begun to win its
footing among the noticeable smaller powers of the day by
sheer dexterity of trimming and shifting sides in the
conflicts of the time. This was the House of Savoy, whose
first possessions were gathered in the crumbling of the old
kingdom of Burgundy, and lay on both slopes of the Alps,
commanding several important passes. On the western and
northern side, the counts, afterwards dukes, of Savoy had to
contend, as time went on, with the expanding kingdom of France
and with the stout-hearted communities which ultimately formed
the Swiss Confederacy. They fell back before both. At one
period, in the fifteenth century, their dominion had stretched
to the Saone, and to the lake of Neufchatel, on both sides of
it, surrounding the free city of Geneva, which they were never
able to overcome, and the lake of Geneva entire. After that
time, the Savoyards gradually lost territory on the Gallic
side and won compensations on the Italian side, in Piedmont,
and at the expense of Genoa and the duchy of Milan. The Duke
Victor Amadeus II. was the most successful winner for his
house, and he made his gains by remarkable manœuvering on both
sides of the wars of Louis XIV. One of his acquisitions (1713)
was the island kingdom of Sicily, which gave him a royal title. A
few years later he exchanged it with Austria for the island
kingdom of Sardinia--a realm more desirable to him for
geographical reasons only. The dukes of Savoy and princes of
Piedmont thus became kings of Sardinia, and the name of the
kingdom was often applied to their whole dominion, down to the
recent time when the House of Savoy attained the grander
kingship of united Italy.
First wars of Louis XIV.
The wars of Louis XIV. gave little opportunity for western and
central Europe to make any other history than that of struggle
and battle, invasion and devastation, intrigue and faithless
diplomacy, shifting of political landmarks and traffic in
border populations, as though they were pastured cattle, for
fifty years, in the last part of the seventeenth century and
the first part of the eighteenth (1665-1715). It will be
remembered that when this King of France married the Infanta
of Spain, he joined in a solemn renunciation of all rights on
her part and on that of her children to such dominions as she
might otherwise inherit. But such a renunciation, with no
sentiment of honor behind it, was worthless, of course, and
Louis XIV., in his own esteem, stood on a height quite above
the moral considerations that have force with common men. When
Philip IV. of Spain died, in 1665, Louis promptly began to put
forward the claims which he had pledged himself not to make.
He demanded part of the Netherlands, and Franche Comté--the
old county (not the duchy) of Burgundy--as belonging to his
queen. It was his good fortune to be served by some of the
greatest generals, military engineers and administrators of
the day--by Turenne, Condé, Vauban, Louvois, and others--and
when he sent his armies of invasion into Flanders and Franche
Comté they carried all before them. Holland took alarm at
these aggressions which came so near to her, and formed an
alliance with England and Sweden to assist Spain. But the
unprincipled English king, Charles II., was easily bribed to
betray his ally; Sweden was bought over; Spain submitted to a
treaty which gave the Burgundian county back to her, and
surrendered an important part of the Spanish Netherlands to
France. Louis' first exploit of national brigandage had thus
been a glorious success, as glory is defined in the vocabulary
of sovereigns of his class. He had stolen several valuable
towns, killed some thousands of people, carried misery into
the lives of some thousands more, and provoked the Dutch to a
challenge of war that seemed promising of more glory of like
kind.
In 1672 he prepared himself to chastise the Dutch, and his
English pensioner, Charles II., with several German princes,
joined him in the war. It was this war, as related already,
which brought about the fall and the death of John de Witt,
Grand Pensionary of Holland; which raised William of Orange to
the restored stadtholdership, and which gave him a certain
leadership of influence in Europe, as against the French king.
It was this war, likewise, which gave the Hohenzollerns their
first great battle-triumph, in the defeat of the Swedes,
allies of the French, at Fehrbellin. For Frederick William,
the Great Elector, had joined the Emperor Leopold and the King
of Spain in another league with Holland to resist the
aggressions of France; while Sweden now took sides with Louis.
England was soon withdrawn from the contest, by the determined
action of Parliament, which forced its king to make peace.
Otherwise the war became general in western Europe and was
frightful in the death and misery it cost. Generally the
French had the most success. Turenne was killed in 1675 and
Condé retired the same year; but able commanders were found in
Luxemburg and Crequi to succeed them. In opposition to William
of Orange, the Dutch made peace at Nimegueu, in 1678, and
Spain was forced to give up Franche Comté, with another
fraction of her Netherland territories; but Holland lost
nothing. Again Louis XIV. had beaten and robbed his neighbors
with success, and was at the pinnacle of his glory. France, it
is true, was oppressed and exhausted, but her king was a
"grand monarch," and she must needs be content.
{1082}
For a few years the grand monarch contented himself with small
filchings of territory, which kept his conscience supple and
gave practice to his sleight-of-hand. On one pretext and
another he seized town after town in Alsace, and, at last,
1681, surprised and captured the imperial free city of
Strasburg, in a time of entire peace. He bombarded Genoa, took
Avignon from the Pope, bullied and abused feeble Spain, made
large claims on the Palatinate in the name of his
sister-in-law, but against her will, and did nearly what he
was pleased to do, without any effective resistance, until
after William of Orange had been called to the English throne.
That completed a great change in the European situation.
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The change had already been more than half brought about by a
foul and foolish measure which Louis had adopted in his
domestic administration. Cursed by a tyrant's impatience at
the idea of free thought and free opinion among his subjects,
he had been persuaded by Catholic zealots near his person to
revoke the Edict of Nantes and revive persecution of the
Huguenots. This was done in 1685. The fatal effects within
France resembled those which followed the persecution of the
Moriscoes of Spain. The Huguenots formed a large proportion of
the best middle class of the kingdom,--its manufacturers, its
merchants, its skilled and thrifty artisans. Infamous efforts
were made to detain them in the country and there force them
to apostacy or hold them under punishment if they withstood.
But there was not power enough in the monarchy, with all its
absolutism, to enclose France in such a wall. Vast numbers
escaped--half a million it is thought--carrying their skill,
their knowledge, their industry and their energy into Holland,
England, Switzerland, all parts of Protestant Germany, and
across the ocean to America. France was half ruined by the
loss.
The League of Augsburg.
At the same time, the Protestant allies in Germany and the
North, whom Louis had held in subserviency to himself so long,
were angered and alarmed by his act. They joined a new
defensive league against him, formed at Augsburg, in 1686,
which embraced the Emperor, Spain, Holland, and Sweden, at
first, and afterwards took in Savoy and other Italian states,
along with Germany almost entire. But the League was miserably
unprepared for war, and hardly hindered the march of Louis'
armies when he suddenly moved them into the Rhenish
electorates in 1688. For the second time in his reign, and
under his orders, the Palatinate was fearfully devastated with
fire and sword. But this attack on Germany, occupying the arms
of France, gave William of Orange his opportunity to enter
England unopposed and take the English crown. That
accomplished, he speedily brought England into the League,
enlarging it to a "grand alliance" of all western Europe
against the dangerous monarch of France, and inspiring it with
some measure of his own energy and courage. France had now to
deal with enemies on every side. They swarmed on all her
frontiers, and the strength and valor with which she met them
were amazing. For three years the French more than held their
own, not only in land-fighting, but on the sea, where they
seemed likely, for a time, to dispute the supremacy of the
English and the Dutch with success. But the frightful draft
made on the resources of the nation, and the strain on its
spirit, were more than could be kept up. The obstinacy of the
king, and his indifference to the sufferings of his people,
prolonged the war until 1697, but with steady loss to the
French of the advantages with which they began. Two years
before the end, Louis had bought over the Duke of Savoy, by
giving back to him all that France had taken from his Italian
territories since Richelieu's time. When the final peace was
settled, at Ryswick, like surrenders had to be made in the
Netherlands, Lorraine, and beyond the Rhine; but Alsace, with
Strasburg, was kept, to be a German graft on France, until the
sharp Prussian pruning knife, in our own time, cut it away.
War of the Spanish Succession.
There were three years of peace after the treaty of Ryswick,
an then a new war--longer, more bitter, and more destructive
than those before it--arose out of questions connected with
the succession to the crown of Spain. Charles II., last of the
Austro-Spanish or Spanish-Hapsburg kings, died in 1700,
leaving no heir. The nearest of his relatives to the throne
were the descendants of his two sisters, one of whom had
married Louis XIV. and the other the Emperor Leopold, of the
Austrian House. Louis XIV., as we know, had renounced all the
Spanish rights of his queen and her issue; but that
renunciation had been shown already to be wasted paper.
Leopold had renounced nothing; but he had required a
renunciation of her Spanish claims from the one daughter,
Maria, of his Spanish wife, and he put forward claims to the
Spanish succession, on his own behalf, because his mother had
been a princess of that nation, as well as his wife. He was
willing, however, to transfer his own rights to a younger son,
fruit of a second marriage, the Archduke Charles.
The question of the Spanish succession was one of European
interest and importance, and attempts had been made to settle
it two years before the death of the Spanish king, in 1698, by
a treaty, or agreement, between France, England, and Holland.
By that treaty these outside powers (consulting Spain not at
all) undertook a partition of the Spanish monarchy, in what
they assumed to be the interest of the European balance of
power. They awarded Naples, Sicily, and some lesser Italian
possessions to a grandson of Louis XIV., the Milanese
territory to the Archduke Charles, and the rest of the Spanish
dominions to an infant son of Maria, the Emperor's daughter,
who was married to the elector of Bavaria. But the infant so
selected to wear the crown of Spain died soon afterwards, and
a second treaty of partition was framed. This gave the
Milanese to the Duke of Lorraine, in exchange for his own
duchy, which he promised to cede to France, and the whole
remainder of the Spanish inheritance was conceded to the
Austrian archduke, Charles. In Spain, these arrangements were
naturally resented, by both people and king, and the latter
was persuaded to set against them a will, bequeathing all that
he ruled to the younger grandson of Louis XIV., Philip of
Anjou, on condition that the latter renounce for himself and
for his heirs all claims to the crown of France. The
inducement to this bequest was the power which the King of
France possessed to enforce it, and so to preserve the unity
of the Spanish realm. That the argument and the persuasion
came from Louis' own agents, while other agents amused
England, Holland and Austria with treaties of partition, is
tolerably clear.
{1083}
Near the end of the year 1700, the King of Spain died; his
will was disclosed; the treaties were as coolly ignored as the
prior renunciation had been, and the young French prince was
sent pompously into Spain to accept the proffered crown. For a
time, there was indignation in Europe, but no more. William of
Orange could persuade neither England nor Holland to war, and
Austria could not venture hostilities without their help. But
that submissiveness only drew from the grand monarch fresh
displays of his dishonesty and his insolence. Philip of
Anjou's renunciation of a possible succession to the French
throne, while occupying that of Spain, was practically
annulled: The government of Spain was guided from Paris like
that of a dependency of France. Dutch and English commerce was
injured by hostile measures. Movements alarming to Holland
were made on the frontiers of the Spanish Netherlands.
Finally, when the fugitive ex-king of England, James II., died
at St. Germains, in September, 1701, Louis acknowledged James'
son, the Pretender, as King of England. This insult roused the
war spirit in England which King William had striven so hard
to evoke. He had already arranged the terms of a new defensive
Grand Alliance with Holland, Austria, and most of the German
states. There was no difficulty now in making it an offensive
combination.
But William, always weak in health, and worn by many cares and
harassing troubles, died in March, 1702, before the war which
he desired broke out. His death made no pause in the movement
of events. Able statesmen, under Queen Anne, his successor,
carried forward his policy and a great soldier was found, in
the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to command
the armies of England and the Dutch. Another commander, of
remarkable genius, Prince Eugene of Savoy, took service with
the Emperor, and these two, acting cordially together, humbled
the overweening pride of Louis XIV. in the later years of his
reign. He had worn out France by his long exactions. His
strong ministers, Colbert, Louvois and others, were dead, and
he did not find successors for them. He had able generals, but
none equal to Turenne, Condé or Luxemburg,--none to cope with
Marlborough and Prince Eugene. The war was widespread, on a
stupendous scale, and it lasted for twelve years. Its
campaigns were fought in the Low Countries, in Germany, in
Italy and in Spain. It glorified the reign of Anne, in English
history, by the shining victories of Blenheim, Ramilies,
Oudenarde and Malplaquet, and by the capture of Gibraltar, the
padlock of the Mediterranean. The misery to which France was
reduced in the later years of the war was probably the
greatest that the much suffering nation ever knew.
The Peace of Utrecht.
Louis sought peace, and was willing to go far in surrenders to
obtain it. But the allies pressed him too hard in their
demands. They would have him not only abandon the Bourbon
dynasty that he had set up in Spain, but join them in
overthrowing it. He refused to negotiate on such terms, and
Fortune approved his resolution, by giving decisive victories
to his arms in Spain, while dealing, out disaster and defeat
in every other field. England grew weary of the war when it
came to appear endless, and Marlborough and the Whigs, who had
carried it on, were ousted from power. The Tories, under
Harley and Bolingbroke, came into office and negotiated the
famous Peace of Utrecht (1713), to which all the belligerents
in the war, save the Emperor, consented. The Emperor yielded
to a supplementary treaty, signed at Rastadt the next year.
These treaties left the Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V., on
his throne, but bound him, by fresh renunciations, not to be
likewise King of France. They gave to England Gibraltar and
Minorca, at the expense of Spain, and Nova Scotia,
Newfoundland and Hudson's Bay at the expense of France. They
took much more from Spain. They took Sicily, which they gave
to the Duke of Savoy, with the title of King; they took
Naples, Milan, Mantua and Sardinia, which they gave to
Austria, or, more strictly speaking, to the Emperor; and they
took the Spanish Netherlands, which they gave to Austria in
the main, with some barrier towns to the Dutch. They took from
France her conquests on the right bank of the Rhine; but they
left her in possession of Alsace, with Strasburg and Landau.
The great victim of the war was Spain.
France at the death of Louis XIV.
Louis XIV. was near the end of his reign when this last of the
fearful wars which he caused was brought to a close. He died
in September, 1715, leaving a kingdom which had reasons to
curse his memory in every particular of its state. He had
foiled the exertions of as wise a minister, Jean Colbert, as
ever strove to do good to France. He had dried the sources of
national life as with a searching and monstrous sponge. He had
repressed everything which he could not absorb in his
flaunting court, in his destroying armies, and in himself. He
had dealt with France as with a dumb beast that had been given
him to bestride; to display himself upon, before the gaze of an
envious world; to be bridled, and spurred at his pleasure, and
whipped; to toil for him and bear burdens as he willed; to
tread upon his enemies and trample his neighbors' fields. It
was he, more than all others before or after, who made France
that dumb creature which suffered and was still for a little
longer time, and then began thinking and went mad.
{1084}
Charles XII. of Sweden.
While the Powers of western Europe were wrestling in the great
war of the Spanish Succession, the nations of the North and
East were tearing each other, at the same time, with equal
stubbornness and ferocity. The beginning of their conflict was
a wanton attack from Russia, Poland and Denmark, on the
possessions of Sweden. Sweden, in the past century, had made
extensive, conquests, and her territories, outside of the
Scandinavian peninsula, were thrust provokingly into the sides
of all these three neighbors. There had been three Charleses
on the Swedish throne in succession, following Christina, the
daughter of Gustavus Adolphus. Queen Christina, an eccentric
character, had abdicated in 1654, in order to join the
Catholic Church, and had been succeeded by her cousin, Charles
X. The six years reign of this Charles was one of constant war
with the Danes and the Poles, and almost uniformly he was the
aggressor. His son and successor, Charles XI., suffered the
great defeat at Fehrbellin which gave prestige to Brandenburg;
but he was shielded by the puissant arm of Louis XIV., his
ally, and lost no territory. More successful in his domestic
policy than in his wars, he, both practically and formally,
established absolutism in the monarchy. Inheriting from his
father that absolute power, while inheriting at the same time
the ruthless ambition of his grandfather, Charles XII. came to
the throne in 1697.
In the first two years of his reign, this extraordinary young
autocrat showed so little of his character that his royal
neighbors thought him a weakling, and Peter the Great, of
Russia, conspired with Augustus of Poland and Frederick IV. of
Denmark to strip him of those parts of his dominion which they
severally coveted. The result was like the rousing of a lion
by hunters who went forth to pursue a hare. The young Swede,
dropping, instantly and forever, all frivolities, sprang at
his assailants before they dreamed of finding him awake, and
the game was suddenly reversed. The hunters became the hunted,
and they had no rest for nine years from the implacable
pursuit of them which Charles kept up. He defeated the Danes
and the Russians in the first year of the war (1700). In 1702
he invaded Poland and occupied Warsaw; in 1704 he forced the
deposition of the Saxon King of Poland, Augustus, and the
election of Stanislaus Leczinski. Not yet satisfied, he
followed Augustus into his electorate of Saxony, and compelled
him there to renounce the Polish crown and the Russian
alliance. In 1708 he invaded Russia, marching on Moscow, but
turning aside to meet an expected ally, Mazeppa the Cossack.
It was the mistake which Napoleon repeated a century later.
The Swedes exhausted themselves in the march, and the Russians
bided their time. Peter the Czar had devoted eight years,
since Charles defeated him at Narva, to making soldiers,
well-trained, out of the mob which that fight scattered. When
Charles had worn his army down to a slender and disheartened
force, Peter struck and destroyed it at Pultowa. Charles
escaped from the wreck and took refuge, with a few hundreds of
is guards, in the Turkish province of Bessarabia, at Bender. In
that shelter, which the Ottomans hospitably accorded to him,
he remained for five years, intriguing to bring the Porte into
war with his Muscovite enemy, while all the fruits of his nine
years of conquest in the North were stripped from him by the
old league revived. Augustus returned to Poland and recovered
his crown. Peter took possession of Livonia, Ingria, and a
great part of Finland. Frederick IV., of Denmark, attacked
Sweden itself. The kingless kingdom made a valiant defense
against the crowd of eager enemies; but Charles had used the
best of its energies and its resources, and it was not strong.
Near the end of 1710, Charles succeeded in pushing the Sultan
into war with the Czar, and the latter, advancing into
Moldavia, rashly placed himself in a position of great peril,
where the Turks had him really at their mercy. But Catherine,
the Czarina, who was present, found means to bribe the Turkish
vizier in command, and Peter escaped with no loss more serious
than the surrender of Azov. That ended the war, and the hopes
of the Swedish king. But still the stubborn Charles wearied
the Porte with his importunities, until he was commanded to
quit the country. Even then he refused to depart,--resisted
when force was used to expel him, and did not take his leave
until late in November, 1714, when he received intelligence
that his subjects were preparing to appoint his sister regent
of the kingdom and to make peace with the Czar. That news
hurried him homeward; but only for continued war. He was about
to make terms with Russia, and to secure her alliance against
Denmark, Poland and Hanover, when he was killed during an
invasion of Norway, in the siege of Friedrickshall (December,
1718). The crown of Sweden was then conferred upon his sister,
but shorn of absolute powers, and practically dependent upon
the nobles. All the wars in which Charles XII. had involved
his kingdom were brought to an end by great sacrifices, and
Russia rose to the place of Sweden as the chief power in the
North. The Swedes paid heavily for the career of their
"Northern Alexander."
Alliance against Spain.
Before the belligerents in the North had quieted themselves,
those of the West were again in arms. Spain had fallen under
the influence of two eager and restless ambitions, that of the
queen, Elizabeth of Parma, and an Italian minister, Cardinal
Alberoni; and the schemes into which these two drew the
Bourbon king, Philip V., soon ruptured the close relations
with France which Louis XIV. had ruined his kingdom to bring
about. To check them, a triple alliance was formed (1717)
between France, England and Holland,--enlarged the next year
to a quadruple alliance by the adhesion of Austria. At the
outset of the war, Spain made a conquest of Sardinia, and
almost accomplished the same in Sicily; but the English
crushed her navy and her rising commerce, while the French
crossed the Pyrenees with an army which the Spaniards could
not resist. A vast combination which Alberoni was weaving, and
which took in Charles XII., Peter the Great, the Stuart
pretender, the English Jacobites, and the opponents of the
regency in France, fell to pieces when the Swedish king fell.
