Part 26 (1/2)
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dream turned to personal monarchy. The history of nearly all Europe during this period tells with variations the story of an attempt to consolidate a monarchy, to make it absolute and to extend its power over weaker adjacent regions, and of the steady resistance, first of the landowners and then with the increase of foreign trade and home industry, of the growing trading and moneyed cla.s.s, to the exaction and interference of the crown. There is no universal victory of either side; here it is the King who gets the upper hand while there it is the {324} man of private property who beats the King. In one case we find a King becoming the sun and centre of his national world, while just over his borders a st.u.r.dy mercantile cla.s.s maintains a republic. So wide a range of variation shows how entirely experimental, what local accidents, were all the various governments of this period.
A very common figure in these national dramas is the King's minister, often in the still Catholic countries a prelate, who stands behind the King, serves him and dominates him by his indispensable services.
Here in the limits set to us it is impossible to tell these various national dramas in detail. The trading folk of Holland went Protestant and republican, and cast off the rule of Philip II of Spain, the son of the Emperor Charles V. In England Henry VIII and his minister Wolsey, Queen Elizabeth and her minister Burleigh, prepared the foundations of an absolutism that was wrecked by the folly of James I and Charles I. Charles I was beheaded for treason to his people (1649), a new turn in the political thought of Europe. For a dozen years (until 1660) Britain was a republic; and the crown was an unstable power, much overshadowed by Parliament, until George III (1760-1820) made a strenuous and partly successful effort to restore its predominance. The King of France, on the other hand, was the most successful of all the European Kings in perfecting monarchy. Two great ministers, Richelieu (1585-1642) and Mazarin (1602-1661), built up the power of the crown in that country, and the process was aided by the long reign and very considerable abilities of King Louis XIV, ”the Grand Monarque” (1643-1715).
Louis XIV was indeed the pattern King of Europe. He was, within his limitations, an exceptionally capable King; his ambition was stronger than his baser pa.s.sions, and he guided his country towards bankruptcy through the complication of a spirited foreign policy with an elaborate dignity that still extorts our admiration. His immediate desire was to consolidate and extend France to the Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb the Spanish Netherlands; his remoter view saw the French Kings as the possible successors of Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He made bribery a state method almost more important than warfare.
Charles II of {325} England was in his pay, and so were most of the Polish n.o.bility, presently to be described. His money, or rather the money of the tax-paying cla.s.ses in France, went everywhere. But his prevailing occupation was splendour. His great palace at Versailles with its salons, its corridors, its mirrors, its terraces and fountains and parks and prospects, was the envy and admiration of the world.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SACK OF A VILLAGE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION]
He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and princelet in Europe was building his own Versailles as much beyond his means as his subjects and credits would permit. Everywhere the n.o.bility rebuilt or extended their chateaux to the new pattern. A great industry of beautiful and elaborate fabrics and furnis.h.i.+ngs developed. The luxurious arts flourished everywhere; sculpture in alabaster, faience, gilt woodwork, metal work, stamped leather, much music, magnificent painting, beautiful printing and bindings, fine crockery, fine vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine furniture went a strange race of ”gentlemen” in tall powdered wigs, silks and laces, poised upon high red heels, supported by amazing canes; and still more wonderful ”ladies,” under towers of powdered hair and wearing vast expansions of silk and satin sustained on wire. Through it all postured the great Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of the meagre and sulky and bitter faces that watched him from those lower darknesses to which his suns.h.i.+ne did not penetrate.
[Map: Central Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648]
The German people remained politically divided throughout this period of the monarchies and experimental governments, and a considerable {326} number of ducal and princely courts aped the splendours of Versailles on varying scales. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48), a devastating scramble among the Germans, Swedes and Bohemians for fluctuating political advantages, sapped the energies of Germany for a century. A map must show the crazy patchwork in which this struggle ended, a map of Europe according to the peace of Westphalia (1648). One sees a tangle of princ.i.p.alities, dukedoms, free states and the like, some partly in and partly out of the Empire. Sweden's arm, the reader will note, reached far into Germany; and except for a few islands of territory within the imperial boundaries France was still far from the Rhine. Amidst this patchwork the {327} Kingdom of Prussia--it became a Kingdom in 1701--rose steadily to prominence and sustained a series of successful wars. Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740-86) had his Versailles at Potsdam, where his court spoke French, read French literature and rivalled the culture of the French King.
In 1714 the Elector of Hanover became King of England, adding one more to the list of monarchies half in and half out of the empire.
