all its forms had been tried and found ineffective. For centuries men laboured under the illusion that uniformity was the surest road to unity. The old persecuting spirit took a long time to die. In England Roman Catholics could not sit in Parliament until 1830, Jews not until 1858, and Atheists not until 1886.

XXIV

GRAND MONARCHY IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND

TH

EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

'HE decline of the Empire and of the Papacy and the growth of separate nations inevitably led to the formation of strong monarchies in many of the countries of Europe. Kings aimed at making themselves absolute, and they were frequently successful. At the end of the sixteenth century France was rapidly approaching a position in which the King could do practically as he liked; Spain was ruled autocratically, so too were many of the Italian principalities; and the English monarchy had reached the zenith of its power. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the rulers of France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia succeeded in enhancing considerably the strength and the outward grandeur of their positions, but in England attempts to establish absolute monarchy ended in failure. There the trading and commercial classes were prepared to tolerate royal pretensions so long as they did not seriously interfere with their own interests, but when the dignity of royalty demanded arbitrary taxation, and the control of people's consciences, they preferred rebellion to compliance with a state of affairs which struck at the very root of personal liberty.

In England the Tudors, partly in order to humiliate the nobility and strengthen the Crown, had encouraged and fostered the development of the middle classes, and although they aimed at making Parliament subservient to themselves,

SEVENTEENTH & EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 413 they did not succeed in utterly crushing the spirit of individuality among its members. This was very obvious when the Tudor dynasty came to an end and its place was taken by that of the Stuarts. The first of the Stuart kings, James I, had very exalted views as to the nature and scope of the royal authority. He declared that as it was blasphemy on the part of men to question what God could do, so it was high presumption on the part of subjects to question what the King could do. He considered himself to be above the law, and once went so far as to levy customs duties in defiance of the principle, already centuries old, that there should be no taxation without consent of Parliament. Moreover, James desired uniformity in religious matters, and saw no reason why liberty of conscience should be granted to those who would not conform to the established religion of the state. His son, Charles I, followed the bad precedents set by his father, and after a troubled reign of eighteen years, during which arbitrary taxation, illegal imprisonment of political opponents, and religious intolerance had almost become features of the national life, the Puritans and those who believed in the supremacy of Parliament rebelled against the King, and a civil war of seven years' duration ended with the execution of Charles and eleven years of republican government. Oliver Cromwell, the chief leader of the opposition to the King, became Lord Protector, and under his strong rule the name of England was feared and respected abroad, the commercial supremacy of the Dutch was undermined, and an important step taken in the development of the British Empire by the conquest of the West Indian island of Jamaica. But the English people had no liking for the republic which Cromwell gave them, and less than two years after his death they invited Charles, the son of the late king, to restore the monarchy. That young man, who had been spending his time in profitless exile, was only too glad to accept the invitation. He would have liked to govern as an absolute monarch like his

friend and example, Louis XIV of France, and he did go some distance in that direction, but he was careful not to go too far, for he was determined above all things not to set out on his travels again. His brother, James II, who succeeded him, had none of this caution, and after three years of almost incredibly foolish government, during which he overrode laws in the most deliberate manner and contrived to alienate almost everybody in the country except the Roman Catholics whom he favoured, his subjects decided that they could not put up with him any longer. He was accordingly deposed, and the crown conferred upon the Dutch prince, William of Orange, and his wife, Mary, who was James's daughter. The deposition of James was a great triumph for law and constitutionalism. It was almost immediately followed by the Bill of Rights, which defined the position of the sovereign and the rights of his subjects. It inaugurated a period lasting about a hundred and fifty years, when England was virtually ruled by the landed gentry. It was a period marked by distinct progress in many directions-in religious toleration, in freedom of speech, in the evolution of newspapers, and in the growing control of government by ministers responsible to a majority in Parliament. But the great mass of the people had, as yet, little or no control over public affairs. The right to vote for members of Parliament was practically confined to the propertied classes, and there were all sorts of anomalies in the system of representation. Before the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, great towns like Manchester and Birmingham returned no members to Parliament, while places like Old Sarum in Wiltshire, which consisted of a mound and a few houses, and Dunwich on the East Coast, which was nothing more than a ruined sea wall, returned two members apiece. The government of England from 1688 to 1832 was distinctly aristocratic in character; it was better than absolute monarchy, but it was far removed from democracy. It was really a form of benevolent despotism—all for the people and

nothing by the people—but controlled, not by a king who was a law unto himself, but by an oligarchy who clung to power partly because they liked it, and partly because they believed that the destinies of the country could be safely entrusted to no one but themselves.

There was one other European country where absolute monarchy failed to take root, and where its overthrow resulted, as in England, in an aristocratical form of government. This was the country which we now know as Holland. Holland was the northern part of the Netherlands, which formed part of the extensive dominions of the Emperor Charles V. It was early affected by the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation, particularly by Calvinism, and the determined efforts of Charles V to eradicate it by persecution failed. His son and successor, Philip II, pursued the same policy of repression with practically the same results. He further exasperated the Netherlanders by taxing them heavily in order that he might have money to carry on a war with France. The result was that by 1570 the whole of the Netherlands, South as well as North, was in revolt. The South, which to-day forms the kingdom of Belgium, was ultimately subdued, and at the end of the struggle remained Spanish and Roman Catholic, but the North, under their great leader William the Silent, Prince of Orange, broke away altogether, and by 1609 had succeeded in forming an independent republic 1 under the headship of the Prince of Orange, who took the title of Stadholder and held the supreme military and executive power in the state. His authority was, however, limited by the existence of the States-General, which made laws like the English Parliament, and which was even less representative of the mass of the people.

In England and Holland Grand Monarchy failed to establish itself. Elsewhere it was more successful, particularly in France, where the kings not only reached a position 1 Its independence was not fully recognized until 1648.