Alberoni was driven from Spain and all his plans were given
up. The Spanish king withdrew from Sicily and surrendered
Sardinia. The Emperor and the Duke of Savoy exchanged islands,
as stated before, and the former (holding Naples already)
revived the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, while the latter
became King of Sardinia.
{1085}
War of the Polish Succession.
These disturbances ended, there were a few years of rest in
Europe, and then another war, of the character peculiar to the
eighteenth century, broke out. It had its cause in the Polish
election of a king to succeed Augustus II. As usual, the
neighboring nations formed a betting ring of onlookers, so to
speak, and "backed" their several candidates heavily. The
deposed and exiled king, Stanislaus Leczinski, who received
his crown from Charles XII. and lost it after Pultowa, was the
French candidate; for he had married his daughter to Louis XV.
Frederick Augustus of Saxony, son of the late King Augustus,
was the Russian and Austrian candidate. The contest resulted
in a double election (1733), and out of that came war. Spain
and Sardinia joined France, and the Emperor had no allies.
Hence the House of Austria suffered greatly in the war, losing
the Two Sicilies, which went to Spain, and were conferred on a
younger son of the king, creating a third Bourbon monarchy.
Part of the duchy of Milan was also yielded by Austria to the
King of Sardinia; and the Duke of Lorraine, husband of the
Emperor's daughter, Maria Theresa, gave up his duchy to
Stanislaus, who renounced therefor his claim on the crown of
Poland. The Duke of Lorraine received as compensation a right
of succession to the grand duchy of Tuscany, where the
Medicean House was about to expire. These were the principal
consequences, humiliating to Austria, of what is known as the
First Family Compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons.
War of Jenkins' Ear.
This alliance between the two courts gave encouragement to
hostile demonstrations in the Spanish colonies against English
traders, who were accused of extensive smuggling, and the
outcome was a petty war (1739), called "the War of Jenkins'
Ear."
War of the Austrian Succession.
Before these hostilities were ended, another "war of
succession," more serious than any before it, was wickedly
brought upon Europe. The Emperor, Charles VI., died in 1740,
leaving no son, but transmitting his hereditary dominions to
his eldest daughter, the celebrated Maria Theresa, married to
the ex-Duke of Lorraine. Years before his death he had sought
to provide against any possible disputing of the succession,
by an instrument known as the Pragmatic Sanction, to which he
obtained, first, the assent of the estates of all the
provinces and kingdoms of the Austrian realm, and, secondly,
the guaranty by solemn treaty of almost every European Power.
He died in the belief that he had established his daughter
securely, and left her to the enjoyment of a peaceful reign.
It was a pitiful illusion. He was scarcely in his grave before
half the guarantors of the Pragmatic Sanction were putting
forward claims to this part and that part of the Austrian
territories. The Elector of Bavaria, the Elector of Saxony (in
his wife's name) and the King of Spain, claimed the whole
succession; the two first mentioned on grounds of collateral
lineage, the latter (a Bourbon cuckoo in the Spanish-Hapsburg
nest) as being the heir of the Hapsburgs of Spain.
While these larger pretensions were still jostling each other
in the diplomatic stage, a minor claimant, who said little but
acted powerfully, sent his demands to the Court of Vienna with
an army following close at their heels. This was Frederick II.
of Prussia, presently known as Frederick the Great, who
resuscitated an obsolete claim on Silesia and took possession
of the province (1740-41) without waiting for debate. If,
anywhere, there had been virtuous hesitations before, his bold
stroke ended them. France could not see her old Austrian rival
dismembered without hastening to grasp a share. She contracted
with the Spanish king and the Elector of Bavaria to enforce
the latter's claims, and to take the Austrian Netherlands in
prospect for compensation, while Spain should find indemnity
in the Austro-Italian states. Frederick of Prussia, having
Silesia in hand, offered to join Maria Theresa in the defense
of her remaining dominions; but his proposals were refused,
and he entered the league against her. Saxony did the same.
England and Sardinia were alone in befriending Austria, and
England was only strong at sea. Maria Theresa found her
heartiest support in Hungary, where she made a personal appeal
to her subjects, and enlarged their constitutional privileges.
In 1742 the Elector of Bavaria was elected Emperor, as Charles
VII. In the same year, Maria Theresa, acting under pressure
from England, gave up the greater part of Silesia to
Frederick, by treaty, as a price paid, not for the help he had
offered at first, but barely for his neutrality. He abandoned
his allies and withdrew from the war. His retirement produced
an immense difference in the conditions of the contest. Saxony
made peace at the same time, and became an active ally on the
Austrian side. So rapidly did the latter then recover their
ground and the French slip back that Frederick, after two
years of neutrality, became alarmed, and found a pretext to
take up arms again. The scale was now tipped to the side on
which he threw himself, but not immediately; and when, in
1745, the Emperor, Charles VII., died suddenly, Maria Theresa
was able to secure the election of her husband, Francis of
Lorraine (or Tuscany), which founded the Hapsburg-Lorraine
dynasty on the imperial throne. This was in September. In the
following December Frederick was in Dresden, and Saxony--the
one effective ally left to the Austrians, since England had
withdrawn from the war in the previous August--was at his
feet. Maria Theresa, having the Spaniards and the French still
to fight in Italy and the Netherlands, could do nothing but make
terms with the terrible Prussian king. The treaty, signed at
Dresden on Christmas Day, 1745, repeated the cession of
Silesia to Frederick, with Glatz, and restored Saxony to the
humbled Elector.
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
France and Spain, deserted the second time by their faithless
Prussian ally, continued the war until 1748, when the
influence of England and Holland brought about a treaty of
peace signed at Aix-la-Chapelle. France gained nothing from
the war, but had suffered a loss of prestige, distinctly.
Austria, besides giving up Silesia to Frederick of Prussia,
was required to surrender a bit of Lombardy to the King of
Sardinia, and to make over Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla to
Don Philip of Spain, for a hereditary principality. Under the
circumstances, the result to Maria Theresa was a notable
triumph, and she shared with her enemy, Frederick, the
fruitage of fame harvested in the war. But antagonism between
these two, and between the interests and ambitions which they
respectively represented--dynastic on one side and national
on the other--was henceforth settled and irreconcilable, and
could leave in Germany no durable peace.
{1086}
Colonial conflicts of France and England.
The peace was broken, not for Germany alone, but for Europe
and for almost the world at large, in six years after the
signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The rupture occurred
first very far from Europe--on the other sides of the globe,
in America and Hindostan, where England and France were eager
rivals in colonial conquest. In America, they had quarreled
since the Treaty of Utrecht over the boundaries of Acadia, or
Nova Scotia, which that treaty transferred to England.
Latterly, they had come to a more serious collision in the
interior of the continent. The English, rooting their
possession of the Atlantic seaboard by strong and stable
settlements, had been tardy explorers and slow in passing the
Alleganies to the region inland. On the other hand, the
French, nimble and enterprising in exploration, and in
military occupation, but superficial and artificial in
colonizing, had pushed their way by a long circuit from
Canada, through the great lakes to the head waters of the
Ohio, and were fortifying a line in the rear of the British
colonies, from the valley of the St. Lawrence to the valley of
the Mississippi, before the English were well aware of their
intent. Then the colonists, Virginians and Pennsylvanians,
took arms, and the career of George Washington was begun as
leader of an expedition in 1754 to drive the French from the
Ohio. It was not successful, and a strong force of regular
troops was sent over next year by the British government,
under Braddock, to repeat the attempt. A frightful
catastrophe, worse than failure, came of this second
undertaking, and open war between France and England, which
had not yet been declared, followed soon. This colonial
conflict of England and France fired the train, so to speak,
which caused a great explosion of suppressed hostilities in
Europe.
The House of Hanover in England.
If the English crown had not been worn by a German king,
having a German principality to defend, the French and English
might have fought out their quarrel on the ocean, and in the
wilderness of America, or on the plains of the Carnatic,
without disturbing their continental neighbors. But England
was now under a new, foreign-bred line of sovereigns,
descended from that daughter of James I., the princess
Elizabeth, who married the unfortunate Elector Palatine and
was queen of Bohemia for a brief winter term. After William of
Orange died, his wife, Queen Mary, having preceded him to the
grave, and no children having been born to them, Anne, the
sister of Mary, had been called to the throne. It was in her
reign that the brilliant victories of Marlborough were won,
and in her reign that the Union of Scotland with England,
under one parliament as well as one sovereign, was brought
about. On Anne's death (1714), her brother, the son of James
II., called "the Pretender," was still excluded from the
throne, because of his religion, and the next heir was sought
and summoned, in the person of the Elector George, of Hanover,
whose remote ancestress was Elizabeth Stuart. George I. had
reigned thirteen years, and his son, George II., had been
twenty-seven years on the throne, when these quarrels with
France arose. Throughout the two reigns, until 1742, the
English nation had been kept mostly at peace, by the potent
influence of a great minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and had
made a splendid advance in material prosperity and strength;
while the system of ministerial government, responsible to
Parliament and independent of the Crown, which has been in
later times the peculiar feature of the British constitution,
was taking shape. In 1742, Walpole fell from power, and the
era of peace for England was ended. But her new dynasty had
been firmly settled, and politically, industrially, and
commercially, the nation was so sound in its condition as to
be well prepared for the series of wars into which it plunged.
In the War of the Austrian Succession England had taken a limited
part, and with small results to herself. She was now about to
enter, under the lead of the high spirited and ambitious Pitt,
afterwards Earl of Chatham, the greatest career of conquest in
her history.

The Seven Years War.
As before said, it was the anxiety of George II. for his
electorate of Hanover which caused an explosion of hostilities
in Europe to occur, as consequence of the remote fighting of
French and English colonists in America. For the strengthening
of Hanover against attacks from France, he sought an alliance
with Frederick of Prussia. This broke the long-standing
anti-French alliance of England with Austria, and Austria
joined fortunes with her ancient Bourbon enemy, in order to be
helped to the revenge which Maria Theresa now promised herself
the pleasure of executing upon the Prussian king. As the
combination finally shaped itself on the French side, it
embraced France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Poland, Saxony, and
the Palatinate, and its inspiring purpose was to break Prussia
down and partition her territories, rather than to support
France against England. The agreements to this end were made
in secret; but Frederick obtained knowledge of them, and
learned that papers proving the conspiracy against him were in
the archives of the Saxony government, at Dresden. His action was
decided with that promptitude which so often disconcerted his
enemies. He did not wait to be attacked by the tremendous
league formed against him, nor waste time in efforts to
dissolve it, but defiantly struck the first blow. He poured
his army into Saxony (August, 1756), seized Dresden by
surprise, captured the documents he desired, and published
them to the world in vindication of his summary precipitation
of war. Then, blockading the Saxon army in Pirna, he pressed
rapidly into Bohemia, defeated the Austrians at Lowositz, and
returned as rapidly, to receive the surrender of the Saxons
and to enlist most of them in his own ranks. This was the
European opening of the Seven Years War, which raged, first
and last, in all quarters of the globe. In the second year of
the war, Frederick gained an important victory at Prague and
suffered a serious reverse at Kolin, which threw most of
Silesia into the hands of the Austrians. Close following that
defeat came crushing news from Hanover, where the incompetent
Duke of Cumberland, commanding for his father, the English
King George, had allowed the French to force him to an
agreement which disbanded his army, and left Prussia alone in
the terrific fight. Frederick's position seemed desperate; but
his energy retrieved it.
{1087}
He fought and defeated the French at Rossbach, near Lützen, on
the 5th of November, and the Austrians, at Leuthen, near
Breslau, exactly one month later. In the campaigns of 1758, he
encountered the Russians at Zorndorf, winning a bloody
triumph, and he sustained a defeat at Hochkirk, in battle with
the Austrians. But England had repudiated Cumberland's
convention and recalled him; English and Hanoverian forces
were again put into the field, under the capable command of
Prince Frederick of Brunswick, who turned the tide in that
quarter against the French, and the results of the year were
generally favorable to Frederick. In 1759, the Hanoverian
army, under Prince Ferdinand, improved the situation on that
side; but the prospects of the King of Prussia were clouded by
heavy disasters. Attempting to push a victory over the
Russians too far, at Kunersdorf, he was terribly beaten. He
lost Dresden, and a great part of Saxony. In the next year he
recovered all but Dresden, which he wantonly and inhumanly
bombarded. The war was now being carried on with great
difficulty by all the combatants. Prussia, France and Austria
were suffering almost equally from exhaustion; the misery
among their people was too great to be ignored; the armies of
each had dwindled. The opponents of Pitt's war policy in
England overcame him, in October, 1761, whereupon he resigned,
and the English subsidy to Frederick was withdrawn. But that
was soon made up to him by the withdrawal of Russia from the
war, at the beginning of 1762, when Peter of Holstein, who
admired Frederick, became Czar. Sweden made peace a little
later. The remainder of the worn and wearied fighters went on
striking at each other until near the end of the year.
Meantime, on the colonial and East Indian side of it, this
prodigious Seven Years War, as a great struggle for
world-empire between England and France, had been adding
conquest to conquest and triumph to triumph for the former. In
1759, Wolfe had taken Quebec and died on the Heights of
Abraham in the moment of victory. Another twelve months saw
the whole of Canada clear of Frenchmen in arms. In the East,
to use the language of Macaulay, "conquests equalling in
rapidity and far surpassing in magnitude those of Cortes and
Pizarro, had been achieved." "In the space of three years the
English had founded a mighty empire. The French had been
defeated in every part of India. Chandernagore had yielded to
Clive, Pondicherry to Coote. Throughout Bengal, Bahar, Orissa,
and the Carnatic, the authority of the East India Company was
more absolute than that of Acbar or Aurungzebe had ever been."
Treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg.
In February, 1763, two treaties of peace were concluded, one
at Paris, on the 10th, between England, France and Spain (the
latter Power having joined France in the war as late as
January, 1762); the other at Hubertsburg, on the 15th, between
Prussia and Austria. France gave up to England all her
possessions in North America, except Louisiana (which passed
to Spain,), and yielded Minorca, but recovered the
Philippines. She surrendered, moreover, considerable interests
in the West Indies and in Africa. The colonial aspirations of
the French were cast down by a blow that was lasting in its
effect. As between Prussia and Austria, the triumphs of the
peace and the glories of the war were won entirely by the
former. Frederick came out of it, "Frederick the Great," the
most famous man of his century, as warrior and as statesman,
both. He had defended his little kingdom for seven years
against three great Powers, and yielded not one acre of its
territory. He had raised Prussia to the place in Germany from
which her subsequent advance became easy and almost
inevitable. But the great fame he earned is spotted with many
falsities and much cynical indifference to the commonest
ethics of civilization. His greatness is of that character
which requires to be looked at from selected standpoints.
Russia.
Another character, somewhat resembling that of Frederick, was
now drawing attention on the eastern side of Europe. Since the
death of Peter the Great, the interval in Russian history had
been covered by six reigns, with a seventh just opening, and
the four sovereigns who really exercised power were women.
Peter's widow, Catherine I., had succeeded him (1725) for two
years. His son, Alexis, he had put to death; but Alexis left a
son, Peter, to whom Catherine bequeathed the crown. Peter II.
died after a brief reign, in 1730; and the nearest heirs were
two daughters of Peter the Great, Anne and Elizabeth. But they
were set aside in favor of another Anne--Anne of
Courland--daughter of Peter the Great's brother. Anne's reign
of ten years was under the influence of German favorites and
ministers, and nearly half of it was occupied with a Turkish
War, in cooperation with Austria. For Austria the war had most
humiliating results, costing her Belgrade, all of Servia, part
of Bosnia and part of Wallachia. Russia won back Asov, with
fortifications forbidden, and that was all. Anne willed her
crown to an infant nephew, who appears in the Russian annals
as Ivan VI.; but two regencies were overthrown by palace
revolutions within little more than a year, and the second one
carried to the throne that Princess Elizabeth, younger
daughter of Peter the Great, who had been put aside eleven
years before. Elizabeth, a woman openly licentious and
intemperate, reigned for twenty-one years, during the whole
important period of the War of the Austrian Succession, and
almost to the end of the Seven Years War. She was bitterly
hostile to Frederick the Great, whose sharp tongue had
offended her, and she joined Maria Theresa with eagerness in
the great effort of revenge, which failed. In the early part
of her reign, war with Sweden had been more successful and had
added South Finland to the Russian territories. It is claimed
for her domestic government that the general prosperity of the
country was advanced.
{1088}
Catherine II.
On the death of Elizabeth, near the end of the year 1761, the
crown passed to her nephew, Peter of Holstein, son of her
eldest sister, Anne, who had married the Duke of Holstein.
This prince had been the recognized heir, living at the
Russian court, during the whole of Elizabeth's reign. He was
an ignorant boor, and he had become a besotted drunkard. Since
1744 he had been married to a young German princess, of the
Anhalt Zerbst family, who took the baptismal name of Catherine
when she entered the Greek Church. Catherine possessed a superior
intellect and a strong character; but the vile court into
which she came as a young girl, bound to a disgusting husband,
had debauched her in morals and lowered her to its own
vileness. She gained so great an ascendancy that the court was
subservient to her, from the time that her incapable husband,
Peter III., succeeded to the throne. He reigned by sufferance
for a year and a half, and then (July, 1762) he was easily
deposed and put to death. In the deposition, Catherine was the
leading actor. Of the subsequent murder, some historians are
disposed to acquit her. She did not scruple, at least, to
accept the benefit of both deeds, which raised her, alone, to
the throne of the Czars.
Partition of Poland.
Peter III., in his short reign, had made one important change
in Russian policy, by withdrawing from the league against
Frederick of Prussia, whom he greatly admired. Catherine found
reasons, quite aside from those of personal admiration, for
cultivating the friendship of the King of Prussia, and a close
understanding with that astute monarch was one of the earliest
objects of her endeavor. She had determined to put an end to
the independence of Poland. As she first entertained the
design, there was probably no thought of the partitioning
afterwards contrived. But her purpose was to keep the Polish
kingdom in disorder and weakness, and to make Russian
influence supreme in it, with views, no doubt, that looked
ultimately to something more. On the death of the Saxon king
of Poland, Augustus III., in 1763, Catherine put forward a
native candidate for the vacant throne, in the person of
Stanislaus Poniatowsky, a Russianized Pole and a former lover
of her own. The King of Prussia supported her candidate, and
Poniatowsky was duly elected, with 10,000 Russian troops in
Warsaw to see that it was properly done. The Poles were
submissive to the invasion of their political independence;
but when Catherine, who sought to create a Russian party in
Poland by protecting the members of the Greek Church and the
Protestants, against the intolerance of the Polish Catholics,
forced a concession of civil equality to the former (1768),
there was a wide-spread Catholic revolt. In the fierce war
which followed, a band of Poles was pursued across the Turkish
border, and a Turkish town was burned by the Russian pursuers.
The Sultan, who professed sympathy with the Poles, then
declared war against Russia. The Russo-Turkish war, in turn,
excited Austria, which feared Russian conquests from the
Turks, and another wide disturbance of the peace of Europe
seemed threatening. In the midst of the excitement there came
a whispered suggestion, to the ear of the courts of Vienna and
St. Petersburg, that they severally satisfy their territorial
cravings and mutually assuage each other's jealousy, at the
expense of the crumbling kingdom of Poland. The whisper may
have come from Frederick II. of Prussia, or it may not. There
are two opinions on the point. From whatever source it came,
it found favorable consideration at Vienna and St. Petersburg,
and between February and August, 1772, the details of the
partition were worked out.
