Louis XIII. followed him to the grave in the succeeding May,
leaving a son, Louis XIV., not yet five years of age, under
the regency of his mother, Anne of Austria. The minister,
Cardinal Mazarin, who enjoyed the confidence of the
queen-regent, and who was supposed to enjoy her affections as
well, had been Richelieu's disciple, and took the helm of
government on Richelieu's recommendation. He was an adroit
politician, with some statesmanlike sagacity, but he lacked
the potent spirit by which his master had awed and ruled every
circle into which he came, great or small. Mazarin had the
Thirty Years War to bring to a close, and he managed the
difficult business with success, wasting nothing of the effect
of the brilliant victories of Condé and Turenne. But the war had
been very costly. Mazarin was no better financier than
Richelieu had been before him, and the burdens of taxation
were greater than wise management would have made them. There
was inevitable discontent, and Mazarin, as a foreigner, was
inevitably unpopular. With public feeling in this state, the
Court involved itself in a foolish conflict with the
Parliament of Paris, and presently there was a Paris
revolution and a civil war afoot (1649). It was a strange
affair of froth and empty rages--this war of "The Fronde," as
it was called--having no depth of earnestness in it and no
honesty of purpose anywhere visible in its complications. The
men and women who sprang to a lead in it--the women more
actively and rancorously than the men--were mere actors of
parts in a great play of court intrigue, for the performance
of which unhappy France had lent its grand stage. There seems
to have been never, in any other civil conflict which history
describes, so extraordinary a mixture of treason and
libertinism, of political and amorous intrigue, of
heartlessness and frivolity, of hot passion and cool
selfishness. The people who fought most and suffered most
hardly appear as noticeable factors in the contest. The court
performers amused themselves with the stratagems and bloody
doings of the war as they might have done with the tricks of a
masquerade.
It was in keeping with the character of the Frondeurs that
they went into alliance, at last, with Spain, and that, even
after peace within the nation had been restored, "the Great
Condé" remained in the Spanish service and fought against his
own countrymen. Mazarin regained control of affairs, and
managed them on the whole ably and well. He brought about an
alliance with England, under Cromwell, and humbled Spain to
the acceptance of a treaty which considerably raised the
position of France among the European Powers. By this Treaty
of the Pyrenees (1659), the northwestern frontier of the
kingdom was both strengthened and advanced; Lorraine was shorn
of some of its territory and prepared for the absorption which
followed after no long time; there were gains made on the side
of the Pyrenees; and, finally, Louis XIV. was wedded to the
infanta of Spain, with solemn renunciations on her part, for
herself and her descendants, of all claims upon the Spanish
crown, or upon Flanders, or Burgundy, or Charolais. Not a
claim was extinguished by these solemn renunciations, and the
Treaty of the Pyrenees is made remarkable by the number of
serious wars and important events to which it gave rise.
Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661 and the government was assumed
personally by Louis XIV., then twenty-three years old.
England Under the Stuarts.
While Germany and France had, each in turn, been disordered by
extremely unlike civil wars, one to the unmitigated
devastation and prostration of the land, the other to the
plain putting in proof of the nothingness of the nation at
large, as against its monarchy and court, the domestic peace
of England had been ruffled in a very different way, and with
very different effects.
The death of Queen Elizabeth united the crown of England with
that of Scotland, on the head of James, son of the unhappy
Mary Stuart. In England he was James I., in Scotland James VI.
