Doubtless the misery caused by the perpetual fighting, and the coming and going of armies during so many years, was very great, even so. It is said that in the principal areas ravaged by the war the population was reduced to one-third of what it had been before. But a consideration of the leisurely way in which the fighting was conducted, and the small number engaged in it, helps us to realise how the people of the countries were able to endure it at all. It also helps us to understand how it was that it took so long to bring the war to a conclusion.
The Protestant King of Denmark took the lead of the Union at the beginning of the long struggle, and at first the Protestants suffered many defeats. The great leader of the Catholics, Wallenstein, overran Denmark itself. The outlook for the Protestant cause was as black as it well could be. At this darkest moment Gustavus Adolphus came with his Swedes from the north, and the Catholics were driven back. Within a few years he was invading Germany, and in 1632 he fought the very important battle of Lutzen, in which the Protestant forces were completely victorious. But it was a victory dearly bought, for Gustavus himself was killed in the battle and the Protestant cause found no other leader of equal ability.
The war dragged on. Spain and France had come in as members of the Catholic League, against the Protestants, but now there arose in France a new policy which set these two Catholic nations in opposition to each other. It is an opposition that is closely associated with the name of one man, the French king's great minister, Richelieu.
We may note here one of the minor results of the Reformation. Previously to the Reformation we find great ecclesiastics, that is to say, men holding the highest positions in the Church, as great ministers of the State also. Our Cardinal Wolsey is an instance. Indeed you will scarcely find an instance anywhere of a great minister who was not a high ecclesiastic. The reason is simple: they were the men who had the education, and nearly the only men. But now many laymen were beginning to be men of learning also, and in most of the Protestant countries the State and the Church were not nearly so closely associated together as they still were in the Roman Catholic countries. Therefore we now begin to see that, whereas in the Catholic countries the chief ministers of State continue to be cardinals and great men of the Church, in the Protestant countries it is so no longer. The king's ministers are most often laymen.
Richelieu's policy
During part of the Thirty Years' War the great French cardinal, Richelieu, had on his hands a heavy task in suppressing a most formidable rising of the Huguenots, whose greatest strength was in the west. England sent a fleet to their assistance, but it effected little. They were compelled to yield, after very brave resistance, and in 1629 was arranged that Peace of Alais, which is noted in history as marking "the end of religious wars." Under that treaty the Huguenots were given equal political rights in France with the Catholics.
Nevertheless in Germany the Thirty Years' War, which certainly had its rise as a war about religion, dragged on for nearly a score of years longer, until its final settlement by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
The terms of that treaty might have been less favourable to the Protestants than they were had the two great Catholic nations of France and Spain been in accord. They had fallen, however, as we have seen, into bitter opposition, which broke out into active war. The real occasion of the war was, as before, the too masterful power which was held in a single hand owing to the accident that the Habsburg family, which governed in Austria, wore the Crown of Spain also. It still possessed those Southern States of the Netherlands which had not won their independence, and it had the Duchy of Milan in Northern Italy as well as Naples in Southern Italy. The Habsburgs still surrounded France. Richelieu's aim was to break this circle. He was ruthless and subtle, and he was single-minded in his determination to make his king not only the despotic ruler of his own country but also powerful throughout Europe. The French monarch was served by his minister as effectively as our Henry VIII. by Wolsey and by Thomas Cromwell. Richelieu had put down a rising of the nobles against the Crown with severity as cruel as that of Henry's last, and worst, minister. The people of France had never secured the rights which the law gave them in England—though the Tudor kings paid those rights little respect—and they gave the nobles no support. In his first aim the great cardinal succeeded. The king became despotic in France.
His position in Europe, with so powerful an opponent in the field as the King of Spain, was not so easily secured. It was a curious twist of policy which brought France to the assistance of the Protestant Union in the later years of the Thirty Years' War—France, a Catholic State and under the influence of a cardinal of the Catholic Church, aiding Protestants against Catholics! And it was the aid of France which saved them, notwithstanding that the French armies twice suffered defeat in Germany.
Of course the motive that brought France in on the Protestant side was the opportunity of opposing Spain.
The Treaty of Westphalia, which really marked the end of the religious wars much more definitely than the Peace of Alais, gave France an extension of territory on her eastern border, at the cost of Germany. It gave Sweden compensation in money and in a fortress or two on the Baltic for what she had done in the war. Switzerland had borne a share in the fighting on the Protestant side, and her independence was recognised by the treaty; and Holland, which had been practically a free country for years, was now formally declared to owe no dependence either to Spain or to the Emperor. The Emperor's power indeed, for a long while vague and declining, was now diminished to almost nothing.