Poland was not yet extinguished. The kingdom was only shorn of
some 160,000 square miles of territory, more than half of
which went to Russia, a third to Austria, and the remainder,
less than 10,000 square miles, to Prussia. This last mentioned
annexation was the old district of West Prussia which the
Polish king, Casimir IV., had wrested from the Teutonic
Knights in 1466, before Brandenburg had aught to do with
Prussian lands or name. After three centuries, Frederick
reclaimed it.
The diminished kingdom of Poland showed more signs of a true
national life, of an earnest national feeling, of a sobered
and rational patriotism, than had appeared in its former
history. The fatal powers monopolized by the nobles, the
deadly "liberum veto," the corrupting elective kingship, were
looked at in their true light, and in May, 1791, a new
constitution was adopted which reformed those evils. But a few
nobles opposed the reformation and appealed to Russia,
supplying a pretext to Catherine on which she filled Poland
with her troops. It was in vain that the patriot Kosciusko led
the best of his countrymen in a brave struggle with the
invader. They were overborne (1793-1794); the unhappy nation
was put in fetters, while Catherine and a new King of Prussia,
Frederick William II., arranged the terms of a second
partition. This gave to Prussia an additional thousand square
miles, including the important towns of Danzig and Thorn,
while Russia took four times as much. A year later, the small
remainder of Polish territory was dismembered and divided
between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and thus Poland
disappeared from the map of Europe as a state.
Russia as left by Catherine II.
Meantime, in her conflicts with the Turks, Catherine was
extending her vast empire to the Dneister and the Caucasus,
and opening a passage for her fleets from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean. By treaty in 1774 she placed the Tartars of the
Crimea in independence of the Turks, and so isolated them for
easy conquest. In 1783 the conquest was made complete. By the
same treaty she secured a right of remonstrance on behalf of
the Christian subjects of the Sultan, in the Danubian
principalities and in the Greek Church at Constantinople,
which opened many pretexts for future interference and for war
at Russian convenience. The aggressions of the strong-willed
and powerful Czarina, and their dazzling success, filled her
subjects with pride, and effaced all remembrance of her
foreign origin and her want of right to the seat which she
filled. She was ambitious to improve the empire, as well as to
expand it; for her liberal mind took in the large ideas of that
speculative age and was much moved by them. She attempted many
reforms; but most things that she tried to do for the
bettering of civilization and the lifting of the people were
done imperiously, and spoiled by the autocratic method of the
doing. In her later years, her inclination towards liberal
ideas was checked, and the French Revolution put an end to it.
{1089}
State of France in the Eighteenth Century.
In tracing the destruction of Poland and the aggrandizement of
Russia, we have passed the date of that great catastrophe in
France which ended the old modern order of things, and
introduced a new one, not for France only, but for Europe at
large. It was a catastrophe toward which the abused French
people had been slowly slipping for generations, pushed
unrelentingly to it by blind rulers and a besotted
aristocracy. By nature a people ardent and lively in temper,
hopeful and brave in spirit, full of intelligence, they had
been held down in dumb repression: silenced in voice, even for
the uttering of their complaints; the national meeting of
their representative States suppressed for nearly two
centuries; taxes wrung from them on no measure save the will
of a wanton-minded and ignorant king; their beliefs
prescribed, their laws ordained, their courts of justice
commanded, their industries directed, their trade hedged
round, their rights and permissions in all particulars meted
out to them by the same blundering and irresponsible
autocracy. How long would they bear it? and would their
deliverance come by the easing of their yoke, or by the
breaking of it?--were the only questions.
Their state was probably at its worst in the later years of
Louis XIV. That seems to be the conclusion which the deepest
study has now reached, and the picture formerly drawn by
historians, of a society continually sinking into lower
miseries, is mostly put aside. The worst state, seemingly, was
passed, or nearly so, when Louis XIV. died. It began to mend
under his despicable successor, Louis XV. (1715-1774),--
perhaps even during the regency of the profligate Orleans
(1715-1723). Why it mended, no historian has clearly
explained. The cause was not in better government; for the
government grew worse. It did not come from any rise in
character of the privileged classes; for the privileged
classes abused their privileges with increasing selfishness.
But general influences were at work in the world at large,
stimulating activities of all kinds,--industry, trade,
speculation, combination, invention, experiment, science,
philosophy,--and whatever improvement occurred in the material
condition and social state of the common people of France may
find its explanation in these. There was an augmentation of
life in the air of the eighteenth century, and France took
some invigoration from it, despite the many maladies in its
social system and the oppressions of government under which it
bent.
But the difference between the France of Louis XIV. and the
France of Louis XVI. was more in the people than in their
state. If their misery was a little less, their patience was
less, and by not a little. The stimulations of the age, which
may have given more effectiveness to labor and more energy to
trade, had likewise set thinking astir, on the same practical
lines. Men whose minds in former centuries would have labored
on riddles dialectical, metaphysical and theological, were now
bent on the pressing problems of daily life. The mysteries of
economic science began to challenge them. Every aspect of
surrounding society thrust questions upon them, concerning its
origin, its history, its inequalities, its laws and their
principles, its government and the source of authority in it.
The so-called "philosophers" of the age, Rousseau, Voltaire
and the encyclopædists--were not the only questioners of the
social world, nor did the questioning all come from what they
taught. It was the intellectual epidemic of the time, carried
into all countries, penetrating all classes, and nowhere with
more diffusion than in France.
After the successful revolt of the English colonies in
America, and the conspicuous blazoning of the doctrines of
political equality and popular self-government in their
declaration of independence and their republican constitution,
the ferment of social free-thinking in France was naturally
increased. The French had helped the colonists, fought side by
side with them, watched their struggle with intense interest,
and all the issues involved in the American revolution were
discussed among them, with partiality to the republican side.
Franklin, most republican representative of the young
republic, came among them and captivated every class. He
recommended to them the ideas for which he stood, perhaps more
than we suspect.
Louis XVI. and his reign.
And thus, by many influences, the French people of all classes
except the privileged nobility, and even in that class to some
small extent, were made increasingly impatient of their
misgovernment and of the wrongs and miseries going with it.
Louis XVI., who came to the throne in 1774, was the best in
character of the Bourbon kings. He had no noxious vices and no
baleful ambitions. If he had found right conditions prevailing
in his kingdom he would have made the best of them. But he had
no capacity for reforming the evils that he inherited, and no
strength of will to sustain those who had. He accepted an
earnest reforming minister with more than willingness, and
approved the wise measures of economy, of equitable taxation,
and of emancipation for manufactures and trade, which Turgot
proposed. But when protected interests, and the privileged
order which fattened on existing abuses, raised a storm of
opposition, he weakly gave way to it, and dismissed the man
(1776) who might possibly have made the inevitable revolution
a peaceful one. Another minister, the Genevan banker, Necker,
who aimed at less reform, but demanded economy, suffered the
same overthrow (1781). The waste, the profligate expenditure,
the jobbery, the leeching of the treasury by high-born
pensioners and sinecure office-holders, went on, scarcely
checked, until the beginnings of actual bankruptcy had
appeared.
The States-General.
Then a cry, not much heeded before, for the convocation of the
States-general of the kingdom--the ancient great legislature
of France, extinct since the year 1614--became loud and
general. The king yielded (1788). The States-general was
called to meet on the 1st of May, 1789, and the royal summons
decreed that the deputies chosen to it from the third
estate--the common people--should be equal in number to the
deputies of the nobility and the clergy together. So the dumb
lips of France as a nation were opened, its tongue unloosed,
its common public opinion, and public feeling made articulate,
for the first time in one hundred and seventy-five years. And
the word that it spoke was the mandate of Revolution.
The States-general assembled at Versailles on the 5th of May,
and a conflict between the third estate and the nobles
occurred at once on the question between three assemblies and
one. Should the three orders deliberate and vote together as
one body, or sit and act separately and apart. The commons
demanded the single assembly. The nobles and most of the
clergy refused the union, in which their votes would be
overpowered.
{1090}
The National Assembly.
After some weeks of dead-lock on this fundamental issue, the
third estate brought it to a summary decision, by boldly
asserting its own supremacy, as representative of the mass of
the nation, and organizing itself in the character of the
"National Assembly" of France. Under that name and character
it was joined by a considerable part of the humbler clergy,
and by some of the nobles,--additional to a few, like
Mirabeau, who sat from the beginning with the third estate, as
elected representatives of the people. The king made a weak
attempt to annul this assumption of legislative sufficiency on
the part of the third estate, and only hurried the exposure of
his own powerlessness. Persuaded by his worst advisers to
attempt a stronger demonstration of the royal authority, he
filled Paris with troops, and inflamed the excitement, which
had risen already to a passionate heat.
Outbreak of the Revolution.
Necker, who had been recalled to the ministry when the meeting
of the States-general was decided upon, now received his
second dismissal (July 11), and the news of it acted on Paris
like a signal of insurrection. The city next day was in
tumult. On the 14th the Bastile was attacked and taken. The
king's government vanished utterly. His troops fraternized
with the riotous people. Citizens of Paris organized
themselves as a National Guard, on which every hope of order
depended, and Lafayette took command. The frightened nobility
began flight, first from Paris, and then from the provinces,
as mob violence spread over the kingdom from the capital. In
October there were rumors that the king had planned to follow
the "émigrés" and take refuge in Metz. Then occurred the
famous rising of the women; their procession to Versailles;
the crowd of men which followed, accompanied but not
controlled by Lafayette and his National Guards; the
conveyance of the king and royal family to Paris, where they
remained during the subsequent year, practically in captivity,
and at the mercy of the Parisian mob.
Meanwhile, the National Assembly, negligent of the dangers of
the moment, while actual anarchy prevailed, busied itself with
debates on constitutional theory, with enactments for the
abolition of titles and privileges, and with the creating of
an inconvertible paper money, based on confiscated church
lands, to supply the needs of the national treasury. Meantime,
too, the members of the Assembly and their supporters outside
of it were breaking into parties and factions, divided by
their different purposes, principles and aims, and forming
clubs,--centers of agitation and discussion,--clubs of the
Jacobins, the Cordeliers, the Feuillants and the like,--where
fear, distrust and jealousy were soon engendering ferocious
conflicts among the revolutionists themselves. And outside of
France, on the border where the fugitive nobles lurked,
intrigue was always active, striving to enlist foreign help
for King Louis against his subjects.
The First Constitution.
In April, 1791, Mirabeau, whose influence had been a powerful
restraint upon the Revolution, died. In June, the king made an
attempt to escape from his durance in Paris, but was captured
at Varennes and brought back. Angry demands for his deposition
were now made, and a tumultuous republican demonstration
occurred, on the Champ de Mars, which Lafayette and the mayor
of Paris, Bailly, dispersed, with bloodshed. But republicanism
had not yet got its footing. In the constitution, which the
Assembly completed at this time, the throne was left
undisturbed. The king accepted the instrument, and a
constitutional monarchy appeared to have quietly taken the
place of the absolute monarchy of the past.
The Girondists.
It was an appearance not long delusive. The Constituent
National Assembly being dissolved, gave way to a Legislative
Assembly (October, 1791) elected under the new constitution.
In the Legislative Assembly the republicans appeared with a
strength which soon gave them control of it. They were divided
into various groups; but the most eloquent and energetic of
these, coming from Bordeaux and the department of the Gironde,
fixed the name of Girondists upon the party to which they
belonged. The king, as a constitutional sovereign, was forced
presently to choose ministers from the ranks of the
Girondists, and they controlled the government for several
months in the spring of 1792. The earliest use they made of
their control was to hurry the country into war with the
German powers, which were accused of giving encouragement to
the hostile plans of the émigrés on the border. It is now a
well-determined fact that the Emperor Leopold was strongly
opposed to war with France, and used all his influence for the
preservation of peace. It was revolutionary France which
opened the conflict, and it was the Girondists who led and
shaped the policy of war.
Overthrow of the Monarchy.
In the first encounters of the war, the undisciplined French
troops were beaten, and Paris was in panic. Measures were
adopted which the king refused to sanction, and he dismissed
his Girondist ministers. Lafayette, who was commanding one
division of the army in the field, approved the king's course,
and wrote an unwise letter to the Assembly, intimating that
the army would not submit to a violation of the constitution.
The republicans were enraged. Everything seemed proof to them
of a treasonable connivance with the enemies of France, to
bring about the subjugation of the country, and a forcible
restoration of the old regime, absolutism, aristocratic
privilege and all. On the 20th of June there was another
rising of the Paris mob, unchecked by those who could, as yet,
have controlled it. The rioters broke into the Tuileries and
humiliated the king and queen with insults, but did no
violence. Lafayette came to Paris and attempted to reorganize
his old National Guard, for the defense of the constitution
and the preservation of order, but failed. The extremists then
resolved to throw down the toppling monarchy at once, by a
sudden blow. In the early morning of August 10, they expelled
the Council-General of the Municipality of Paris from the
Hotel de Ville, and placed the government of the city under
the control of a provisional Commune, with Danton at its head.
{1091}
At the same hour, the mob which these conspirators held in
readiness, and which they directed, attacked the Tuileries and
massacred the Swiss guard, while the king and the royal family
escaped for refuge to the Chamber of the Legislative Assembly,
near at hand. There, in the king's presence, on a formal
demand made by the new self-constituted Municipality or
Commune of Paris, the Assembly declared his suspension from
executive functions, and invited the people to elect without
delay a National Convention for the revising of the
Constitution. Commissioners, hastily sent out to the provinces
and the armies in the field, were received everywhere with
submission to the change of government, except by Lafayette
and his army, in and around Sedan. The Marquis placed them
under arrest and took from his soldiers a new oath of fidelity
to the constitution and the king. But he found himself
unsupported, and, yielding to the sweep of events, he obeyed a
dismissal by the new government from his command, and left
France, to wait in exile for a time when he might serve his
Country with a conscience more assured.
The Paris Commune.
Pending the meeting of the Convention, the Paris Commune,
increased in number to two hundred and eighty-eight, and
dominated by Danton and Robespierre, became the governing
power in France. The Legislative Assembly was subservient to
it; the kingless Ministry, which had Danton in association
with the restored Girondists, was no less so. It was the
fierce vigor of the Commune which caused the king and the
royal family to be imprisoned in the Temple; which instituted
a special tribunal for the summary trial of political
prisoners; which searched Paris for "suspects," on the night
of August 29-30, gathered three thousand men and women into
the prisons and convents of the city, planned and ordered the
"September Massacres" of the following week, and thus thinned
the whole number of these "suspects" by a half.
Fall of the Girondists.
On the 22d of September the National Convention assembled. The
Jacobins who controlled the Commune were found to have carried
Paris overwhelmingly and all France largely with them, in the
election of representatives. A furious, fanatical democracy, a
bloodthirsty anarchism, was in the ascendant. The republican
Girondists were now the conservative party in the Convention.
They struggled to hold their ground, and very soon they were
struggling for their lives. The Jacobin fury was tolerant of
no opposition. What stood in its path, with no deadlier weapon
than an argument or an appeal, must be, not merely overcome,
but destroyed. The Girondists would have saved the king from
the guillotine, but they dared not adopt his defense, and
their own fate was sealed when they gave votes, under fear,
which sent him in January to his death. Five months longer
they contended irresolutely, as a failing faction, with their
terrible adversaries, and then, in June, 1793, they were
proscribed and their arrest decreed. Some escaped and raised
futile insurrections in the provinces. Some stayed and faced
the death which awaited them in the fast approaching "reign of
terror."
"The Mountain" and "the Terror."
The fall of the Girondists left the Jacobin "Mountain"
(so-called from the elevation of the seats on which its
deputies sat in the Convention) unopposed. Their power was not
only absolute in fact, but unquestioned, and they inevitably
ran to riot in the exercise of it. The same madness overcame
them in the mass which overcame Nero, Caligula, Caracalla, as
individuals; for it is no more strange that the unnatural and
awful feeling of unlimited dominion over one's fellows should
turn the brain of a suddenly triumphant faction, than that it
should madden a single shallow-minded man. The men of "the
Mountain" were not only masters of France--except in La Vendée
and the neighboring region south of the Loire, where an obstinate
insurrection had broken out--but the armies which obeyed them
had driven back the invading Germans, had occupied the
Austrian Netherlands and taken possession of Savoy and Nice.
Intoxicated by these successes, the Convention had proclaimed
a crusade against all monarchical government, offering the
help of France to every people which would rise against
existing authorities, and declaring enmity to those who
refused alliance with the Revolution. Holland was attacked and
England forced to war. The spring of 1793 found a great
European coalition formed against revolutionary France, and
justified by the aggressions of the Jacobinical government.
For effective exercise of the power of the Jacobins, the
Convention as a whole proved too large a body, even when it
had been purged of Girondist opposition. Its authority was now
gathered into the hands of the famous Committee of Public
Safety, which became, in fact, the Revolutionary Government,
controlling the national armies, and the whole administration
of domestic and foreign affairs. Its reign was the Reign of
Terror, and the fearful Revolutionary Tribunal, which began
its bloody work with the guillotine in October, 1793, was the
chief instrument of its power. Robespierre, Barère, St. Just,
Couthon, Billaud-Varennes, Collot d' Herbois and Carnot--the
latter devoted to the business of the war--were the
controlling members of the Committee. Danton withdrew from it,
refusing to serve.
In September, the policy of terrorism was avowedly adopted,
and, in the language of the Paris Commune, "the Reign of
Terror" became "the order of the day." The arraignment of
"suspects" before the Revolutionary Tribunal began. On the
14th of October Marie Antoinette was put on trial; on the 16th
she met her death. On the 31st the twenty-one imprisoned
Girondist deputies were sent to the guillotine; followed on
the 10th of November by the remarkable woman, Madame Roland,
who was looked upon as the real leader of their party. From
that time until the mid-summer following, the blood-madness
raged; not in Paris alone, but throughout France, at Lyons,
Marseilles, Toulon, Bordeaux, Nantes, and wherever a show of
insurrection and resistance had challenged the ferocity of the
Commissioners of the Revolutionary Government, who had been
sent into the provinces with unlimited death-dealing powers.
{1092}
But when Jacobinism had destroyed all exterior opposition, it
began very soon to break into factions within itself. There
was a pitch in its excesses at which even Danton and
Robespierre became conservatives, as against Hébert and the
atheists of his faction. A brief struggle ensued, and the
Hébertists, in March, 1794, passed under the knife of the
guillotine. A month later Danton's enemies had rallied and he,
with his followers, went down before their attack, and the
sharp knife in the Place de la Revolution silenced his bold
tongue. Robespierre remained dominant for a few weeks longer
in the still reigning Committee of Public Safety; but his
domination was already undermined by many fears, distrusts and
jealousies among his colleagues and throughout his party. His
downfall came suddenly on the 27th of July. On the morning of
that day he was the dictator of the Convention and of its
ruling committee; at night he was a headless corpse, and Paris
was shouting with joy.
On the death of Robespierre the Reign of Terror came quickly
to an end. The reaction was sudden and swift. The Committee of
Public Safety was changed; of the old members only Carnot,
indispensable organizer of war, remained. The Revolutionary
Tribunal was remodeled. The Jacobin Club was broken up. The
surviving Girondist deputies came back to the Convention.
Prosecution of the Terrorists for their crimes began. A new
struggle opened, between the lower elements in Parisian and
French society, the sansculotte elements, which had controlled
the Revolution thus far, and the middle class, the
bourgeoisie, long cowed and suppressed, but now rallying to
recover its share of power. Bourgeoisie triumphed in the
contest. The Sansculottes made their last effort in a rising
on the 1st Prairial (May 20, 1795) and were put down. A new
constitution was framed which organized the government of the
Republic under a legislature in two chambers,--a Council of
Five Hundred and a Council of Ancients,--with an executive
Directory of Five. But only one third of the legislature first
assembled was to be freely elected by the people. The
remaining two thirds were to be taken from the membership of
the existing Convention. Paris rejected this last mentioned
feature of the constitution, while France at large ratified
it. The National Guard of Paris rose in insurrection on the
13th Vendémiare (October 5), and it was on this occasion that
the young Corsican officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, got his foot
on the first round of the ladder by which he climbed
afterwards to so great a height. Put in command of the regular
troops in Paris, which numbered only 5,000, against 30,000 of the
National Guards, he crushed the latter in an action of an
hour. That hour was the opening hour of his career.
