We are apt to suppose that progress and innovation are so peculiarly the features of these latter times that it is only in them that a man of more than ordinary length of life has witnessed any remarkable change. We meet with men still alive who were acquainted with Franklin and Voltaire, who have been presented at the court of Louis the Sixteenth and have visited President Pierce at the White House. But the period we have now to examine is quite as varied in the contrasts presented by the duration of a lifetime as in any other age of the world. Of this we shall take a French chronicler as an example,—a man who was as greedy of news, and as garrulous in relating it, as Froissart himself, but who must take a very inferior rank to that prose minstrel of “gentle blood,” as he limited his researches principally to the scandals which characterized his time. We mean the truth-speaking libeller BrantÔme. "A.D. 1616."This man died within a year or two of Shakspeare, and yet had accompanied Mary to Scotland, and given that poetical account of the voyage from Calais, when she sat in the stern of the vessel with her eyes fixed on the receding shore, and said, “Adieu, France, adieu! I shall never see you more;” and again, on the following morning, bending her looks across the water when land was no longer to be seen, and exclaiming, “Adieu, France! I shall never see you more.” The mere comparison of these two things—the return of Mary to her native kingdom, torn at that time with all the struggles of anarchy and distress, and the death of the greatest of earth’s poets, rich and honoured, in his well-built house at Stratford-on-Avon—suggests a strange contrast between the beginning of BrantÔme’s literary career and its close: the events filling up the interval are like the scarcely-discernible heavings in a dark and tumultuous sea,—a storm perpetually raging, and waves breaking upon every shore. In his own country, cruelty and demoralization had infected all orders in the State, till murder, and the wildest profligacy of manners, were looked on without a shudder. BrantÔme attended the scanty and unregretted funeral of Henry the Third, the last of the house of Valois, who was stabbed by the monk Jacques Clement for faltering in his allegiance to the Church. A sentence had been pronounced at Rome against the miserable king, and the fanatic’s dagger was ready. Sixtus the Fifth, in full consistory, declared that the regicide was “comparable, as regards the salvation of the world, to the incarnation and the resurrection, and that the courage of the youthful Jacobin surpassed that of Eleazar and Judith.” “That Pope,” says Chateaubriand, the Catholic historian of France, “had too little political conviction, and too much genius, to be sincere in these sacrilegious comparisons; but it was of importance to him to encourage the fanatics who were ready to murder kings in the name of the papal power.” BrantÔme had seen the issuing of a bull containing the same penalties against Elizabeth, the death of Mary on the scaffold, and the failure of the Armada. After the horrors of the religious wars, from the conspiracy of Amboise in 1560 to the publication of the edict of toleration given at Nantes in 1598, he had seen the comparatively peaceful days of Henry the Fourth, till fanaticism again awoke a suspicion of a return to his original Protestant leanings, as shown in his opposition to the house of Austria, and Ravaillac renewed the meritorious work of Clement in 1610. Last of all, the spectator of all these changes saw England and Scotland forever united under one crown, and the first rise of the master of the modern policy of Europe, for in the year of BrantÔme’s death a young priest was appointed Secretary of State in France, whom men soon gazed on with fear and wonder as the great Cardinal Richelieu.

In England the alterations were as great and striking. After the troubled years from Elizabeth’s accession to the Armada, a period of rest and progress came. Interests became spread over the whole nation, and did not depend so exclusively on the throne. Wisdom and good feeling made Elizabeth’s crown, in fact, what laws and compacts have made her successors’,—a constitutional sovereign’s. She ascertained the sentiments of her people almost without the intervention of Parliament, and was more a carrier-through of the national will than the originator of absolute decrees. The moral battles of a nation in pursuit of some momentous object like religious or political freedom bring forth great future crops, as fields are enriched on which mighty armies have been engaged. The fertilizing influence extends in every direction, far and near. If, therefore, the intellectual harvest that followed the final rejection of the Pope and crowning defeat of the Spaniard included Shakspeare and Bacon, and a host of lesser but still majestic names, we may venture also to remark, on the duller and more prosaic side of the question, that in the first year of the seventeenth century a patent was issued by which a commercial speculation attained a substantive existence, for the East India Company was founded, with a stock of seventy-two thousand pounds, and a fleet of four vessels took their way from the English harbours, on their first voyage to the realm where hereafter their employers, who thus began as merchant adventurers, were to rule as kings. The example set by these enterprising men was followed by high and low. During the previous century people had been too busy with their domestic and religious disputes to pay much attention to foreign exploration. They were occupied with securing their liberties from the tyranny of Henry the Eighth and their lives from the truculence of Mary. Then the plots perpetually formed against Elizabeth, by domestic treason and foreign levy, kept their attention exclusively on home-affairs. But when the State was settled and religion secure, the long-pent-up activity of the national mind found vent in distant expeditions. A chivalrous contempt of danger, and poetic longing for new adventure, mingled with the baser attractions of those maritime wanderings. The families of gentle blood in England, instead of sending their sons to waste their lives in pursuit of knightly fame in the service of foreign states, equipped them for far higher enterprises, and sent them forth to gather the riches of unknown lands beyond the sea. Romantic rumours were rife in every manor-house of the strange sights and inexhaustible wealth to be gained by undaunted seamanship and judicious treatment of the natives of yet-unexplored dominions. Spain and Portugal had their kingdoms, but the extent of America was great enough for all. Islands were everywhere to be found untouched as yet by the foot of European; and many a winter’s night was spent in talking over the possible results of sailing up some of the vast rivers that came down like bursting oceans from the far-inland regions to which nobody had as yet ascended,—the people and cities that lay upon their banks, the gold and jewels that paved the common soil. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, these imaginings had grown into sufficing motives of action, and gentlemen were ready from all the ports of the kingdom to sail on their adventurous voyages. In addition to the chance those gallant mariners had of realizing their day-dreams by the tedious methods of discovery and exploration, there was always the prospect of making prize of a galleon of Spain; for at all times, however friendly the nations might be in the European waters, a war was carried on beyond the Azores. Not altogether lost, therefore, was the old knightly spirit of peril-seeking and adventure in those commercial and geographical speculations. There were articles of merchandise in the hold, gaudy-coloured cloths, and bead ornaments, and wretched looking-glasses, besides brass and iron; but all round the captain’s cabin were arranged swords and pistols, boarding-pikes, and other implements of fight. Guns also of larger size peeped out of the port-holes, and the crew were chosen as much with a view to warlike operations as to the ordinary duties of the ship. The Spaniards had made their way into the Pacific, and had established large settlements on the shores of Chili and Peru. Scenes which have been reacted at the diggings in modern times took place where the Europeans fixed their seat, and ships loaded with the precious metals found their way home, exposed to all the perils of storm and war. Drake had pounced upon several of their galleys and despoiled them of their precious cargo. Cavendish, a gentleman of good estate in Suffolk, had followed in his wake, and, after forcing his way through the Straits of Magellan, had reached the shores of California itself and there captured a Spanish vessel freighted with a vast amount of gold. All these adventures of the expiring sixteenth century became traditions and ballads of the young seventeenth. Raleigh, the most accomplished gentleman of his time, gave the glory of his example to the maritime career, and all the oceans were alive with British ships. While Raleigh and others of the upper class were carrying on a sort of cultivated crusade against the monopoly of the Spaniards, others of a less aristocratic position were busied in the more regular paths of commerce. We have seen the formation of the India Company in 1600. Our competitors, the Dutch, fitted out fleets on a larger scale, and established relations of trade and friendship with the natives of Polynesia and New Holland, and even of Java and India. But the zeal of the public in trading-speculations was not only shown in those well-conducted expeditions to lands easily accessible and already known: a company was established for the purpose of opening out the African trade, and a commercial voyage was undertaken to no less a place than Timbuctoo by a gallant pair of seamen of the names of Thomson and Jobson. It was not long before these efforts at honest international communication, and even the exploits of the Drakes and Cavendishes, who acted under commissions from the queen, degenerated into lawless piracy and the golden age of the Buccaneers. The policy of Spain was complete monopoly in her own hands, and a refusal of foreign intercourse worthy of the potentates of China and Japan. All access was prohibited to the flags of foreign nations, and the natural result followed. Adventurous voyagers made their appearance with no flag at all, or with the hideous emblem of a death’s head emblazoned on their standard, determined to trade peaceably if possible, but to trade whether peaceably or not. The Spanish colonists were not indisposed to exchange their commodities with those of the new-comers, but the law was imperative. The Buccaneers, therefore, proceeded to help themselves to what they wanted by force, and at length came to consider themselves an organized estate, governed by their own laws, and qualified to make treaties like any other established and recognised power. Cuba had been nearly depopulated by the cruelties and fanaticism of its Spanish masters, and was seized on by the Buccaneers. From this rich and beautiful island the pirate-barks dashed out upon any Spanish sail which might be leaving the mainland. Commanding the Gulf of Mexico, and with the power of crossing the Isthmus of Panama by a rapid march, those redoubtable bandits held the treasure-lands of the Spaniards in terrible subjection. And up to the commencement even of the eighteenth century the frightful spectacle was presented of a powerful confederacy of the wildest and most dissolute villains in Europe domineering over the most frequented seas in the world, and filling peaceful voyagers, and even well-armed men-of-war, with alarm by their unsparing cruelty, and atrocities which it curdles the blood to think of.

