THE GROWING POWER OF FRANCE
The event of chief importance in the story of the second half of the
seventeenth century is the gradual shifting of the power in Europe
from the hand of Spain into the hand of France. It was indeed in the
earlier half that Spain had begun to fail. We have noticed more than
once how, with all the far-flung possessions of her great ruling
family of Habsburg--possessions in Italy, in Austria, in the
Netherlands--she held France surrounded and hemmed in. On the other
hand, France had all the advantage which, as is well known, belongs
to the "central position." She could throw her whole force into the
struggle on this side or on that far more easily than Spain could
mass her force on any one point. And the very fact that Spain had so
many possessions to defend proved in the end her weakness. She spent
her vast strength in the struggle. Moreover, she had inflicted on
herself a great loss by driving out of the country the converted Jews
and the converted Mahommedans. The last of the latter were expelled
in the tenth year of the seventeenth century, and the Jews had gone
long before. Both were intelligent and industrious people, and Spain
thus lost a most valuable section of her population.
She had immense wealth coming to her from America, but the transport
of this wealth made a heavy demand on her fleet. When Elizabeth was
{90} on the throne of England, English seamen, by their constant
attacks, drained much of the life-blood of the Spanish fleet. Under
the vacillating rule of the Stuarts, English attacks on the Spanish
treasure ships grew inconsiderable, but another formidable menace to
Spain had arisen in the sea-power of the Dutch.
The naval power of Holland had been necessary to her during the war
of religion in which Spain had tried to crush out the Protestant
spirit. As early as 1607 the Dutch fleet had practically destroyed
the principal fleet of Spain off Gibraltar. The Dutch, as we have
seen, had taken the supremacy which the Portuguese had held in the
Malay Archipelago; and since Portugal till 1640 had been for sixty
years under the King of Spain, it was nearly equivalent to taking
that supremacy from Spain herself. The victory which really was
decisive was won by the great Dutch admiral, Van Tromp, in 1639. It
made Holland, so lately a mere province of Spain, the strongest
sea-power in the world.
[Sidenote: Cromwell as dictator]
And at this point, that is to say, in 1651, Cromwell, in his
masterful manner, passed the law called the Navigation Act which
directly challenged the naval power of Holland. It provided that
ships trading to England should carry no other goods than those
produced in the country to which the ship belonged; and this was a
direct challenge to the Dutch because they had a great carrying
trade, and their ships brought to England the goods produced in many
other countries besides their own. Moreover, the English claimed
that the ships of all other nations meeting English ships in the
Channel, should salute them by lowering their flags. The English
admiral, Blake, meeting the Dutch fleet under Van Tromp in the
Channel, demanded that he should lower the Dutch flag accordingly,
and Van Tromp's reply was a broadside from his guns.
As always, the English seamen fought with astonishing {91} skill and
courage. Probably in the whole course of this Greatest Story only
one other nation, and that the Dutch, has rivalled them in their
genius for the battle at sea. After several actions the issue was
still open. Van Tromp swept the Channel for a while, after an
English defeat, splicing a broom, by way of derision, to his
masthead. But the English fleet was strengthened; Blake came forth
again from the Thames and harried Van Tromp successfully. While
Cromwell was Protector neither side had the decisive mastery. The
day of England's humiliation was to come later, when a Dutch fleet
sailed up the Thames and burned English ships at Chatham; but that
was not until again a weak Stuart was on the throne.
What Cromwell and his Puritans did was amazing. He had Ireland in
rebellion on his hands. He put down that rising with an iron
severity. Rulers of England before him had established those
colonies of Scottish and other immigrants which are the source of the
present division of Ireland into the Free State in the south and the
Northern Ireland which is still directly under the English
Government. Cromwell's plan to break up the centres of rebellion was
to shift sections of the Irish people themselves out of their homes
and plant them down in other parts of the same country. It was a
policy that left a hatred of English rule which still lives in the
hearts of the descendants of the people so mistreated. But for the
moment it brought a forced peace.
Also on his hands was a Scottish rising, of the Church party which
was opposed equally to English Puritans and to Scottish Covenanters.