The Austrian branch of the descendants of Charles V retained the t.i.tle of Emperor; the Spanish branch retained Spain. But now there was also an Emperor of the East again. After the fall of Constantinople (1453), the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great (1462-1505), claimed to be heir to the Byzantine throne and adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle upon his arms. His grandson, Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), a.s.sumed the imperial t.i.tle of Caesar (Tsar). But only in the latter half of the seventeenth century did Russia cease to seem remote and Asiatic to the European mind. The Tsar Peter the Great (1682-1725) brought Russia into the arena of Western affairs. He built a new capital for his empire, Petersburg upon the Neva, that played the part of a window between Russia and Europe, and he set up his Versailles at Peterhof eighteen miles away, employing a French architect who gave him a terrace, fountains, cascades, picture gallery, park and all the recognized appointments of Grand Monarchy. In Russia as in Prussia French became the language of the court.
Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia and Russia was the Polish kingdom, an ill-organized state of great landed proprietors too jealous of their own individual grandeur to permit more than a nominal kings.h.i.+p to the monarch they elected. Her fate was division among these three neighbours, in spite of the efforts of France to retain her as an independent ally. Switzerland at this time was a group of republican cantons; Venice was a republic; Italy like so much of Germany was divided among minor dukes and princes. The Pope ruled like a prince in the papal states, too fearful now of losing the allegiance of the remaining Catholic princes to interfere between them and their subjects or to remind the world of the commonweal of Christendom. There remained indeed no common {328} political idea in Europe at all; Europe was given over altogether to division and diversity.
All these sovereign princes and republics carried on schemes of aggrandizement against each other. Each one of them pursued a ”foreign policy” of aggression against its neighbours and of aggressive alliances. We Europeans still live to-day in the last phase of this age of the multifarious sovereign states, and still suffer from the hatreds, hostilities and suspicions it engendered.
The history of this time becomes more and more manifestly ”gossip,” more and more unmeaning and wearisome to a modern intelligence. You are told of how this war was caused by this King's mistress, and how the jealousy of one minister for another caused that. A t.i.ttle-tattle of bribes and rivalries disgusts the intelligent student. The more permanently significant fact is that in spite of the obstruction of a score of frontiers, reading and thought still spread and increased and inventions multiplied.
The eighteenth century saw the appearance of a literature profoundly sceptical and critical of the courts and policies of the time. In such a book as Voltaire's _Candide_ we have the expression of an infinite weariness with the planless confusion of the European world.
{329}
LIII
THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE EUROPEANS IN ASIA AND OVERSEAS
While Central Europe thus remained divided and confused, the Western Europeans and particularly the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the British were extending the area of their struggles across the seas of all the world. The printing press had dissolved the political ideas of Europe into a vast and at first indeterminate fermentation, but that other great innovation, the ocean-going sailing s.h.i.+p, was inexorably extending the range of European experience to the furthermost limits of salt water.
The first overseas settlements of the Dutch and Northern Atlantic Europeans were not for colonization but for trade and mining. The Spaniards were first in the field; they claimed dominion over the whole of this new world of America. Very soon however the Portuguese asked for a share. The Pope--it was one of the last acts of Rome as mistress of the world--divided the new continent between these two first-comers, giving Portugal Brazil and everything else east of a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, and all the rest to Spain (1494). The Portuguese at this time were also pus.h.i.+ng overseas enterprise southward and eastward.
In 1497 Vasco da Gama had sailed from Lisbon round the Cape to Zanzibar and then to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were Portuguese s.h.i.+ps in Java and the Moluccas, and the Portuguese were setting up and fortifying trading stations round and about the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Mozambique, Goa, and two smaller possessions in India, Macao in China and a part of Timor are to this day Portuguese possessions.
The nations excluded from America by the papal settlement paid little heed to the rights of Spain and Portugal. The English, the Danes and Swedes, and presently the Dutch, were soon staking {330} out claims in North America and the West Indies, and his Most Catholic Majesty of France heeded the papal settlement as little as any Protestant. The wars of Europe extended themselves to these claims and possessions.
[Map: Britain, France & Spain in America, 1750]
In the long run the English were the most successful in this scramble for overseas possessions. The Danes and Swedes were too {331} deeply entangled in the complicated affairs of Germany to sustain effective expeditions abroad. Sweden was wasted upon the German battlefields by a picturesque king, Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant ”Lion of the North.” The Dutch were the heirs of such small settlements as Sweden made in America, and the Dutch were too near French aggressions to hold their own against the British.
In the far East the chief rivals for empire were the British, Dutch and French, and in America the British, French and Spanish.
The British had the supreme advantage of a water frontier, the ”silver streak” of the English Channel, against Europe. The tradition of the Latin Empire entangled them least.
[Ill.u.s.tration: EUROPEANS TIGER HUNTING IN INDIA]