Eastward as far as China, westward to the islands and shores of the great Pacific, up the rivers of Africa, and even among the forests of New Holland and Tasmania, the swarms of European adventurers succeeded each other without cessation. The marvel is, that, with such ceaseless activity, any islands, however remote or small, were left for the discovery of after-times. But the tide of English emigration rolled towards the mainland of North America with a steadier flow than to any other quarter. The idea of a northwest passage to India had taken possession of men’s minds, and hardy seamen had already braved the horrors of a polar winter, and set examples of fortitude and patience which their successors, from Behrens to Kane, have so nobly followed. But the fertile plains of Virginia, and the navigable streams of the eastern shore, were more alluring to the peaceful and unenterprising settlers, whose object was to find a new home and carry on a lucrative trade with the native Indians. In 1607, a colony, properly so called,—for it had made provision for permanent settlement, and consisted of a hundred and ten persons, male and female,—arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake. The river Powhatan was eagerly explored; and at a point sufficiently far up to be secure from sudden attack from the sea, and on an isthmus easily defended from native assault, they pitched their tents on a spot which was hereafter known as Jamestown and is still honoured as the earliest of the American settlements. Our neighbour Holland was not behindhand either in trade or colonization, and equally with England was excited to fresh efforts by its recovered liberty and independence. In all directions of intellectual and physical employment those two States went boundingly forward at the head of the movement. The absolute monarchies lay lazily by, and relied on the inertness of their mass for their defence against those active competitors; and Spain, an unwieldy bulk, showed the intimate connection there will always exist between liberal institutions at home and active progress abroad. The sun never set on the dominions of the Spanish crown, but the life of the people was crushed out of them by the weight of the Inquisition and despotism. The United Provinces and combined Great Britain had shaken off both those petrifying institutions, and Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Dutchmen were ploughing up every sea, presenting themselves at the courts of strange-coloured potentates, in regions whose existence had been unknown a few years before, and gradually accustoming the wealth and commerce of the world to find their way to London and Amsterdam.

To go from these views of hardihood and enterprise, from the wild heaving of unruly vigour which animated the traffickers and tyrants of the main, to the peaceful and pedantic domestic reign of James the First, shows the two extremes of European character at this time. The English people were not more than four millions in number, but they were the happiest and most favoured of all the nations. This was indeed the time,

for we have seen how the division of the great monastic properties had created a new order in the State. All accounts concur in describing the opening of this century as the period of the greatest physical prosperity of the body of the people. A great deal of dulness and unrefinement there must still have been in the boroughs, where such sage officials as Dogberry displayed their pomp and ignorance,—a great deal of clownishness and coarseness in country-places, where Audreys and Autolycuses were to be found; but among townsmen and peasantry there was none of the grinding poverty which a more unequal distribution of national wealth creates. There were great Whitsun ales, and dancings round the Maypole; feasts on village greens, and a spirit of rude and personal independence, which became mellowed into manly self-respect when treated with deference by the higher ranks, the old hereditary gentry and the retired statesmen of Queen Bess, but bristled up in insolence and rebellion when the governing power thwarted its wishes, or fanaticism soured it with the bitter waters of polemic strife. The sturdy Englishman who doffed his hat to the squire, and joined his young lord in sports upon the green, in the beginning of James’s reign, was the same stout-hearted, strong-willed individual who stiffened into Puritanism and contempt of all earthly authorities in the unlovely, unloving days of the Rump and Cromwell. Nor should we miss the great truth which lies hidden under the rigid forms of that period,—that the same noble qualities which characterized the happy yeoman and jocund squire of 1620—their earnestness, energy, and intensity of home affections—were no less existent in their ascetic short-haired descendants of 1650. The brimfulness of life which overflowed into expeditions against the Spaniards in Peru, and unravellings of the tangled rivers of Africa, and trackings of the wild bears among the ice-floes of Hudson’s Bay, took a new direction when the century reached the middle of its course, and developed itself in the stormy discussions of the contending sects and the blood and misery of so many battle-fields. How was this great change worked on the English mind? How was it that the long-surviving soldier, courtier, landholder, of Queen Elizabeth saw his grandson grow up into the hard-featured, heavy-browed, keen-sworded Ironside of Oliver? A squire who ruined himself in loyal entertainments to King James on his larder-and-cellar-emptying journey from Edinburgh to London in 1603 may have lived to see his son, and son’s son, rejoicing with unholy triumph over the victory of Naseby in 1644 and the death of Charles in 1649.