The government of the Directory was instituted on the 27th of
October following. Of its five members, Carnot and Barras were
the only men of note, then or afterwards.
The war with the Coalition.
While France was cowering under "the Terror," its armies,
under Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru, had withstood the great
European combination with astonishing success. The allies were
weakened by ill feeling between Prussia and Austria over the
second partition of Poland, and generally by a want of concert
and capable leadership in their action. On the other side, the
democratic military system of the Republic, under Carnot's
keen eyes, was continually bringing forward fresh soldierly
talent to the front. The fall of the Jacobins made no change
in that vital department of the administration, and the
successes of the French were continued. In the summer of 1794
they carried the war into Germany, and expelled the allies
from the Austrian Netherlands. Thence they invaded Holland,
and before the end of January, 1795, they were masters of the
country; the Stadtholder had fled to England, and a Batavian
Republic had been organized. Spain had suffered losses in
battle with them along the Pyrenees, and the King of Sardinia
had yielded to them the passes of the Maritime Alps. In April
the King of Prussia made peace with France. Before the close
of the year 1795 the revolt in La Vendée was at an end; Spain
had made peace; Pichegru had attempted a great betrayal of the
armies on the Rhine, and had failed.
Napoleon in Italy.
This in brief was the situation at the opening of the year
1796, when the "little Corsican officer," who won the
confidence of the new government of the Directory by saving
its constitution on the 13th Vendemiare, planned the campaign
of the year, and received the command of the army sent to
Italy. He attacked the Sardinians in April, and a single month
sufficed to break the courage of their king and force him to a
treaty of peace. On the 10th of May he defeated the Austrians
at Lodi; on the 15th he was in Milan. Lombardy was abandoned
to him; all central Italy was at his mercy, and he began to
act the sovereign conqueror in the peninsula, with a contempt
for the government at Paris which he hardly concealed. Two
ephemeral republics were created under his direction, the
Cisalpine, in Lombardy, and the Cispadane, embracing Modena,
Ferrara and Bologna. The Papacy was shorn of part of its
territories.
Every attempt made by the Austrians to shake the hold which
Bonaparte had fastened on the peninsula only fixed it more
firmly. In the spring he began movements beyond the Alps, in
concert with Hoche on the Rhine, which threatened Vienna
itself and frightened Austria into proposals of peace.
Preliminaries, signed in April, foreshadowed the hard terms of
the treaty concluded at Campo Formio in the following October.
Austria gave up her Netherland provinces to France, and part
of her Italian territories to the Cisalpine Republic; but
received, in partial compensation, the city of Venice and a
portion of the dominions of the Venetian state; for, between
the armistice and the treaty, Bonaparte had attacked and
overthrown the venerable republic, and now divided it with his
humbled enemy.
France under the Directory.
The masterful Corsican, who handled these great matters with
the airs of a sovereign, may have known himself already to be
the coming master of France. For the inevitable submission
again of the many to one was growing plain to discerning eyes.
The frightful school-teaching of the Revolution had not
impressed practical lessons in politics on the mind of the
untrained democracy, so much as suspicions, distrusts, and
alarms. All the sobriety of temper, the confidence of feeling,
the constraining habit of public order, without which the
self-government of a people is impracticable, were yet to be
acquired. French democracy was not more prepared for
republican institutions in 1797 than it had been in 1789.
{1093}
There was no more temperance in its factions, no more balance
between parties, no more of a steadying potency in public
opinion. But it had been brought to a state of feeling that
would prefer the sinking of all factions under some vigorous
autocracy, rather than another appeal of their quarrels to the
guillotine. And events were moving fast to a point at which
that choice would require to be made. The summer of 1797 found
the members of the Directory in hopeless conflict with one
another and with the legislative councils. On the 4th of
September a "coup d' état," to which Bonaparte contributed
some help, purged both the Directory and the Councils of men
obnoxious to the violent faction, and exiled them to Guiana.
Perhaps the moment was favorable then for a soldier, with the
great prestige that Bonaparte had won, to mount to the seat of
power; but he did not so judge.
The Expedition to Egypt.
He planned, instead, an expedition to Egypt, directed against
the British power in the East,--an expedition that failed in
every object it could have, except the absence in which it
kept him from increasing political disorders at home. He was
able to maintain some appearance of success, by his
subjugation of Egypt and His invasion of Syria; but of harm
done to England, or of gain to France in the Mediterranean,
there was none; since Nelson, at the battle of the Nile,
destroyed the French fleet, and Turkey was added to the
Anglo-Austrian coalition. The blunder of the expedition, as
proved by its whole results, was not seen by the French people
so plainly, however, as they saw the growing hopelessness of
their own political state, and the alarming reverses which
their armies in Italy and on the Rhine had sustained since
Bonaparte went away.
French Aggressions.--The new Coalition.
Continued aggressions on the part of the French had provoked a
new European coalition, formed in 1798. In Switzerland they
had overthrown the ancient constitution of the confederacy,
organizing a new Helvetic Republic on the Gallic model, but
taking Geneva to themselves. In Italy they had set up a third
republic, the Roman, removing the Pope forcibly from his
sovereignty and from Rome. Every state within reach had then
taken fresh alarm, and even Russia, undisturbed in the
distance, was now enlisted against the troublesome democracy
of France.
The unwise King of Naples, entering rashly into the war before
his allies could support him, and hastening to restore the
Pope, had been driven (December, 1798) from his kingdom, which
underwent transformation into a fourth Italian republic, the
Parthenopeian. But this only stimulated the efforts of the
Coalition, and in the course of the following year the French
were expelled from all Italy, saving Genoa alone, and the
ephemeral republics they had set up were extinguished. On the
Rhine they had lost ground; but they had held their own in
Switzerland, after a fierce struggle with the Russian forces
of Suwarrow.
Napoleon in power.
When news of these disasters, and of the ripeness of the
situation at Paris for a new coup d' état, reached Bonaparte,
in Egypt, he deserted his army there, leaving it, under
Kléber, in a helpless situation, and made his way back to
France. He landed at Fréjus on the 9th of October. Precisely a
month later, by a combination with Sieyès, a veteran
revolutionist and maker of constitutions, he accomplished the
overthrow of the Directory. Before the year closed, a fresh
constitution was in force, which vested substantially
monarchical powers in an executive called the First Consul,
and the chosen First Consul was Napoleon Bonaparte. Two
associate Consuls, who sat with him, had no purpose but to
conceal for a short time the real absoluteness of his rule.
From that time, for fifteen years, the history of France--it
is almost possible to say the history of Europe--is the story
of the career of the extraordinary Corsican adventurer who
took possession of the French nation, with unparalleled
audacity, and who used it, with all that pertained to
it--lives, fortunes, talents, resources--in the most
prodigious and the most ruthless undertakings of personal
ambition that the modern world has ever seen. He was
selfishness incarnate; and he was the incarnation of genius in
all those modes of intellectual power which bear upon the
mastery of momentary circumstances and the mastery of men. But
of the higher genius that might have worthily employed such
vast powers,--that might have enlightened and inspired a
really great ambition in the man, to make himself an enduring
builder of civilization in the world, he had no spark. The
soul behind his genius was ignoble, the spirit was mean. And
even on the intellectual side, his genius had its narrowness.
His projects of selfishness were extraordinary, but never
sagacious, never far-sighted, thoughtfully studied, wisely
planned. There is no appearance in any part of his career of a
pondered policy, guiding him to a well-determined end in what
he did. The circumstances of any moment, whether on the
battle-field or in the political arena, he could handle with a
swift apprehension, a mastery and a power that may never have
been surpassed. But much commoner men have apprehended and
have commanded in a larger and more successful way the general
sweep of circumstances in their lives. It is that fact which
belittles Napoleon in the comparison often made between him
and Cæsar. He was probably Cæsar's equal in war. But who can
imagine Cæsar in Napoleon's place committing the blunders of
blind arrogance which ruined the latter in Germany and Spain,
or making his fatuous attempt to shut England, the great naval
power, out of continental Europe?
His domestic administration was beneficial to France in many
ways. He restored order, and maintained it, with a powerful
hand. He suppressed faction effectually, and eradicated for
the time all the political insanities of the Revolution. He
exploited the resources of the country with admirable success;
for his discernment in such matters was keen and his practical
judgment was generally sound. But he consumed the nation
faster than he gave it growth. His wars--the wars in which
Europe was almost unceasingly kept by the aggression of his
insolence and his greed--were the most murderous, the most
devouring, that any warrior among the civilized races of
mankind has ever been chargeable with.
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His blood-guiltiness in these wars is the one glaring fact
which ought to be foremost in every thought of them. But it is
not. There is a pitiable readiness in mankind to be dazzled
and cheated by red battle-lights, when it looks into history
for heroes; and few figures have been glorified more
illusively in the world's eye than the marvelous warrior, the
vulgar-minded adventurer, the prodigy of self-exalting genius,
Napoleon Bonaparte.
In the first year of his Consulate, Bonaparte recovered Italy,
by the extraordinary Marengo campaign, while Moreau won the
victory of Hohenlinden, and the Treaty of Luneville was
brought about. Austria obtained peace again by renewing the
concessions of Campo Formio, and by taking part in a
reconstruction of Germany, under Bonaparte's dictation, which
secularized the ecclesiastical states, extinguished the
freedom of most of the imperial cities, and aggrandized
Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden and Saxony, as protégés and
dependencies of France. England was left alone in the war,
with much hostile feeling raised against her in Europe and
America by the arrogant use she had made of her mastery of the
sea. The neutral powers had all been embittered by her
maritime pretensions, and Bonaparte now brought about the
organization among them of a Northern League of armed
neutrality. England broke it with a single blow, by Nelson's
bombardment of Copenhagen. Napoleon, however, had conceived
the plan of starving English industries and ruining British
trade by a "continental system" of blockade against them,
which involved the compulsory exclusion of British ships and
British goods from all European countries. This impossible
project committed him to a desperate struggle for the
subjugation of Europe. It was the fundamental cause of his
ruin.
The First Empire.
In 1802 the First Consul advanced his restoration of
absolutism in France a second step, by securing the Consulate
for life. A short interval of peace with England was arranged,
but war broke out anew the following year, and the English for
a time had no allies. The French occupied Hanover, and the
Germans were quiescent. But in 1804, Bonaparte shocked Europe
by the abduction and execution of the Bourbon prince, Duc
d'Enghien, and began to challenge again the interference of
the surrounding powers by a new series of aggressive measures.
His ambition had thrown off all disguises; he had transformed
the Republic of France into an Empire, so called, and himself,
by title, into an Emperor, with an imposing crown. The
Cisalpine or Italian Republic received soon afterwards the
constitution of a kingdom, and he took the crown to himself as
King of Italy. Genoa and surrounding territory (the Ligurian
Republic) were annexed, at nearly the same time, to France;
several duchies were declared to be dependencies, and an
Italian principality was given to Napoleon's elder sister. The
effect produced in Europe by such arbitrary and admonitory
proceedings as these enabled Pitt, the younger, now at the
head of the English government, to form an alliance (1805),
first with Russia, afterwards with Austria, Sweden and Naples,
and finally with Prussia, to break the yoke which the French
Emperor had put upon Italy, Holland, Switzerland and Hanover,
and to resist his further aggressions.
Austerlitz and Trafalgar.
The amazing energy and military genius of Napoleon never had
more astonishing proof than in the swift campaign which broke
this coalition at Ulm and Austerlitz. Austria was forced to
another humiliating treaty, which surrendered Venice and
Venetia to the conqueror's new Kingdom of Italy; gave up Tyrol
to Bavaria; yielded other territory to Würtemberg, and raised
both electors to the rank of kings, while making Baden a grand
duchy, territorially enlarged. Prussia was dragged by force
into alliance with France, and took Hanover as pay. But
England triumphed at the same time on her own element, and
Napoleon's dream of carrying his legions across the Channel,
as Cæsar did, was forever dispelled by Nelson's dying victory
at Trafalgar. That battle, which destroyed the combined navies
of France and Spain, ended hope of contending successfully
with the relentless Britons at sea.
End of the Holy Roman Empire.
France was never permitted to learn the seriousness of
Trafalgar, and it put no check on the vaulting ambition in
Napoleon which now began to o'erleap itself. He gave free rein
to his arrogance in all directions. The King of Naples was
expelled from his kingdom and the crown conferred on Joseph
Bonaparte. Louis Bonaparte was made King of Holland. Southern
Germany was suddenly reconstructed again. The little kingdoms
of Napoleon's creation and the small states surrounding them
were declared to be separated from the ancient Empire, and
were formed into a Confederation of the Rhine, under the
protection of France. Warned by this rude announcement of the
precarious tenure of his imperial title as the head of the
Holy Roman Empire, Francis II. resigned it, and took to
himself, instead, a title as meaningless as that which
Napoleon had assumed,--the title of Emperor of Austria. The
venerable fiction of the Holy Roman Empire disappeared from
history on the 6th of August, 1806.
Subjugation of Prussia.
But while Austria had become submissive to the offensive
measures of Napoleon, Prussia became now fired with
unexpected, sudden wrath, and declared war in October, 1800.
It was a rash explosion of national resentment, and the
rashness was dearly paid for. At Jena and Auerstadt, Prussia
sank under the feet of the merciless conqueror, as helplessly
subjugated as a nation could be. Russia, attempting her
rescue, was overcome at Eylau and Friedland; and both the
vanquished powers came to terms with the victor at Tilsit
(July, 1807). The King of Prussia gave up all his kingdom west
of the Elbe, and all that it had acquired in the second and
third partitions of Poland. A new German kingdom, of
Westphalia, was constructed for Napoleon's youngest brother,
Jerome. A free state of Danzig, dependent on France, and a
Grand Duchy of Warsaw, were created. The Russian Czar, bribed
by some pieces of Polish Prussia, and by prospective
acquisitions from Turkey and Sweden, became an ally of
Napoleon and an accomplice in his plans for the subjection of
Europe. He enlisted his empire in the "continental system"
against England, and agreed to the enforcement of the decree
which Napoleon issued from Berlin, declaring the British
islands in a state of blockade, and prohibiting trade with
them. The British government retorted by its "orders in

council," which blockaded in the like paper-fashion all ports
of France and of the allies and dependencies of France. And so
England and Napoleon fought one another for years in the
peaceful arena of commerce, to the exasperation of neutral
nations and the destruction of the legitimate trade of the
world.
{1095}
The crime against Spain.
And now, having prostrated Germany, and captivated the Czar,
Napoleon turned toward another field, which had scarcely felt,
as yet, his intrusive hand. Spain had been in servile alliance
with France for ten years, while Portugal adhered steadily to
her friendship with Great Britain, and now refused to be
obedient to the Berlin Decree. Napoleon took prompt measures
for the punishment of so bold a defiance. A delusive treaty
with the Spanish court, for the partition of the small kingdom
of the Braganzas, won permission for an army under Junot to
enter Portugal, through Spain. No resistance to it was made.
The royal family of Portugal quitted Lisbon, setting sail for
Brazil, and Junot took possession of the kingdom. But this
accomplished only half of Napoleon's design. He meant to have
Spain, as well; and he found, in the miserable state of the
country, his opportunity to work out an ingenious,
unscrupulous scheme for its acquisition. His agents set on
foot a revolutionary movement, in favor of the worthless crown
prince, Ferdinand, against his equally worthless father, Charles
IV., and pretexts were obtained for an interference by French
troops. Charles was first coerced into an abdication; then
Ferdinand was lured to an interview with Napoleon, at Bayonne,
was made prisoner there, and compelled in his turn to
relinquish the crown. A vacancy on the Spanish throne having
been thus created, the Emperor gathered at Bayonne a small
assembly of Spanish notables, who offered the seat to Joseph
Bonaparte, already King of Naples. Joseph, obedient to his
imperial brother's wish, resigned the Neapolitan crown to
Murat, his sister's husband, accepted the crown of Spain, and
was established at Madrid with a French army at his back.
This was one of the two most ruinous of the political blunders
of Napoleon's life. He had cheated and insulted the whole
Spanish nation, in a way too contemptuous to be endured even
by a people long cast down. There was a revolt which did not
spring from any momentary passion, but which had an obstinacy
of deep feeling behind that made effective suppression of it
impossible. French armies could beat Spanish armies, and
disperse them, but they could not keep them dispersed; and
they could not break up the organization of a rebellion which
organized itself in every province, and which went on, when
necessary, without any organization at all. England sent
forces to the peninsula, under Wellington, for the support of
the insurgent Spaniards and Portuguese; and thenceforward, to
the end of his career, the most inextricable difficulties of
Napoleon were those in which he had entangled himself on the
southern side of the Pyrenees.
The chastening of Germany.
The other cardinal blunder in Napoleon's conduct, which proved
more destructive to him than the crime in Spain, was his
exasperating treatment of Germany. There was neither
magnanimity on the moral side of him nor real wisdom on the
intellectual side, to restrain him from using his victory with
immoderate insolence. He put as much shame as he could invent
into the humiliations of the German people. He had Prussia
under his heel, and he ground the heel upon her neck with the
whole weight of his power. The consequence was a pain and a
passion which wrought changes like a miracle in the temper and
character of the abused nation. There were springs of feeling
opened and currents of national life set in motion that might
never have been otherwise discovered. Enlightened men and
strong men from all parts of Germany found themselves called
to Prussia and to the front of its affairs, and their way made
easy for them in labors of restoration and reform. Stein and
Hardenburg remodeled the administration of the kingdom,
uprooted the remains of serfdom in it, and gave new freedom to
its energies. Scharnhorst organized the military system on
which rose in time the greatest of military powers. Humboldt
planned the school system which educated Prussia beyond all
her neighbors, in the succeeding generations. Even the
philosophers came out of their closets and took part, as
Fichte did, in the stirring and uplifting of the spirit of
their countrymen. So it was that the outrages of Napoleon in
Germany revenged themselves, by summoning into existence an
unsuspected energy that would be turned against him to destroy
him in the end.
But the time of destruction was not yet come. He had a few
years of triumph still before him,--of triumph everywhere
except in Portugal and Spain. Austria, resisting him once more
(1809), was once more crushed at Wagram, and to such
submissiveness that it gave a daughter of the imperial house
in marriage to the parvenu sovereign of France, next year,
when he divorced his wife Josephine. He was at the summit of
his renown that year, but already declining from the greatest
height of his power. In 1811 there was little to change the
situation.
The fall of Napoleon.
In 1812 the downfall of Napoleon was begun by his fatal
expedition to Russia. The next year Prussia, half regenerated
within the brief time since Jena and Tilsit, went into
alliance with Russia, and the War of Liberation was begun.
Austria soon joined the alliance; and at Leipzig (Oct. 18,
1813) the three nations shattered at last the yoke of
oppression that had bound Europe so long. At the same time,
the French armies in Spain were expelled, and Wellington
entered France through the Pyrenees, to meet the allies who
pursued Napoleon across the Rhine. Forced to abdicate and
retire to the little island of Elba (the sovereignty of which
was ceded to him), he remained there in quiet from May, 1814,
until March, 1815, when he escaped and reappeared in France.
Army and people welcomed him. The Bourbon monarchy, which had
been restored by the allies, fell at his approach. The king,
Louis XVIII., fled. Napoleon recovered his throne and occupied
it for it few weeks. But the alliance which had expelled him from
it refused to permit his recovery of power. The question was
settled finally at Waterloo, on the 18th of June, when a
British army under Wellington and a Prussian army under
Blücher won a victory which left no hope to the beaten
Emperor. He surrendered himself to the commander of a British
vessel of war, and was sent to confinement for the remainder
of his life on the remote island of St. Helena.