That too he dealt with masterfully and severely. He was a virtual
dictator.
The Parliament ventured to oppose him: he dissolved the Parliament.
With indifference to the form of all government recognised in
England, he chose eleven of his generals to act as his ministers.
The {92} Army, with Cromwell as its head, was for the time the
governing body. He was greatly hated, and still more greatly feared.
Plots were formed against his life; but none were successful. He
died peacefully in 1658 and his portentous figure goes out of the
story.
Like nearly every dictator, he left no under-study able to play his
part. His son Richard, with little of his father's hardness, was
put, reluctantly, into his place. He retired at the first
opportunity. Within little more than a year of the great Protector's
death the Army weakened, and the Parliament, which he had overridden
by that Army's aid, regained its power. The Stuart who was king by
hereditary right was recalled. The tremendous episode of the
Commonwealth was, to outward seeming, almost as if it had not
happened.
Meanwhile, that is, in 1659, France and Spain had for the moment made
terms of peace, of which one article was that Louis XIV. should marry
a Bavarian princess, and another that France should take over from
Spain certain frontier fortresses and also a part of the Spanish
Netherlands.
That peace was maintained for some seven years, during which Spain
was much occupied by recurring wars with Portugal, Portugal having
thrown off the Spanish sovereignty in 1640.
But a new king came to the throne of Spain, and Louis put forward
further claims in the Netherlands. Louis, at the moment, was in
alliance with Holland against England in the war which had been
provoked by the Navigation Act.
A peace was now formally made by the English Government with Holland,
which was quickly followed by an alliance between the two countries
so lately at war. Yet, while this alliance was thus sealed by the
Government, Charles, King of England, on his own account, and in
return for sums of money advanced {93} to him by Louis, made a secret
treaty of alliance with the French. Four years later, England and
France, as allies, declared war upon Holland. A separate peace was
made between England and Holland two years later again; but between
France and Holland the war continued for another four years. A
temporary peace was then agreed to, but yet again Louis, by further
claims, provoked the war anew; and it was while this war was in
progress that William of Holland became King of England, in
succession to James II., last of the Stuarts.
This conjunction naturally brought England and Holland into a really
active alliance, and so threw England into war with France. It was a
war which at first went badly for the allies, both on sea and land,
and England was menaced with invasion by the French--a menace
dispelled by the great English naval victory of La Hogue in 1692.
[Sidenote: The Peace of Ryswick]
On land also the Dutch gained some successes, and in 1697 a general
peace, to which Spain was one of the signatories, was made at
Ryswick. By a former treaty, some ten years earlier, Spain had given
up, as we have seen, part of her Netherlands possessions. That
treaty had been broken, as usual, by the aggressive policy of the
Grand Monarque, Louis XIV. But by the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697,
Spain recovered a portion of the Netherlands territory that had been
taken from her during the latter course of the war. Nevertheless,
only a year later--as we are able to state now, though probably
nothing was known of it at the time--a secret pact was made between
England, France, and Holland for dividing up the Spanish dominions.
The whole story is one of false dealing between nations and of
alliances so quickly shifting as to be bewildering, and so guileful
as to be offensive to all faith in human nature. But the very idea
that there {94} could be good faith between nations, or any other
guide for their conduct than the selfish interest of each, never
seems to have entered into the minds of the statesmen of that day.
They may have been men of honour in their personal dealings, but in
their international dealings such terms as honour and honesty were
empty words, conveying no meaning.
All through this portion of our story Christian Europe was constantly
in peril from the Turk on the borders, and often far over the
borders, of Austria and Hungary. Never was that menace greater than
in 1683 when he was besieging Vienna with a great force. He was
defeated by Poles and Germans. Yet at this supreme crisis Louis, the
Catholic King of France, was secretly favouring the Moslems!
The story of our own country at this time is especially humiliating.
Cromwell, in the early years of the half-century which we have been
considering, had set England high in the estimation of the world.