His character combined shrewdness in some directions with the
most foolish simplicity in others. He was not vicious, he was
not in any particular a bad man; but he was exasperating in
his opinionated self-conceit, and in his gaucheries of mind
and body. The Englishmen of those days did not love the Scots;
and, all things considered, we may wonder, perhaps, that James
got on so well as he did with his English subjects. He had
high notions of kingship, and a superlative opinion of his own
king-craft, as he termed the art of government. He scarcely
deviated from the arbitrary lines which Elizabeth had laid
down, though he had nothing of Elizabeth's popularity. He
offended the nation by truckling to its old enemy, the King of
Spain, and pressing almost shamefully for a marriage of his
elder son to the Spanish infanta. The favorites he enriched
and lavished honors upon were insolent upstarts. His treatment
of the growing Puritanism in English religious feeling was
contemptuous. There was scarcely a point on which any
considerable number of his subjects could feel in agreement
with him, or entertain towards him a cordial sentiment of
loyalty or respect. Yet his reign of twenty-two years was
disturbed by nothing more serious than the fatuous "gunpowder
plot" (1605) of a few discontented Catholics. But his son had
to suffer the retarded consequences of a loyalty growing weak,
on one side, while royalty strained its prerogatives on the
other.
The reign of James I. witnessed the effective beginnings of
English colonization in America,--the planting of a durable
settlement in Virginia and the migration of the Pilgrim
Fathers to New England. The latter movement (1620) was one of
voluntary exile, produced by the hard treatment inflicted on
those "Separatists" or "Independents" who could not reconcile
themselves to a state-established Church. Ten years later, the
Pilgrim movement, of Independents, was followed by the greater
migration of Puritans--quite different in class, in character
and in spirit.
{1075}
Charles. I.
James died in 1625, and the troubled reign of his son, Charles
I., began. Charles took over from his father a full measure of
popular discontent, along with numerous active springs in
operation for increasing it. The most productive of these was
the favorite, Buckingham, who continued to be the sole
counselor and minister of the young king, as he had been of
the older one, and who was utterly hateful to England, for
good reasons of incapacity and general worthlessness. In the
king himself, though he had virtues, there was a coldness and
a falsity of nature which were sure to widen the breach
between him and his people.
Failing the Spanish marriage, Charles had wedded (1624) a
French princess, Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII. The
previous subserviency to Spain had then been followed by a war
with that country, which came to Charles among his
inheritances, and which Buckingham mismanaged, to the shame of
England. In 1627 another war began, but this time with France,
on account of the Huguenots besieged at La Rochelle. Again the
meddlesome hand of Buckingham wrought disaster and national
disgrace, and public indignation was greatly stirred. When
Parliament endeavored to call the incapable minister to
account, and to obtain some security for a better management
of affairs, the king dissolved it. Twice was this done, and
Charles and his favorite employed every arbitrary and
questionable device that could be contrived for them, to raise
money without need of the representatives of the people. At
length, in 1628, they were driven to face a third Parliament,
in order to obtain supplies. By this time the Commons of
England were wrought up to a high and determined assertion of
their rights, as against the Crown, and the Puritans had
gained a majority in the popular representation. In the lower
House of Parliament, therefore, the demands of the king for
money were met by a counter-demand for guarantees to protect
the people from royal encroachments on their liberties. The
Commons were resolute, and Charles gave way to them, signing
with much reluctance the famous instrument known as the
"Petition of Right," which pledged the Crown to abstain in
future from forced loans, from taxes imposed without
Parliamentary grant, from arbitrary imprisonments, without
cause shown, and from other despotic proceedings. In return
for his signature to the Petition of Right, Charles received a
grant of money; but the Commons refused to authorize his
collection of certain customs duties, called Tonnage and
Poundage, beyond a single year, and it began attacks on
Buckingham,--whereupon the king prorogued it. Shortly
afterwards Buckingham was assassinated; a second expedition to
relieve Rochelle failed miserably; and early in 1629
Parliament was assembled again. This time the Puritan temper
of the House began to show itself in measures to put a stop to
some revivals of ancient ceremony which had appeared in
certain churches. At the same time officers of the king, who
had seized goods belonging to a member of the House, for
non-payment of Tonnage and Poundage, were summoned to the bar
to answer for it. The king protected them, and a direct
conflict of authority arose. On the 2d of March, the king sent
an order to the Speaker of the House of Commons for
adjournment; but the Speaker was forcibly held in his chair,
and not permitted to announce the adjournment, until three
resolutions had been read and adopted, denouncing as an enemy
to the kingdom every person who brought in innovations in
religion, or who advised the levying of Tonnage and Poundage
without parliamentary grant, or who voluntarily paid such
duties, so levied. This done, the members dispersed; the king
dissolved Parliament immediately, and his resolution was taken
to govern England thenceforth on his own authority, with no
assembly of the representatives of the people to question or
criticise him. He held to that determination for eleven years,
during which long time no Parliament sat in England, and the
Constitution was practically obliterated.
