right of God to rule the world as He saw fit. As a natural result, few ventured to doubt the
right of the divine "Vice-Regent" to do the same thing and to demand the obedience of the
masses because he was the direct representative of the Absolute Ruler of the Universe
and responsible only to Almighty God.
When the Lutheran Reformation proved successful, those rights which formerly had been
invested in the Papacy were taken over by the many European sovereigns who became
Protestants. As head of their own national or dynastic churches they insisted upon being
"Christ's Vice-Regents" within the limit of their own territory. The people did not question
the right of their rulers to take such a step. They accepted it, just as we in our own day
accept the idea of a representative system which to us seems the only reasonable and just
form of government. It is unfair therefore to state that either Lutheranism or Calvinism
caused the particular feeling of irritation which greeted King-James's oft and loudly
repeated assertion of his "Divine Right." There must have been other grounds for the
genuine English disbelief in the Divine Right of Kings.
The first positive denial of the "Divine Right" of sovereigns had been heard in the
Netherlands when the Estates General abjured their lawful sovereign King Philip II of
Spain, in the year 1581. "The King," so they said, "has broken his contract and the King
therefore is dismissed like any other unfaithful servant." Since then, this particular idea of a
king's responsibilities towards his subjects had spread among many of the nations who
inhabited the shores of the North Sea. They were in a very favourable position. They were
rich. The poor people in the heart of central Europe, at the mercy of their Ruler's body-
guard, could not afford to discuss a problem which would at once land them in the
deepest dungeon of the nearest castle. But the merchants of Holand and England who
possessed the capital necessary for the maintenance of great armies and navies, who knew
how to handle the almighty weapon caled "credit," had no such fear. They were wiling to
pit the "Divine Right" of their own good money against the "Divine Right" of any Habsburg
or Bourbon or Stuart. They knew that their guilders and shilings could beat the clumsy
feudal armies which were the only weapons of the King. They dared to act, where others
were condemned to suffer in silence or run the risk of the scaffold.
When the Stuarts began to annoy the people of England with their claim that they had a
right to do what they pleased and never mind the responsibility, the English middle classes
used the House of Commons as their first line of defence against this abuse of the Royal
Power. The Crown refused to give in and the King sent Parliament about its own business.
Eleven long years, Charles I ruled alone. He levied taxes which most people regarded as
ilegal and he managed his British kingdom as if it had been his own country estate. He had
capable assistants and we must say that he had the courage of his convictions.
Unfortunately, instead of assuring himself of the support of his faithful Scottish subjects,
Charles became involved in a quarrel with the Scotch Presbyterians. Much against his wil,
but forced by his need for ready cash, Charles was at last obliged to cal Parliament
together once more. It met in April of 1640 and showed an ugly temper. It was dissolved
a few weeks later. A new Parliament convened in November. This one was even less
pliable than the first one. The members understood that the question of "Government by
Divine Right" or "Government by Parliament" must be fought out for good and al. They
attacked the King in his chief councilors and executed half a dozen of them. They
announced that they would not alow themselves to be dissolved without their own
approval. Finaly on December 1, 1641, they presented to the King a "Grand
Remonstrance" which gave a detailed account of the many grievances of the people
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against their Ruler.
Charles, hoping to derive some support for his own policy in the country districts, left
London in January of 1642. Each side organised an army and prepared for open warfare
between the absolute power of the crown and the absolute power of Parliament. During
this struggle, the most powerful religious element of England, caled the Puritans, (they
were Anglicans who had tried to purify their doctrines to the most absolute limits), came
quickly to the front. The regiments of "Godly men," commanded by Oliver Cromwel, with
their iron discipline and their profound confidence in the holiness of their aims, soon
became the model for the entire army of the opposition. Twice Charles was defeated.
After the battle of Naseby, in 1645, he fled to Scotland. The Scotch sold him to the
English.
There folowed a period of intrigue and an uprising of the Scotch Presbyterians against the
English Puritan. In August of the year 1648 after the three-days' battle of Preston Pans,
Cromwel made an end to this second civil war, and took Edinburgh. Meanwhile his
soldiers, tired of further talk and wasted hours of religious debate, had decided to act on
their own initiative. They removed from Parliament al those who did not agree with their
own Puritan views. Thereupon the "Rump," which was what was left of the old Parliament,
accused the King of high treason. The House of Lords refused to sit as a tribunal. A
special tribunal was appointed and it condemned the King to death. On the 30th of
January of the year 1649, King Charles walked quietly out of a window of White Hal
onto the scaffold. That day, the Sovereign People, acting through their chosen
representatives, for the first time executed a ruler who had failed to understand his own
position in the modern state.