But Cromwell had died, and with him had gone down much for which he
had so strongly stood. Again two Stuarts succeeded one another on
England's throne, and the English king, like a very Petit Monarque,
became a pensionary, a paid creature, of the Grand Monarque of
France. Charles II. of England, and James II. after him, with no
sense of responsibility, acted both as knaves and fools, though both
had good wits enough, had they used them rightly; and they brought
England into the very valley of humiliation. Out of that humiliation
she was rescued by the accession to the English throne--jointly with
his English wife, daughter of James I.--of William of Orange, ruler
of Holland. Englishmen of a later day have perhaps been less
grateful than they should be for what some will call the happy
accident, and others the Providential dispensation, that, at this
critical moment, she found a king who had a sense of duty to {95} his
subjects, and a king who brought so valuable an alliance as that of
his Dutch fellow-countrymen.
Had some such foreign source of strength not come to our country's
aid, had the succession continued in the Stuart line with other kings
like those Stuarts who had occupied the throne, it is not possible to
say what her fortunes might have been, but it is scarcely possible to
doubt that she must have fallen, for a while at least, under the
sovereignty of France. As it was, she had fallen under a most
despotic rule by her own kings. Partly under the pretence that he
was about to make war against France, and partly by expending money
that he had secretly received from the French king, Charles II. had
raised a large army. He had employed it to stamp out all opposition
at home. The Grand Monarque was a strict Roman Catholic, and he used
all his power over his royal pensioners in England to induce them to
bring England back into the fold of Rome. But if anything were
needed to make the great majority of the English and Scottish people
yet more determined than before that the State religion should not be
that of Rome, a powerful influence towards the stiffening of that
determination was supplied by a measure passed by Louis in 1685 and
known in history as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
[Sidenote: Edict of Nantes revoked]
That Edict of Nantes had permitted to the Huguenots, the French
Protestants, freedom to practise their religion and to live under no
disadvantages, as compared with their fellow-countrymen of the Roman
Church. The Revocation of the Edict not only withdrew those
permissions, but was accompanied and followed by a deadly persecution
under which many of the Huguenots lost their lives and the survivors
fled to Protestant countries, especially to England and to Holland.
It was a persecution and an expulsion very similar, {96} in its
motives and in its effects, to the flight from Spain of the converted
Jews and Mahommedans, and of the Pilgrim Fathers and other Puritans
from England. It is curious that in each instance it was a flight of
a singularly industrious, intelligent, and valuable portion of the
population of each nation, and resulted in a serious loss to those
nations from which the exodus was made. And as they were a loss to
those countries which they left, so were they a gain to those which
received them. The Huguenots in England retain to this day those
characteristics of valuable citizens. Years before, England had been
similarly fortunate in receiving the Flemish weavers who had fled
from Flanders before the Inquisition and the Spanish armies commanded
by the Duke of Alva.
France could very ill afford such a loss. Louis XIV., who came to
the throne at the age of four years old in 1643 and lived until 1715,
reigning thus no less than seventy-two years, became towards the end
of the seventeenth century without dispute the greatest monarch in
Europe and in all the western world. It is safest to limit his
greatness by that word "western," because in another part of the
world-stage there was at least one other monarch, the Emperor of
China, who could not conceive the possibility that there was a human
being so eminent as himself; and also in India there was a very
powerful sovereign of the Moguls who yielded an authority and lived
in a splendour perhaps as great as either of these.
Louis's court at least was splendid beyond all that had been seen in
the West, his courtiers more magnificent in their costumes and
brilliancy, more sumptuous in their expenditure. Over the people on
their estates, the nobles had unbounded power. Had the people been
in very name slaves they could not have been more enslaved in
reality. But even the most powerful of the nobles was absolutely
subservient {97} to the king. He had an army, which was immense for
those days, at his command.
Consider, for a moment, what that power meant, in the hands of one
who had been a king since four years old. It meant that his will had
always been law to those about him. He had heard only pleasant
words, because no one had dared tell him an unpleasant truth. What
chance, then, had he, coming to manhood in such circumstances, of
knowing anything of the real truth about the world and about his
subjects?
