54

STATE OF FRANCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

prelates and hireling scribblers may have taught, and whatever a people worked up to enthusiasm by fanatical preachers may have acted. Proofs of this would be easy to draw, not only from the conduct of such princes as Ferdinand I. and Maximilian II., who could scarce be esteemed papists though they continued in the pope's communion; but even from that of princes who persecuted their Protestant subjects with great violence. Enough has been said, I think, to show your lordship how little need there is of going up higher than the beginning of the sixteenth century in the study of history, to acquire all the knowledge necessary at this time in ecclesiastical policy, or in civil policy as far as it is relative to this. Historical monuments of this sort are in every man's hand, the facts are sufficiently verified, and the entire scenes lie open to our observation: even that scene of solemn banter exhibited in the council of Trent, imposes on no man who reads Paolo, as well as Pallavicini, and the letters of Vargas.

A view of the civil government of Europe in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

I. IN FRANCE.-A very little higher need we go to observe those great changes in the civil constitutions of the principal nations of Europe in the partition of power among them, and by consequence in the whole system of European policy, which have operated so strongly for more than two centuries, and which operate still. I will not affront the memory of our Henry VII. so much as to compare him to Lewis XI. ; and yet I perceive some resemblance between them, which would perhaps appear greater if Philip of Commines had wrote the history of Henry as well as that of Lewis; or if my Lord Bacon had wrote that of Lewis as well as that of Henry. This prince came to the crown of England a little before the close of the fifteenth century, and Lewis began his reign in France about twenty years sooner. These reigns made remarkable periods in the histories of both nations. To reduce the power, privileges, and possessions of the nobility, and to increase the wealth and authority of the crown, was the principal object of both. In this their success was so great, that the constitutions of the two governments have had since that time more resemblance in name and in form than in reality, to the constitutions that prevailed before. Lewis XI. was the first, say the French, qui mit les rois hors de page. The independency of the nobility had rendered the state of his predecessors very dependent, and their power precarious. They were the sovereigns of great vassals; but these vassals were so powerful, that one of them was sometimes able, and two or three of them always, to give law to the sovereign. Before Lewis came to the crown, the English had been driven out of their possessions in France, by the poor cha

racter of Henry VI., the domestic troubles of his reign, and the defection of the house of Burgundy from his alliance, much more than by the ability of Charles VII., who seems to have been neither a greater hero nor a greater politician than Henry VI.; and even than by the vigour and union of the French nobility in his service. After Lewis came to the crown, Edward IV. made a show of carrying the war again into France; but he soon returned home, and your lordship will not be at a loss to find much better reasons for his doing so, in the situation of his affairs and the characters of his allies, than those which Philip of Commines draws from the artifice of Lewis, from his good cheer and his pensions. Now from this time our pretensions on France were in effect given up, and Charles the Bold, the last prince of the house of Burgundy, being killed, Lewis had no vassal able to molest him. He reunited the duchy of Burgundy and Artois to his crown, he acquired Provence by gift, and his son Brittany by marriage: and thus France grew in the course of a few years into that great and compact body which we behold at this time. The history of France, before this period is, like that of Germany, a complicated history of several states and several interests; sometimes concurring like members of the same monarchy, and sometimes warring on one another. Since this period, the history of France is the history of one state under a more uniform and orderly government; the history of a monarchy wherein the prince is possessor of some, as well as lord of all the great fieffes; and, the authority of many tyrants centring in one, though the people are not become more free, yet the whole system of domestic policy is entirely changed. Peace at home is better secured, and the nation grown fitter to carry war abroad. The governors of great provinces and of strong fortresses have opposed their king, and taken arms against his authority and commission since that time; but yet there is no more resemblance between the authority and pretensions of these governors, or the nature and occasions of these disputes, and the authority and pretensions of the vassals of the crown in former days, or the nature and occasions of their disputes with the prince and with one another, than there is between the ancient and the present peers of France. In a word, the constitution is so altered, that any knowledge we can acquire about it, in the history that precedes this period, will serve to little purpose in our study of the history that follows it, and to less purpose still in assisting us to judge of what passes in the present age. The kings of France since that time, more masters at home, have been able to exert themselves more abroad : and they began to do so immediately; for Charles VIII., son and successor of Lewis XI., formed great designs of foreign conquest, though they were disappointed by his inability, by the levity of the nation, and by other causes. Lewis XII. and Francis I., but especially Francis, meddled deeply in the affairs of Europe, and though the superior genius

56 ENGLAND UNDER NORMAN, PLANTAGENET, AND TUDOR RULE.

of Ferdinand, called the Catholic, and the star of Charles V. prevailed against them, yet the efforts they made show sufficiently how the strength and importance of this monarchy were increased in their time. From whence we may date likewise the rivalship of the house of France, for we may reckon that of Valois and that of Bourbon as one upon this occasion, and the house of Austria, that continues at this day, and that has cost so much blood and so much treasure in the course of it.