But though Holland stood thus finally free, we have to remember that there still were what were called "the Spanish Netherlands," a district, under the rule of Spain, not very different in its boundaries from modern Belgium. In these Spanish Netherlands fighting between France and Spain continued, in spite of the Treaty of Westphalia. They met each other too in Italy, and the war lingered on with changing results for more than ten years. In Germany the Protestants had gained religious freedom under the Treaty of Westphalia, and the German princes of both Protestant and Catholic faiths had been freed from the rather uncertain bond of union in which they had been held by the Emperor. Thus disunited, they had little power, and the power of France became greater by their weakness.
Mazarin's policy
Richelieu died in 1642 and another great churchman, Cardinal Mazarin, became the king's chief minister in his place. But in the following year died also that king whom Richelieu had served faithfully, ably, and unscrupulously. He was succeeded by Louis XIV., the monarch whose Court was so splendid, with himself as the centre of its glory, that he is known as Le Roi Soleil—the Sun King. He was a child of four when he came to the throne. The regent was his mother, and since she was a daughter of Philip II. a reversal of the policy of Richelieu was expected from her. To the grievous disappointment of a large party in France itself and also in Spain and Austria, she put herself into the hands of Mazarin; and he was a faithful follower of Richelieu. The war with Spain continued. But in the very year of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia there broke out in France that uprising of the nobles and of the people which is called the "Fronde." It had a remarkable success at first; though a success which did not endure. Under the captaincy of the great Prince Condé, who had led an earlier rising of the nobles against the Crown and, before that, had taken a leading part on the Huguenots' side, Mazarin was driven from Paris.
The strength of the two parties was so evenly divided, however, that in this very same year Condé himself and a number of his adherents were put under arrest. Within three years from the middle of the century the Queen Mother, with Mazarin as her minister, was re-established in power and the old lines of policy were pursued, both at home and abroad.
Our England, as we have seen, played little direct part in the long drawn-out war between the Protestants and Catholics on the Continent. Neither did she directly take any large part in the European contest between the two great Catholic powers. She did, nevertheless, come into touch and into opposition with both France and Spain abroad.
The predominance of Portugal in the East had been finally broken. French, Dutch, and English all had sailed round the Cape and formed settlements in India and the Malay Archipelago, disputing with Spain and Portugal the trade of the East. In the West, in the New World, Spain for the most part was content to develop, in such peace as the English seamen would grant her, her empire in Mexico and South America. The occupation of Bermuda and of Barbadoes by the English was accomplished without as much opposition from Spain as we should expect to find, and Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement of Virginia, named after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, was achieved without fighting except against the native Red Indians, was from this expedition that Sir Walter has the credit of introducing into England potatoes and tobacco.
Even before the beginning of the century we have seen the settlement of England's first Colony, Newfoundland, and it was in the first years of the seventeenth century that a trading port was established on the St. Lawrence river, soon to grow into the city of Quebec.
Spaniards had settled along the coast of what now is Florida, England had planted the colony which commemorates the Virgin Queen; and southward of Virginia lies a state still named after Louis, King of France—Louisiana. At that time it formed but a small part of a far larger territory so-called and claimed as a French possession. England and France, however, did not come to blows in this part of the newly found great continent, but they did fall to fighting over their settlements on the shore of the St. Lawrence. In the meantime settlers from England had formed a colony in what was called New England, between the St. Lawrence in the north and Virginia southward. Among these were the colonists who received the name of the Pilgrim Fathers—pilgrims flying from England for their religion's sake, to become the fathers of an important part of the great American nation.
Religious differences
We may pay a little further attention now to the reasons that induced them to go this pilgrimage. Their principal motive was to escape persecution on account of their religion. That desire led to several pilgrimages and movements of people of the same kind in course of the story. It was a similar motive, for instance, which made many of the Huguenots come to England and other foreign lands. Some went to Canada, where they encountered, as we have said, the English on the St. Lawrence. To understand the violent intolerance of any differences of religious belief and practice which produced these movements, we have to understand the way in which the men of that date viewed those differences.