{1096}
The Congress of Vienna.
But Europe, delivered from one tyrannical master, was now
given over to several of them, in a combination which
oppressed it for a generation. The sovereigns who had united
to dethrone Napoleon, with the two emperors, of Austria and
Russia, at their head, and with the Austrian minister,
Metternich, for their most trusted counselor, assumed first,
in the Congress of Vienna, a general work of political
rearrangement, to repair the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
disturbances, and then, subsequently, an authoritative
supervision of European politics which proved as meddlesome as
Napoleon's had been. Their first act, as before stated, was to
restore the Bourbon monarchy in France, indifferent to the
wishes of the people. In Spain, Ferdinand had already taken
the throne, when Joseph fled. In Italy, the King of Sardinia
was restored and Genoa transferred to him; Lombardy and
Venetia were given back to Austria; Tuscany, Modena and some
minor duchies received Hapsburg princes; the Pope recovered
his States, and the Bourbons returned to Naples and Sicily. In
Germany, the Prussian kingdom was enlarged again by several
absorptions, including part of Saxony, but some of its Polish
territory was given to the Czar; Hanover became a kingdom;
Austria resumed the provinces which Napoleon had conveyed to
his Rhenish proteges; and, finally, a Germanic Confederation
was formed, to take the place of the extinct Empire, and with
no more efficiency in its constitution. In the Netherlands, a
new kingdom was formed, to bear the Netherland name, and to
embrace Holland and Belgium in union, with the House of Orange
on the throne.
The Holy Alliance.
Between the Czar, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of
Prussia, there was a personal agreement that went with these
arrangements of the Congress of Vienna, and which was
prolonged for a number of years. In the public understanding,
this was associated, perhaps wrongly, with a written
declaration, known as the Holy Alliance, in which the three
sovereigns set forth their intention to regulate their foreign
and domestic policy by the precepts of Christianity, and
invited all princes to join their alliance for the maintenance
of peace and the promotion of brotherly love. Whether
identical as a fact with this Holy Alliance or secreted behind
it, there was, and long continued to be, an undoubted league
between these sovereigns and others, which had aims very
different from the promotion of brotherly love. It was wholly
reactionary, hostile to all political liberalism, and
repressive of all movements in the interest of the people.
Metternich was its skilful minister, and the deadly, soulless
system of beaureaucratic absolutism which he organized in
Austria was the model of government that it strove to
introduce.
In Italy, the governments generally were reduced to the
Austrian model, and the political state of the peninsula, for
forty years, was scarcely better, if at all, than it had been
under the Spanish rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
Germany, as divided as ever, under a federal constitution
which federated nothing else so much as the big and little
courts and their reactionary ideas, was profoundly depressed
in political spirit, while prospering materially and showing
notable signs of intellectual life.
France was not slow in finding that the restored Bourbons and
the restored émigrés had forgotten nothing and learned
nothing, in the twenty-five years of their exile. They put all
their strength into the turning back of the clock, trying to
make it strike again the hours in which the Revolution and
Napoleon had been so busy. It was futile work; but it sickened
and angered the nation none the less. After all the stress and
struggle it had gone through, there was a strong nation yet to
resist the Bourbonism brought back to power. It recovered from
the exhaustion of its wars with a marvellous quickness. The
millions of peasant land-owners, who were the greatest
creation of the Revolution, dug wealth from its soil with
untiring free arms, and soon made it the most prosperous land
in Europe. Through country and city, the ideas of the
Revolution were in the brains of the common people, while its
energies were in their brawn, and Bourbonism needed more
wisdom than it ever possessed to reconcile them to its
restoration.
Revolutions of 1820-1821.
It was not in France, however, but in Spain, that the first
rising against the restored order of things occurred.
Ferdinand VII., when released from his French imprisonment in
1814, was warmly received in Spain, and took the crown with
quite general consent. He accepted the constitution under
which the country had been governed since 1812, and made large
lying promises of a liberal rule. But when seated on the
throne, he suppressed the constitution, restored the
Inquisition, revived the monasteries, called back the expelled
Jesuits, and opened a deadly persecution of the liberals in
Spanish politics. No effective resistance to him was organized
until 1820, when a revolutionary movement took form which
forced the king, in March, to reestablish the constitution and
call different men to his council. Portugal, at the same time,
adopted a similar constitution, and the exiled king, John VI.,
returning now from Brazil, accepted it.
The revolution in Spain set fire to the discontent that had
smouldered in Italy. The latter broke forth, in the summer of
1820, at Naples, where the Bourbon king made no resistance to
a sudden revolt of soldiers and citizens, but yielded the
constitution they demanded at once. Sardinia followed, in the
next spring, with a rising of the Piedmontese, requiring
constitutional government. The king, Victor Emmanuel I., who
was very old, resigned the crown to his brother, Charles
Felix. The latter refused the demands of the
constitutionalists and called upon Austria for help.
{1097}
These outbreaks of the revolutionary spirit were alarming to
the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance and excited them to a
vigorous activity. They convened a Congress, first at Troppau,
in October, 1820, afterwards at Laybach, and finally at
Verona, to plan concerted action for the suppressing of the
popular movements of the time. As the result of these
conferences, the congenial duty of restoring absolutism in the
Two Sicilies, and of helping the King of Sardinia against his
subjects, was imposed upon Austria and willingly performed;
while the Bourbon court of France was solicited to put an end
to the bad example of constitutional government in Spain. Both
commissions were executed with fidelity and zeal. Italy was
flung down and fettered again; French troops occupied Spain
from 1823 until 1827. England, alone, protested against this
flagrant policing of Europe by the Holy Alliance. Canning, its
spirited minister, "called in the New World," as he described
his policy, "to redress the balance of the old," by
recognizing the independence of the Spanish colonies in
America, which, Cuba excepted, were now separated forever from
the crown of Spain. Brazil in like manner was cut loose from
the Portuguese crown, and assumed the constitution of an
empire, under Dom Pedro, the eldest son of John VI.
Greek War of Independence.
These stifled revolutions in western Europe failed to
discourage a more obstinate insurrection which began in the
East, among the Christian subjects of the Turks, in 1821. The
Ottoman government had been growing weaker and more vicious
for many years. The corrupted and turbulent Janissaries were
the masters of the empire, and a sultan who attempted, as
Selim III. (1789-1807) had done, to introduce reforms, was
put to death. Russia, under Alexander I., had been continuing
to gain ground at the expense of the Turks, and assuming more
and more of a patronage of the Christian subjects of the
Porte. There seems to be little doubt that the rising begun in
1821, which had its start in Moldavia, and its first leader in a
Greek, Ypsilanti, who had been an officer in the Russian
service, received encouragement from the Czar. But Alexander
turned his back on it when the Greeks sprang to arms and
seriously appealed to Europe for help in a war of national
independence. The Congress of Verona condemned the Greek
rising, in common with that of Spain. Again, England alone
showed sympathy, but did nothing as a government, and left the
struggling Greeks to such help as they might win from
individual friends. Lord Byron, with others, went to Greece,
carrying money and arms; and, generally, these volunteers lost
much of their ardor in the Greek cause when they came into
close contact with its native supporters. But the Greeks,
however lacking in high qualities, made an obstinate fight,
and held their ground against the Turks, until the feeling of
sympathy with them had grown too strong in England and in
France for the governments of those countries to be heedless
of it. Moreover, in Russia, Alexander I. had been succeeded
(1825) by the aggressive Nicholas, who had not patience to
wait for the slow crumbling of the Ottoman power, but was
determined to break it as summarily as he could. He joined
France and England, therefore, in an alliance and in a naval
demonstration against the Turks (1827), which had its result
in the battle of Navarino. The allies of Nicholas went no
farther; but he pursued the undertaking, in a war which lasted
until the autumn of 1829. Turkey at the end of it conceded the
independence of Greece, and practically that of Wallachia and
Moldavia. In 1830, a conference at London established the
Greek kingdom, and in 1833 a Bavarian prince, Otho I., was
settled on the throne.
Revolutions of 1830.
Before this result was reached, revolution in western Europe,
arrested in 1821-23, had broken out afresh. Bourbonism had
become unendurable to France. Charles X., who succeeded his
brother Louis XVIII; in 1824, showed not only a more arbitrary
temper, but a disposition more deferential to the Church than
his predecessor. He was fond of the Jesuits, whom his subjects
very commonly distrusted and disliked. He attempted to put
shackles on the press, and when elections to the chamber of
deputies went repeatedly against the government, he undertook
practically to alter the suffrage by ordinances of his own. A
revolution seemed then to be the only remedy that was open to
the nation, and it was adopted in July, 1830, the veteran
Lafayette taking the lead. Charles X. was driven to
abdication, and left France for England. The crown was
transferred to Louis Philippe, of the Orleans branch of the
Bourbon family,--son of the Philip Égalité who joined the
Jacobins in the Revolution.
The July Revolution in France proved a signal for more
outbreaks in other parts of Europe than had followed the
Spanish rising of ten years before.
Belgium broke away from the union with Holland, which had
never satisfied its people, and, after some struggle, won
recognized independence, as a new kingdom, with Leopold of
Saxe Coburg raised to the throne.
Russian Poland, bearing the name of a constitutional kingdom
since 1815, but having the Czar for its king and the Czar's
brother for viceroy, found no lighter oppression than before,
and made a hopeless, brave attempt to escape from its bonds.
The revolt was put down with unmerciful severity, and
thousands of the hapless patriots went to exile in Siberia.
In Germany, there were numerous demonstrations in the smaller
states, which succeeded more or less in extorting
constitutional concessions; but there was no revolutionary
movement on a larger scale.
Italy remained quiet in both the north and the south, where
disturbances had arisen before; but commotions occurred in the
Papal states, and in Modena and Parma, which required the arms
of Austria to suppress.
In England, the agitations of the continent hastened forward a
revolution which went far beyond all other popular movements
of the time in the lasting importance of its effects, and
which exhibited in their first great triumph the peaceful
forces of the Platform and the Press.
{1098}
England under the last two Georges.
But we have given little attention to affairs in Great Britain
during the past half century or more, and need to glance
backward.
Under the third of the Georges, there was distinctly a check
given to the political progress which England had been making
since the Revolution of 1688. The wilfulness of the king
fairly broke down, for a considerable period, the system of
responsible cabinet government which had been taking shape and
root under the two earlier Hanoverians, and ministers became
again, for a time, mere mouthpieces of the royal will. The
rupture with the American colonies, and the unsuccessful war
which ended in their independence, brought in another
influence, adverse, for the time being, to popular claims in
government. For it was not King George, alone, nor Lord North,
nor any small Tory faction, that prosecuted and upheld the
attempt to make the colonists in America submissive to
"taxation without representation." The English nation at large
approved the war; English national sentiment was hostile to
the Americans in their independent attitude, and the
Whigs--the liberals then in English politics--were a
discredited and weakened party for many years because of their
leaning to the American side of the questions in dispute.
Following close upon the American war, came the French
Revolution, which frightened into Toryism great numbers of
people who did not by nature belong there. In England, as
everywhere else, the reaction lasted long, and government was
more arbitrary and repressive than it could possibly have
continued to be under different circumstances.
Meantime extraordinary social changes had taken place, which
tended to mark more strongly the petrifying of things in the
political world. The great age of mechanical invention had
been fully opened. Machines had begun to do the work of human
hands in every industry, and steam had begun to move the
machines. The organization of labor, too, had assumed a new
phase. The factory system had arisen; and with it had appeared
a new growth of cities and towns. Production was accelerated;
wealth was accumulating more rapidly, and the distribution of
wealth was following different lines. The English middle class
was rising fast as a money-power and was gathering the
increased energies of the kingdom into its hands.
Parliamentary Reform in England.
But while the tendency of social changes had been to increase
vastly the importance of this powerful middle class, the
political conditions had actually diminished its weight in
public affairs. In Parliament, it had no adequate
representation. The old boroughs, which sent members to the
House of Commons as they had sent them for generations before,
no longer contained a respectable fraction of the "commons of
England," supposed to be represented in the House, and those
who voted in the boroughs were not at all the better class of
the new England of the nineteenth century. Great numbers of
the boroughs were mere private estates, and the few votes
polled in them were cast by tenants who elected their
landlords' nominees. On the other hand, the large cities and
the numerous towns of recent growth had either no
representation in Parliament, or they had equal representation
with the "rotten boroughs" which cast two or three or
half-a-dozen votes.
That the commons of England, with all the gain of substantial
strength they had been making in the last half of the
eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth,
endured this travesty of popular representation so long as
until 1832, is proof of the potency of the conservatism which
the French Revolution induced. The subject of parliamentary
reform had been now and then discussed since Chatham's time;
but Toryism had always been able to thrust it aside and bring
the discussion to naught. At last there came the day when the
question would no longer be put down. The agitations of 1830,
combined with a very serious depression of industry and trade,
produced a state of feeling which could not be defied. King and
Parliament yielded to the public demand, and the First Reform
Bill was passed. It widened the suffrage and amended very
considerably the inequities of the parliamentary
representation; but both reforms have been carried much
farther since, by two later bills.
Repeal of the English Corn Laws.
The reform of Parliament soon brought a broader spirit into
legislation. Its finest fruits began to ripen about 1838, when
an agitation for the repeal of the foolish and wicked English
"corn-laws" was opened by Cobden and Bright. In the day of the
"rotten boroughs," when the landlords controlled Parliament,
they imagined that they had "protected" the farming interest,
and secured higher rents to themselves, by laying heavy duties
on the importation of foreign bread-stuffs. A famous "sliding
scale" of such duties had been invented, which raised the
duties when prices in the home market dropped, and lowered
them proportionately when home prices rose. Thus the consumers
were always deprived, as much as possible, of any cheapening
of their bread which bountiful Nature might offer, and paid a
heavy tax to increase the gains of the owners and cultivators
of land.
Now that other "interests" besides the agricultural had a
voice in Parliament, and had become very strong, they began to
cry out against this iniquity, and demand that the "corn laws"
be done away with. The famous "anti-corn-law league,"
organized mainly by the exertions of Richard Cobden, conducted
an agitation of the question which brought about the repeal of
the laws in 1846.
But the effect of the agitation did not end there. So thorough
and prolonged a discussion of the matter had enlightened the
English people upon the whole question between "protection"
and free trade. The manufacturers and mechanics, who had led
the movement against protective duties on food-stuffs, were
brought to see that they were handicapped more than protected
by duties on imports in their own departments of production.
So Cobden and his party continued their attacks on the theory
of "protection" until every vestige of it was cleared from the
English statute books.
The Revolutions of 1848.
Another year of revolutions throughout Europe came in 1848,
and the starting point of excitement was not, this time, at
Paris, but, strangely enough, in the Vatican, at Rome. Pius
IX. had been elected to the papal chair in 1846, and had
immediately rejoiced the hearts and raised the hopes of the
patriots in misgoverned Italy by his liberal measures of
reform and his promising words. The attitude of the Pope gave
encouragement to popular demonstrations in various Italian
states during the later part of 1847; and in January 1848 a
formidable rising occurred in Sicily, followed in February by
another in Naples. King Ferdinand II. was compelled to change
his ministers and to concede a constitution, which he did not
long respect.
{1099}
Lombardy was slow this time in being kindled; but when the
flame of revolution burst out it was very fierce. The
Austrians were driven first from Milan (March, 1848), and then
from city after city, until they seemed to be abandoning their
Italian possessions altogether. Venice asserted its republican
independence under the presidency of Daniel Manin. Charles
Albert, King of Sardinia, thought the time favorable for
recovering Lombardy to himself, and declared war against
Austria. The expulsion of the Austrians became the demand of
the entire peninsula, and even the Pope, the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, and the King of Naples were forced to join the
patriotic movement in appearance, though not with sincerity.
But the King of Sardinia brought ruin on the whole
undertaking, by sustaining a fatal defeat in battle at
Custozza, in July, 1848.
France had been for some time well prepared for revolt, and
was quick to be moved by the first whisper of it from Italy.
The short-lived popularity of Louis Philippe was a thing of
the past. There was widespread discontent with many things,
and especially with the limited suffrage. The French people
had the desire and the need of something like that grand
measure of electoral reform which England secured so
peacefully in 1832; but they could not reach it in the
peaceful way. The aptitude and the habit of handling and
directing the great forces of public opinion effectively in
such a situation were alike wanting among them. There was a
mixture, moreover, of social theories and dreams in their
political undertaking, which heated the movement and made it
more certainly explosive. The Parisian mob took arms and built
barricades on the 23d of February. The next day Louis Philippe
signed an abdication, and a week later he was an exile in
England. For the remainder of the year France was strangely
ruled: first by a self-constituted provisional government,
Lamartine at its head, which opened national workshops, and
attempted to give employment and pay to 125,000 enrolled
citizens in need; afterwards by a Constituent National
Assembly, and an Executive Commission, which found the
national workshops a devouring monster, difficult to control
and hard to destroy. Paris got rid of the shops in June, at
the cost of a battle which lasted four days, and in which more
than 8,000 people were wounded or slain. In November a
republican constitution, framed by the Assembly, was adopted,
and on the 10th of December Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, son of
Louis Bonaparte, once King of Holland, and of Hortense
Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Josephine, was elected
President of the Republic by an enormous popular vote.
The revolutionary shock of 1848 was felt in Germany soon after
the fall of the monarchy in France. In March there was rioting
in Berlin and a collision with the troops, which alarmed the
king so seriously that he yielded promises to almost every
demand. Similar risings in other capitals had about the same
success. At Vienna, the outbreak was more violent and drove
both Metternich and the Emperor from the city. In the first
flush of these popular triumphs there came about a most
hopeful-looking election of a Germanic National Assembly,
representative of all Germany, and gathered at Frankfort, on
the invitation of the Diet, for a revision of the constitution
of the Confederation. But the Assembly contained more learned
scholars than practical statesmen, and its constitutional work
was wasted labor. A Constituent Assembly elected in Prussia
accomplished no more, and was dispersed in the end without
resistance; but the king granted a constitution of his own
framing. The revolutionary movement in Germany left its
effects, in a general loosening of the bonds of harsh
government, a general broadening of political ideas, a final
breaking of the Metternich influence, even in Austria; but it
passed over the existing institutions of the much-divided
country with a very light touch.
In Hungary the revolution, stimulated by the eloquence of
Kossuth, was carried to the pitch of serious war. The
Hungarians had resolved to be an independent nation, and in
the struggle which ensued they approached very near the
attainment of their desire; but Russia came to the help of the
Hapsburgs, and the armies of the two despotisms combined were
more than the Hungarians could resist. Their revolt was
abandoned in August, 1849, and Kossuth, with other leaders,
escaped through Turkish territory to other lands.
The suppression of the Hungarian revolt was followed by a
complete restoration of the despotism and domination of the
Austrians in Italy. Charles Albert, of Sardinia, had taken
courage from the struggle in Hungary and had renewed
hostilities in March, 1849. But, again, he was crushingly
defeated, at Novara, and resigned, in despair, the crown to
his son, Victor Emmanuel II. Venice, which had resisted a long
siege with heroic constancy, capitulated in August of the same
year. The whole of Lombardy and Venetia was bowed once more
under the merciless tyranny of the Austrians, and savage
revenges were taken upon the patriots who failed to escape.
Rome, whence the Pope--no longer a patron of liberal
politics--had fled, and where a republic had been once more
set up, with Garibaldi and Mazzini in its constituent
assembly, was besieged and taken, and the republic overturned,
by troops sent from republican France. The Neapolitan king
restored his atrocious absolutism without help, by measures of
the greatest brutality.
A civil war in Switzerland, which occurred simultaneously with
the political collisions in surrounding countries, is hardly
to be classed with them. It was rather a religious conflict,
between the Roman Catholics and their opponents. The Catholic
cantons, united in a League, called the Sonderbund, were
defeated in the war; the Jesuits were expelled from
Switzerland in consequence, and, in September, 1848, a new
constitution for the confederacy was adopted.