II. IN ENGLAND.-Though the power and influence of the nobility sunk in the great change that began under Henry VII. in England, as they did in that which began under Lewis XI. in France; yet the new constitutions that these changes produced were very different. In France, the lords alone lost, the king alone gained; the clergy held their possessions and their immunities, and the people remained in a state of mitigated slavery. But in England the people gained as well as the crown. The commons had already a share in the legislature; so that the power and influence of the lords being broken by Henry VII., and the property of the commons increasing by the sale that his son made of church lands, the power of the latter increased, of course, by this change in a constitution, the forms whereof were favourable to them. The union of the roses put an end to the civil wars of York and Lancaster, that had succeeded those we commonly call the Barons' Wars; and the humour of warring in France, that had lasted near four hundred years under the Normans and Plantagenets, for plunder as well as conquest, was spent. Our temple of Janus was shut by Henry VII. We neither laid waste our own or other countries any longer; and wise laws and a wise government changed insensibly the manners, and gave a new turn to the spirit of our people. We were no longer the freebooters we had been. Our nation maintained her reputation in arms whenever the public interest or the public authority required it; but war ceased to be what it had been, our principal and almost our sole profession. The arts of peace prevailed among us. We became husbandmen, manufacturers, and merchants, and we emulated neighbouring nations in literature. It is from this time that we ought to study the history of our country, my lord, with the utmost application. We are not much concerned to know with critical accuracy what were the ancient forms of our parliaments, concerning which, however, there is little room for dispute from the reign of Henry III. at least; nor in short the whole system of our civil constitution before Henry VII., and of our ecclesiastial constitution before Henry VIII. But he who has not studied and acquired a thorough knowledge of them both from these periods down to the present time, in all the variety of events by which they have been affected, will be very unfit to judge or to take care of either. Just as little are we concerned to know, in any nice detail, what the conduct of our princes, relatively to their neighbours on the continent, was before this period,

and at a time when the partition of power and a multitude of other circumstances rendered the whole political system of Europe so vastly different from that which has existed since. But he who has not traced this conduct from the period we fix down to the present age, wants a principal part of the knowledge that every English minister of state should have. Ignorance in the respects here spoken of is the less pardonable, because we have more and more authentic means of information concerning this than concerning any other period. Anecdotes enough to glut the curiosity of some persons, and to silence all the captious cavils of others, will never be furnished by any portion of history; nor indeed can they, according to the nature and course of human affairs; but he who is content to read and observe, like a senator and a statesman, will find in our own and in foreign historians as much information as he wants concerning the affairs of our island, her fortune at home and her conduct abroad, from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. I refer to foreign historians as well as to our own, for this series of our own history, not only because it is reasonable to see in what manner the historians of other countries have related the transactions wherein we have been concerned, and what judgment they have made of our conduct, domestic and foreign, but for another reason likewise. Our nation has furnished as ample and as important matter, good and bad, for history as any nation under the sun; and yet we must yield the palm in writing history most certainly to the Italians and to the French, and I fear even to the Germans. The only two pieces of history we have, in any respect to be compared with the ancient, are, the reign of Henry VII., by my Lord Bacon, and the history of our civil wars in the last century by your noble ancestor, my Lord Chancellor Clarendon. But we have no general history to be compared with some of other countries; neither have we, which I lament much more, particular histories, except the two I have mentioned, nor writers of memorials, nor collectors of monuments and anecdotes, to vie in number or in merit with those that foreign nations can boast, from Commines, Guicciardin, Du Bellay, Paolo, Davila, Thuanus, and a multitude of others, down through the whole period that I propose to your lordship. But although this be true to our shame, yet it is true likewise that we want no necessary means of information. They lie open to our industry and our discernment. Foreign writers are for the most part scarce worth reading when they speak of our domestic affairs; nor are our English writers, for the most part, of greater value when they speak of foreign affairs. In this mutual defect the writers of other countries are, I think, more excusable than ours; for the nature of our government, the political principles in which we are bred, our distinct interest as islanders, and the complicated various interests and humours of our parties, all these are so peculiar to ourselves, and so different from the notions, manners, and

58

SPAIN, THE NETHERLANDS, GERMANY, AND AUSTRIA.

habits of other nations, that it is not wonderful they should be puzzled or should fall into error, when they undertake to give relations of events that result from all these, or to pass any judgment upon them. But as these historians are mutually defective, so they mutually supply each others defects. We must compare them, therefore, make use of our discernment, and draw our conclusions from both. If we proceed in this manner, we have an ample fund of history in our power, from whence to collect sufficient authentic information; and we must proceed in this manner, even with our own historians of different religions, sects, and parties, or run the risk of being misled by domestic ignorance and prejudice in this case, as well as by foreign ignorance and prejudice in the other.

III. IN SPAIN AND THE EMPIRE.-Spain figured little in Europe till the latter part of the fifteenth century; till Castile and Arragon were united by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella; till the total expulsion of the Moors, and till the discovery of the West Indies. After this, not only Spain took a new form and grew into immense power, but the heir of Ferdinand and Isabella, being heir likewise of the houses of Burgundy and Austria, such an extent of dominion accrued to him by all these successions, and such an addition of rank and authority by his election to the empire, as no prince had been master of in Europe from the days of Charles the Great. It is proper to observe here how the policy of the Germans altered in the choice of an emperor, because the effects of this alteration have been great. When Rodolphus of Hapsburg was chosen in the year 1270, or about that time, the poverty and the low estate of this prince, who had been marshal of the court to a king of Bohemia, was an inducement to elect him. The disorderly and lawless state of the empire made the princes of it in those days unwilling to have a more powerful head. But a contrary maxim took place at this era: Charles V. and Francis I., the two most powerful princes of Europe, were the sole candidates; for the elector of Saxony, who is said to have declined, was rather unable to stand in competition with them; and Charles was chosen by the unanimous suffrages of the electoral college, if I mistake not. Another Charles, Charles IV., who was made emperor illegally enough on the deposition of Lewis of Bavaria, and about one hundred and fifty years before, seems to me to have contributed doubly to establish this maxim, by the wise constitutions that he procured to pass, that united the empire in a more orderly form and better system of government; and by alienating the imperial revenues to such a degree, that they were no longer sufficient to support an emperor who had not great revenues of his own. The same maxim and other circumstances have concurred to keep the empire in this family ever since, as it had been often before; and this family having large dominions in the empire, and larger pretensions as well as dominions out of it, the other states