In the first place, looking at it from the Protestant side, the Protestants felt very bitterly the evil conduct which they saw in the establishments of the Church. They protested against these evils, and also against the authority claimed by the Pope. The Puritans in England, for nearly the same reasons, were in protest against what we may call the High Church Protestants and against the authority claimed by the Crown as head of that Church.
On the Catholic side, the Pope and all the authorities were naturally incensed against any who protested against his authority, because it was essentially part of his claim, as Pope, that he was infallible, that he could do no wrong, and that therefore it was a sin to protest against anything he might choose to do or affirm. And inevitably, since he was spiritual ruler of the Catholic kings, he used his immense influence to induce them to put down this defiance of his authority by their subjects.
Then that spirit of inquiry and of protest, which was directed first against the Pope and his commands, very easily led men into criticism of the authority of the kings themselves and into protest against their actions: and this was a kind of protest which was not at all agreeable to the despotic kings of that day.
Finally, we should note this point most particularly—that men had lately begun to read for themselves, for the first time, the Bible, and that in the Old Testament they found that the Lord punished Israel and Judah—whole nations at a time—because certain sections of those nations deviated from His true service. Thence they derived the conviction that if any section of a modern nation deviated and went astray from the practice of the true religion, that nation as a whole was liable to divine punishment. We must get that conviction of theirs into our minds, and see all that is implied by it, if we would understand how it was that they were so fiercely intolerant of these religious differences. It explains a great deal of what is otherwise obscure and difficult about persecution done in the name of religion. It explains why the nations were so ready to send out of their midst any section that so differed from the majority in their religious beliefs: and it explains also why these sections were so very willing to go. The English Puritans who went to America, both at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, and again later, must have felt that they were getting away from the society of wicked men in whose punishment they might expect to be included; and similarly the rest of the nation would be only too pleased to see them go—for the same reason, that the majority feared lest the wrath of Heaven should fall upon the whole mass of the people, because of the wickedness (that is to say, of the difference of religious belief and practice which they looked upon as wickedness) of this small section.
Cavaliers and Puritans
Ten years later than the expedition of the Pilgrim Fathers, that is to say, in 1630, there was a further large emigration of Puritans from Old England into New England. Under Charles I. who had succeeded James, and tried to pursue the same policy of governing and extorting money without a Parliament, the strained feeling between the Crown and the people grew more intense. They formed themselves into distinct parties—Royalists or Cavaliers on the outside, and Puritans on the other.
The smouldering hostility broke into open war. In the first battles the Royalists had the advantage. The Puritan armies were raw and badly organised. But in their ranks were men of ability and of stern purpose. Under the orders of Oliver Cromwell as their commander-in-chief a rigid discipline was imposed. They went into battle singing hymns, inspired by an intense conviction that they were fighting in the service of the Lord. It was a union of discipline with zeal which the light-hearted and light-headed Cavaliers could not match.
The Royalists wore gallant and gay attire and flowing curls, and culled all the joys of life. The Puritans dressed themselves in sombre colours, set their faces into solemn lines and regarded even innocent mirth and amusement as a sin. The earnestness which marked all their behaviour they brought to the business of fighting.
After the fortunes of the war had gone variously in several campaigns, the Royalists suffered what really was a decisive defeat in the battle of Naseby in 1645. Their cause never recovered from it.
There was quartered in the north of England at this time a Scottish army. Charles had endeavoured to impose on the Church of Scotland the form of Protestantism which was the State religion in England. But the majority of the Scottish people professed a religion much more nearly akin to that of the English Puritans. They bound themselves by a Covenant (whence its adherents were called Covenanters) to oppose by all means in their power the priests and the bishops whom the Scottish king of the United Kingdom tried to force on them. They took arms and made their way victoriously south until they were bribed to stop and to establish themselves in quarters in the north of England by part payment and part promise of payment of a yearly sum. And to the protection of that army Charles fled, as his fortunes grew more and more desperate, after the defeat at Naseby in 1646. The payments promised to the Scots were much in arrears. After long negotiations they gave up their king into the hands of the English Puritans in exchange for a large sum of money to quit the debt. Once the king escaped, but was recaptured, and in 1649, after a trial in which the verdict was certain from the first, was executed on the block.
