despotism; tired of Puritan austerity; tired of revolution and
political uncertainty;--so tired that it threw itself down at
the feet of the most worthless member of the most worthless
royal family in its history, and gave itself up to him without
a condition or a guarantee. For twenty-five years it endured
both oppression and disgrace at his hands. It suffered him to
make a brothel of his Court; to empty the national purse into
the pockets of his shameless mistresses and debauched
companions; to revive the ecclesiastical tyranny of Laud; to
make a crime of the religious creeds and the worship of more
than half his subjects; to sell himself and sell the honor of
England to the king of France for a secret pension, and to be
in every possible way as ignoble and despicable as his father
had been arrogant and false. When he died, in 1685, the
prospects of the English nation were not improved by the
accession of his brother, the Duke of York, who became James
II.
{1078}
James had more honesty than his brother or his father; but the
narrowness and meanness of the Stuart race were in his blood.
He had made himself intolerable; to his subjects, both English
and Scotch, by entering the Catholic Church, openly, while
Charles was believed to have done the same in secret. His
religion was necessarily bigotry, because of the smallness of
his nature, and he opposed it to the Protestantism of the
kingdom with a kind of brutal aggressiveness. In the first
year of his reign there was a rebellion undertaken, in the
interest of a bastard son of Charles II., called Duke of
Monmouth; but it was savagely put down, first by force of
arms, at Sedgemoor, and afterwards by the "bloody assizes" of
the ruthless Judge Jeffreys. Encouraged by this success
against his enemies James began to ignore the "Test Act,"
which excluded Catholics from office, and to surround himself
by men of his own religion. The Test Act was an unrighteous
law, and the "Declaration of Indulgence" which James issued,
for the toleration of Catholics and Dissenters, was just in
principle, according to the ideas of later times; but the
action of the king with respect to both was, nevertheless, a
gross and threatening violation of law. England had submitted
to worse conduct from Charles II., but its Protestant temper
was now roused, and the loyalty of the subject was consumed by
the fierceness of the Churchman's wrath. James' daughter,
Mary, and her husband, William, Prince of Orange, were invited
from Holland to come over and displace the obnoxious father
from his throne. They accepted the invitation, November, 1688;
the nation rose to welcome them; James fled,--and the great
Revolution, which ended arbitrary monarchy in England forever,
and established constitutional government on clearly defined
and lasting bases, was accomplished without the shedding of a
drop of blood.
The House of Orange and the Dutch Republic.
William of Orange, who thus acquired a place in the line of
English kings, held, at the same time, the nearly regal office
of Stadtholder of Holland; but the office had not remained
continuously in his family since William the Silent, whose
great-grandson he was. Maurice, the son of the murdered
William the Silent, had been chosen to the stadtholdership
after his father's death, and had carried forward his father's
work with success, so far as concerned the liberation of the
United Provinces from the Spanish yoke. He was an abler
soldier than William, but not his equal as a statesman, nor as
a man. The greater statesman of the period was John of
Barneveldt, between whom and the Stadtholder an opposition
grew up which produced jealousy and hostility, more especially
on the part of the latter. A shameful religious conflict had
arisen at this time between the Calvinists, who numbered most
of the clergy in their ranks, and a dissenting body, led by
Jacob Hermann, or Arminius, which protested against the
doctrine of predestination. Barneveldt favored the Arminians.
The Stadtholder, Maurice, without any apparent theological
conviction in the matter, threw his whole weight of influence
on the side of the Calvinists; and was able, with the help of
the Calvinist preachers, to carry the greater part of the
common people into that faction. The Arminians were everywhere
put down as heretics, barred from preaching or teaching, and
otherwise silenced and ill treated. It is a singular fact
that, at the very time of this outburst of Calvinistic fury,
the Dutch were exhibiting otherwise a far more tolerant temper
in religion than any other people in Europe, and had thrown
open their country as a place of shelter for the persecuted of
other lands,--both Christian sectaries and Jews. We infer,
necessarily, that the bitterness of the Calvinists against the
Arminians was more political than religious in its source, and
that the source is really traceable to the fierce ambition of
Prince Maurice, and the passion of the party which supported
his suspicious political aims.
