Chapter IV: , VII (34)

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.

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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.

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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.