[Sidenote: The French peasantry]
The real truth about his subjects was, though Louis did not know it,
that their state was as utterly miserable as that of human beings
well could be. They were ground down not only by their local lords
and nobles, but also by the heavy taxes that they had to contribute
in order that the king should be able to keep up this magnificence in
his court, to pay so large an army and to wage costly wars. It was
no part of the French constitution, as of the English, that the money
supplied for the purposes of government should be voted by the
Parliament. It is true that English kings often tried, sometimes
successfully, to extract such money without a vote of Parliament; but
at least the law was there, for the people to appeal to, as a great
fact in the English constitution. Its existence made a very great
difference.
Thus, while all went so gloriously with France upon the surface and
in the upper ranks, below, in those foundations on which, after all,
this splendid edifice was based, there was misery and increasing
poverty--poverty which could have only one end, that there would be
no money to pay for the wars and for the magnificence, and misery so
intolerable that men would rise and revolt against their conditions
of life, no matter how many should perish in the revolution. We,
now, knowing what actually did come to pass, can see how the forces
were slowly accumulating which would {98} bring it all about. But
from the eyes of men of that time, living in the midst of it, the end
was hidden; and most of all, as we may suppose, hidden from that
resplendent monarch himself.
We may observe as curious that in the varying struggle that we have
seen going on between France, Spain, England, and Holland during this
half-century, we hear so little of Germany taking a hand. Certain of
the German States did, as a matter of fact, play some small part,
directly, in that struggle, either as Protestants in alliance with
the Protestant Dutch, or later in their own defence against the
claims of the French king; but the reason why Germany, as a whole,
took no continuous or large share, by direct action at the centre,
was in the first place that her power was much broken up--she was
split into a number of separate States, with no strong central
authority to combine their action; secondly, that indirectly she
really was playing a part that was important--serving as a guard to
keep back the Turk on the south-eastern corner of Europe.
Always we have to remember, in considering the action of our story at
this period, that there was this menace from the Turk pressing in on
the side of Austria and Hungary. The power of Russia was rising, but
she was continuously engaged in wars farther north--with Sweden and
with Poland. The fortunes of these wars went variously, and to no
decisive result. At one time we do indeed see Poland and Russia in
alliance against the Turk; but no decision was reached in that war
either. Peter the Great, well named for the greatness to which he
brought his country, came to the Russian throne in 1682. But great
Russia was as yet only in process of establishing herself and was
beset by enemies. She was soon to be a very prominent actor in the
world's story, but her time had not then come.
{99}
Turkey was fighting on all her land borders, and carrying on an
indecisive naval war with the Venetians the while. The Venetians
gained part of Greece from the Turks; the Austrians took Belgrade
from them; several of the Balkan States maintained their
independence. Evidently the fighting force of the Turks was not as
powerful as it had been. By the end of the century they were more
concerned with keeping the large empire that they had won than in
adding to it by further conquests; and they made peace, for the time
being, with Russia, Poland, Austria, and Venice.
As yet there was no Italian nation to play a part in the contest
which had now ended in the transference to France of the
overmastering power in the world which had been Spain's.
[Sidenote: The Spanish Succession]
We have noticed how a secret pact had been made between England,
France, and Holland for partitioning the domains of Spain. But the
King of Spain, dying in 1700, gave, by will, the whole of his
possessions to Philip of Aragon, grandson of Louis XIV. The
inheritor was an infant. The Grand Monarque did not hesitate, in
spite of the secret pact, to accept the inheritance on his grandson's
behalf. It was an arrangement which would have given his family more
power than even the house of Habsburg had possessed. It menaced the
liberty of England, of Holland, and of all Europe. The War of the
Spanish Succession, which occupied the first years of the eighteenth
century, was waged to oppose it. England's portion in that war in
the Netherlands is commonly known to Englishmen as the Wars of
Marlborough, from the great leader, the Duke of Marlborough, who
commanded in them.