Great causes must have been at work to produce this astonishing change, and some of them it will not be difficult to point out. Perhaps, indeed, the prosperity we have described may itself have contributed to the alteration in the English ways of thought. While the nation was trampled on by Henry the Eighth, with property and life insecure and poverty universally diffused, or even while it was guided by the strong hand of Elizabeth, it had neither power nor inclination to examine into its rights. The rights of a starving and oppressed population are not very great, even in its own eyes. It is the well-fed, law-protected, enterprising citizen who sees the value of just and settled government, because the blessings he enjoys depend upon its continuance. The mind of the nation had been pauperized along with its body by the life of charitable dependence it had led at the doors of church and monastery in the olden time. It little mattered to a gaping crowd expecting the accustomed dole whether the great man in London was a tyrannical king or not. They did not care whether he dismissed his Parliaments or cut off the heads of his nobility. They still found their “bit and sup,” and saw the King, and Parliament, and nobility, united in obedience to the Church. But when this debasing charity was discontinued, independence came on. The idle hanger-on of the religious house became a cottager, and worked on his own land; by industry he got capital enough to take some additional acres; and the man of the next generation had forgotten the low condition he sprang from, and had so sharpened his mind by the theological quarrels of the time that he began to be able to comprehend the question of general politics. He saw, as every population and potentate in Europe saw with equal clearness, that the question of civil freedom was indissolubly connected with the relation between Church and State; he perceived that the extent of divergence from the old faith regulated in a great measure the spirit, and even the constitution, of government where it took place,—that adhesion to Rome meant absolutism and dependence, that Calvinism had a strong bias towards the republican form, and that the Church he had helped to establish was calculated to fill up the ground between those two extremes, and be the religious representative of a State as liberal as Geneva by its attention to the interests of all, and as monarchical as Spain by its loyalty to an hereditary crown. Now, the middle ground in great and agitating affairs is always the most difficult to maintain. Both sides make it their battle-field, and try to win it to themselves; and according as one assailant seems on the point of carrying his object, the defender of that disputed territory has to lean towards the other. Both parties are offended at the apparent inconsistency; and we are therefore not to be surprised if we find the Church accused of looking to both the hostile camps in turn.

James was a fatal personage to every cause he undertook to defend. He had neither the strength of will of Henry, nor the proud consistency of Elizabeth; but he had the arrogance and presumption of both. Questions which the wise queen was afraid to touch, and left to the ripening influence of time, this blustering arguer dragged into premature discussion, stripped them of all their dignity by the frivolousness of the treatment he gave them, and disgusted all parties by the harshness and rapidity of his partial decisions. Every step he took in the quelling of religious dissension by declarations in favour of proscription and authority which would have endeared him to Gregory the Seventh, he accompanied with some frightful display of his absolutist tendencies in civil affairs. The same man who roared down the modest claims of a thousand of the clergy who wished some further modification of the Book of Common Prayer threw recusant members of Parliament into prison, persecuted personal enemies to death, with scarcely a form of law, punished refractory towns with loss of franchises and privileges, and made open declaration of his unlimited power over the lives and properties of all his subjects. People saw this unvarying alliance between his polemics and his politics, and began to consider seriously whether the comforts their trade and industry had given them could be safe under a Church calling itself reformed, but protected by such a king. If he was only suspected in England, in his own country he was fully known. Dearer to James would have been a hundred bishops and cardinals seated in conclave in Holyrood than a Presbyterian Synod praying against his policy in the High Kirk. He had even written to the Pope with offers of accommodation and reconcilement, and made no secret of his individual and official disgust at the levelling ideas of those grave followers of Knox and Calvin. Those grave followers of Knox and Calvin, however, were not unknown on the south side of the Tweed. The intercourse between the countries was not limited to the hungry gentry who followed James on his accession. A community of interest and feeling united the more serious of the Reformers, and visits and correspondence were common between them. But, while a regard for their personal freedom and the security of their wealth attracted the attention of the English middle class to the proceedings of King James, events were going on in foreign lands which had an immense effect on the development of the anti-monarchic, anti-episcopal spirit at home. These events have not been sufficiently considered in this relation, and we have been too much in the habit of looking at our English doings in those momentous years,—from the end of James’s reign to the Restoration,—as if Britain had continued as isolated from her Continental neighbours as before the Norman Conquest. But a careful comparison of dates and actions will show how intimate the connection had become between the European States, and how instantaneously the striking of a chord at Prague or Vienna thrilled through the general heart in Edinburgh and London.

The Reformation, after achieving its independence and equality at the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, had made great though silent progress. Broken off in Germany into two parties, the Lutheran and the Calvinist, who hated each other, as usual, in exact proportion to the smallness of their difference, the union was still kept up between them as regarded their antagonism to the Papists. With all three denominations, the religious part of the question had fallen into terrible abeyance. It was now looked on by the leaders entirely as a matter of personal advancement and political rule. In this pursuit the fanaticism which is generally limited to theology took the direction of men’s political conduct; and there were enthusiasts among all the sects, who saw visions, and dreamed dreams, about the succession to thrones and the raising of armies, as used to happen in more ancient times about the bones of martyrs and the beatification of saints. The great object of Protestants and Catholics was to obtain a majority in the college of the Prince Electors by whom the Empire was bestowed. This consisted of the seven chief potentates of Germany, of whom four were secular,—the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Marquis of Brandenburg; and three ecclesiastic,—the Archbishops of Mentz, TrÈves, and Cologne. The majority was naturally secured to the Romanists by the official adhesion of these last. But it chanced that the Elector of Cologne fell violently in love with Agnes of Mansfeldt, a canoness of Gerrestein; and having of course studied the history of our Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, he determined to follow his example, and offered the fair canoness his hand. He was unwilling, however, to offer his hand without the Electoral crozier, and, by the advice of his friends, and with the promised support of many of the Protestant rulers, he retained his ecclesiastical dignity and made the beautiful Agnes his wife. This would not have been of much consequence in a lower rank, for many of the cathedral dignitaries in Cologne and other places had retained their offices after changing their faith; but all Germany was awake to the momentous nature of this transaction, for it would have conveyed a majority of the Electoral voices to the Protestants and opened the throne of the empire itself to a Protestant prince. Such, however, was the strength at that time of the opposition to Rome, that all the efforts of the Catholics would have been ineffectual to prevent this ruinous arrangement but for a circumstance which threw division into the Protestant camp. Gebhard had adhered to the Calvinistic branch of the Reformation, and the Lutherans hated him with a deadlier hatred than the Pope himself. With delight they saw him outlawed by the Emperor and excommunicated by Rome, his place supplied by a Prince of Bavaria, who was elected by the Chapter of Cologne to protect them from their apostate archbishop, and the head of the house of Austria strengthened by the consolidation of his Electoral allies and the unappeasable dissensions of his enemies. While petty interests and the narrowest quarrels of sectarianism divided the Protestants, and while the Electors and other princes who had adopted their theological opinions were doubtful of the political results of religious freedom, and many had waxed cold, and others were discontented with the small extent of the liberation from ancient trammels they had yet obtained, a very different spectacle was presented on the other side. Popes and Jesuits were heartily and unhesitatingly at work. “No cold, faint-hearted doubtings teased them.” Their object was incommoded by no refinements or verbal differences; they were determined to assert their old supremacy,—to trample out every vestige of resistance to their power; and they entered upon the task without scruple or remorse. Ferdinand the Emperor, the prop and champion of the Romish cause, was as sincere and as unpitying as Dominic. When he had been nominated King Elect of Bohemia, in 1598, while yet in his twentieth year, his first thought was the future use he might make of his authority in the extermination of the Protestant faith. The Jesuits, by whom he was trained from his earliest years, never turned out a more hopeful pupil. His ambition would have been, if he had had it in his power, to become a follower of Loyola himself; but, as he was condemned by fate to the lower office of the first of secular princes, he determined to employ all its power at the dictation of his teachers. He went a pilgrimage to Loretto, and, bowing before the miraculous image of the Virgin, promised to reinstate the true Church in its unquestioned supremacy, and bent all his thoughts to the fulfilment of his vow. Two-thirds of his subjects in his hereditary states were Protestant, but he risked all to attain his object. He displaced their clergy, and banished all who would not conform. He introduced Catholics from foreign countries to supply the waste of population, and sent armed men to destroy the newly-erected schools and churches of the hateful heretics. This man was crowned King of Bohemia in 1618, and Emperor of Germany in the following year.

