Essays on the political history of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. ... Edited by Sir E. Head, Bart

Preface

. In consenting to edit this translation, I cannot but feel that I have undertaken a task which ought to have been executed by far abler hands. The death of Mrs. Austin has deprived us of one who united a masculine power of understanding with the tact and delicacy peculiar to a woman. Had she fulfilled her intention of looking over these pages the reader might have been sure that the meaning of the author was correctly given, and that it was conveyed to him in pure and idiomatic English. No doubt, too, the fact that those who have executed the translation are near and dear to her, would have secured at her hands peculiar care in its supervision. To her we owe some of the very best translations to be found in the English language ; and there are few persons whose energies and accomplishments would enable them to edit successfudy the EDITOR'S

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. VI Lectures on the Province of Jurisprudence, and translate Ranke's " History of the Popes." As it is, I have been requested to do that imperfectly which she would have done perfectly, but I cannot let this volume appear without a tribute to the memory of one whose friendship and regard I shad never cease to value. EDMUND HEAD. Note. — With the exception of the last eight pages, the whole of this translation has been revised and corrected by the late Sir Edmund Head. PEEFACE. Without having formed the project of executing such a task, I have long and often thought of a work, the object of which should be to show the changes and modifications in the political position, both internal and external, of the large states of the west of Europe from the close of the feudal period to our own days.

Such a book would have to show the changes which successively took place in the principles, the form, and conduct of the governments guiding the affairs of those great states ; the increase or decrease in their power ; the character of their ambition, whether just or immoderate ; their influence for good or for evd over the fate of the people subject to them ; their relations in peace or war with one another, and the territorial consequences of their wars. It would be necessary to take into account the time when the historical facts occurred, the

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. VIII irresistible movement of human ideas, and the action of the men who held sway ; it would be necessary too to examine what those men, eminent for courage and ability, who from the end of the fourteenth century chanced to be mixed up in the government of nations, said, thought, or wrote in the affairs with which they had to deal. Such were Edward III, Van Artevelde, Henry V, Louis XI, Cardinal Amboise, Julius II, Duprat, Charles V, Perrenot, Ximenes, William the Silent, Catherine of Medicis, Elizabeth, L'Hopital, Henry IV, Sully, Ferdinand II, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu, Mazarin, Crom well, Louis XIV, Lionne, De Witt, and William III. We ought to learn how they judged the state of society in the midst of which they lived, as compared with that which preceded it, and in what degree each had at heart the well-being of mankind or his own gratification.

Such a book would be the political history of modern times; but that which I now publish is not the beginning or even the sketch of such a book. It is at the most what a painter would call the ground on which to work. It is, perhaps, useless, in the times in which we live, to define what we understand by the politics of a country. In a few words, it means

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. IX its everyday life, in relation to its institutions, and to the laws of general interest in force at the moment : in short, the relations of all with the government, whatever may be its form, and the relations of that government with foreign states. When this everyday life, with these laws of general interest and the institutions of a country are ex plained, and when these relations of the people to their government, and of the government to foreign states are discussed, then we in fact write its political history. The modern history of Western Europe, if we look at its general outlines, up to the end of the wars of Louis XIV, seems to offer the following characteristics of certain periods. First, the Feudal Period. — The territory is split up among the possessors of fiefs, who depend nominally on the crown, but are in reality independent.

The Anglo-French wars have the true feudal cha racter, and turn mainly on the claims of the royal houses engaged in them. They were wars asserting certain rights ; not wars of conquest ; for the kings of England claimed to be the legitimate heirs of the crown of France. This period ends with the fourteenth century ; and these wars gradually re laxed their force, though they did not cease till

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. X the next century ; an epoch which is rather the end of the middle ages than the beginning of modern times. Period of the Wars of Families. — Fifteenth Century. — The feudal element has been weakened by the action of time, and by the struggles between the lords themselves. Fiefs have been gradually absorbed into each other, and made larger. The royal power has become stronger in France, in England, and in Spain. Contests are no longer carried on between the feudal vassals, but between the princes of the same family, who are individuady more powerful, but less numerous. This was the epoch of the war for the " public weal " in France under the Dukes of Burgundy and Charles VII, and Louis XI, and of the Wars of the Roses in England. Period of the Wars between States. — The great kingdoms now contend either to conquer each from the other certain portions of territory, or to obtain domains situated beyond their own limits.