{1100}
The Second Empire in France.
The election of Louis Napoleon to the Presidency of the French
Republic was ominous of a disposition among the people to
bring back a Napoleonic regime, with all the falsities that it
might imply. He so construed the vote which elected him, and
does not seem to have been mistaken. Having surrounded himself
with unprincipled adventurers, and employed three years of his
presidency in preparations for the attempt, he executed a coup
d' état on the 2d of December, dispersing the National
Assembly, arresting influential republicans, and submitting to
popular vote a new constitution which prolonged his presidency
to ten years. This was but the first step. A year later he
secured a "plébiscite" which made him hereditary Emperor of
the French. The new Empire--the Second Empire in France--was
more vulgar, more false, more fraudulent, more swarmingly a
nest of self-seeking and dishonest adventurers, than the First
had been, and with nothing of the saving genius that was in
the First. It rotted for eighteen years, and then it fell,
France with it.
The Crimean War.
A certain respectability was lent to this second Napoleonic
Empire by the alliance of England with it in 1854, against
Russia. The Czar, Nicholas, had determined to defy resistance
in Europe to his designs against the Turks. He first
endeavored to persuade England to join him in dividing the
possessions of "the sick man," as he described the Ottoman,
and, that proposal being declined, he opened on his own
account a quarrel with the Porte. France and England joined
forces in assisting the Turks, and the little kingdom of
Sardinia, from motives of far-seeing policy, came into the
alliance. The principal campaign of the war was fought in the
Crimea, and its notable incident was the long siege of
Sebastopol, which the Russians defended until September, 1855.
An armistice was concluded the following January, and the
terms of peace were settled at a general conference of powers
in Paris the next March. The results of the war were a check
to Russia, but an improvement of the condition of the Sultan's
Christian subjects. Moldavia and Wallachia were soon
afterwards united under the name of Roumania, paying tribute
to the Porte, but otherwise independent.
Liberation and Unification of Italy.
The part taken by Sardinia in the Crimean War gave that
kingdom a standing in European politics which had never been
recognized before. It was a measure of sagacious policy due to
the able statesman, Count Cavour, who had become the trusted
minister of Victor Emmanuel, the Sardinian king. The king and
his minister were agreed in one aim--the unification of Italy
under the headship of the House of Savoy. By her participation
in the war with Russia, Sardinia won a position which enabled
her to claim and secure admission to the Congress of Paris,
among the greater powers. At that conference, Count Cavour
found an opportunity to direct attention to the deplorable
state of affairs in Italy, under the Austrian rule and
influence. No action by the Congress was taken; but the
Italian question was raised in importance at once by the
discussion of it, and Italy was rallied to the side of
Sardinia as the necessary head of any practicable movement
toward liberation. More than that: France was moved to
sympathy with the Italian cause, and Louis Napoleon was led to
believe that his throne would be strengthened by espousing it.
He encouraged Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, therefore, in an
attitude toward Austria which resulted in war (1859), and when
the Sardinians were attacked he went to their assistance with
a powerful force. At Magenta and Solferino the Austrians were
decisively beaten, and the French emperor then abruptly closed
the war, making a treaty which ceded Lombardy alone to
Sardinia, leaving Venetia still under the oppressor, and the
remainder of Italy unchanged in its state. For payment of the
service he had rendered, Louis Napoleon exacted Savoy and
Nice, and Victor Emmanuel was compelled to part with the
original seat of his House.
There was bitter disappointment among the Italian patriots
over the meagerness of the fruit yielded by the splendid
victories of Magenta and Solferino. Despite the treaty of
Villafranca, they were determined to have more, and they did.
Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna demanded annexation to
Sardinia, and, after a plébiscite, they were received (March,
1860) into the kingdom and represented in its parliament. In
the Two Sicilies there was an intense longing for deliverance
from the brutalities of the Neapolitan Bourbons. Victor
Emmanuel could not venture an attack upon the rotten kingdom,
for fear of resentments in France and elsewhere. But the
adventurous soldier, Garibaldi, now took on himself the task
of completing the liberation of Italy. With an army of
volunteers, he first swept the Neapolitans out of Sicily, and
then took Naples itself, within the space of four months,
between May and September, 1860. The whole dominion was
annexed to what now became the Kingdom of Italy, and which
embraced the entire peninsula except Rome, garrisoned for the
Pope by French troops, and Venetia, still held in the clutches
of Austria. In 1862, Garibaldi raised volunteers for an attack
on Rome; but the unwise movement was suppressed by Victor
Emmanuel. Two years later, the King of Italy brought about an
agreement with the French emperor to withdraw his garrison
from Rome, and, after that had been done, the annexation of
Rome to the Italian kingdom was a mere question of time. It
came about in 1870, after the fall of Louis Napoleon, and
Victor Emmanuel transferred his capital to the Eternal City.
The Pope's domain was then limited to the precincts of the
Vatican.
The Austro-Prussian War.
The unification of Italy was the first of a remarkable series
of nationalizing movements which have been the most
significant feature of the history of the last half of the
nineteenth century. The next of these movements to begin was
in Germany--the much divided country of one peculiarly
homogeneous and identical race. Influences tending toward
unification had been acting on the Germans since Prussia rose
to superiority in the north. By the middle of the century, the
educated, military Prussia that was founded after 1806 had
become a power capable of great things in capable hands; and
the capable hands received it. In 1861, William I. succeeded
his brother as king; in 1862, Otto von Bismarck became his
prime minister. It was a remarkable combination of qualities
and talents, and remarkable results came from it.
{1101}
In 1864, Prussia and Austria acted together in taking
Schleswig and Holstein, as German states, from Denmark. The
next year they quarreled over the administration of the
duchies. In 1866, they fought, and Austria was entirely
vanquished in a "seven weeks war." The superiority of Prussia,
organized by her great military administrator and soldier,
Moltke, was overpowering. Her rival was left completely at her
mercy. But Bismarck and his king were wisely magnanimous. They
refrained from inflicting on the Austrians a humiliation that
would rankle and keep enmities alive. They foresaw the need of
future friendship between the two powers of central Europe, as
against Russia on the one side and France on the other, and
they shaped their policy to secure it. It sufficed them to
have put Austria out of the German circle, forever; to have
ended the false relation in which the Hapsburgs--rulers of an
essentially Slavonic and Magyar dominion--had stood towards
Germany so long.
Prussia now dominated the surrounding German states so
commandingly that the mode and the time of their unification
may be said to have been within her own control. Hanover,
Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Schleswig-Holstein, and Frankfort were
incorporated in the Prussian kingdom at once. Saxony and the
other states of the north were enveloped in a North German
Confederation, with the King of Prussia for its hereditary
president and commander of its forces. The states of southern
Germany were left unfederated for the time being, but bound
themselves by treaty to put their armies at the disposal of
Prussia. Thus Germany as a whole was already made practically
one power, under the control of King William and his great
minister.
Final Expulsion of Austria from Italy.
The same war which unified Germany carried forward the
nationalization of Italy another step. Victor Emmanuel had
shrewdly entered into an alliance with Prussia before the war
began, and attacked Austria in Venetia simultaneously with the
German attack on the Bohemian side. The Italians were beaten
at Custozza, and their navy was defeated in the Adriatic; but
the victorious Prussians exacted Venetia for them in the
settlement of peace, and Austria had no more footing in the
peninsula.
Austria-Hungary.
It is greatly to the credit of Austria, long blinded and
stupefied by the narcotic of absolutism, that the lessons of
the war of 1866 sank deep into her mind and produced a very
genuine enlightenment. The whole policy of the court of Vienna
was changed, and with it the constitution of the Empire. The
statesmen of Hungary were called into consultation with the
statesmen of Austria, and the outcome of their discussions was
an agreement which swept away the old Austria, holding Hungary
in subjection, and created in its place a new power--a federal
Austria-Hungary--equalized in its two principal parts, and
united under the same sovereign with distinct constitutions.
The Franco-German War.
The surprising triumph of Prussia in the Seven Weeks War stung
Louis Napoleon with a jealousy which he could not conceal. He
was incapable of perceiving what it signified,--of perfection
in the organization of the Prussian kingdom and of power in
its resources. He was under illusions as to the strength of
his own Empire. It had been honeycombed by the rascalities
that attended and surrounded him, and he did not know it. He
imagined France to be capable of putting a check on Prussian
aggrandizement; and he began very early after Sadowa to pursue
King William with demands which were tolerably certain to end
in war. When the war came, in July, 1870, it was by his own
declaration; yet Prussia was prepared for it and France was
not. In six weeks time from the declaration of war,--in one
month from the first action,--Napoleon himself was a prisoner
of war in the hands of the Germans, surrendered at Sedan, with
the whole army which he personally commanded; the Empire was in
collapse, and a provisional government had taken the direction
of affairs. On the 20th of September Paris was invested; on
the 28th of October Baznine, with an army of 150,000 men,
capitulated at Metz. A hopeless attempt to rally the nation to
fresh efforts of defence in the interior, on the Loire, was
valiantly made under the lead of Gambetta; but it was too
late. When the year closed, besieged Paris was at the verge of
starvation and all attempts to relieve the city had failed. On
the 28th of January, 1871, an armistice was sought and
obtained; on the 30th, Paris was surrendered and the Germans
entered it. The treaty of peace negotiated subsequently ceded
Alsace to Germany, with a fifth of Lorraine, and bound France
to pay a war indemnity of five milliards of francs.
The Paris Commune.
In February, 1871, the provisional "Government of National
Defense" gave way to a National Assembly, duly elected under
the provisions of the armistice, and an executive was
instituted at Bordeaux, under the presidency of M. Thiers.
Early in March, the German forces were withdrawn from Paris,
and control of the city was immediately seized by that
dangerous element--Jacobinical, or Red Republican, or
Communistic, as it may be variously described--which always
shows itself with promptitude and power in the French capital,
at disorderly times. The Commune was proclaimed, and the
national government was defied. From the 2d of April until the
28th of May Paris was again under siege, this time by forces
of the French government, fighting to overcome the
revolutionists within. The proceedings of the latter were more
wantonly destructive than those of the Terrorists of the
Revolution, and scarcely less sanguinary. The Commune was
suppressed in the end with great severity.
The Third French Republic.
M. Thiers held the presidency of the Third Republic in France
until 1873, when he resigned and was succeeded by Marshal
MacMahon. In 1875 the constitution which has since remained,
with some amendments, in force, was framed and adopted. In
1878 Marshal MacMahon gave place to M. Jules Grévy, and the
latter to M. Sadi Carnot in 1887. Republican government seems
to be firmly and permanently established in France at last.
The country is in a prosperous state, and nothing but its
passionate desire to recover Alsace and to avenge Sedan
appears threatening to its future.
{1102}
The new German Empire.
While the army of the Germans was still besieging Paris, and
King William and Prince Bismarck were at Versailles, in
January, 1871, the last act which completed the unification
and nationalization of Germany was performed. This was the
assumption of the title of Emperor by King William, in
response to the prayer of the princes of Germany and of the
North German Parliament. On the 16th of the following April, a
constitution for the German Empire was proclaimed.
The long and extraordinary reign of the Emperor William I. was
ended by his death in 1888. His son, Frederick III., was dying
at the time of an incurable disease, and survived his father
only three months. The son of Frederick III., William II.,
signalized the beginning of his reign by dismissing, after a
few months, the great minister, Count Bismarck, on whom his
strong grandfather had leaned, and who had wrought such
marvels of statesmanship and diplomacy for the German race.
What may lie at the end of the reign which had this
self-sufficient beginning is not to be foretold.
The Russo-Turkish War.
Since the Franco-German War of 1870-1871, the peace of Europe
has been broken but once by hostilities within the European
boundary. In 1875 a rising against the unendurable misrule of
the Turks began in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was imitated
the next year in Bulgaria. Servia and Montenegro declared war
against Turkey and were overcome. Russia then espoused the
cause of the struggling Slavs, and opened, in 1877, a most
formidable new attempt to crush the Ottoman power, and to
accomplish her coveted extension to the Mediterranean. From
May until the following January the storm of war raged
fiercely along the Balkans. The Turks fought stubbornly, but
they were beaten back, and nothing but a dangerous opposition
of feeling among the other powers in Europe stayed the hand of
the Czar from being laid upon Constantinople. The powers
required a settlement of the peace between Russia and Turkey
to be made by a general Congress, and it was held at Berlin in
June, 1878. Bulgaria was divided by the Congress into two
states, one tributary to the Turk, but freely governed, the
other subject to Turkey, but under a Christian governor. This
arrangement was set aside seven years later by a bloodless
revolution, which formed one Bulgaria in nominal relations of
dependence upon the Porte. This was the third important
nationalizing movement within a quarter of a century, and it
is likely to go farther in southeastern Europe, until it
settles, perhaps, "the Eastern question," so far as the
European side of it is concerned.
Bosnia and Herzegovina were given to Austria by the Congress
of Berlin; the independence of Roumania, Servia, and
Montenegro was made more complete; the island of Cyprus was
turned over to Great Britain for administration.
Spain in the last half Century.
A few words will tell sufficiently the story of Spain since
the successor of Joseph Bonaparte quitted the scene. Ferdinand
VII. died in 1833, and his infant daughter was proclaimed
queen, as Isabella II., with her mother, Christina, regent.
Isabella's title was disputed by Don Carlos, the late king's
brother, and a civil war between Carlists and Christinos went
on for years. When Isabella came of age she proved to be a
dissolute woman, with strong proclivities toward arbitrary
government. A liberal party, and even a republican party, had
been steadily gaining ground in Spain, and the queen placed
herself in conflict with it. In 1868 a revolution drove her
into France. The revolutionists offered the crown to a prince
distantly related to the royal family of Prussia. It was this
incident that gave Louis Napoleon a pretext for quarreling
with the King of Prussia in 1870 and declaring war. Declined
by the Hohenzollern prince, the Spanish crown was then offered
to Amadeo, son of the King of Italy, who accepted it, but
resigned it again in 1873, after a reign of two years, in
disgust with the factions which troubled him. Castelar, the
distinguished republican orator, then formed a republican
government which held the reins for a few months, but could
not establish order in the troubled land. The monarchy was
restored in December, 1874, by the coronation of Alfonso XII.,
son of the exiled Isabella. Since that time Spain has
preserved a tolerably peaceful and contented state.
England and Ireland.
In recent years, the part which Great Britain has taken in
Continental affairs has been slight; and, indeed, there has
been little in those affairs to bring about important
international relations. In domestic politics, a single series
of questions, concerning Ireland and the connection of Ireland
with the British part of the United Kingdom, has mastered the
field, overriding all others and compelling the statesmen of
the day to take them in hand. The sudden imperiousness of
these questions affords a peculiar manifestation of the
political conscience in nations which the nineteenth century
has wakened and set astir. Through all the prior centuries of
their subjection, the treatment of the Irish people by the
English was as cruel and as heedless of justice and right as
the treatment of Poles by Russians or of Greeks by Turks. They
were trebly oppressed: as conquered subjects of an alien race,
as religious enemies, as possible rivals in production and
trade. They were deprived of political and civil rights; they
were denied the ministrations of their priests; the better
employments and more honorable professions were closed to
them; the industries which promised prosperity to their
country were suppressed. A small minority of Protestant
colonists became the recognized nation, so far as a
nationality in Ireland was recognized at all. When Ireland was
said to have a Parliament, it was the Parliament of the
minority alone. No Catholic sat in it; no Catholic was
represented in it. When Irishmen were permitted to bear arms,
they were Protestant Irishmen only who formed the privileged
militia. Seven-tenths of the inhabitants of the island were
politically as non-existent as actual serfdom could have made
them. For the most part they were peasants and their state as
such scarcely above the condition of serfs. They owned no
land; their leases were insecure; the laws protected them in
the least possible degree; their landlords were mostly of the
hostile creed and race. No country in Europe showed conditions
better calculated to distress and degrade a people.
{1103}
This was the state of things in Ireland until nearly the end
of the eighteenth century. In 1782 legislative independence
was conceded; but the independent legislature was still the
Parliament in which Protestants sat alone. In 1793 Catholics
were admitted to the franchise; but seats in Parliament were
still denied to them and they must elect Protestants to
represent them. In 1800 the Act of Union, creating the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, extinguished the
Parliament at Dublin and provided for the introduction of
Irish peers and members to represent Irish constituencies in
the greater Parliament at London; but still no Catholic could
take a seat in either House. Not until 1829, after eighteen
years of the fierce agitation which Daniel O'Connell stirred
up, were Catholic disabilities entirely removed and the people
of that faith placed on an equal footing with Protestants in
political and civil rights. O'Connell's agitation was not for
Catholic emancipation alone, but for the repeal of the Act of
Union and the restoration of legislative independence and
national distinctness to Ireland. That desire has been hot in
the Irish heart from the day the Union was accomplished. After
O'Connell's death, there was quiet on the subject for a time.
The fearful famine of 1845-7 deadened all political feeling.
Then there was a recurrence of the passionate animosity to
British rule which had kindled unfortunate rebellions in 1798
and 1803. It produced the Fenian conspiracies, which ran their
course from about 1858 to 1867. But soon after that time Irish
nationalism resumed a more politic temper, and doubled the
energy of its efforts by confining them to peaceful and lawful
ways. The Home Rule movement, which began in 1873, was aimed
at the organization of a compact and well-guided Irish party
in Parliament, to press the demand for legislative
independence and to act with united weight on lines of Irish
policy carefully laid down. This Home Rule party soon acquired
a powerful leader in Mr. Charles Parnell, and was successful
in carrying questions of reform in Ireland to the forefront of
English politics.
Under the influence of its great leader, Mr. Gladstone, the
Liberal party had already, before the Home Rule party came
into the field, begun to adopt measures for the redress of
Irish wrongs. In 1869, the Irish branch of the Church of
England, calling itself the Church of Ireland, was
disestablished. The membership of that church was reckoned to
be one-tenth of the population; but it had been supported by
the taxation of the whole. The Catholics, the Presbyterians
and other dissenters were now released from this unjust
burden. In 1870, a Land Bill--the first of several, which
restrict the power of Irish landlords to oppress their
tenants, and which protect the latter, while opening
opportunities of land-ownership to them--was passed. The land

question became for a time more prominent than the Home Rule
question, and the party of Mr. Parnell was practically
absorbed in an Irish National Land League, formed to force
landlords to a reduction of rents. The methods of coercion
adopted brought the League into collision with the Liberal
Government, notwithstanding the general sympathy of the latter
with Irish complaints. For a time the Irish Nationalists went
into alliance with the English Conservatives; but in 1886 Mr.
Gladstone became convinced, and convinced the majority of his
party, that just and harmonious relations between Ireland and
Great Britain could never be established without the
concession of Home Rule to the former. A bill which he
introduced to that end was defeated in the House of Commons
and Mr. Gladstone resigned. In 1892 he was returned to power,
and in September of the following year he carried in the House
of Commons a bill for the transferring of Irish legislation to
a distinct Parliament at Dublin. It was defeated, however, in
the House of Lords, and the question now rests in an unsettled
state. Mr. Gladstone's retirement from the premiership and
from the leadership of his party, which occurred in March,
1894, may affect the prospects of the measure; but the English
Liberals are committed to its principle, and it appears to be
certain that the Irish question will attain some solution
within no very long time.
Conclusion.
The beginning of the year 1894, when this is written, finds
Europe at peace, as it has been for a number of years. But the
peace is not of friendship, nor of honorable confidence, nor
of good will. The greater nations are lying on their arms, so
to speak, watching one another with strained eyes and with
jealous hearts. France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia, are
marshaling armies in the season of peace that, not many years
ago, would have seemed monstrous for war. Exactions of
military service and taxation for military expenditure are
pressed upon their people to the point of last endurance. The
preparation for battle is so vast in its scale, so unceasing,
so increasing, so far in the lead over all other efforts among
men, that it seems like a new affirmation of belief that war
is the natural order of the world.