The attention of the British public had been particularly directed to German interests for the six years preceding this date, by the marriage of Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, with Elizabeth, the graceful and accomplished daughter of King James. Frederick was young and ambitious, and was endeared to the English people as leader of the Protestant cause against the overweening pretensions of the house of Austria. That house was still the most powerful in Europe; for though the Spanish monarchy was held by another branch, for all the purposes of despotism and religion its weight was thrown into the same scale. Spanish soldiers, and all the treasures of America, were still at the command of the Empire; and perhaps Catholicism was rather strengthened than weakened by the adherence of two of the greatest sovereigns in the world, instead of having the personal influence of only one, as in the reign of Charles the Fifth. All the Elector’s movements were followed with affectionate interest by the subjects of his father-in-law; but James himself disapproved of opposition being offered to the wildest excesses of royal prerogative either in himself or any other anointed ruler. Besides this, he was particularly hostile to the young champion’s religious principles, for the latter was attached to the Calvinistic or unepiscopal party. "A.D. 1619."James declined to give him any aid in maintaining his right to the crown of Bohemia, to which he was elected by the Protestant majority of that kingdom on the accession of Ferdinand to the Empire, and managed to show his feelings in the most offensive manner, by oppressing such of Frederick’s co-religionists as he found in any part of his dominions. The advocates of peace at any price have praised the behaviour of the king in this emergency; but it may be doubted whether an energetic display of English power at this time might not have prevented the great and cruel reaction against freedom and Protestantism which the victory of the bigoted Ferdinand over his neglected competitor introduced. A riot, accompanied with violence against the Catholic authorities, was the beginning of the troubles in Bohemia; and Ferdinand, as if to explain his conduct to the satisfaction of James, published a manifesto, which might almost be believed to have been the production of that Solomon of the North. “If sovereign power,” he says, “emanates from God, these atrocious deeds must proceed from the devil, and therefore must draw down divine punishment.” This logic was unanswerable at Whitehall, and the work of extermination went on. Feeble efforts were forced upon the unwilling father-in-law; for all the chivalry of England was wild with sympathy and admiration of the Bohemian queen. Hundreds of gallant gentlemen passed over to swell the Protestant ranks; and when they returned and told the tale of all the horrors they had seen, the remorseless vengeance of the triumphant Church, and all the threatenings with which Rome and the Empire endeavoured to terrify the nations which had rebelled against their yoke, Puritanism, or resistance to the slightest approach towards Popery either in essentials or externals, became patriotism and self-defence; and at this very time, while men’s minds were inflamed with the descriptions of the torturings and executions which followed the battle of Prague in 1620, and the devastation and depopulation of Bohemia, James took the opportunity of forcing the Episcopal form of government on the Scottish Presbyterians.

“The greatest matter,” he says, in an address to the prelates of the reluctant dioceses,—“the greatest matter the Puritans had to object against the Church government was, that your proceedings were warranted by no law, which now by this last Parliament is cutted short. The sword is now put in your hands. Go on, therefore, to use it, and let it rest no longer till ye have perfected the service trusted to you; or otherwise we must use it both against you and them.” While the people of both nations were willing to sink their polemic differences of Calvinist and Anglican in one great attempt to deliver the Protestants in Germany from the power of the house of Austria,—while for this purpose they would have voted taxes and raised armies with the heartiest good will,—the king’s whole attention was bestowed on a set of manoeuvres for the obtaining a Spanish-Austrian bride for his son. To gain this he would have humbled himself to the lowest acts. At a whisper from Madrid, he interfered with the German war, to the detriment of his own daughter; and England perceived that his ineradicable love of power and hatred of freedom had blinded him to national interests and natural affections. If we follow the whole career of James, and a great portion of his successor’s, we shall see the same remarkable coincidence between the events in England and abroad,—unpopularity of the king, produced by his apparent lukewarmness in the general Protestant cause as much as by his arbitrary acts at home. Whatever the nation desired, the king opposed. When Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, began his triumphant career in 1630, and re-established the fallen fortunes of Protestantism, Charles concluded a dishonourable peace with Spain, without a single provision in favour of the Protestants of the German States, and allowed the Popish Cardinal Richelieu first to consolidate his forces by an unsparing oppression of the Huguenots in France, and then to almost compensate for his harshness by a gallant support of the Swedish hero in his struggle against the Austrian power.

There was no longer the same content and happiness in the towns and country districts as there had been at the commencement of the century. Men had looked with contempt and dislike on the proceedings of James’s court,—his coarse buffoonery, and disgraceful patronage of a succession of worthless favourites; and they continued to look, not indeed with contempt, but with increased dislike and suspicion, on the far purer court and dignified manners of his unfortunate son. A French princess, though the daughter of Henry the Fourth, was regarded as an evil omen for the continuance of good government or religious progress. Her attendants, lay and clerical, were not unjustly considered spies, and advisers with interests hostile to the popular tendencies. And all this time went on the unlucky coincidences which distinguished this reign,—of Catholic cruelties in foreign lands, and approaches to the Catholic ceremonial in the reformed Church. While Tilly, the remorseless general of the Emperor, was letting loose the most ferocious army which ever served under a national standard upon the inhabitants of Magdeburg, heaping into the history of that miserable assault all the sufferings that “horror e’er conceived or fancy feigned,”—and while the echo of that awful butchery, which has not yet died out of the German heart, was making sorrowful every fireside in what was once merry England,—the king’s advisers pursued their blind way, torturing their opponents with knife and burning-brand upon the pillory, flogging gentlemen nearly to death upon the streets, and consecrating churches with an array of surplice, and censer, and processions, and organ-blowings, which would have done honour to St. Peter’s at Rome. People saw a lamentable connection between the excesses of Catholic cruelty and the tendency in our sober establishment to Catholic traditions, and became fanatical in their detestation of the simplest forms.

In ordinary times the wise man considers mere forms as almost below his notice; but there are periods when the emblem is of as much importance as the thing it typifies. Church ceremonies, and gorgeous robes, and magnificent worship, were accepted by both parties as the touchstone of their political and religious opinions. Laud pushed aside the Archbishop of Glasgow, who stood at Charles’s right hand on his visit to Scotland in 1633, on the express ground that he had not the orthodox fringe upon his habit,—a ridiculous ground for so open an insult, if it had not had an inner sense. The Archbishop of Glasgow professed himself a moderate Churchman by the plainness of his dress, and Laud accepted it as a defiance. Meanwhile the essential insignificance of the symbol threw an air of ridicule over the importance attached to it. Dull-minded men, who had not the faculty of seeing how deep a question may lie in a simple exposition of it, or frivolous men, who could not rise to the real earnestness which enveloped those discussions, were scandalized at the persistency of Laud in enforcing his fancies, and the obstinacy of a great portion of the clergy and people in resisting them. But the Puritans, with clearer eyes, saw that a dance, according to proclamation, on the village green on Sunday, meant not a mere desecration of the Sabbath, but a crusade against the rights of conscience and an assertion of arbitrary power. Altars instead of communion-tables in churches meant not merely a restoration of the Popish belief in the real sacrifice of the mass, but a placing of the king above the law, and the abrogation of all liberty. They could not at this time persuade the nation of these things. The nation, for the most part, saw nothing more than met their bodily eyes; and, in despair of escaping the slavery which they saw the success of Ferdinand in Germany was likely to spread over Europe, they began the long train of voyages to the Western World, which times of suffering and uncertainty have continued at intervals to the present day. It is said that a vessel was stopped by royal warrant when it was on the point of sailing from the Thames with emigrants to America in 1637. On board were various persons whose names would probably never have been heard of if they had been allowed in peace and safety to pursue their way to Boston, but with which in a few years “all England rang from side to side.” They were Oliver Cromwell, and Hampden, and Haselrig, Lord Brook, and Lord Saye.