The period which folowed the death of Charles is usualy caled after Oliver Cromwel. At
first the unofficial Dictator of England, he was officialy made Lord Protector in the year
1653. He ruled five years. He used this period to continue the policies of Elizabeth. Spain
once more became the arch enemy of England and war upon the Spaniard was made a
national and sacred issue.
The commerce of England and the interests of the traders were placed before everything
else, and the Protestant creed of the strictest nature was rigourously maintained. In
maintaining England's position abroad, Cromwel was successful. As a social reformer,
however, he failed very badly. The world is made up of a number of people and they
rarely think alike. In the long run, this seems a very wise provision. A government of and
by and for one single part of the entire community cannot possibly survive. The Puritans
had been a great force for good when they tried to correct the abuse of the royal power.
As the absolute Rulers of England they became intolerable.
When Cromwel died in 1658, it was an easy matter for the Stuarts to return to their old
kingdom. Indeed, they were welcomed as "deliverers" by the people who had found the
yoke of the meek Puritans quite as hard to bear as that of autocratic King Charles.
Provided the Stuarts were wiling to forget about the Divine Right of their late and
lamented father and were wiling to recognise the superiority of Parliament, the people
promised that they would be loyal and faithful subjects.
Two generations tried to make a success of this new arrangement. But the Stuarts
apparently had not learned their lesson and were unable to drop their bad habits. Charles
II, who came back in the year 1660, was an amiable but worthless person. His indolence
and his constitutional insistence upon folowing the easiest course, together with his
conspicuous success as a liar, prevented an open outbreak between himself and his
people. By the act of Uniformity in 1662 he broke the power of the Puritan clergy by
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banishing al dissenting clergymen from their parishes. By the so-caled Conventicle Act of
1664 he tried to prevent the Dissenters from attending religious meetings by a threat of
deportation to the West Indies. This looked too much like the good old days of Divine
Right. People began to show the old and wel-known signs of impatience, and Parliament
suddenly experienced difficulty in providing the King with funds.
Since he could not get money from an unwiling Parliament, Charles borrowed it secretly
from his neighbour and cousin King Louis of France. He betrayed his Protestant alies in
return for 200,000 pounds per year, and laughed at the poor simpletons of Parliament.
Economic independence suddenly gave the King great faith in his own strength. He had
spent many years of exile among his Catholic relations and he had a secret liking for their
religion. Perhaps he could bring England back to Rome! He passed a Declaration of
Indulgence which suspended the old laws against the Catholics and Dissenters. This
happened just when Charles' younger brother James was said to have become a Catholic.
Al this looked suspicious to the man in the street People began to fear some terrible
Popish plot. A new spirit of unrest entered the land. Most of the people wanted to prevent
another outbreak of civil war. To them Royal Oppression and a Catholic King—yea, even
Divine Right,—were preferable to a new struggle between members of the same race.
Others however were less lenient. They were the much-feared Dissenters, who invariably
had the courage of their convictions. They were led by several great noblemen who did
not want to see a return of the old days of absolute royal power.
For almost ten years, these two great parties, the Whigs (the middle class element, caled
by this derisive name be-cause in the year 1640 a lot of Scottish Whiggamores or horse-
drovers headed by the Presbyterian clergy, had marched to Edinburgh to oppose the
King) and the Tories (an epithet originaly used against the Royalist Irish adherents but
now applied to the supporters of the King) opposed each other, but neither wished to
bring about a crisis. They alowed Charles to die peacefuly in his bed and permitted the
Catholic James II to succeed his brother in 1685. But when James, after threatening the
country with the terrible foreign invention of a "standing army" (which was to be
commanded by Catholic Frenchmen), issued a second Declaration of Indulgence in 1688,
and ordered it to be read in al Anglican churches, he went just a trifle beyond that line of
sensible demarcation which can only be transgressed by the most popular of rulers under
very exceptional circumstances. Seven bishops refused to comply with the Royal
Command. They were accused of "seditious libel." They were brought before a court. The
jury which pronounced the verdict of "not guilty" reaped a rich harvest of popular
approval.
At this unfortunate moment, James (who in a second marriage had taken to wife Maria of
the Catholic house of Modena-Este) became the father of a son. This meant that the
throne was to go to a Catholic boy rather than to his older sisters, Mary and Anne, who
were Protestants. The man in the street again grew suspicious. Maria of Modena was too
old to have children! It was al part of a plot! A strange baby had been brought into the
palace by some Jesuit priest that England might have a Catholic monarch. And so on. It
looked as if another civil war would break out. Then seven wel-known men, both Whigs
and Tories, wrote a letter asking the husband of James's oldest daughter Mary, Wiliam III
the Stadtholder or head of the Dutch Republic, to come to England and deliver the
country from its lawful but entirely undesirable sovereign.