Barneveldt lost influence as the consequence of the
Calvinistic triumph, and was exposed helplessly to the
vindictive hatred of Prince Maurice, who did not scruple to
cause his arrest, his trial and execution (1619), on charges
which none believed. Maurice, whose memory is blackened by
this great crime, died in 1625, and was succeeded by his
half-brother, Frederic Henry. The war with Spain had been
renewed in 1621, at the end of the twelve years truce, and
more than willingly renewed; for the merchant class, and the
maritime interest in the cities which felt secure, preferred
war to peace. Under a hostile flag they pushed their commerce
into Spanish and Portuguese seas from which a treaty of peace
would undoubtedly exclude them; and, so long as Spanish
American silver fleets were afloat, the spoils of ocean war
were vastly enriching. It was during these years of war that
the Dutch got their footing on the farther sides of the world,
and nearly won the mastery of the sea which their slower but
stronger English rivals wrested from them in the end. Not
until the general Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, was a final
settlement of issues between Spain and the United Provinces
brought about. The freedom and independence of the Provinces,
as sovereign states, was then acknowledged by the humbled
Spaniard, and favorable arrangements of trade were conceded to
them. The southern, Catholic Provinces, which Spain had held,
were retained in their subjection to her.
Frederic Henry, the third Stadtholder, was succeeded in 1647
by his son, William II. The latter wasted his short career of
less than four years in foolish plotting to revolutionize the
government and transform the stadtholdership into a monarchy,
supported by France, for the help of which country he seemed
willing to pay any base and treasonable price. Dying suddenly
in the midst of his scheming, he left an unborn son--the
future William III. of England--who came into the world a week
after his father had left it. Under these circumstances the
stadtholdership was suspended, with strong feelings against
the revival of it, resulting from the conduct of William II.
The lesser provinces then fell under the domination of
Holland--so much so that the name of Holland began soon to be
applied to the confederation at large, and is very commonly
used with that meaning for a long subsequent time. The chief
minister of the Estates of Holland, known as the Grand
Pensionary, became the practical head of the federal
government. After 1653 the office of Grand Pensionary was
filled by a statesman of high ability, John de Witt, the chief
end of whose policy appears to have been the prevention of the
return of the House of Orange to power. The government thus
administered, and controlled by the commercial class, was
successful in promoting the general prosperity of the
provinces, and in advancing their maritime importance and
power.
{1079}
It conducted two wars with England--one with the Commonwealth
and one with the restored monarchy--and could claim at least
an equal share of the naval glory won in each. But it
neglected the land defense of the country, and was found
shamefully unprepared in 1672, when the Provinces were
attacked by a villainous combination, formed between Louis
XIV. of France and his servile pensioner, Charles II. of
England. The republic, humbled and distressed by the rushing
conquests of the French, fixed its hopes upon the young Prince
of Orange, heir to the prestige of a great historic name, and
turned its wrath against the party of De Witt. The Prince was
made Stadtholder, despite the opposition of John de Witt, and
the latter, with his brother Cornelius, was murdered by a mob
at Amsterdam. William of Orange proved both wise and heroic as
a leader, and the people were roused to a new energy of
resistance by his appeals and his example. They cut their
dykes and flooded the land, subjecting themselves to
unmeasured loss and distress, but peremptorily stopping the
French advance, until time was gained for awakening public
feeling in Europe against the aggressions of the unscrupulous
French king. Then William of Orange began that which was to be
his great and important mission in life,--the organizing of
resistance to Louis XIV. Without the foresight and penetration
of French designs which he evinced,--without his unflagging
exertions for the next thirty years,--without his diplomatic
tact, his skill of management, his patience in war, his
obstinate perseverance,--it seems to be a certainty that the
ambitious "grand monarch," concentrating the whole power of
France in himself, would have been able to break the
surrounding nations one by one, and they would not have
combined their strength for an effective self-protection. The
revolution of 1688-9 in England, which gave the crown of that
kingdom to William, and his wife Mary, contributed greatly to
his success, and was an event nearly as important in European
politics at large as it was in the constitutional history of
Great Britain.