England and Holland, then, had been drawn into natural alliance,
after years of fighting, by the establishment on the throne of
England of William of Orange who married Mary, the heiress to the
Crown; but James II., the rightful king, still lived. He was king
{100} by right of inheritance, but had used his kingship so
wrongfully, in such direct opposition to the wishes of his people,
that he had been driven from the throne and from the country. He
fled to France where he could be sure of a friendly welcome from a
Catholic king. The favour that he had shown, contrary to the law of
England, to English Catholics had been a great part of his wrongdoing
in the eyes of his people. Moreover, Louis was well disposed to aid
any enemy of the ruler of Holland.
So there came assistance of French troops for James, a landing in
Catholic Ireland, and a march, leading to the famous Battle of the
Boyne, wherein, in 1690, James and his Catholics suffered a defeat,
at the hands of William and his Protestants, which meant the end in
England of the Stuarts, the Jacobite kings. That battle further
meant the firm establishment as King of England, Scotland, and
Ireland of this ruler of Holland who was married to Mary, the
daughter of the last Jacobite king. It was his own father-in-law
that William succeeded on the throne, and the father-in-law still
lived.
He lived, and not only was made welcome at the Court of France, but
also had many faithful to his cause in England. But William ruled
wisely, and his hold on power grew steadily. The Dutch guards that
he had brought with him from Holland gave offence to his English
subjects. He had the sound sense to remove the offence and send the
guards back to Holland. The very idea that the king should have what
we call "a standing army" was still new and strange to Englishmen.
They had been accustomed to armies raised for special wars, but not
until rather lately to soldiers maintained under arms in time of
peace. The idea of a foreign regiment in their midst was naturally
not agreeable.
It was in the last year of the century that William {101} sent back
his Dutch guards, and surely gained, rather than lost, in security on
the throne by doing so. He died three years later. His wife had
died before him, and he was succeeded by yet another daughter of
James II., "the good Queen Anne," wisest of the Stuart monarchs.
[Sidenote: Settlement of America]
All through the troubles of that last half-century Englishmen in
increasing numbers sought refuge from them in America where land,
fertile land, appeared to be unlimited for all who chose to take it
and could keep it against the attacks of the Red Indians whom they
drove out. Spain was predominant in Mexico and in South America, and
in North America she claimed and insecurely held a land of indefinite
boundaries which she called Florida. But it was a land of woods and
prairies of unknown extent whither the Spanish conquerors did not go.
The very name Florida has a Spanish sound; and in the same way
Louisiana, with its capital city of New Orleans, tells the story of
French settlement. It was farther north, however, along the shores
of that great St. Lawrence estuary running up into Canada, that
English and French fell, as we have seen already, to fighting for the
new lands. From Virginia southwards, the settlement that Sir Walter
Raleigh had so named in honour of his queen, nearly up to the St.
Lawrence, were vast lands along the eastern sea-board which the
English explored without meeting enemies other than the Indians.
From time to time there were hideous massacres of the white men; but
the Indians were too poorly armed and generally too disunited to make
serious opposition to the settlers. There was a settlement of the
Dutch, at an early date, a little southward of the present New York;
and farther south again a settlement of the Swedes; but both became
incorporated in the larger numbers of the English.
Just as the name Florida speaks of Spain, and {102} Louisiana of the
Grand Monarque of France, so we find other States on the eastern
sea-board with names that have a story to tell us of our own
monarchs. For there are, besides Elizabeth's Virginia. Mary's
Maryland, and the Carolinas of the Charleses; later, Georgia, of the
Georges. The titles, however, do not indicate the dates of the
settlement of the various States which bear them.
It is well to have the atlas open at the map of North America when we
discuss these colonies. We shall see thereon a name Pennsylvania,
which tells us of the pilgrims led out by the Quaker, Penn.
Maryland, we should note, which is called after the Catholic queen,
was resorted to largely by the Catholics. New England was the centre
of Puritan migration. There was a religious reason, in the first
instance, for many of the settlements in America. We have seen
before how glad men were to be quit of those of an alien religion
from their midst; and also how glad those aliens were to go.