And yet, the dread of war is greater in the civilized world
than ever before. The interests and influences that work for
peace are more powerful than at any former time. The wealth
which war threatens, the commerce which it interrupts, the
industry which it disturbs, the intelligence which it offends,
the humanity which it shocks, the Christianity which it
grieves, grow stronger to resist it, year by year. The
statesman and the diplomatist are under checks of
responsibility which a generation no older than Palmerston's
never felt. The arbitrator and the tribunal of arbitration
have become familiar within a quarter of a century. The spirit
of the age opposes war with rising earnestness and increasing
force; while the circumstance and fact of the time seem
arranged for it as the chief business of mankind. It is a
singular and a critical situation; the outcome from it is
impenetrably hidden.
Within itself, too, each nation is troubled with hostilities
that the world has not known before. Democracy in politics is
bringing in, as was inevitable, democracy in the whole social
system; and the period of adjustment to it, which we are
passing through, could not fail to be a period of trial and of
many dangers. The Anarchist, the Nihilist, the Socialist in
his many variations--what are they going to do in the time
that lies before us?
Europe, at the present stage of its history, is in the thick
of many questions; and so we leave it.
{1104}
EURYMEDON, Battles of the (B. C. 466).
See ATHENS: B. C. 470-466.
EUSKALDUNAC.
See BASQUES.
EUTAW SPRINGS, Battle of(1781).
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1780-1781.
EUTHYNI, The.
See LOGISTÆ.
EUTYCHIAN HERESY.
See NESTORIAN AND MONOPHYSITE CONTROVERSY.
EUXINE, The.
Euxinus Pontus, or Pontus Euxinus, the Black Sea,
as named by the Greeks.
EVACUATION DAY.
The anniversary of the evacuation of New York by
the British, Nov. 25, 1783.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1783 (NOVEMBER-DECEMBER).
EVANGELICAL UNION OF GERMANY, The.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1608-1618.
EVER VICTORIOUS ARMY, The.
See CHINA: A. D. 1850-1864.
EVESHAM, Battle of (1265).
The battle which finished the civil war in England known as
the Barons' War. It was fought Aug. 3, 1265, and Earl Simon de
Montfort, the soul of the popular cause, was slain, with most
of his followers. Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I.,
commanded the royal forces.
See ENGLAND: A. D. 1216-1274.
EVICTIONS, Irish.
See IRELAND: A. D. 1886.
EXARCHS OF RAVENNA.
See ROME: A. D. 554-800.
EXARCHS OF THE DIOCESE.
See PRIMATES.
EXCHEQUER.--EXCHEQUER ROLLS.--EXCHEQUER TALLIES.
"The Exchequer of the Norman kings was the court in which the
whole financial business of the country was transacted, and as
the whole administration of justice, and even the military
organisation, was dependent upon the fiscal officers, the
whole framework of society may be said to have passed annually
under its review. It derived its name from the chequered cloth
which covered the table at which the accounts were taken, a
name which suggested to the spectator the idea of a game at
chess between the receiver and the payer, the treasurer and
the sheriff. ... The record of the business was preserved in
three great rolls; one kept by the Treasurer, another by the
Chancellor, and a third by an officer nominated by the king,
who registered the matters of legal and special importance.
The rolls of the Treasurer and Chancellor were duplicates;
that of the former was called from its shape the great roll of
the Pipe, and that of the latter the roll of the Chancery. These
documents are mostly still in existence. The Pipe Rolls are
complete from the second year of Henry II. and the
Chancellor's Rolls nearly so. Of the preceding period only one
roll, that of the thirty-first year of Henry I., is preserved,
and this with Domesday book is the most valuable store of
information which exists for the administrative history of the
age. The financial reports were made to the barons by the
sheriffs of the counties. At Easter and Michælmas each of
these magistrates produced his own accounts and paid in to the
Exchequer such an instalment or proffer as he could afford,
retaining in hand sufficient money for current expenses. In
token of receipt a tally was made; a long piece of wood in
which a number of notches were cut, marking the pounds,
shillings, and pence received; this stick was then split down
the middle, each half contained exactly the same number of
notches, and no alteration could of course be made without
certain detection. ... The fire which destroyed the old Houses
of Parliament is said to have originated in the burning of the
old Exchequer tallies."
W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
chapter 11, section 126.
"The wooden 'tallies' on which a large notch represented
£1,000, and smaller notches other sums, while a halfpenny was
denoted by a small round hole, were actually in use at the
Exchequer until the year 1824."--
Sir J. Lubbock,
Preface to Hall's "Antiquities and
Curiosities of the Exchequer."
ALSO IN: E. F. Henderson,
Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages,
book 1, number 5.
See, also, CURIA REGIS and CHESS.
EXCHEQUER, Chancellor of the.
In the reign of Henry III., of England, "was created the
office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, to whom the Exchequer
seal was entrusted, and who with the Treasurer took part in
the equitable jurisdiction of the Exchequer, although not in
the common law jurisdiction of the barons, which extended
itself as the legal fictions of pleading brought common pleas
into this court."
W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England,
chapter 15, section 237.
EXCLUSION BILL, The.
See ENGLAND: A. D. 1679-1681.
EXCOMMUNICATIONS AND INTERDICTS.
"Excommunication, whatever opinions may be entertained as to
its religious efficacy, was originally nothing more in
appearance than the exercise of a right which every society
claims, the expulsion of refractory members from its body. No
direct temporal disadvantages attended this penalty for
several ages; but as it was the most severe of spiritual
censures, and tended to exclude the object of it, not only
from a participation in religious rites, but in a considerable
degree from the intercourse of Christian society, it was used
sparingly and upon the gravest occasions. Gradually, as the
church became more powerful and more imperious,
excommunications were issued upon every provocation, rather as
a weapon of ecclesiastical warfare than with any regard to its
original intention. ... Princes who felt the inadequacy of
their own laws to secure obedience called in the assistance of
more formidable sanctions. Several capitularies of Charlemagne
denounce the penalty of excommunication against incendiaries
or deserters from the army. Charles the Bald procured similar
censures against his revolted vassals. Thus the boundary
between temporal and spiritual offences grew every day less
distinct; and the clergy were encouraged to fresh
encroachments, as they discovered the secret of rendering them
successful. ... The support due to church censures by temporal
judges is vaguely declared in the capitularies of Pepin and
Charlemagne. It became in later ages a more established
principle in France and England, and, I presume, in other
countries. By our common law an excommunicated person is
incapable of being a witness or of bringing an action; and he
may be detained in prison until he obtains absolution. By the
Establishments of St. Louis, his estate or person might be
attached by the magistrate. These actual penalties were
attended by marks of abhorrence and ignominy still more
calculated to make an impression on ordinary minds. They were
to be shunned, like men infected with leprosy, by their
servants, their friends, and their families. ...
{1105}
But as excommunication, which attacked only one and perhaps a
hardened sinner, was not always efficacious, the church had
recourse to a more comprehensive punishment. For the offence
of a nobleman she put a county, for that of a prince his
entire kingdom, under an interdict or suspension of religious
offices. No stretch of her tyranny was perhaps so outrageous
as this. During an interdict the churches were closed, the
bells silent, the dead unburied, no rite but those of baptism
and extreme unction performed. The penalty fell upon those who
had neither partaken nor could have prevented the offence; and
the offence was often but a private dispute, in which the
pride of a pope or bishop had been wounded. Interdicts were so
rare before the time of Gregory VII., that some have referred
them to him as their author; instances may however be found of
an earlier date."
H. Hallam,
The Middle Ages,
chapter 7, part 1.
ALSO IN:
M. Gosselin,
The Power of the Pope in the Middle Ages,
part 2, chapter 1, article 3.
H. C. Lea,
Studies in Church History,
part 3.
P. Schaff,
History of the Christian Church,
volume 4, chapter 8, section 86.
EXECUTIVE SESSIONS.
See CONGRESS OF THE UNITED SESSIONS.
EXEGETÆ, The.
A board of three persons in ancient Athens "to whom
application might be made in all matters relating to sacred
law, and also, probably, with regard to the significance of
the Diosemia, or celestial phenomena and other signs by which
future events were foretold."
G. F. Schömann,
Antiquities of Greece: The State,
part 3, chapter 3.
EXETER, Origin of.
"Isca Damnoniorum, Caer Wisc, Exanceaster, Exeter, keeping
essentially the same name under all changes, stands
distinguished as the one great English city which has, in a
more marked way than any other, kept its unbroken being and
its unbroken position throughout all ages. The City on the
Exe, in all ages and in all tongues keeping its name as the
City on the Exe, allows of an easy definition. ... It is the
one city [of England] in which we can feel sure that human
habitation and city life have never ceased from the days of
the early Cæsars to our own." At the Norman conquest, Exeter
did not submit to William until after a siege of 18 days, in
1068.
E. A. Freeman,
Exeter,
chapters 1-2.
EXILARCH, The.
See JEWS: 7TH CENTURY.
EXODUS FROM EGYPT, The.
See JEWS: THE ROUTE OF THE EXODUS.
EYLAU, Battle of (1807).
See GERMANY: A. D. 1806-1807.
EYRE, Governor, and the Jamaica insurrection.
See JAMAICA: A. D. 1865.
EYSTEIN I., King of Norway, A. D. 1116-1122.
Eystein II., 1155--1157.
EZZELINO, OR ECCELINO DI ROMANO,
The tyranny of, and the crusade against.
See VERONA: A. D. 1236-1259.
F.
FABIAN POLICY.-FABIAN TACTICS.
The policy pursued by Q. Fabius Maximus, the Roman Dictator,
called "the Cunctator" or Lingerer, in his campaigns against
Hannibal.
See PUNIC WAR, THE SECOND.
FACTORY LEGISLATION, English.
"During the 17th and 18th centuries, when the skill of the
workmen had greatly improved, and the productiveness of labour
had increased, various methods were resorted to for the
purpose of prolonging the working day. The noontide nap was
first dispensed with, then other intervals of rest were
curtailed, and ultimately artificial light was introduced,
which had the effect of abolishing the difference between the
short days of winter and the long days of summer, thus
equalising, the working day throughout the year. The opening
of the 19th century was signalised by a new cry, namely, for a
reduction in the hours of labour; this was in consequence of
the introduction of female and child labour into the
factories, and the deterioration of the workers as a result of
excessive overwork. ... The overwork of the young, and
particularly the excessive hours in the factories, became such
crying evils that in 1801 the first Act was passed to restrict
the hours of labour for apprentices, who were prohibited from
working more than 12 hours a day, between six A. M. and nine
P. M., and that provision should be made for teaching them to
read and write, and other educational exercises. This Act
further provided that the mills should be whitewashed at least
once a year; and that doors and windows should be made to
admit fresh air. This Act was followed by a series of
commissions and committees of inquiry, the result being that
it was several times amended. The details of the evidence
given before the several commissions and committees of inquiry
are sickening in the extreme; the medical testimony was
unanimous in its verdict that the children were physically
ruined by overwork; those who escaped with their lives were so
crippled and maimed that they were unable to maintain
themselves in after life, and became paupers. It was proven
that out of 4,000 who entered the factory before they were 30
years of age, only 600 were to be found in the mills after
that age. By Sir Robert Peel's Bill in 1819 it was proposed to
limit the hours to 11 per day with one and a half for meals,
for those under 16 years of age. But the mill-owners
prophesied the ruin of the manufacturers of the country--they
could not compete with the foreign markets, it was an
interference with the freedom of labour, the spare time given
would be spent in debauchery and riot, and that if passed,
other trades would require the same provisions. The Bill was
defeated, and the hours fixed at 72 per week; the justices,
that is to say the manufacturers, were entrusted with the
enforcement of the law. In 1825 a new law was passed defining
the time when breakfast and dinner was to be taken, and fixing
the time to half an hour for the first repast, and a full hour
for dinner; the traditional term of apprentices was dropped
and the modern classification of children and young persons
was substituted, and children were once more prohibited from
working more than 12 hours a day. But every means was adopted
to evade the law. ... After thousands of petitions, and
numerous angry debates in Parliament, the Act of 1833 was
passed, which limited the working hours of children to 48
hours per week, and provided that each child should have a
certain amount of schooling, and with it factory inspectors
were appointed to enforce the law.
{1106}
But the law was not to come into operation until March 1,
1836, during which time it had to be explained and defended in
one session, amended in a second, and made binding in a third.
After several Royal Commissions and inquiries by select
committees, this Act has been eight times amended, until the
working hours of children are now limited to six per day, and
for young persons and women to 56 per week; these provisions
with certain modifications are now extended to workshops, and
the whole law is being consolidated and amended. ... The whole
series of the Factory Acts, dating from 42 George III., c. 73,
to the 37 and 38 Victoria 1874, forms a code of legislation,
in regard to working people, unexampled in any age and
unequalled in any country in the world. . . . Outside
Parliament efforts have been constantly made to further reduce
the working hours."
G. Howell,
The Conflicts of Capital and Labour,
pages 298-301.
"The continental governments, of course, have been obliged to
make regulations covering kindred subjects, but rarely have
they kept pace with English legislation. America has enacted
progressive laws so far as the condition of factory workers
has warranted. It should be remembered that the abuses which
crept into the system in England never existed in this country
in any such degree as we know they did in the old country. Yet
there are few States in America where manufactures predominate
or hold an important position in which law has not stepped in
and restricted either the hours of labor, or the conditions of
labor, and insisted upon the education of factory children,
although the laws are usually silent as to children of
agricultural laborers. It is is not wholly in the passage of
purely factory acts that the factory system has influenced the
legislation of the world. England may have suffered
temporarily from the effects of some of her factory
legislation, and the recent reduction of the hours of labor to
nine and one-half per day, less than in any other country, has
had the effect of placing her works at a disadvantage; but, in
the long run, England will be the gainer on account of all the
work she has done in the way of legislative restrictions upon
labor. In this she has changed her whole policy. Formerly
trade must be restricted and labor allowed to demoralize
itself under the specious plea of being free; now, trade must
be free and labor restricted in the interests of society,
which means in the interest of good morals. The factory system
has not only wrought this change, but has compelled the
economists to recognize the distinction between commodities
and services. There has been greater and greater freedom of
contract in respect to commodities, but the contracts which
involve labor have become more and more completely under the
authority and supervision of the State. 'Seventy-five years
ago scarcely a single law existed in any country for
regulating the contract for services in the interest of the
laboring classes. At the same time the contract for
commodities was everywhere subject to minute and incessant
regulations' [Hon. F. A. Walker]. Factory legislation in
England, as elsewhere, has had for its chief object the
regulation of the labor of children and women; but its scope
has constantly increased by successive and progressive
amendments until they have attempted to secure the physical
and moral well-being of the working-man in all trades, and to
give him every condition of salubrity and of personal safety
in the workshops. The excellent effect of factory legislation
has been made manifest throughout the whole of Great Britain.
'Physically, the factory child can bear fair comparison with
the child brought up in the fields,' and, intellectually,
progress is far greater with the former than with the latter.
Public opinion, struck by these results, has demanded the
extension of protective measures for children to every kind of
industrial labor, until parliament has brought under the
influence of these laws the most powerful industries. To carry
the factory regulations and those relative to schooling into
effect, England has an efficient corps of factory inspectors.
The manufacturers of England are unanimous in acknowledging
that to the activity, to the sense of impartiality, displayed
by these inspectors, is due the fact that an entire
application of the law has been possible without individual
interests being thereby jeopardized to a very serious extent.
... In no other country is there so elaborate a code of
factory laws as the 'British factory and workshop act' of 1878
(41 Vict., chapter 16), it being an act consolidating all the
factory acts since Sir Robert Peel's act of 1802."
C. D. Wright,
Factory Legislation
(Tenth Census of the United States, volume 2).
ALSO IN:
First annual Report of the Factory Inspectors of
the State of New York, 1886, appendix.
C. Knight,
Popular History of England,
volume 8, chapters 22 and 27.
H. Martineau,
History of the Thirty Years' Peace,
volume 2, pages 512-515.
See, also, ENGLAND: A. D. 1832-1833.
FADDILEY, Battle of.
Fought successfully by the Britons with the West Saxons, on
the border of Cheshire, A. D. 583.
J. R. Green,
The Making of England,
page 206.
FAENZA, Battle of (A. D. 542).
See ROME: A. D. 535-553.
FÆSULÆ.
See FLORENCE, ORIGIN AND NAME.
FAGGING.
See EDUCATION, MODERN: EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.
ENGLAND.--THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
FAGGIOLA, Battle of (1425).
See ITALY: A. D. 1412-1447.
FAINÉANT KINGS.
See FRANKS: A. D. 511-752.
FAIR OAKS, Battle of.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1862 (MAY: VIRGINIA).
FAIRFAX AND THE PARLIAMENTARY ARMY.
See ENGLAND: A. D. 1645 (JANUARY-APRIL),
and (JUNE); 1647 (APRIL-AUGUST);
1648 (NOVEMBER); 1649 (FEBRUARY).
FALAISE.
"The Castle [in Normandy] where legend fixes the birth of
William of Normandy, and where history fixes the famous homage
of William of Scotland, is a vast donjon of the eleventh or
twelfth century. One of the grandest of those massive square
keeps which I have already spoken of as distinguishing the
earliest military architecture of Normandy crowns the summit
of a precipitous rock, fronted by another mass of rock, wilder
still, on which the cannon of England were planted during
Henry's siege. To these rocks, these 'felsen,' the spot owes
its name of Falaise. ... Between these two rugged heights lies
a narrow dell. ... The den is crowded with mills and
tanneries, but the mills and tanneries of Falaise have their
share in the historic interest of the place. ... In every from
which the story has taken in history or legend, the mother of
the Conqueror appears as the daughter of a tanner of Falaise."
E. A. Freeman,
Norman Conquest,
chapter 8, section 1.
{1107}
FALAISE, Peace of (1175).
See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1174-1189.
FALK LAWS, The.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1873-1887.
FALKIRK, Battles of (1298 and 1746).
See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1290-1305;
and 1745-1746.
FAMAGOSTA: A. D. 1571. Taken by the Turks.
See TURKS: A. D. 1566-1571.
FAMILIA.
The slaves belonging to a master were collectively called
familia among the Romans.
E. Guhl and W. Koner,
Life of the Greeks and Romans,
section 100.
FAMILY COMPACT,
The First Bourbon.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1733.
The Second.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1743 (OCTOBER).
The Third.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1761 (AUGUST).
FAMILY COMPACT IN CANADA, The.
See CANADA: A. D.1820-1837.
FAMINE, The Cotton.
See, ENGLAND: A. D. 1861-1865,
FAMINE, The Irish.
See IRELAND: A. D. 1845-1847.
FANARIOTS.
See PHANARIOTS.
FANEUIL HALL.
"The fame of Faneuil Hall [Boston, Mass.] is as wide as the
country itself. It has been called the 'Cradle of Liberty,'
because dedicated by that early apostle of freedom, James
Otis, to the cause of liberty, in a speech delivered in the
hall in March, 1763. ... Its walls have echoed to the voices
of the great departed in times gone by, and in every great
public exigency the people, with one accord, assembled
together to take counsel within its hallowed precincts. ...
The Old Market-house ... existing in Dock Square in 1734, was
demolished by a mob in 1736-37. There was contention among the
people as to whether they would be served at their houses in
the old way, or resort to fixed localities, and one set of
disputants took this summary method of settling the question.