Affairs had now reached such a crisis that they could no longer continue undecided. A Parliament was called in 1640, after an unexampled interval of eleven years, and, after a few days’ session, was angrily dissolved. Another, however, was indispensable in the same year, and on the 3d of November the Long Parliament met. The long-repressed indignation of the Commons broke forth at once. Laud and Wentworth, the principal advisers of the king, were tried and executed, and precautions taken, by stringent acts, to prevent a recurrence of arbitrary government. Everywhere there seemed a rally in favour of the Protestant or liberal cause. The death of Richelieu, the destroyer of French freedom, opened a prospect of recovered independence to the Huguenots; the victories of Torstenson the Swede, worthy successor of Gustavus Adolphus, brought down the pride of the Austrian Catholics; and Puritans, Independents, and other outraged sects and parties, by the restoration of the Parliament, got a terrible instrument of vengeance against their oppressors. A dreadful time, when on both sides the forms of law were perverted to the most lawless purposes; when peacefully-inclined citizens must have been tormented with sad misgivings by the contending claims of Parliament and King,—a Parliament correctly constituted and in the exercise of its recognised authority, a King with no flaw to his title, and professing his willingness to limit himself to the undoubted prerogatives of his place. "A.D. 1642."It was probably a relief to the undecided when the arbitrament was removed from the court of argument to the field of battle. All the time of that miserable civil war, the other states of Europe were in nearly as great confusion as ourselves. France was torn to pieces by factions which contended for the mantle of the departed cardinal; Germany was traversed from end to end by alternately retreating and advancing armies. But still the simultaneousness of events abroad and at home is worthy of remark. The great fights which decided the quarrel in England were answered by victories of the Protestant arms in Germany and the apparent triumph of the discontented in France. The young king, Louis the Fourteenth, carried from town to town, and disputed between the parties, gave little augury of the despotism and injustice of his future throne. There were barricades in Paris, and insurrections all over the land. But at last, and at the same time, all the combatants in England, and France, and Germany—Huguenot, Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant, and Papist—were tired out with the length and bitterness of the struggle. So in 1648 the long Thirty Years’ War was brought to a close by the Peace of Westphalia. Kingly power in France was curtailed, the house of Austria was humbled; and Charles was carried prisoner to Windsor. The Protestants of Germany, by the terms of the peace, were replaced in their ancient possessions. They had freedom of worship and equality of civil rights secured. A general law preserved them from the injustice or aggressions of their local masters; and the compromise guaranteed by so many divergent interests, and guarded by such equally-divided numbers, has endured to the present time. The English conquerors would be contented with no less than their foreign friends had obtained. But the blot upon their conduct, the blood of the misguided and humbled Charles, hindered the result of their wisest deliberations. Moderate men were revolted by the violence of the act, and old English loyalty, delivered from the fear of foreign or domestic oppression, was awakened by the sad end of a crowned and anointed King. "A.D. 1649."Nothing compensates in an old hereditary monarchy for the want of high descent in its ruler. Not all Cromwell’s vigour and genius, his glory abroad and energetic government at home, attracted the veneration of English squires, whose forefathers had fought at Crecy, to the grandson of a city knight, or, at most, to the descendant of a minister of Henry the Eighth. Charles the Second rose before them with the transmitted dignity of a hundred kings. He counted back to Scottish monarchs before the Norman Conquest, and traced by his mother’s side his lineal ancestry up to Charlemagne and Clovis. English history presents no instance of the intrusion of an unroyal usurper in her list of sovereigns. Cromwell stands forth the solitary instance of a man of the people virtually seizing the crown; and the ballads and pamphlets of the time show how the comparative humility of his birth excited the scorn of his contemporaries. And this feeling was not limited to ancient lords and belted cavaliers: it permeated the common mind. There was something ennobling for the humblest peasant to die for King and Cause; but, however our traditions and the lapse of two hundred years may have elevated the conqueror at Worcester and Dunbar, we are not to forget that, in the estimation of those who had drunk his beer at Huntingdon or listened to his tedious harangues in Parliament, there would be neither patriotism nor honour in dying for bluff Old Noll. But there were more dangerous enemies to bluff Old Noll than the newness of his name. The same cause which had made the nation dissatisfied with the arbitrary pretensions of James and Charles was at work in making it intolerant of the rule of the usurpers.

The great soldier and politician, who had overthrown an ancient dynasty and crushed the seditions of the sects, had increased the commercial prosperity of the three kingdoms. Wealth poured in at all the ports, and was rapidly diffused over the land; internal improvements kept pace with foreign enterprise; and the England which long ago had been too rich to be arbitrarily governed was now again too rich to be kept in durance by the sour-faced hypocrisies of the Puritans. Those lank-haired gentlemen, whose conduct had not quite answered to the self-denying proclamations with which they had begun, were no longer able to persuade the well-to-do citizen, and the high-waged mechanic, and the prosperous farmer, that religion consisted in speaking through the nose and forswearing all innocent enjoyment. The great battle had been fought, and the fruits of it, they thought, were secure. Were people to be debarred from social meetings and merry-makings at Christmas, and junketings at fairs, by act of Parliament? Acts of Parliament would first have been required strong enough to do away with youth and health, and the power of admiring beauty, and the hopes of marriage. "A.D. 1641-49."The troubles had lasted seven or eight years; and all through that period, and for some time before, while the thick cloud was gathering, all gayety had disappeared from the land. But by the middle of Cromwell’s time there was a new generation, in the first flush of youth,—lads and lasses who had been too young to know any thing of the dark days of Laud and Wentworth. They were twenty years of age now. Were they to have no cakes and ale because their elders were so prodigiously virtuous? They had many years of weary restraint and formalism to make up for, and in 1660 the accumulated tide of joyousness and delight burst all barriers. A flood of dancing and revelry, and utter abandonment to happiness, spread over the whole country; and merriest of the dancers, loudest of the revellers, happiest of the emancipated, was the young and brilliant king. Never since the old times of the Feasts of Fools and the gaudy processions of the Carnival had there been such a riotous jubilee as inaugurated the Restoration. The reaction against Puritanism carried the nation almost beyond Christianity and landed it in heathenism again. The saturnalia of Rome were renewed in the banquetings of St. James’s. Nothing in those first days of relaxation seemed real. King and courtiers and cavaliers in courtly palaces, and enthusiastic townsfolk and madly loyal husbandmen, seemed like mummers at a play; and it was not till the candles were burned out, and the scenes grew dingy, and daylight poured upon that ghastly imitation of enjoyment, that England came to its sober senses again. Then it saw how false was the parody it had been playing. It had not been happy; it had only been drunk; and already, while Charles was in the gloss of his recovered crown, the second reaction began. Cromwell became respectable by comparison with the sensual debauchee who sold the dignity of his country for a little present enjoyment and soothed the reproaches of his people with a joke. Give us a Man to rule over us, the English said, and not a sayer of witty sayings and a juggler with such sleight of hand. And yet the example of the court was so contagious, and the fashion of enjoyment so wide-spread, that on the surface every thing appeared prosperous and happy. The stern realities of the first recusants had been so travestied by the exaggerated imitation of their successors that no faith was placed in the serious earnestness of man or woman. Frivolity was therefore adopted as a mark of sense; and if the popular literature of a period is to be accepted as a mirror held up to show the time its image, the old English character had undergone a perfect change. Thousands flocked every day to the playhouses to listen to dialogues, and watch the evolvement of plots, where all the laws of decency and honour were held up to ridicule. Comus and his crew, which long ago had held their poetic festival in the pure pages of Milton, were let loose, without the purity or the poetry, in every family circle. And the worst and most disgusting feature of the picture is that those wassailers who were thus the missionaries of vice were persecutors for religion. While one royal brother was leading the revels at Whitehall, surrounded by luxury and immorality as by an atmosphere without which he could not live, the other, as luxurious, but more moodily depraved, listened to the groans of tortured Covenanters at Holyrood House. Charles and James were like the two executioners of Louis the Eleventh: one laughed, and the other groaned, but both were pitilessly cruel. A recurrence to the dark days of the Sects, the godly wrestlings in prayer of illiterate horsemen, and the sincere fanaticism of the Fifth-Monarchy men, would have been a change for the better from the filth and foulness of the reign of the Merry Monarch and the blood and misery of that of the gloomy bigot.

