CHAPTER VI

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.

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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.

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[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_.]

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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.

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[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.

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