The unity of the state is complete, and feudal or family rivalries have been extinguished. This is the time of the great wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. France and Spain are fighting for the sovereignty of certain parts of Italy. The rivalry between the Houses of France

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. XI and Spain,— and after a branch of the Spanish house had been established on the Imperial throne, — the rivalry between the Houses of France and of Austria, fill up these two great centuries, from the accession of Charles VIII. to the Treaty of Utrecht (1483 — 1713). This struggle in the most remarkable manner assumed a personal character in the first instance as between Charles V. and Francis I. ; it languished during the reign of the last prince of the Valois race and under Philip II. ; but it became more intense from the time of Philip III. to that of Charles II. of Spain, and under Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. in France. Tlie Period of the Wars for Supremacy, which sometimes are scarcely to be distinguished from those of the preceding period. — In proportion as each state became more powerful, and whenever it was represented by a man of greater strength, the ambition of its king was to obtain the supremacy of Europe.

Such men were Charles V, Richelieu, Louis XIV, and William III. Ad these, and even Phdip II, sought to possess greater power than any other European state, and to acquire a moral in fluence greater than all of them put together. The struggle for European supremacy confounds itself therefore with the struggle between state and state ;

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. it cannot be said to be limited by any fixed epoch, because it depends upon the character and the qualities of certain men. Revolutionary Periods. — The insurrections against the crown, by dissatisfied subjects, depend, like the wars for supremacy, on the character of the sove reigns under whose reign they break out. The three great revolutions of modern history, which shook the throne of Phdip II. of Spain, and over threw those of Charles I. of England, and Louis XVI. of France, are separated by intervals of one century from each other. They imply an advanced state of society, and an exaggerated condition of the kingly power. The differences of their cha racter, violence, and duration depend on the social condition in the midst of which they spring, and the greater or less feebleness of the power which they attack.

The modern history of Western Europe has, there fore, to narrate successively the end of the feudal system, the family wars, and, at the same time, the wars between state and state, the wars of nations for supremacy, and the revolutions, which have taken place. It has to tell us, moreover, how far religious ideas before the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but especially after it, were con-

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. XIII nected with the political government of states, and what portion of aid or of embarrassment, in a manner ever-varying and irregular but full of passion, they brought to each. Up to the end of the seventeenth century, these are the great chapters of modern history. But in the midst of its principal features there is one which in those powerful states of Western Europe that played the most important parts, and led the way in social progress, is most constantly prominent ; and that is their uninterrupted advance towards the unity of the monarchy. Those who governed these states had to sway masses of people every day becoming larger, and territories every day becoming wider. Of the five great principal sovereignties, or groups of sovereignties, which, if we except some secondary states, geographically make up Western Europe — that is to say, England, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy — the three first were con stituted, in a manner more or less open to question, on the basis of monarchical unity.

The two others, Germany and Italy, followed a different course. They remained broken up, — Germany into mo narchical states for the most part of secondary im portance, Italy into smad principalities, more or less independent, and into republics. Burgundy, if

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. XIV it had continued to exist as a powerful and independent state, such as it was under the Dukes of the House of Valois, would have formed a sixth great kingdom ; but, after one century of such a life (the fifteenth), it disappeared from the map of Europe. Thus, as historically there are five great cate gories of facts, w*hich are present in succession in the modern history of Western Europe, so geogra phically, and putting aside some secondary states which will be mentioned, there are five great and principal divisions of territory. If we consider how these five great kingdoms, or these groups of kingdoms, are placed with reference to each other on the European scene, we recognise among them the following condition of things : — When the Anglo-French wars had ceased with the fifteenth century — when the three great mon archies of Spain, France, and England had each secured its independence at home, and was firmly established — when the wars between France and Spain had commenced — France and Spain played the first part as combatants ; generally, at first with a marked superiority on the side of Spain. During these wars, England — that is to say, the England of Henry VIII, of Elizabeth, and even later the

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. XV England of the Stuarts — kept a little in the back ground of the two principal powers. She interfered indeed in the affairs of the continent with her material force and her moral authority, but she remained in the second rank ; she consulted her own security, leant by preference towards that one of the rivals w*ho was the weaker, and occasionally proposed herself as mediator between the two. At a later period England was destined to occupy the first rank. During this great war between France and Spain, the two remaining powers — Italy and Germany — which with France, Spain, and England, completed the five great states of Europe — were made up, as they have since continued to be, of groups of states, separated one from the other, and divided in their wishes and interests, without any force of unity or cohesion.