Germany after the Thirty Years War.
In a natural order of things, Germany should have supplied the
main resistance to Louis XIV. and held his unscrupulous
ambition in check. But Germany had fallen to its lowest state
of political demoralization and disorder. The very idea of
nationality had disappeared. The Empire, even collapsed to the
Germanic sense, and even reduced to a frame and a form, had
almost vanished from practical affairs. The numerous petty
states which divided the German people stood apart from one
another, in substantial independence, and were sundered by
small jealousies and distrusts. Little absolute principalities
they were, each having its little court, which aped, in a
little way, the grand court of the grand monarch of
France--central object of the admiration and the envy of all
small souls in its time. Half of them were ready to bow down
to the splendid being at Versailles, and to be his creatures,
if he condescended to bestow a nod of patronage and attention
upon them. The French king had more influence among them than
their nominal Emperor. More and more distinctly the latter
drew apart in his immediate dominions as an Austrian
sovereign; and more and more completely Austrian interests and
Austrian policy became removed and estranged from the interests
of the Germanic people. The ambitions and the cares of the
House of Hapsburg were increasingly in directions most
opposite to the German side of its relations, tending towards
Italy and the southeast; while, at the same time, the narrow
church influence which depressed the Austrian states widened a
hopeless intellectual difference between them and the northern
German people.
Brandenburg.--Prussia.
The most notable movements in dull German affairs after the
Peace of Westphalia were those which connected themselves with
the settling and centering in Brandenburg of a nucleus of
growing power, around which the nationalizing of Germany has
been a crystalizing process ever since. The Mark of
Brandenburg was one of the earliest conquests (tenth century)
of the Germans from the Wends. Prussia, afterwards united with
Brandenburg, was a later conquest (thirteenth century) from
Wendish or Slavonic and other pagan inhabitants, and its
subjugation was a missionary enterprise, accomplished by the
crusading Order of Teutonic Knights, under the authority and
direction of the Pope. The Order, which held the country for
more than two centuries, and ruled it badly, became
degenerate, and about the middle of the fifteenth century it
was overcome in war by Casimir IV. of Poland, who took away
from it the western part of its territory, and forced it to do
homage to him for the eastern part, as a fief of the Polish
crown. Sixty years later, the Reformation movement in Germany
brought about the extinguishment of the Teutonic Order as a
political power. The Grand Master of the Order at that time
was Albert, a Hohenzollern prince, belonging to a younger
branch of the Brandenburg family. He became a Lutheran, and
succeeded in persuading the Polish king, Sigismund I., to
transfer the sovereignty of the East Prussian fief to him
personally, as a duchy. He transmitted it to his descendants,
who held it for a few generations; but the line became extinct
in 1618, and the Duchy of Prussia then passed to the elder
branch of the family and was united with Brandenburg. The Mark
of Brandenburg had been raised to the rank of an Electorate in
1356 and had been acquired by the Hohenzollern family in 1417.
The superior weight of the Brandenburg electors in northern
Germany may be dated from their acquisition of the important
Duchy of Prussia; but they made no mark on affairs until the
time of Frederick William I., called the Great Elector, who
succeeded to the Electorate in 1640, near the close of the
Thirty Years War. In the arrangements of the Peace of
Westphalia he secured East Pomerania and other considerable
additions of territory. In 1657 he made his Duchy of Prussia
independent of Poland, by treaty with the Polish king. In 1672
and 1674 he had the courage and the independence to join the
allies against Louis XIV., and when the Swedes, in alliance
with Louis, invaded his dominions, he defeated and humbled
them at Fehrbellen, and took from them the greater part of
their Pomeranian territory. When the Great Elector died, in
1688, Brandenburg was the commanding North-German power, and
the Hohenzollern family had fully entered on the great career
it has since pursued.