The leaders of the Commons in their recent proceedings were
arrested and imprisoned. Sir John Eliot, the foremost of them,
died in harsh confinement within the Tower, and others were
held in long custody, refusing to recognize the jurisdiction
of the king's judges over things done in Parliament.
Wentworth and Laud.
One man, of great ability, who had stood at the beginning with
Sir John Eliot, and acted with the party which opposed the
king, now went over to the side of the latter and rose high in
royal favor, until he came in the end to be held chiefly
responsible for the extreme absolutism to which the government
of Charles was pushed. This was Sir Thomas Wentworth, made
Earl of Strafford at a later day, in the tardy rewarding of
his services. But William Laud, Bishop of London, and
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was the evil counselor of
the king, much more than Wentworth, in the earlier years of
the decade of tyranny. It was Laud's part to organize the
system of despotic monarchy on its ecclesiastical side; to
uproot Puritanism and all dissent, and to cast religion for
England and for Scotland in one mould, as rigid as that of
Rome.
For some years, the English nation seemed terrorized or
stupefied by the audacity of the complete overthrow of its
Constitution. The king and his servants might easily imagine
that the day of troublesome Parliaments and of inconvenient
laws was passed. At least in those early years of their
success, it can scarcely have occurred to their minds that a
time of accounting for broken laws, and for the violated
pledges of the Petition of Right, might come at the end. At
all events they went their way with seeming satisfaction, and
tested, year by year, the patient endurance of a people which
has always been slow to move. Their courts of Star Chamber and
of High Commission, finding a paramount law in the will and
pleasure of the king, imprisoned, fined, pilloried, flogged
and mutilated in quite the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition,
though they did not burn.
{1076}
They collected Tonnage and Poundage without parliamentary
consent, and servile judges enforced the payment. They
invented a claim for "ship-money" (in commutation of an
ancient demand for ships to serve in the King's navy) from
inland towns and counties, as well as from the commercial
ports; and when John Hampden, a squire in Buckinghamshire,
refused payment of the unlawful tax, their obedient judges
gave judgment against him. And still the people endured; but
they were laying up in memory many things, and gathering a
store of reasons for the action that would by and by begin.
Rebellion in Scotland.
At last, it was Scotland, not England, that moved to rebel.
Laud and the king had determined to break down Presbyterianism
in the northern kingdom and to force a Prayer Book on the
Scottish Church. There was a consequent riot at St. Giles, in
Edinburgh (1637); Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the bishop,
and Scotland presently was in revolt, signing a National
Covenant and defying the king. Charles, attempting to frighten
the resolute Scots with an army which he could not pay, was
soon driven to a treaty with them (1639) which he had not
honesty enough to keep. Wentworth, who had been Lord Deputy of
Ireland since 1632, and who had framed a model of absolutism
in that island, for the admiration of his colleagues in
England, now returned to the king's side and became his chief
adviser. He counselled the calling of a Parliament, as the
only means by which English help could be got for the
restoring of royal authority in Scotland. The Parliament was
summoned and met in April, 1640. At once, it showed a temper
which alarmed the king and he dissolved it in three weeks.
Again Charles made the attempt to put down his Scottish
subjects without help from an English Parliament, and again
the attempt failed.
The Long Parliament.