They were less advanced, if we may so speak, in their political career, and stood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at a point in politics which France, Spain, and England had attained one hundred and fifty years before. Now and then they showed a tendency to unite under the influence of an ambitious or a powerful man, like Julius II, Charles V, or Ferdinand II. ; but they could not accomplish their end, and they thus continued to act a secondary

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. part to that played by France, Spain, or England. They served however as a mark for the ambition of the powers of the first rank, each of which wished, at one and the same time, to exercise a pre dominant influence over them. Charles V. and Francis I, Charles V. and Henry II, afterwards Henry IV. and Richelieu, Philip III. and Philip IV, and Ferdinand II, all sought successively, in the great wars of Italy, in the wars of Germany and of Lorraine, in the Thirty Years' War, in that of the Valtedine and of Mantua, not exactly the mastery, but the preponderance in Italy and in Germany. Italy precedes Germany, in the order of time, as the theatre and object of this struggle ; and, when Spain had established her superiority over the French arms in Italy, so as to leave for France of the seventeenth century nothing more there to gain, except some petty conquests, then Germany, in her turn, became the field and the subject of contention.

Thus, during the wars between Spain and France, and between Austria and France, Italy and Ger many, which lay beyond their limits, were coveted, if not as affording territory to be conquered, at least in the character of a field for the exercise of superior influence by one of the combatants. Throughout these two centuries of conflict, Italy and Germany

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. XVII figured only in the third rank, behind France, Spain, and England. It w*as not their destiny in those times, which are now so remote from us, to follow the course pursued by the other great powers in their progress towards unity. Stdl further in the rear of this third rank, three other states of less importance fill up the geogra phical outline of Western Europe. Two of these, from their position, their character, and their history, became independent early in their career, while the destiny of the third was special and remarkable. I allude, of course, to Switzerland, Venice, and the Low Countries. The two first were powerful and warlike republics, but Venice, though Italian, did not always share the destinies of Italy, nor Switzerland those of Germany, although it spoke that language.

The Low Countries remain, and we will speak of them presently, but we will first succinctly sum up that which we have just been attempting to describe. Spain, France, England, Italy, and Germany — five great states, or groups of states — Venice, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, — three states of secondary importance — compose the map of Western Europe. After the cessation of the wars between France and England, first Spain and b

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. France, and then Austria and France, play the principal part in war against each other. England at this epoch figures only in the second line, as the ally of one or the other of the two great powers, or the mediator between them. The part of England, however, is destined one day to become more important than that of France or Spain. Italy and Germany, which complete the number of the five great states, occupy the third place in the scene. France and Spain, and later still, France ank Austria, fight to obtain preponderance, first in Italy, and subsequently in Germany. They contend for the possession of Italy, frequently in Italy itself; and they contend for Germany, frequently in Germany itself. Such is the position of affairs presented to us, and such, with successive variations of time and place, is the most general view put before us on the map of Western Europe since the feudal wars.

This portion of the Continent, then, in the transition from feudal times to our own, has passed through the wars of families, the wars between States, the general European wars, the Reformation, and the revolution affecting the form of government. We have already said that, when wrars became of a general character, and were conducted by men of great ambition or

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. XIX of great genius, they ceased to have some fixed conquest as their object, but aimed rather at obtaining supremacy in Europe — a supremacy which passed from one to the other of the great powers — from Spain to France or from France to England — as the capricious chances of a battle, or the success which fortune gave to the genius of some politician, might alternately decide. Such was the supremacy which belonged to Spain under Charles V, and even after him under Philip II. ; to France under Henry IV, and Richelieu, and during the early days of Louis XIV. ; to England in the old age of Louis XIV, and under William III. I have now something to say of the Low Countries, and of their position in Europe. The provinces which once formed the circle of Burgundy have almost always played a more important part in the affairs of Europe than the amount of their population w^ould seem to warrant.