Montreal, on its first settlement, in 1542, was a Catholic
establishment. The Jesuits were pressing out to the farthest West in
this quarter of the globe, converting the Red Indians, as they also
pressed eastward about the same time to India, China, and to Japan.
But Montreal had to become a military and an industrial settlement
too. All the early settlers, whatever interpretation they put on the
Bible, had to carry the sword, as well as the Cross, with them. They
had, in truth, scant semblance of right in their complaint that the
Indians were always ready to turn and massacre them. Were they not
expelling the Indians, who had done them no manner of harm, out of
their own homes?
The French, in these early days, explored and claimed possession of
an immense territory in North America. We may trace it all along
both sides of the gulf and the river of St. Lawrence, and westward to
{103} the Great Lakes. Southward we may trace it along wide lands
watered by the Ohio, and down the Mississippi until we come out at
New Orleans. Mobile, at the river's mouth, was even earlier settled
by the French.
All this, from the Great Lakes southward, lay westward and inland of
the English settlement along the coast. But the limits of the
territories claimed were not very clearly drawn; at first it was only
by a fort here and there, and not by any continuous settlement, that
possession of the vast lands was claimed and partially made good by
the white men. The upper Mississippi was explored before the end of
the century, and some settlement had been made of the Canadian
north-west.
[Sidenote: Settlements in the East]
Progress, as ever, was more slow in the East. It was in 1652 that
the Dutch colonised the Cape of Good Hope. Amongst those Dutch
colonists, and of the same reformed religion, were a number of the
Huguenots from France. In 1661 the English colonised the Gold Coast,
on the west of Africa, where the Portuguese had previously been in
possession, and in the same year Portugal ceded to the English Crown
what soon proved to be of the greatest importance to England in the
East, the province of Bombay in India.
So saying, we have to understand that the hold of any of the western
nations on India was almost confined to the coasts and to the ports.
It did not go far into the country.
Bombay, in this sense of its coastal trading towns, was transferred
by the Crown to the East India Company a year or two later, and some
twenty-five years later again a disaster happened which made its
possession of the first value to England, for in the attempt to
increase their holding in Bengal the English were so heavily defeated
that they were driven out of that province altogether. Bengal and
Madras had {104} been separated for purposes of the administration of
their Governments some years before. But now the headquarters of the
Company were established in Bombay, after the temporary loss of
Bengal. It was in the first year of the new century that Calcutta
was founded.
Thus went the story along the Indian coasts; but in India itself the
Mahommedan power of the Moguls, which we have spoken of before, was
now rising to its zenith. This was in the reign of the great
Aurungzeb. And at the same time, in spite of this supremacy of the
Moguls, arose into prominence two principal races of the Hindus, the
Mahrattas and the Sikhs. The power of all three was to be greatly
diminished in the years to come, but their rise is of particular
interest because it is the division between Mahommedans and Hindus
which is the main cause of unrest in India to-day, and also the
reason why the native Indians are incapable of uniting so as to throw
off a foreign yoke altogether. If that yoke were removed the
fighting between these opposed elements would certainly be fatal to
the well-being of the country. It is just about the date at which we
have now arrived in this Greatest Story that we see the two elements
most clearly in opposition.
Another event of much importance for England's future empire in India
happened about the same date on India's north-west border: that state
of Afghanistan, at length, after prolonged and doubtful fighting
against Persia, finally gained its independence. Its importance is
that it thus became what we call a "buffer state," preventing the
direct collision of Russia with the Indian Empire. That threatened
collision, and the value of the "buffer state," was not in evidence
in the story at this time; but it was at this time that the
foundation of its future value to England was laid.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
{105}
[Illustration: THE POTALA AT LHASA, FROM THE W.S.W. From Fergusson's
_History of Indian and Eastern Architecture_. _From a photograph by
Lieut. F. M. Bailey_.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Court of the Great Mogul in India is one of {106} those two which
were mentioned a few pages back as rivalling in its splendour that of
the Grand Monarque himself. The other is that of China, where a new
dynasty, the Manchus, came by conquest to the throne. As usual, it
was by way of invasion of a people from the north, more warlike and
less civilised than the Chinese. As usual, the warlike conquerors
lost their own characteristics among the multitudes of the more
civilised nation. But they kept the throne till close on the end of
the eighteenth century, and by enforcing some sort of authority, from
Pekin as a centre, they brought the empire to greater prosperity than
it had known during the very many previous years in which it had been
distracted by feuds between the local chieftains. Tibet, the land of
the "Forbidden City" of Lhasa, with its wonderful Potala, the palace
of the holy Lama, was conquered and absorbed for a while into the
huge empire.