Then the desperate king summoned another Parliament, which
concentrated in itself, when it came together, the suppressed
rebellion that had been in the heart of England for ten years,
and which broke his flimsy fabric of absolutism, almost at a
single blow. It was the famous Long Parliament of English
history, which met in November, 1640, and which ruled England
for a dozen years, until it gave way to the Cromwellian
dictatorship. It sent Laud and Strafford to the Tower,
impeached the latter and brought him to the block, within six
months from the beginning of its session; and the king gave up
his minister to the vengeance of the angry Commons with hardly
one honest attempt to protect him. Laud waited in prison five
years before he suffered the same fate. The Parliament
declared itself to be indissoluble by any royal command; and
the king assented. It abolished the Star Chamber and the Court
of High Commission; and the king approved. It swept
ship-money, and forest claims, and all of Charles' lawless
money-getting devices into the limbo; and he put his signature
to its bills. But all the time he was intriguing with the
Scots for armed help to overthrow his masterful English
Parliament, and he was listening to Irish emissaries who
offered an army for the same purpose, on condition that
Ireland' should be surrendered to the Catholics.
Civil War.
Charles had arranged nothing on either of these treacherous
plans, nor had he gained anything yet from the division
between radicals and moderates that was beginning to show
itself in the popular party, when he suddenly brought the
strained situation to a crisis, in January, 1642, by his most
foolish and arrogant act. He invaded the House of Commons in
person, with a large body of armed men, for the purpose of
arresting five members--Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazlerigg and
Strode--whom he accused of having negotiated treasonably with
the Scots in 1640. The five members escaped; the House
appealed to the citizens of London for protection; king and
Parliament began immediately to raise troops; the nation
divided and arrayed itself on the two sides,--most of the
gentry, the Cavaliers, supporting the king, and most of the
Puritan middle-class, wearing close-cut hair and receiving the
name Roundheads, being ranged in the party of Parliament. They
came to blows in October, when the first battle was fought, at
Edgehill.
In the early period of the war, the parliamentary forces were
commanded by the Earl of Essex; and Sir Thomas Fairfax was
their general at a later stage; but the true leader on that
side, for war and for politics alike, was soon found in Oliver
Cromwell, a member of Parliament, whose extraordinary capacity
was first shown in the military organization of the Eastern
Counties, from which he came. After 1645, when the army was
remodeled, with Cromwell as second in rank, his real
chieftainship was scarcely disguised. The decisive battle of
the war was fought that year at Naseby, where the king's cause
suffered an irrecoverable defeat.
The Presbyterians of Scotland had now allied themselves with
the English Roundheads, on condition that the Church of
England should be remodeled in the Presbyterian form. The
Puritan majority in Parliament being favorable to that form, a
Solemn League and Covenant between the two nations had been
entered into, in 1643, and an Assembly of Divines was convened
at Westminster to frame the contemplated system of the Church.
But the Independents, who disliked Presbyterianism, and who
were more tolerantly inclined in their views, had greatly
increased in numbers, and some of the stronger men on the
Parliament side, including Cromwell, the strongest of all,
were among them. This difference brought about a sharp
struggle within the popular party for the control of the
fruits of the triumph now beginning to seem secure. Under
Cromwell, the Army became a powerful organization of religious
Independency, while Parliament sustained Presbyterianism, and
the two stood against each other as rival powers in the state.
{1077}
At the beginning of the year 1646 the fortunes of Charles had
fallen very low. His partisan, Montrose, in Scotland, had been
beaten; his intrigues in Ireland, for the raising of a
Catholic army, had only alarmed and disgusted his English
friends; he was at the end of his resources, and he gave
himself up to the Scots. The latter, in conjunction with the
Presbyterian majority in Parliament, were willing to make
terms with him, and restore him to his throne; on conditions
which included the signing of the Covenant and the
establishing of Presbyterianism in the Churches of both
kingdoms. He refused the proposal, being deluded by a belief
that the quarrel of Independents and Presbyterians would open
his way to the recovery of power without any concessions at
all. The Scots then surrendered him to the English, and he was
held in confinement by the latter for the next two years,
scheming and pursuing intrigues in many directions, and
convincing all who dealt with him that his purposes were never
straightforward--that he was faithless and false to the core.