But happier times were almost within view, though still hid behind the glare of those orgies of the unclean. From 1660 to 1688 does not seem a very long time in the annals of a nation, nor even in the life of one of ourselves. Twenty-eight years have elapsed since the Revolution in Paris which placed Louis Philippe upon the throne; and the young man of twenty at that time is not very old yet. But when men or nations are cheated in the object of their hopes, it does not take long to turn disappointment into hatred. The Restoration of 1660 was to bring back the golden age of the first years of James,—the prosperity without the tyranny, the old hereditary rule without its high pretensions, the manliness of the English yeoman without his tendency to fanatical innovation. And instead of this Arcadia there was nothing to be seen but a kingdom without dignity, a king without honesty, and a people without independence. England was no longer the arbiter of European differences, as in the earlier reigns, nor dominator of all the nations, as when the heavy sword of Cromwell was uneasy in its sheath. It was not even a second-rate power: its capital had been insulted by the Dutch; its monarch was pensioned by the French; its religion was threatened by the Pope; the old animosities between England and Scotland were unarranged; and the point to be remembered in your review of the Seventeenth Century is that in the years from the Restoration to the Revolution we had touched the basest string of humility. We were neither united at home nor respected abroad. We had few ships, little commerce, and no public spirit. France revenged Crecy and Poictiers and Agincourt, by dressing our kings in her livery; and the degraded monarchs pocketed their wages without feeling their humiliation. Therefore, as the highest point we have hitherto stood upon was when Elizabeth saw the destruction of the Armada, the lowest was undoubtedly that when we submitted to the buffoonery of Charles and the bloodthirstiness of James.

But far more remarkable, as a characteristic of this century, than the lowering of the rank of England in relation to foreign states, is the rise, for the first time in Europe, of a figure hitherto unknown,—a true, unshackled, and absolute king, and that in the least likely of all positions and in the person of the least likely man. This was the appearance on the throne of France of Louis the Fourteenth. Other monarchs, both in England and France, had attained supreme power,—supreme, but not independent. No one had hitherto been irresponsible to some other portions of the State. The strongest of the feudal kings was held in check by his nobility,—the greatest of the Tudors by Parliament and people. Declarations, indeed, had frequently been made that God’s anointed were answerable to God alone. But of the two loudest of these declaimers, John, who said,—

had shortly after this magnificent oration surrendered his crown to the Pope; and James the First, who blustered more fiercely (if possible) about his superiority to human law, was glad to bend before his Lords and Commons in anticipation of a subsidy, and eat his leek in peace.

But this phenomenon of a king above all other authority occurred, we have observed, in the most unlikely country to present so strange a sight; for nowhere was a European throne so weak and unstable as the throne of the house of Bourbon after the murder of Henry the Fourth. The moment that strong hand was withdrawn from the government, all classes broke loose. The nobles conspired against the queen, Marie de Medicis, who relied upon foreign favourites and irritated the nation to madness. Paris rose in insurrection, and tore the wretched Concini, her counsellor, whom she had created Marshal D’Ancre, to pieces; and, to glut their vengeance still more, the judges condemned his innocent wife to be burned as a sorceress. Louis the Thirteenth, the unworthy son of the great Henry, rejoiced in these atrocities, which he thought freed him from all restraint. But he found it impossible to quell the wild passions by which he profited for a while. Civil war raged between the court and country factions, and soon became embittered into religious animosities. "A.D. 1622."The sight of a king marching at the head of a Catholic army against a portion of his Reformed subjects was looked upon by the rapidly-increasing malcontents in England with anxious curiosity. For year by year the strange spectacle was unrolled before their eyes of what might yet be their fate at home. Perhaps, indeed, the success of the royal arms, and the policy of strength and firmness introduced by Cardinal Richelieu, may have contributed in no slight degree to the measures pursued by Wentworth and Laud in their treatment of the English recusants. With an anticipative interest in our Hull and Exeter, the Puritans of England looked on the resistance made by Rochelle; and we can therefore easily imagine with what feelings the future soldiers of Marston Moor received the tidings that the Popish cardinal had humbled the capital of the Huguenots by the help of fleets furnished to them by Holland and England! Richelieu, indeed, knew how to make his enemies weaken each other throughout his whole career. "A.D. 1627."Those enemies were the nobility of France, the house of Austria, and the Reformed Faith. When Rochelle was attacked the second time, and England pretended to arm for its defence, he contrived to win Buckingham, the chief of the expedition, to his cause, and procured a letter from King Charles, placing the fleet, which apparently went to the support of the Huguenots, at the service of the King of France! After a year’s siege, and the most heroic resistance, Rochelle fell at last, in 1628. And, now that the Huguenots were destroyed as a dangerous party, the eyes of the great minister were turned against his other foes. He divided the nobles into hostile ranks, degraded them by petty annoyances, terrified them by unpitying executions of the chiefs of the oldest families, showed their weakness by arresting marshals at the head of their armies, and during the remaining years of his authority monopolized all the powers of the state. To weaken Spain and Austria, we have seen how he assisted the Protestants in the Thirty Years’ War; to weaken England, which was only great when it assumed its place as bulwark and champion of the Protestant faith, he encouraged the court in its suicidal policy and the oppressed population in resistance. Ever stirring up trouble abroad, and ever busy in repressing liberty at home, the ministry of Richelieu is the triumph of unprincipled skill. But when he died, in 1643, there was no man left to lift up the burden he threw off. The king himself, Louis the Thirteenth, as much a puppet as the old descendants of Clovis under their Mayors of the Palace, left the throne he had nominally filled, vacant in the same year; and the heir to the dishonoured crown and exhausted country was a boy of five years of age, under the tutelage of an unprincipled mother, and with the old hereditary counsellors and props of his throne decimated by the scaffold or impoverished by confiscation. The tyranny of Richelieu had at least attained something noble by the high-handed insolence of all his acts. If people were to be trampled on, it was a kind of consolation to them that their oppressor was feared by others as well as themselves. But the oppression of the doomed French nation was to be continued by a more ignoble hand. The Cardinal Mazarin brought every thing into greater confusion than ever. In twenty millions of men there will always be great and overmastering spirits, if only an opportunity is found for their development; but civil commotion is not the element in which greatness lives. All sense of honour disappears when conduct is regulated by the shifting motives of party politics. "A.D. 1648-1654."The dissensions of the Fronde, accordingly, produced no champion to whom either side could look with unmingled respect. The Great CondÉ and the famous Turenne showed military talent of the highest order, but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity of character counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of those six years are like a series of dissolving views, or the changing combinations of a kaleidoscope: CondÉ and Turenne, always on opposite sides,—for each changed his party as often as the other; battles prepared for by masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both sides with epigrams and songs; the wildest excesses of debauchery and vice practised by both sexes and all ranks in the State; archbishops fighting like gladiators and intriguing like the vulgarest conspirators; princes imprisoned with a jest, and executions attended with cheers and laughter; and over all an Italian ecclesiastic, grinning with satisfaction at the increase of his wealth,—caballing, cheating, and lying, but keeping a firm grasp of power:—no country was ever so split into faction or so denuded of great men.