{1080}
Frederick William's son Frederick, with none of his father's
talent, had a pushing but shallow ambition. He aspired to be a
king, and circumstances made his friendship so important to
the Emperor Leopold I. that the latter, exercising the
theoretical super-sovereignty of the Cæsars, endowed him with
the regal title. He was made King of Prussia, not of
Brandenburg, because Brandenburg stood in vassalage to the
Empire, while Prussia was an independent state.
Poland and Russia.
When Brandenburg and Prussia united began to rise to
importance, the neighboring kingdom of Poland had already
passed the climax of its career. Under the Jagellon dynasty,
sprung from the Duke Jagellon of Lithuania, who married
Hedwig, Queen of Poland, in 1386, and united the two states,
Poland was a great power for two centuries, and seemed more
likely than Russia to dominate the Slavonic peoples of Europe.
The Russians at that time were under the feet of the Mongols
or Tartars, whose terrific sweep westwards, from the steppes
of Asia, had overwhelmed them completely and seemed to bring
their independent history to an end. Slowly a Russian duchy
had emerged, having its seat of doubtful sovereignty at
Moscow, and being subject quite humbly to the Mongol Khan.
About 1477 the Muscovite duke of that time, Ivan Vasilovitch,
broke the Tartar yoke and acquired independence. But his
dominion was limited. The Poles and Lithuanians, now united,
had taken possession of large and important territories
formerly Russian, and the Muscovite state was entirely cut off
from the Baltic. It began, however, in the next century, under
Ivan the Terrible, first of the Czars, to make conquests
southward and south-eastward, from the Tartars, until it had
reached the Caspian Sea. The dominion of the Czar stretched
northward, at the same time, to the White Sea, at the single
port of which trade was opened with the Russian country by
English merchant adventurers in the reign of Elizabeth. Late
in the sixteenth century the old line of rulers, descended
from the Scandinavian Ruric, came to an end, and after a few
years Michael Romanoff established the dynasty which has
reigned since his time.
As between the two principal Slavonic nations, Russia was now
gaining stability and weight, while Poland had begun to lose
both. It was a fatal day for the Poles when, in 1573, on the
death of the last of the Jagellons, they made their monarchy
purely elective, abolishing the restriction to one family
which had previously prevailed. The election was by the
suffrage of the nobles, not the people at large (who were
generally serfs), and the government became an oligarchy of
the most unregulated kind known in history. The crown was
stripped of power, and the unwillingness of the nobility to
submit to any national authority, even that of its own
assembly, reached a point, about the middle of the seventeenth
century, at which anarchy was virtually agreed upon as the
desirable political state. The extraordinary "liberum veto,"
then made part of the Polish constitution, gave to each single
member of the assemblies of the nobles, or of the deputies
representing them, a right to forbid any enactment, or to
arrest the whole proceedings of the body, by his unsupported
negative. This amazing prerogative appears to have been
exercised very rarely in its fullness; but its theoretical
existence effectually extinguished public spirit and paralyzed
all rational legislation. Linked with the singular feebleness
of the monarchy, it leaves small room for surprise at the
ultimate shipwreck of the Polish state.
The royal elections at Warsaw came to be prize contests at
which all Europe assisted. Every Court set up its candidate
for the paltry titular place; every candidate emptied his
purse into the Polish capital, and bribed, intrigued,
corrupted, to the best of his ability. Once, at least (1674),
when the game was on, a sudden breeze of patriotic feeling
swept the traffickers out of the diet, and inspired the
election of a national hero, John Sobieski, to whom Europe
owes much; for it was he who drove back the Turks, in 1683,
when their last bold push into central Europe was made, and
when they were storming at the gates of Vienna. But when
Sobieski died, in 1696, the old scandalous vendue of a crown
was re-opened, and the Elector of Saxony was the buyer. During
most of the last two centuries of its history, Poland sold its
throne to one alien after another, and allowed foreign states
to mix and meddle with its affairs. Of real nationality there
was not much left to extinguish when the time of extinction
came. There were patriots, and very noble patriots, among the
Poles, at all periods of their history; but it seems to have
been the very hopelessness of the state into which their
country had drifted which intensified their patriotic feeling.