On the fifth of November of the year 1688, Wiliam landed at Torbay. As he did not wish
to make a martyr out of his father-in-law, he helped him to escape safely to France. On
the 22nd of January of 1689 he summoned Parliament. On the 13th of February of the
same year he and his wife Mary were proclaimed joint sovereigns of England and the
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country was saved for the Protestant cause.
Parliament, having undertaken to be something more than a mere advisory body to the
King, made the best of its opportunities. The old Petition of Rights of the year 1628 was
fished out of a forgotten nook of the archives. A second and more drastic Bil of Rights
demanded that the sovereign of England should belong to the Anglican church.
Furthermore it stated that the king had no right to suspend the laws or permit certain
privileged citizens to disobey certain laws. It stipulated that "without consent of Parliament
no taxes could be levied and no army could be maintained." Thus in the year 1689 did
England acquire an amount of liberty unknown in any other country of Europe.
But it is not only on account of this great liberal measure that the rule of Wiliam in England
is stil remembered. During his lifetime, government by a "responsible" ministry first
developed. No king of course can rule alone. He needs a few trusted advisors. The
Tudors had their Great Council which was composed of Nobles and Clergy. This body
grew too large. It was restricted to the smal "Privy Council." In the course of time it
became the custom of these councilors to meet the king in a cabinet in the palace. Hence
they were caled the "Cabinet Council." After a short while they were known as the
"Cabinet."
Wiliam, like most English sovereigns before him, had chosen his advisors from among al
parties. But with the increased strength of Parliament, he had found it impossible to direct
the politics of the country with the help of the Tories while the Whigs had a majority in the
house of Commons. Therefore the Tories had been dismissed and the Cabinet Council
had been composed entirely of Whigs. A few years later when the Whigs lost their power
in the House of Commons, the king, for the sake of convenience, was obliged to look for
his support among the leading Tories. Until his death in 1702, Wiliam was too busy
fighting Louis of France to bother much about the government of England. Practicaly al
important affairs had been left to his Cabinet Council. When Wiliam's sister-in-law, Anne,
succeeded him in 1702 this condition of affairs continued. When she died in 1714 (and
unfortunately not a single one of her seventeen children survived her) the throne went to
George I of the House of Hanover, the son of Sophie, grand-daughter of James I.
This somewhat rustic monarch, who never learned a word of English, was entirely lost in
the complicated mazes of England's political arrangements. He left everything to his
Cabinet Council and kept away from their meetings, which bored him as he did not
understand a single sentence. In this way the Cabinet got into the habit of ruling England
and Scotland (whose Parliament had been joined to that of England in 1707) without
bothering the King, who was apt to spend a great deal of his time on the continent.
During the reign of George I and George II, a succession of great Whigs (of whom one,
Sir Robert Walpole, held office for twenty-one years) formed the Cabinet Council of the
King. Their leader was finaly recognised as the official leader not only of the actual
Cabinet but also of the majority party in power in Parliament. The attempts of George III
to take matters into his own hands and not to leave the actual business of government to
his Cabinet were so disastrous that they were never repeated. And from the earliest years
of the eighteenth century on, England enjoyed representative government, with a
responsible ministry which conducted the affairs of the land.
To be quite true, this government did not represent al classes of society. Less than one
man in a dozen had the right to vote. But it was the foundation for the modern
representative form of government. In a quiet and orderly fashion it took the power away
from the King and placed it in the hands of an ever increasing number of popular
representatives. It did not bring the milenium to England, but it saved that country from
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most of the revolutionary outbreaks which proved so disastrous to the European continent
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
THE BALANCE OF POWER
IN FRANCE ON THE OTHER HAND THE "DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS"
CONTINUED WITH GREATER POMP AND SPLENDOUR THAN EVER
BEFORE AND THE AMBITION OF THE RULER WAS ONLY TEMPERED BY
THE NEWLY INVENTED LAW OF THE "BALANCE OF POWER"
As a contrast to the previous chapter, let me tel you what happened in France during the
years when the English people were fighting for their liberty. The happy combination of the
right man in the right country at the right moment is very rare in History. Louis XIV was a
realisation of this ideal, as far as France was concerned, but the rest of Europe would
have been happier without him.
The country over which the young king was caled to rule was the most populous and the
most briliant nation of that day. Louis came to the throne when Mazarin and Richelieu, the
two great Cardinals, had just hammered the ancient French Kingdom into the most
strongly centralised state of the seventeenth century. He was himself a man of
extraordinary ability. We, the people of the twentieth century, are stil surrounded by the
memories of the glorious age of the Sun King. Our social life is based upon the perfection
of manners and the elegance of expression attained at the court of Louis. In international
and diplomatic relations, French is stil the official language of diplomacy and international
gatherings because two centuries ago it reached a polished elegance and a purity of
expression which no other tongue had as yet been able to equal. The theatre of King Louis
stil teaches us lessons which we are only too slow in learning. During his reign the French
Academy (an invention of Richelieu) came to occupy a position in the world of letters
which other countries have flattered by their imitation. We might continue this list for many
pages. It is no matter of mere chance that our modern bil-of-fare is printed in French. The
very difficult art of decent cooking, one of the highest expressions of civilisation, was first
practiced for the benefit of the great Monarch. The age of Louis XIV was a time of
splendour and grace which can stil teach us a lot.