If it was a matter of discussion for ages to whom the superior influence in Italy and in Germany should belong, it was equally a matter of importance to know whether the Low Countries should enter or remain in the orbit of Spain, France, England, or Germany. The southern provinces of the Netherlands, during the middle ages, were b

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. XX very powerful by their arms, their wealth, their municipal liberty, and their industry. Before and during the government of the Dukes of Burgundy, these provinces were by turns French or English in the sentiments which they manifested, or rather in the tendencies of those who governed them. They were French during the wars of the Arma gnacs, and were engaged in the troubles of France against that faction ; they were English when the Treaty of Troyes wras signed. They wTere French because the Dukes of Burgundy were the vassals of France ; they were English, and the allies of England, by accident, and because a spirit of vengeance animated Philip the Good against France, or because Charles the Bold professed to intend the invasion of that country wfith the assistance of England. This alliance was far from being, as it might have been, the result of a serious combination.

In the succeeding age, Charles V. found the Low Countries as it were on the rent-roll of his inheritance, and Francis I. did not take them from him : in fact he never seriously made the attempt. Charles V. was too powerful, and during the greater part of his career too successful, to allow any one gravely to dispute his possession of the

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. XXI Netherlands. They rendered him the greatest service, for they provided him abundantly with money, and, if we except the revolt of Ghent, they caused him little anxiety. To the people of Ghent the Emperor was cold and severe, but he made up for it by entrusting the government of the country to two women of high character and of great capacity, Margaret of Parma and Mary of Hungary. He showed so much affection and confidence to his Flemish subjects, as frequently to rouse the jealousy of the Spaniards. Under Philip II, during the religious wars, the southern provinces had the wish but not the power to throw off the Spanish yoke. They were at length convinced that they could not free themselves from Spain without foreign aid. They might have offered themselves to France, if the sovereign of that country, not being able to make up his mind to defend them, had had energy enough to incorporate them.

They would have given themselves to England, as the provinces of the north wished to do, had Eliza beth consented to take them ; and had not she seen, in the bitter resentment of Spain deprived of her possessions, and in the jealousy of France, a double chance of war, which shocked her prudence, and alarmed her parsimony.

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. The northern provinces, lost to Phdip II, founded and maintained their independence ; so that Holland became, after the sixteenth century, as formidable as any state in Europe by its maritime power and the boldness of its commercial enterprise. The southern portion, however, remained subject to Spain ; and Philip II, regretting in his old age that he had passed all his life away from the Low Countries, gave what he yet possessed of them to his daughter, without renouncing his claim to them definitively, and without recognising the independence of those which had freed themselves in the north. After the death of Isabella, Spain still retained possession of this rich domain, but Henry IV. once thought of taking it from her, and bestowing it on the United Provinces (a plan conceived, but not executed).

Richelieu also had for a moment the project, which he did not realize, of dividing the spoil between France and Holland ; and Louis XIV. imprudently attempted the con quest, without thinking that he was ruining France, and that he had to deal with the armies of Europe, the navy of England, and the bold and patient spirit of William III. The southern pro vinces of the Low Countries, then — let us call them for shortness, Belgium — remained Spanish, in

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. XXIII spite of the greed of France, and in spite of the fact that they were ill-defended by Spain. Thus it was that Belgium, during the whole course of the struggle between France and Spain, from the rupture of the Treaty of Noyon (1519), until the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht (1713), continued throughout that great war to have an importance disproportioned to its population and mditary force, as one of the fields of battle, and as one of the great stakes which were played for, This importance resulted from its central posi tion on the map of Europe, from its wealth, its contiguity to France, to Germany and to the sea, its situation on two great rivers, the considerable in crease of power it brought or threatened to bring to any one of the great states which might possess it or covet it ; and from the difficulty of founding a balance of power in Europe likely to last, when these provinces were in the hands of one of the great States, or of one of those deeply engaged in a general war.