Russia had acquired magnitude and strength as a barbaric
power, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but it was
not until the reign of Peter the Great, which opened in 1682,
that the great Slavonic empire began to take on a European
character, with European interests and influences, and to
assimilate the civilization of the West. Peter may be said to
have knotted Russia to Europe at both extremities, by pushing
his dominions to the Baltic on the north and to the Black Sea
on the south, and by putting his own ships afloat in both.
From his day, Russia has been steadily gathering weight in
each of the two continents over which her vast bulk of empire
is stretched, and moving to a mysterious great destiny in time
to come.
The Turks.
The Turks, natural enemies of all the Christian races of
eastern and southeastern Europe, came practically to the end
of their threatening career of conquest about the middle of
the sixteenth century, when Suleiman the Magnificent died
(1566). He had occupied a great part of Hungary; seated a
pasha in Buda; laid siege to Vienna; taken Rhodes from the
Knights of St. John; attacked them in Malta; made an alliance
with the King of France; brought a Turkish fleet into the
western Mediterranean, and held Europe in positive terror of
an Ottoman domination for half a century. His son Selim added
Cyprus to the Turkish conquests; but was humbled in the
Mediterranean by the great Christian victory of Lepanto, won
by the combined fleets of Spain, Venice and the Pope, under
Don John of Austria. After that time Europe had no great fear
of the Turk; though he still fought hard with the Venetians,
the Poles, the Russians, the Hungarians, and, once more,
carried his arms even to Vienna. But, on the whole, it was a
losing fight; the crescent was on the wane.
{1081}
Last glories of Venice.
In the whole struggle with the Ottomans, through the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the republic
of Venice bore a noble part. She contested with them foot by
foot the Greek islands, Peloponnesus, and the eastern shores
of the Adriatic. Even after her commerce began to slip from
her control, and the strength which came from it sank rapidly,
she gave up her eastern possessions but slowly, one by one,
and after stout resistance. Crete cost the Turks a war of
twenty-four years (1645-1669). Fifteen years afterwards the
Venetians gathered their energies afresh, assumed the
aggressive, and conquered the whole Peloponnesus, which they
held for a quarter of a century. Then it was lost again, and
the Ionian Islands alone remained Venetian territory in the
East.
Rise of the House of Savoy.
Of Italy at large, in the seventeenth century, lying prostrate
under the heavy hand of Spain, there is no history to claim
attention in so brief a sketch as this. One sovereign family
in the northwest, long balanced on the Alps, in uncertainty
between a cis-Alpine and a trans-Alpine destiny, but now
clearly committed to Italian fortunes, had begun to win its
footing among the noticeable smaller powers of the day by
sheer dexterity of trimming and shifting sides in the
conflicts of the time. This was the House of Savoy, whose
first possessions were gathered in the crumbling of the old
kingdom of Burgundy, and lay on both slopes of the Alps,
commanding several important passes. On the western and
northern side, the counts, afterwards dukes, of Savoy had to
contend, as time went on, with the expanding kingdom of France
and with the stout-hearted communities which ultimately formed
the Swiss Confederacy. They fell back before both. At one
period, in the fifteenth century, their dominion had stretched
to the Saone, and to the lake of Neufchatel, on both sides of
it, surrounding the free city of Geneva, which they were never
able to overcome, and the lake of Geneva entire. After that
time, the Savoyards gradually lost territory on the Gallic
side and won compensations on the Italian side, in Piedmont,
and at the expense of Genoa and the duchy of Milan. The Duke
Victor Amadeus II. was the most successful winner for his
house, and he made his gains by remarkable manœuvering on both
sides of the wars of Louis XIV. One of his acquisitions (1713)
was the island kingdom of Sicily, which gave him a royal title. A
few years later he exchanged it with Austria for the island
kingdom of Sardinia--a realm more desirable to him for
geographical reasons only. The dukes of Savoy and princes of
Piedmont thus became kings of Sardinia, and the name of the
kingdom was often applied to their whole dominion, down to the
recent time when the House of Savoy attained the grander
kingship of united Italy.
First wars of Louis XIV.