Unfortunately this briliant picture has another side which was far less encouraging. Glory
abroad too often means misery at home, and France was no exception to this rule Louis
XIV succeeded his father in the year 1643. He died in the year 1715. That means that the
government of France was in the hands of one single man for seventy-two years, almost
two whole generations.
It wil be wel to get a firm grasp of this idea, "one single man." Louis was the first of a long
list of monarchs who in many countries established that particular form of highly efficient
autocracy which we cal "enlightened despotism." He did not like kings who merely played
at being rulers and turned official affairs into a pleasant picnic. The Kings of that
enlightened age worked harder than any of their subjects. They got up earlier and went to
bed later than anybody else, and felt their "divine responsibility" quite as strongly as their
"divine right" which alowed them to rule without consulting their subjects.
Of course, the king could not attend to everything in person. He was obliged to surround
himself with a few helpers and councilors. One or two generals, some experts upon
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foreign politics, a few clever financiers and economists would do for this purpose. But
these dignitaries could act only through their Sovereign. They had no individual existence.
To the mass of the people, the Sovereign actualy represented in his own sacred person
the government of their country. The glory of the common fatherland became the glory of
a single dynasty. It meant the exact opposite of our own American ideal. France was ruled
of and by and for the House of Bourbon.
The disadvantages of such a system are clear. The King grew to be everything. Everybody
else grew to be nothing at al. The old and useful nobility was gradualy forced to give up
its former shares in the government of the provinces. A little Royal bureaucrat, his fingers
splashed with ink, sitting behind the greenish windows of a government building in faraway
Paris, now performed the task which a hundred years before had been the duty of the
feudal Lord. The feudal Lord, deprived of al work, moved to Paris to amuse himself as
best he could at the court. Soon his estates began to suffer from that very dangerous
economic sickness, known as "Absentee Landlordism." Within a single generation, the
industrious and useful feudal administrators had become the wel-mannered but quite
useless loafers of the court of Versailes.
Louis was ten years old when the peace of Westphalia was concluded and the House of
Habsburg, as a result of the Thirty Years War, lost its predominant position in Europe. It
was inevitable that a man with his ambition should use so favourable a moment to gain for
his own dynasty the honours which had formerly been held by the Habsburgs. In the year
1660 Louis had married Maria Theresa, daughter of the King of Spain. Soon afterward,
his father-in-law, Philip IV, one of the half-witted Spanish Habsburgs, died. At once Louis
claimed the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) as part of his wife's dowry. Such an
acquisition would have been disastrous to the peace of Europe, and would have
threatened the safety of the Protestant states. Under the leadership of Jan de Witt,
Raadpensionaris or Foreign Minister of the United Seven Netherlands, the first great
international aliance, the Triple Aliance of Sweden, England and Holand, of the year
1661, was concluded. It did not last long. With money and fair promises Louis bought up
both King Charles and the Swedish Estates. Holand was betrayed by her alies and was
left to her own fate. In the year 1672 the French invaded the low countries. They marched
to the heart of the country. For a second time the dikes were opened and the Royal Sun
of France set amidst the mud of the Dutch marshes. The peace of Nimwegen which was
concluded in 1678 settled nothing but merely anticipated another war.
A second war of aggression from 1689 to 1697, ending with the Peace of Ryswick, also
failed to give Louis that position in the affairs of Europe to which he aspired. His old
enemy, Jan de Witt, had been murdered by the Dutch rabble, but his successor, Wiliam
III (whom you met in the last chapter), had checkmated al efforts of Louis to make
France the ruler of Europe.
The great war for the Spanish succession, begun in the year 1701, immediately after the
death of Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, and ended in 1713 by the Peace of
Utrecht, remained equaly undecided, but it had ruined the treasury of Louis. On land the
French king had been victorious, but the navies of England and Holand had spoiled al
hope for an ultimate French victory; besides the long struggle had given birth to a new and
fundamental principle of international politics, which thereafter made it impossible for one
single nation to rule the whole of Europe or the whole of the world for any length of time.
That was the so-caled "balance of power." It was not a written law but for three centuries
it has been obeyed as closely as are the laws of nature. The people who originated the
idea maintained that Europe, in its nationalistic stage of development, could only survive
when there should be an absolute balance of the many conflicting interests of the entire