It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our British troubles: no sternness, no reality; love-letters and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful earnestness of the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents; the gentlemen of France utterly debased and frivolized; religion ridiculed; nothing left of the old landmarks; and no Cromwell possible. But, while all these elements of confusion were heaving and tumbling in what seemed an inextricable chaos, Mazarin, the vainest and most selfish of charlatans, died, and the young king, whom he had kept in distressing dependence and the profoundest political inactivity, found himself delivered from a master and free to choose his path. This was in 1661. Charles and Louis were equally on their recovered thrones; for what exile had been to the one, Mazarin had been to the other. "A.D. 1641-1660."Charles had had the experience of nineteen years and of various fortunes to guide him. He had seen many men and cities, and he deceived every expectation. Louis had been studiously brought up by his mother and her Italian favourite in the abasement of every lofty aspiration. He was only encouraged in luxury and vice, and kept in such painful vassalage that his shyness and awkwardness revealed the absence of self-respect to the very pages of his court; and he, no less than Charles, deceived all the expectations that had been formed of his career. He found out, as if by intuition, how brightly the monarchical principle still burned in the heart of all the French. Even in their fights and quarrellings there was a deep reverence entertained for the ideal of the throne. The King’s name was a tower of strength; and when the nation, in the course of the miserable years from 1610 to 1661, saw the extinction of nobility, religion, law, and almost of civilized society, it caught the first sound that told it it still had a king, as an echo from the past assuring it of its future. It forgot Louis the Thirteenth and Anne of Austria, and only remembered that its monarch was the grandson of Henry the Fourth. Nobody remembered that circumstance so vividly as Louis himself; but he remembered also that his line went upwards from the Bourbons, and included the Saint Louis of the thirteenth century and the renewer of the Roman Empire of the ninth. He let the world know, therefore, that his title was Most Christian King as well as foremost of European powers. He forced Spain to yield him precedence, and, for the first time in history, exacted a humiliating apology from the Pope. The world is always apt to take a man at his own valuation. Louis, swelling with pride, ambitious of fame, and madly fond of power, declared himself the greatest, wisest, and most magnificent of men; and everybody believed him. Every thing was soon changed throughout the land. Ministers had been more powerful than the crown, and had held unlimited authority in right of their appointment. A minister was nothing more to Louis than a valet-de-chambre. He gave him certain work to do, and rewarded him if he did it; if he neglected it, he discharged him. At first the few relics of the historic names of France, the descendants of the great vassals, who carried their heads as lofty as the Capets or Valois, looked on with surprise at the new arrangements in camp and court. But the people were too happy to escape the oligarchic confederacy of those hereditary oppressors to encourage them in their haughty disaffection. Before Louis had been three years on the unovershadowed throne, the struggle had been fairly entered on by all the orders of the State, which should be most slavish in its submission. Rank, talent, beauty, science, and military fame all vied with each other in their devotion to the king. He would have been more than mortal if he had retained his senses unimpaired amid the intoxicating fumes of such incense. Success in more important affairs came to the support of his personal assumptions. Victories followed his standards everywhere. Generals, engineers, and administrators, of abilities hitherto unmatched in Europe, sprang up whenever his requirements called them forth. Colbert doubled his income without increasing the burdens on his people. Turenne, CondÉ, Luxembourg, and twenty others, led his armies. Vauban strengthened his fortifications or conducted his sieges, and the dock-yards of Toulon and Brest filled the Mediterranean and the Atlantic with his fleets. Poets like MoliÈre, Corneille, and Racine ennobled his stage; while the genius of Bossuet and FÉnÉlon inaugurated the restoration of religion. For eight-and-twenty years his fortunes knew no ebb. He was the object of all men’s hopes and fears, and almost of their prayers. Nothing was too great or too minute for his decision. He was called on to arbitrate (with the authority of a master) between sovereign States, and to regulate a point of precedence between the duchesses of his court. Oh, the weary days and nights of that uneasy splendour at Versailles! when his steps were watched by hungry courtiers, and his bed itself surrounded by applicants for place and favour. No galley-slave ever toiled harder at his oar than this monarch of all he surveyed at the management of his unruly family. It was the day of etiquette and form. The rights of princesses to arm-chairs or chairs with only a back were contested with a vigour which might have settled the succession to a throne. The rank which entitled to a seat in the king’s coach or an invitation to Marly was disputed almost with bloodshed, and certainly with scandal and bitterness. The depth of the bows exacted by a prince of the blood, the number of attendants necessary for a legitimated son of La ValliÈre or Montespan, put the whole court into a turmoil of angry parties; and all these important points, and fifty more of equal magnitude, were formally submitted to the king and decided with a gravity befitting a weightier cause. Nothing is more remarkable in the midst of these absurd inanities than the great fund of good common sense that is found in all the king’s judgments. He meditates, and temporizes, and reasons; and only on great occasions, such as a quarrel about dignity between the wife of the dauphin and the Duchess of Maine, does he put on the terrors of his kingly frown and interpose his irresistible command. It would have been some consolation to the foreign potentates he bullied or protected—the Austrian and Spaniard, or Charles in Whitehall—if they had known what a wretched and undignified life their enslaver and insulter lived at home. It was whispered, indeed, that he was tremendously hen-pecked by Madame de Maintenon, whom he married without having the courage to elevate her to the throne; but none of them knew the pettinesses, the degradations, and the miseries of his inner circle. They thought, perhaps, he was planning some innovation in the order of affairs in Europe,—the destruction of a kingdom, or the change of a dynasty. He was devoting his deepest cogitations to the arrangement of a quarrel between his sons and his daughters-in-law, the invitations to a little supper-party in his private room, or the number of steps it was necessary to advance at the reception of a petty Italian sovereign. The quarrels between his children became more bitter; the little supper-parties became more dull. Death came into the gilded chambers, and he was growing old and desolate. Still the torturing wheel of ceremony went round, and the father, with breaking heart, had to leave the chamber of his deceased son, and act the part of a great king, and go through the same tedious forms of grandeur and routine which he had done before the calamity came. Fancy has never drawn a personage more truly pitiable than Louis growing feeble and friendless in the midst of all that magnificence and all that heartless crowd. You pardon him for retiring for consolation and sympathy to the quiet apartment where Madame de Maintenon received him without formality and continued her needlework or her reading while he was engaged in council with his ministers. He must have known that to all but her he was an Office and not a Man. He yearned for somebody that he could trust in and consult with, as entering into his thoughts and interests; and that calm-blooded, meek-mannered, narrow-hearted woman persuaded him that in her he had found all that his heart thirsted for in the desert of his royalty. But in that little apartment he was now to find refuge from more serious calamities than the falsehood of courtiers or the quarrels of women. Even French loyalty was worn out at last. Victories had glorified the monarch, but brought poverty and loss to the population. Complaints arose in all parts of the country of the excess of taxation, the grasping dishonesty of the collectors, the extravagance of the court, and even—but this was not openly whispered—the selfishness of the king. He had lavished ten millions sterling on the palace and gardens of Versailles; he had enriched his sycophants with pensions on the Treasury; he had gratified the Church with gorgeous donations, and with the far more fatal gift of vengeance upon its opponents. The Huguenots were in the peaceful enjoyment of the rights secured to them by the Edict of Nantes, granted by Henry the Fourth in 1598. But those rights included the right of worshipping God in a different manner from the Church, and denying the distinguishing doctrines of the Holy Catholic faith. "A.D. 1685."The Edict of Toleration was repealed as a blot on the purity of the throne of the Most Christian King. Thousands of the best workmen in France were banished by this impolitic proceeding, and Louis thought he had shown his attachment to his religion by sending the ingenuity and wealth, and glowing animosity, of the most valuable portion of his subjects into other lands. Germany calculated that the depopulation caused by his wars was more than compensated by the immigration. England could forgive him his contemptuous behaviour to her king and Parliament when she saw the silk-mills of Spitalfields supplied by the skilled workmen of Lyons. Eight hundred thousand people left their homes in consequence of this proscription of their religion, and Germany and Switzerland grew rich with the stream of fugitives. It is said that only five thousand found their way to this country,—enough to set the example of peaceful industry and to introduce new methods of manufacture.