... In 1740, the question of the Market-house being revived,
Peter Faneuil proposed to build one at his own cost on the
town's land in Dock Square, upon condition that the town
should legally authorize it, enact proper regulations, and
maintain it for the purpose named. Mr. Faneuil's noble offer
was courteously received, but such was the division of opinion
on the subject that it was accepted by a majority of only
seven votes, out of 727 persons voting. The building was
completed in September, 1742, and three days after, at a
meeting of citizens, the hall was formally accepted and a vote
of thanks passed to the donor. ... The town voted that the
hall should be called Faneuil Hall forever. ... The original
size of the building was 40 by 100 feet, just half the present
width; the hall would contain 1,000 persons. At the fire of
January 13, 1763, the whole interior was destroyed, but the
town voted to rebuild in March, and the State authorized a
lottery in aid of the design. The first meeting after the
rebuilding was held on the 14th March, 1763, when James Otis
delivered the dedicatory address. In 1806 the Hull was
enlarged in width to 80 feet, and by the addition of a third
story."
S. A. Drake,
Old Landmarks of Boston,
chapter 4.
FANNIAN LAW, The.
See ORCHIAN, FANNIAN, DIDIAN LAWS.
FARM.
See FERM.
FARMERS' ALLIANCE.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1877-1891.
FARMER'S LETTERS, The.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1767-1768.
FARNESE, Alexander, Duke of Parma, in the Netherlands.
See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1577-1581, to 1588-1593.
FARNESE, The House of.
See PARMA: A. D. 1545-1592.
FARRAGUT, Admiral David G.
Capture of New Orleans.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1862 (APRIL: ON THE MISSISSIPPI).
Attack on Vicksburg.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1862 (MAY-JULY: ON THE MISSISSIPPI).
Victory in Mobile Bay.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D.1864 (AUGUST: ALABAMA).
FARSAKH, OR FARSANG, The.
See PARASANG.
FASCES.
See LICTORS.
FASTI.
"Dies Fasti were the days upon which the Courts of Justice [in
ancient Rome] were open, and legal business could be
transacted before the Praetor; the Dies Nefasti were those
upon which the Courts were closed. ... All days consecrated to
the worship of the Gods by sacrifices, feasts or games, were
named Festi. ... For nearly four centuries and a-half after
the foundation of the city the knowledge of the Calendar was
confined to the Pontifices alone. ... These secrets which
might be, and doubtless often were, employed for political
ends, were at length divulged in the year B. C. 314, by Cn.
Flavius, who drew up tables embracing all this
carefully-treasured information, and hung them up in the Forum
for the inspection of the public. From this time forward
documents of this description were known by the name of Fasti.
... These Fasti, in fact, corresponded very closely to a
modern Almanac. ... The Fasti just described have, to prevent
confusion, been called Calendaria, or Fasti Calendares, and
must be carefully distinguished from certain compositions also
named Fasti by the ancients. These were regular chronicles in
which were recorded each year the names of the Consuls and
other magistrates, together with the remarkable events, and
the days on which they occurred. The most important were the
Annales Maximi, kept by the Pontifex Maximus."
W. Ramsay,
Manual of Roman Antiquities,
chapter 11.
FATIMITE CALIPHS, The.
See MAHOMETAN CONQUEST AND EMPIRE: A. D. 908-1171;
Also, ASSASSINS.
FAVILA, King of Leon and the Asturias, or Oviedo, A. D. 737-739.
FEAST OF LIBERTY.
See GREECE: B. C. 479:
PERSIAN WARS.
PLATÆA.
FEAST OF REASON, The.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1793 (NOVEMBER).
FEAST OF THE FEDERATION, The.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1789-1791.
FEAST OF THE SUPREME BEING, The.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1793-1794 (NOVEMBER-JUNE).
FECIALES.--FETIALES.
See FETIALES.
FEDELI.
See CATTANI.
FEDERAL CITY, The.
See WASHINGTON (CITY): A. D. 1791.
FEDERAL CONSTITUTION OF SWITZERLAND.
See CONSTITUTION OF THE SWISS CONFEDERATION.
{1108}
FEDERAL CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
See CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.--FEDERATIONS.
"Two requisites seem necessary to constitute a Federal
Government in ... its most perfect form. On the one hand, each
of the members of the Union must be wholly independent in
those matters which concern each member only. On the other
hand, all must be subject to a common power in those matters
which concern the whole body of members collectively. Thus
each member will fix for itself the laws of its criminal
jurisprudence, and even the details of its political
constitution. And it will do this, not as a matter of
privilege or concession from any higher power, but as a matter
of absolute right, by virtue of its inherent powers as an
independent commonwealth. But in all matters which concern the
general body, the sovereignty of the several members will
cease. Each member is perfectly independent within its own
sphere; but there is another sphere in which its independence,
or rather its separate existence, vanishes. It is invested
with every right of sovereignty on one class of subjects, but
there is another class of subjects on which it is as incapable
of separate political action as any province or city of a
monarchy or of an indivisible republic. ... Four Federal
Commonwealths ... stand out, in four different ages of the
world, as commanding, above all others, the attention of
students of political history. Of these four, one belongs to
what is usually known as 'ancient,' another to what is
commonly called 'mediæval' history; a third arose in the
period of transition between mediæval and modern history; the
creation of the fourth may have been witnessed by some few of
those who are still counted among living men, ... These four
Commonwealths are, First, the Achaian League [see GREECE: B.
C. 280-146] in the later days of Ancient Greece, whose most
flourishing period comes within the third century before our
era. Second, the Confederation of the Swiss Cantons [see
CONSTITUTION OF THE SWISS CONFEDERATION], which, with many
changes in its extent and constitution, has lasted from the
thirteenth century to our own day. Third, the Seven United
Provinces of the Netherlands [see NETHERLANDS: A. D.
1577-1581, and after], whose Union arose in the War of
Independence against Spain, and lasted, in a republican form,
till the war of the French Revolution. Fourth, the United
States of North America [see CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA], which formed a Federal Union after their revolt
from the British Crown under George the Third, and whose
destiny forms one of the most important, and certainly the
most interesting, of the political problems of our own time.
Of these four, three come sufficiently near to the full
realization of the Federal idea to be entitled to rank among
perfect Federal Governments. The Achaian League, and the
United States since the adoption of the present Constitution,
are indeed the most perfect developments of the Federal
principle which the world has ever seen. The Swiss
Confederation, in its origin a Union of the loosest kind, has
gradually drawn the Federal bond tighter and tighter, till,
within our own times, it has assumed a form which fairly
entitles it to rank beside Achaia and America. The claim of
the United Provinces is more doubtful; their union was at no
period of their republican being so close as that of Achaia,
America, and modern Switzerland."
E. A. Freeman,
History of Federal Government,
volume 1, pages 3-6.
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:
Classification of Federal Governments.
"To the classification of federal governments publicists have
given great attention with unsatisfactory results. History
shows a great variety of forms, ranging from the lowest
possible organization, like that of the Amphictyonic Council
[see AMPHIKTYONIC COUNCIL] to the highly centralized and
powerful German Empire. Many writers deny that any fixed
boundaries can be described. The usual classification is,
however, into three divisions,--the Staatenstaat, or state
founded on states; the Staatenbund, or union of states--to
which the term Confederacy nearly corresponds; and the
Bundesstaat, or united state, which answers substantially to
the term federation as usually employed. The Staatenstaat is
defined to be a state in which the units are not individuals,
but states, and which, therefore, has no operation directly on
individuals, but deals with and legislates for its corporate
members; they preserve undisturbed their powers of government
over their own subjects. The usual example of a Staatenstaat
is the Holy Roman Empire [see ROMAN EMPIRE, THE HOLY]. This
conception ... is, however, illogical in theory, and never has
been carried out in practice. ... Historically, also, the
distinction is untenable. The Holy Roman Empire had courts,
taxes, and even subjects not connected with the states. In
theory it had superior claims upon all the individuals within
the Empire; in practice it abandoned control over the states.
The second category is better established. Jellinek says:
"When states form a permanent political alliance, of which
common defence is at the very least the purpose, with
permanent federal organs, there arises a Staatenbund.' This
form of government is distinguished from an alliance by the
fact that it has permanent federal organs; from a commercial
league by its political purpose; from a Bundesstaat by its
limited purpose. In other words, under Staatenbund are
included the weaker forms of true federal government, in which
there is independence from other powers, and, within the
purposes of the union, independence from the constituent
states. ... The Staatenbund form includes most of the federal
governments which have existed. The Greek confederations
(except perhaps the Lycian and Achæan) and all the mediæval
leagues were of this type: even the strong modern unions of
the United States, Germany, and Switzerland, have gone through
the Staatenbund stage in their earlier history. Between the
Staatenbund and the more highly developed form, the
Bundesstaat, no writer has described an accurate boundary.
There are certain governments, notably those of Canada,
Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, in which is found
an elaborate and powerful central organism, including federal
courts; to this organism is assigned all or nearly all the
common concerns of the nation; within its exclusive control
are war, foreign affairs, commerce, colonies, and national
finances; and there is an efficient power of enforcement
against states. Such governments undoubtedly are
Bundesstaaten."
A. B. Hart,
Introduction to the Study of Federal Government
(Harvard Historical Monographs, number 2),
chapter 1.
{1109}
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:
Greek Federations.
"Under the conditions of the Græco-Roman civic life there were
but two practicable methods of forming a great state and
diminishing the quantity of warfare. The one method was
conquest with incorporation, the other method was federation.
... Neither method was adopted by the Greeks in their day of
greatness. The Spartan method of extending its power was
conquest without incorporation: when Sparta conquered another
Greek city, she sent a harmost to govern it like a tyrant; in
other words she virtually enslaved the subject city. The
efforts of Athens tended more in the direction of a peaceful
federalism. In the great Delian confederacy [see GREECE: B. C.
478-477, and ATHENS: B. C. 466-454], which developed into the
maritime empire of Athens, the Ægean cities were treated as
allies rather than subjects. As regards their local affairs
they were in no way interfered with, and could they have been
represented in some kind of a federal council at Athens, the
course of Grecian history might have been wonderfully altered.
As it was, they were all deprived of one essential element of
sovereignty,--the power of controlling their own military
forces. ... In the century following the death of Alexander,
in the closing age of Hellenic independence, the federal idea
appears in a much more advanced stage of elaboration, though
in a part of Greece which had been held of little account in
the great days of Athens and Sparta. Between the Achaian
federation, framed in 274 B. C., and the United States of
America, there are some interesting points of resemblance
which have been elaborately discussed by Mr. Freeman, in his
'History of Federal Government.' About the same time the
Ætolian League [see ÆTOLIAN LEAGUE] came into prominence in
the north. Both these leagues were instances of true federal
government, and were not mere confederations; that is, the
central government acted directly upon all the citizens and
not merely upon the local governments. Each of these leagues
had for its chief executive officer a General elected for one
year, with powers similar to those of an American President.
In each the supreme assembly was a primary assembly at which
every citizen from every city of the league had a right to be
present, to speak, and to vote; but as a natural consequence
these assemblies shrank into comparatively aristocratic
bodies. In Ætolia, which was a group of mountain cantons
similar to Switzerland, the federal union was more complete
than in Achaia, which was a group of cities. ... In so far as
Greece contributed anything towards the formation of great and
pacific political aggregates, she did it through attempts at
federation. But in so low a state of political development as
that which prevailed throughout the Mediterranean world in
pre-Christian times, the more barbarous method of conquest
with incorporation was more likely to be successful on a great
scale. This was well illustrated in the history of Rome,--a civic
community of the same generic type with Sparta and Athens, but
presenting specific differences of the highest importance. ...
Rome early succeeded in freeing itself from that insuperable
prejudice which elsewhere prevented the ancient city from
admitting aliens to a share in its franchise. And in this
victory over primeval political ideas lay the whole secret of
Rome's mighty career."
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:
Mediæval Leagues in Germany.
"It is hardly too much to say that the Lombard League led
naturally to the leagues of German cities. The exhausting
efforts of the Hohenstaufen Emperors to secure dominion in
Italy compelled them to grant privileges to the cities in
Germany; the weaker emperors, who followed, bought support
with new charters and privileges. The inability of the Empire
to keep the peace or to protect commerce led speedily to the
formation of great unions of cities, usually commercial in
origin, but very soon becoming political forces of prime
importance. The first of these was the Rhenish League, formed
in 1254. The more important cities of the Rhine valley, from
Basle to Cologne, were the original members; but it eventually
had seventy members, including several princes and ruling
prelates. The league had Colloquia, or assemblies, at stated
intervals; but, beyond deciding upon a general policy, and the
assignment of military quotas, it had no legislative powers.
There was, however, a Kommission, or federal court, which
acted as arbiter in disputes between the members. The chief
political service of the league was to maintain peace during
the interregnum in the Empire (1256-1273). During the
fourteenth century it fell apart, and many of its members
joined the Hansa or Suabian League. ... In 1377 seventeen
Suabian cities, which had been mortgaged by the Emperor,
united to defend their liberties. They received many
accessions of German and Swiss cities; but in 1388 they were
overthrown by Leopold III. of Austria, and all combinations of
cities were forbidden. A federal government they cannot be
said to have possessed; but political, almost federal
relations continued during the fifteenth century. The similar
leagues of Frankfort and Wetterau were broken up about the
same time. Other leagues of cities and cantons were in a like
manner formed and dissolved,--among them the leagues of
Hauenstein and Burgundy; and there was a confederation in
Franche Comté, afterward French territory. All the mediæval
leagues thus far mentioned were defensive, and had no extended
relations beyond their own borders. The great Hanseatic League
[see HANSA TOWNS], organized as a commercial union, developed
into a political and international power, which negotiated and
made war on its own account with foreign and German
sovereigns; and which was for two centuries one of the leading
powers of Europe."
A. B. Hart,
Introduction to the Study of Federal Government
(Harvard Historical Monographs, number 2),
chapter 3.
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:
Mediæval League of Lombardy.
When Frederick Barbarossa entered Italy for the fifth time in
1163, to enforce the despotic sovereignty over that country
which the German kings, as emperors, were then claiming (see
ITALY: A. D. 961-1039), a league of the Lombard cities was
formed to resist him. "Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso,
the most powerful towns of the Veronese marches, assembled
their consuls in congress, to consider of the means of putting
an end to a tyranny which overwhelmed them. The consuls of
these four towns pledged themselves by oath in the name of
their cities to give mutual support to each other in the
assertion of their former rights, and in the resolution to
reduce the imperial prerogatives to the point at which they
were fixed under the reign of Henry IV. Frederick, informed of
this association; returned hastily into Northern Italy, to put it
down ... but he soon perceived that the spirit of liberty had
made progress in the Ghibeline cities as well as in those of
the Guelphs. ...
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Obliged to bend before a people which he considered only as
revolted subjects, he soon renounced a contest so humiliating,
and returned to Germany, to levy an army more submissive to
him. Other and more pressing interests diverted his attention
from this object till the autumn of 1166. ... When Frederick,
in the month of October, 1166, descended the mountains of the
Grisons to enter Italy by the territory of Brescia, he marched
his army directly to Lodi, without permitting any act of
hostility on the way. At Lodi, he assembled, towards the end
of November, a diet of the kingdom of Italy, at which he
promised the Lombards to redress the grievances occasioned by
the abuses of power by his podestas, and to respect their just
liberties; ... to give greater weight to his negotiation, he
marched his army into Central Italy. ... The towns of the
Veronese marches, seeing the emperor and his army pass without
daring to attack them, became bolder: they assembled a new
diet, in the beginning of April, at the convent of Pontida,
between Milan and Bergamo. The consuls of Cremona, of Bergamo,
of Brescia, of Mantua and Ferrara met there, and joined those
of the marches. The union of the Guelphs and Ghibelines, for
the common liberty, was hailed with universal joy. The
deputies of the Cremonese, who had lent their aid to the
destruction of Milan, seconded those of the Milanese villages
in imploring aid of the confederated towns to rebuild the city
of Milan. This confederation was called the League of Lombardy.
The consuls took the oath, and their constituents afterwards
repeated it, that every Lombard should unite for the recovery
of the common liberty; that the league for this purpose should
last twenty years; and, finally, that they should aid each
other in repairing in common any damage experienced in this
sacred cause, by any one member of the confederation:
extending even to the past this contract for reciprocal
security, the league resolved to rebuild Milan. ... Lodi was
soon afterwards compelled, by force of arms, to take the oath
to the league; while the towns of Venice, Placentia, Parma,
Modena, and Bologna voluntarily and gladly joined the
association."
J. C. L. de Sismondi,
History of the Italian Republics,
chapter 2.
In 1226 the League was revived
or renewed against Frederick II.
See ITALY: A. D. 1183-1250.
"Milan and Bologna took the lead, and were followed by
Piacenza, Verona, Brescia, Faenza, Mantua, Vercelli, Lodi,
Bergamo, Turin, Alessandria, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso. ...
Nothing could be more unlike, than the First and the Second
Lombard Leagues, that of 1167, formed against Frederick the
First after the most cruel provocation, was sanctioned by the
Pope, and had for its end the deliverance of Lombardy. That of
1226, formed against Frederick the Second, after no
provocation received, was discountenanced by the Pope, and
resulted in the frustration of the Crusade and in sowing the
germ of endless civil wars. This year is fixed upon by the
Brescian Chronicler as the beginning of 'those plaguy factions
of Guelf and Ghibelline, which were so engrained into the
minds of our forefathers, that they have handed them down as
an heir-loom to their posterity, never to come to an end.'"
T. L. Kington,
History of Frederick the Second,
volume 1, pages 265-266.
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:
Modern Federations.
"A remarkable phenomenon of the last hundred years is the
impetus that has been given to the development of Federal
institutions. There are to-day contemporaneously existing no
less than eight distinct Federal Governments. First and
foremost is the United States of America, where we have an
example of the Federal Union in the most perfect form yet
attained. Then comes Switzerland, of less importance than the
United States of America, but most nearly approaching it in
perfection. Again we have the German Empire [see CONSTITUTION
OF GERMANY], that great factor in European politics, which is
truly a Federal Union, but a cumbrous one and full of
anomalies. Next in importance comes the Dominion of Canada
[see CONSTITUTION OF CANADA], which is the only example of a
country forming a Federal Union and at the same time a colony.
Lastly come the Argentine Republic, Mexico, and the States of
Colombia and Venezuela [see CONSTITUTIONS]. This is a very
remarkable list when we consider that never before the present
century did more than two Federal Unions ever coexist, and
that very rarely, and that even those unions were far from
satisfying the true requirements of Federation. Nor is this
all. Throughout the last hundred years we can mark a growing
tendency in countries that have adopted the Federal type of
Government to perfect that Federal type and make it more truly
Federal than before. In the United States of America, for
instance, the Constitution of 1789 was more truly Federal than
the Articles of Confederation, and certainly since the Civil
War we hear less of State Rights, and more of Union. It has
indeed been remarked that the citizens of the United States
have become fond of applying the words 'Nation' and 'National'
to themselves in a manner formerly unknown. We can mark the
same progress in Switzerland. Before 1789, Switzerland formed
a very loose system of Confederated States--in 1815, a
constitution more truly Federal was devised; in 1848, the
Federal Union was more firmly consolidated; and lastly, in
1874, such changes were made in the Constitution that
Switzerland now presents a very fairly perfect example of
Federal Government. In Germany we may trace a similar
movement. In 1815, the Germanic Confederation was formed; but
it was only a system of Confederated States, or what the
Germans call Staatenbund; but after various changes, amongst
others the exclusion of Austria in 1866, it became, in 1871, a
composite State or, in German language, a Bundestaat. Beyond
this, we have to note a further tendency to Federation. In the
year 1886, a Bill passed the Imperial Parliament to permit of
the formation of an Australasian Council for the purposes of
forming the Australasian Colonies into a Federation. Then we
hear of further aspirations for applying the Federal system,
as though there were some peculiar virtue or talismanic effect
about it which rendered it a panacea for all political troubles.
There has, also, been much talk about Imperial Federation.
Lastly, some people think they see a simple solution of the
Irish Question in the application of Federation, particularly
the Canadian form of it, to Ireland."
Federal Government
(Westminster Rev., May, 1888,
pages 573-574).
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