But the fortunes of China and the glories of the Emperor's court had
very little influence in the making of the great world story. It was
a land, a vast land, apart. And it did not move. How stationary it
was is indicated by the curious fact that although China is credited
with the invention and use of gunpowder before any of the western
nations, the only artillery that they had for their defence against
the Manchu invaders was cast for them by the Jesuits, Jesuit
missionaries from the West. With a beautiful impartiality, the
Jesuits are said to have cast cannon for the Manchus also. It is
truly a remarkable circumstance that these emissaries, devoted, at
the imminent risk of their lives, to carrying the Christian faith all
over the world, should be thus engaged in making munitions of war.
But the members of this singular religious order were always
practical, always active as politicians in all the countries into
which they went. And there were none which they did not penetrate.
{107}
[Sidenote: Populations of East and West]
At first the Jesuits were made welcome in China, but a reaction
against all western people seems to have taken place when the Manchu
emperor was firmly established on his throne. Japan also set her
face against the new trade that was carried out in Dutch and
Portuguese vessels. Moreover, in 1662 the Dutch suffered a heavy
reverse in being driven out of the island of Formosa, after long and
hard fighting. The beginning of the eighteenth century really saw
the doors of the far East more firmly closed to the West than they
had been fifty years before. The far East therefore was, for the
time being, even less in the world story than it had been. But it
had its own story, which sufficed for itself, and it was a story in
which very many actors played a part. The western lands were still
what we should reckon very thinly populated. Our England, for
instance, nearly certainly did not have a population of more than
five millions and a half at the end of the seventeenth century. But
already there must have been a relatively dense population in China.
In Pekin, in an appalling earthquake that happened in 1661, it is
said that 400,000 people lost their lives. Now the total population
of London in 1685 is put at only a little more than half a million,
and London was already far and away the largest town in our country,
seventeen times larger than Bristol, which then was second to it in
numbers. North of the Trent, the country was still scarcely
civilised or settled at all. But after nightfall the unlighted
streets of the cities were probably more dangerous than any part of
the country. Near London even, at a much later date, it was the law
that all the covert near the high roads should be cut away so as to
leave less shelter for the lurking highwaymen; but still the
picturesque Dick Turpins abounded. And high roads, roads along which
a coach might go, ever so slowly, sometimes drawn by oxen, were few,
and these few were bad. Great men {108} travelled with six horses to
their coach and a large following, not for honour and glory but
because it was likely that the pulling power of six horses and even
more might be required to draw the coach through the marshy places of
the road--and in the undrained and unenclosed country the marshy
places were many. Nor were the numerous retainers for vain show:
they were for necessary protection, and at any moment might have to
use their arms.
When the fields began to be enclosed and drained, they would grow
more corn or pasture and so help to support a larger population; but
the enclosing meant that much of the waste, where the poor people had
picked firewood and perhaps caught or killed some game, were taken
from them. And as it was in England, so too was it in other European
countries as they advanced in civilisation.
In the main, then, the story of the latter half of the seventeenth
century is the story of the shifting of the great power in the world
from Spain to France. The story of the early years of the eighteenth
century is in the main the story of the opposition of the other
nations to the carrying out of the provisions of the will of the King
of Spain by which he bequeathed all that was Spain's to the grandson
of the French king. Had those provisions been faithfully executed
they would have thrown so great power and wealth into the hands of
the ruler of France that no other nation could have lived at ease
under so vast a menace. Already France had submitted to some check
in agreeing to the provisions of the Peace of Ryswick. But she was
arrogant and aggressive still.
{109}