Disastrous results of the war in Germany.
The accounts of the misery and depopulation of Germany caused by the Thirty Years' War are well-nigh incredible. Thousands of villages were wiped out altogether; in some regions the population was reduced by one half, in others to a third, or even less, of what it had been at the opening of the conflict. The flourishing city of Augsburg was left with but sixteen thousand souls instead of eighty thousand. The people were fearfully barbarized by privation and suffering and by the atrocities of the soldiers of all the various nations. Until the end of the eighteenth century Germany was too exhausted and impoverished to make any considerable contribution to the culture of Europe. Only one hopeful circumstance may be noted as we leave this dreary subject. After the Peace of Westphalia the elector of Brandenburg was the most powerful of the German princes next to the emperor. As king of Prussia he was destined to create another European power, and at last to humble the house of Hapsburg and create a new German empire in which Austria should have no part.
General Reading.—The most complete and scholarly account of the Thirty Years' War to be had in English is Gindely, History of the Thirty Years' War (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2 vols., $3.50).
CHAPTER XXX
STRUGGLE IN ENGLAND FOR CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT
The question of absolute or limited monarchy in England.
183. The great question which confronted England in the seventeenth century was whether the king should be permitted to rule the people, as God's representative, or should submit to the constant control of the nation's representatives, i.e., Parliament. In France the Estates General met for the last time in 1614, and thereafter the French king made laws and executed them without asking the advice of any one except his immediate counselors. In general, the rulers on the continent exercised despotic powers, and James I of England and his son Charles I would gladly have made themselves absolute rulers, for they entertained the same exalted notions of the divine right of kings which prevailed across the English Channel. England finally succeeded, however, in adjusting the relations between king and Parliament in a very happy way, so as to produce a limited, or constitutional, monarchy. The long and bitter struggle between the house of Stuart and the English Parliament plays an important rôle in the history of Europe at large, as well as in that of England. After the French Revolution, at the end of the eighteenth century, the English system began to become popular on the continent, and it has now replaced the older absolute monarchy in all the kingdoms of western Europe.
Accession of James I, 1603–1625.