But the full benefit of the measures of Louis and Maintenon was denied us, by the distrust with which the Protestant exiles looked on the accession to our throne of a narrower despot and more bigoted persecutor than Louis; for in this same year James the Second succeeded Charles. Relying on each other’s support, and gratified with the formal approval of the repeal of the Edict of Nantes pronounced by the Pope, the two champions of Christendom pursued their way,—dismissals from office, exclusion from promotion, proscription from worship in France, and assaults on the Church, and bloody assizes, in England,—till all the nations felt that a great crisis was reached in the fortunes both of England and France, and Protestant and Romanist alike looked on in expectation of the winding-up of so strange a history. Judicial blindness was equally on the eyes of the two potentates chiefly interested. James remained inactive while William Prince of Orange, the avowed chief of the new opinions, was getting ready his ships and army, and congratulated himself on the silence of his people, which he thought was the sign of their acquiescence instead of the hush of expectation. All the other powers—the Papal Chair included—were not sorry to see a counterpoise to the predominance of France; and when William appeared in England as the deliverer from Popery and oppression, the battle was decided without a blow. "A.D. 1688."James was a fugitive in his turn, and found his way to Versailles. It is difficult to believe that any of the blood of Scotland or Navarre flowed in the veins of the pusillanimous king. He begged his protector, through whose councils he had lost his kingdom, to give it him back again; and the opportunity of a theatrical display of grandeur and magnanimity was too tempting to be thrown away. Louis promised to restore him his crown, as if it were a broken toy. It was a strange sight, during the remainder of their lives, to see those two monarchs keeping up the dignity of their rank by exaggerations of their former state. No mimic stage ever presented a more piteous spectacle of poverty and tinsel than the royal pair. Punctilios were observed at their meetings and separations, as if a bow more or less were of as much consequence as the bestowal or recovery of Great Britain; and in the estimation of those professors of manners and deportment a breach of etiquette would have been more serious than La Hogue or the Boyne. In that wondrous palace of Versailles all things had long ceased to be real. Speeches were made for effect, and dresses and decorations had become a part of the art of governing, and for some years the system seemed to succeed. When the king required to show that he was still a conqueror like Alexander the Great, preparations were made for his reception at the seat of war, and a pre-arranged victory was attached lo his arrival, as Cleopatra wished to fix a broiled fish to Anthony’s hook. He entered the town of Mons in triumph when Luxembourg had secured its fall. He appeared also with unbounded applause at the first siege of Namur, and carried in person the news of his achievement to Versailles. Every day came couriers hot and tired with intelligence of fresh successes. Luxembourg conquered at Fleurus, 1690; Catinat conquered Savoy, 1691; Luxembourg again, in 1692, had gained the great day of Steinkirk, and Nerwinde in 1693. But the tide now turned. William the Third was the representative at that time of the stubbornness of his new subjects’ character, who have always found it difficult to see that they were defeated. He was generally forced to retire after a vigorously-contested fight; but he was always ready to fight again next day, always calm and determined, and as confident as ever in the firmness of his men. Reports very different from the glorious bulletins of the earlier years of the Great Monarch now came pouring in. Namur was retaken, Dieppe and Havre bombarded, all the French establishments in India seized by the Dutch, their colony at St. Domingo captured by the English, Luxembourg dead, and the whole land again, for the second time, exhausted of men and money. It was another opportunity for the display of his absolute power. France prayed him to grant peace to Europe, and the earthly divinity granted France’s prayer. Europe itself, which had rebelled against him, accepted the pacification it had won by its battles and combinations, as if it were a gift from a superior being. "A.D. 1697."He surrendered his conquests with such grandeur, and looked so dignified while he withdrew his pretensions, acknowledging the Prince of Orange to be King of England, and the King of England to have no claim on the crown he had promised to restore to him, that it took some time to perceive that the terms of the Peace of Ryswick were proofs of weakness and not of magnanimity. But the object of his life had been gained. He had abased every order in the State for the aggrandizement of the Crown, and, for the first time since the termination of the Roman Empire, had concentrated the whole power of a nation into the will of an individual. And this strange spectacle of a possessor of unlimited authority over the lives and fortunes of all his subjects was presented in an age that had seen Charles the First of England brought to the block and James the Second driven into exile! The chance of France’s peacefully rising again from this state of depression into liberty would have been greater if Louis, in displacing the other authorities, had not disgraced them. He dissolved his Parliament, not with a file of soldiers, like Cromwell or Napoleon, but with a riding-whip in his hand. He degraded the nobility by making them the satellites of his throne and creatures of his favour. He humbled the Church by secularizing its leaders; so that Bossuet, bishop and orator as he was, was proud to undertake the office of peacemaker between him and Madame de Montespan in one of their lovers’ quarrels. And the Frenchmen of the next century looked in vain for some rallying-point from which to begin their forward course towards constitutional improvement. They found nothing but parliaments contemned, nobles dishonoured, and priests unchristianized.