The Treaty of Utrecht caused these provinces to pass from the hands of the elder branch of the Spanish house to those of the younger, which had been established on the Imperial throne since the abdication of Charles V. The Low Countries— the birthplace of Phdip the

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. Good, of Mary of Hungary, of the family of Croy, of Adrian VI, of four or five generations of the House of Nassau, of Egmont, of Barneveld, of Tilly, of Tromp, of De Witt, and of Heinsius— and more especially the provinces of the south, the country where the Dukes of Burgundy lived, where Charles V. was born, where the Duke of Alva combated the Revolution and the Reformation, where Maurice of Nassau fought against Spinola, William III. against Louis XIV. — where so much blood has been shed, from the time of the battle of Bouvines down to our own day — this country has her place in the annals of Europe, and has assigned to her a definite and important sphere of action of her own. It would be curious to examine the detail of military or diplomatic events, for the sake of seeing how far Belgium was mixed up in the affairs of Europe from the time of the death of Edward III. to the Peace of Utrecht, that is, from the time when she made a commercial alliance with England to that clay when, after having been less than one hun dred years governed by the Dukes of Burgundy, and for two hundred years by the Kings of Spain, the country passed under the dominion of the House of Austria. It would be interesting, by closely

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. XXV questioning the sovereigns of Europe, and the acts of their respective governments, to ascertain in what manner, why, in what circumstances, and in how great a degree, the uncertain fate of Belgium in volves or menaces the true, necessary and lasting conditions of the balance of power in Europe. When we follow the steps of French policy, from the time of the English wars to the close of the seventeenth century — from the accession of Charles VIII. to the death of Louis XIV, it is easy to distinguish three leading ideas. First, there was that of the war with Spain, represented by Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I. ; then that of the alliance of France with the foreign Reformers, with a view to the same contest, and this alliance was represented by Henry IV. and Richelieu ; lastly, there was that most ill-judged war against Austria and against all Europe united, whether Protestant or Catholic, at once the dream and the ruin of Louis XIV.

All these wTars, all the treaties which terminated them, the dynastic revolutions of the Low Countries and of England, and the civil wars in France and in Germany, affected the fate of the Belgian pro vinces, by increasing or diminishing in some way their security or prosperity.

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. XXVI They never could be indifferent to the general course of these European events, nor unaffected by their results. Looking thus to the destinies of Europe as a whole, and to the course of events during three centuries, such, in a' few words, is the place, and such the influence which belongs to the Low Countries, and particularly to the Belgian provinces. We cannot rank them among the great states of Europe ; but we can say, that they have been a party in all the great suits, and that during their temporary connexion with Burgundy and Franche-Comte, while France and England were wastins* their strength in the convulsions of civil war, they occupied one of the first places. This general picture, presented so briefly, will be repeated in a still more incomplete manner in the five sketches which form this volume.

Making allowance for the encroachment which we have remarked, of one epoch upon another, whenever a powerful genius hastens the course of events, these sketches correspond to the five sets of historical facts which we have enumerated. They are indissolubly connected by the chain of occurrences through three centuries, and they are intended specially to illustrate the principle, whether it were lasting or transitory, generous or selfish, which animated and

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. XXVII guided each government. This is a peculiar aspect of history which may be studied lovingly and carefully, without neglecting its general tenor, or the other portions of the great drama which it presents. The government, whatever was its form, its excel lences, or its defects, whatever was the principle or the passion that guided it — we are speaking of governments of former times — affected all the in terests, and involved the whole fate of the people with whom it was concerned. In making an especial study of the conduct of governments, we are bound to observe what changes have been made in their principle, and in the law of their existence, as well as what passed in the mind of those who administered them. There is no country, for example, which, in the progress of its domestic podcy, presents a field of observation so varied as England, inasmuch as the system was feudal under the descendants of the Norman con querors, and advanced gradually tow*ards a parliamentary form, as the influence of the Great Charter was developed ; at a later period the country was governed despotically, after the fashion of con tinental states, by craft under the Tudors, and with blind rashness under the Stuarts. The government was republican for a moment as an experiment, but

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. it was only again to become and to remain parlia mentary, after its second revolution ; and in this form, thus definitively adopted, England has conti nued to grow in power and influence. The history, therefore, of the constitutional government of England has the merit of exhibiting to the spectator, in its successive conditions, each theo retical principle and its practical application in politics, as it likewise shows in the persons of the rulers— from the reign of Henry V. in the fifteenth century to that of Queen Anne in the eighteenth — all the varieties of intellect and passion which are to be found in a human being invested with power and authority, and thus subjected to a dangerous trial. It would require much more time than I have devoted to this work— and the subject would require to be more completely worked out — if I ■wished to place before the eye of the reader a complete picture of European politics during the period which separates us from the middle ages.