Ill-will and suspicion, meanwhile, were widening the breach
between Parliament and the Army. Political and religious
agitators were gaining influence in the latter and republican
ideas were spreading fast. At length (December, 1648), the
Army took matters into its own hands; expelled from Parliament
those members who favored a reconciliation with the king, on
the basis of a Presbyterian establishment of the Church, and
England passed under military rule. The "purged" Parliament
(or rather the purged House of Commons, which now set the
House of Lords aside, declaring itself to be the sole and
supreme power in the state) brought King Charles to trial in
the following month, before a High Court of Justice created
for the occasion. He was convicted of treason, in making war
upon his subjects, and was beheaded on the 30th of January,
1649.
The Commonwealth and the Protectorate.
The king being thus disposed of, the House of Commons
proclaimed England a Commonwealth, "without a King or House of
Lords," took to itself the name of Parliament, and appointed
an executive Council of State, forty-one in number. The new
government, in its first year, had a rebellion in Ireland to
deal with, and sent Cromwell to the scene. He crushed it with
a merciless hand. The next year Scotland was in arms, for the
late king's son, now called Charles II., who had entered the
country, accepted Presbyterianism, and signed the Covenant.
Again Cromwell was the man for the occasion, and in a campaign
of two months he ended the Scottish war, with such decision that
he had no more fighting to do on English or Scottish soil
while he lived. There was war with the Dutch in 1652, 1653 and
1654, over questions of trade, and the long roll of English naval
victories was opened by the great soldier-seaman, Robert
Blake.
But the power which upheld and carried forward all things at
this time was the power of Oliver Cromwell, master of the
Army, and, therefore, master of the Commonwealth. The
surviving fragment of the Long Parliament was an anomaly, a
fiction; men called it "the Rump." In April, 1653, Cromwell
drove the members of it from their chamber and formally took
to himself the reins of government which in fact he had been
holding before. A few months later he received from his
immediate supporters the title of Lord Protector, and an
Instrument of Government was framed, which served as a
constitution during the next three years. Cromwell was as
unwilling as Charles had been to share the government with a
freely elected and representative Parliament. The first House
which he called together was dissolved at the end of five
months (1655), because it persisted in discussing a revision
of the constitution. His second Parliament, which he summoned
the following year, required to be purged by the arbitrary
exclusion of about a hundred members before it could be
brought to due submission. This tractable body then made
certain important changes in the constitution, by an enactment
called the "Humble Petition and Advice." It created a second
house, to take the place of the House of Lords, and gave to
the Lord Protector the naming of persons to be life-members of
such upper house. It also gave to the Protector the right of
appointing his own successor, a right which Cromwell exercised
on his death-bed, in 1658, by designating his son Richard.
The responsible rule of Cromwell, from the expulsion of the
Rump and his assumption of the dignity of Lord Protector,
covered only the period of five years. But in that brief time
he made the world respect the power of England as it had never
been respected before. His government at home was as absolute
and arbitrary as the government of the Stuarts, but it was
infinitely wiser and more just. Cromwell was a statesman of
the higher order; a man of vast power, in intellect and will.
That he did not belong to the yet higher order of commanding
men, whose statesmanship is pure in patriotism and uncolored
by selfish aims, is proved by his failure to even plan a more
promising settlement of the government of England than that
which left it, an anomalous Protectorate, to a man without
governing qualities, who happened to be his son.
Restoration of the Stuarts.
Richard Cromwell was brushed aside after eight months of an
absurd attempt to play the part of Lord Protector. The
officers of the Army and the resuscitated Rump Parliament,
between them, managed affairs, in a fashion, for almost a
year, and then they too were pushed out of the way by the army
which had been stationed in Scotland, under General George
Monk. By the action of Monk, with the consent, and with more
than the consent, of England at large, the Stuart monarchy was
restored. Charles II. was invited to return, and in May, 1660,
he took his seat on the re-erected throne.