The king being dead, the Parliament declared the country a Commonwealth, under Oliver Cromwell, who had the title of Protector. The Protector's powers were not strictly defined, and perhaps there was no real limit to them, seeing that he had the army, which was all-powerful, ready to do his bidding. And this was a power which he had proved that he would not hesitate to use. He was a man typical of the Puritan spirit—absolutely convinced of the justice of his cause and determined to make it prevail no matter at what cost of suffering to himself, to his friends, or to his enemies—a very terrible man, whose value, in those distracted times, was that he not only made himself a terror to his enemies at home, but also made England feared and respected abroad as she had not been under the weak Stuart kings.
So now, by the middle of the seventeenth century, we may at length truly say that Europe had passed through that most miserable period of wars about religion which accompanied and followed the Reformation. We have to look on those religious wars as one of the two great features in our story during that half-century. The other principal feature is the continual expansion of the white Europeans into countries which had been in the possession of men of colour.
England had sent a few ships, which effected little, to help the Huguenots in their fight with the French Crown, and we catch a far-off echo of that hostility in the fighting which took place between English and French over the French settlements in the St. Lawrence. The French were defeated, but for the time being they were allowed to remain in possession of their Canadian settlements.
GENERAL WOLFE'S STATUE AT QUEBEC, CANADA.
GENERAL WOLFE'S STATUE AT QUEBEC, CANADA.
Quebec had been founded as early as 1608. It was not until 1641 that the foundations were laid of Montreal. But in the meantime Prince Edward's Island, Nova Scotia, and several of the West Indian islands had been occupied by English colonists.
Portugal during most of this half-century was under the Spanish king. She regained her complete independence, under a king of her own, in 1640. But by that time she had lost her empire in the East. Spain, sailing west from the New World, had arrived at the Philippine Islands, which Portugal had reached going east. Thus neither had transgressed the famous Bull. And yet East and West did meet in those islands. Drake, moreover, in his famous circumnavigation of the world, had come to the neighbouring Spice Islands, going west.
Both English and Dutch had taken a hand in destroying the Portuguese claims to any exclusive right of settlement in the East. Between English and Dutch, a decision was not reached so easily. It was largely on account of the excessive prices charged by the Dutch for pepper and other spices brought from the East Indian islands that the British East India Company was formed. It received a charter from the Crown to found settlements and claim trading rights for England. The Dutch so stubbornly held and defended their trade in the islands that the British gained no headway there until after the first half of the century. They did, however, make some trading settlements on the mainland of India, of which the earliest was in Madras, in 1639.
But an immediate impression was made on the Dutch supremacy in the islands the moment that the resolute policy of Cromwell took the place of the easy indifference of the Stuarts.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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, 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 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?
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
THE POTALA AT LHASA, FROM THE W.S.W. From Fergusson's <i>History of Indian and Eastern Architecture</i>. <i>From a photograph by Lieut. F. M. Bailey</i>.
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.
The Court of the Great Mogul in India is one of 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.
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 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.
We may probably say that no other man has made so great a difference to the history of the world, by his last will and testament, as did the King of Spain by that will which left all his monarchy to the grandson of him who already was so great as to be called the Grand Monarque. He willed away his vast territories, as it had been a five-acre field, and his subjects, of many nationalities, as they had been the sheep or cattle thereon.
And the Grand Monarque, by accepting the gift on behalf of his infant grandson, united his enemies so that they forgot their own mutual quarrels and formed a great alliance against him.
But he was very strong. He had a huge army, he had great wealth, and he had the advantage of being at the centre of the theatre of conflict, while his foes were on the circumference.
The most formidable in the alliance against him were the English and the Dutch. William III., husband of Mary, daughter of James II., was on the English throne. As Protestants and Stuarts, Mary and her sister Anne, who succeeded in 1702, in some degree conciliated both parties in England. William III., besides being married to England's queen, was himself of the English Royal line, being a grandson of Charles I. An Act of Settlement, as it was called, had been passed by the English Parliament which should exclude, after Anne's death, a son born to James II. by a second marriage. This son, a Catholic, thus excluded, received welcome at the French Court and became the centre of Jacobite intrigues for the Crown of England. It was his recognition as King of England by Louis XIV. which determined William III. to support with all his forces what came to be known as the Grand Alliance against France. William, however, died suddenly as the result of an accident before the war really began.
Queen Anne then, came to the throne, and the command of the allied English and Dutch forces was taken by John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough. He proved himself a great general. His first great victory was in the battle of Blenheim in 1704, followed by that of Ramillies two years later. The French had received so heavy a beating that the Grand Monarque sought peace; but the terms offered did not satisfy the victors.
The war was not restricted to the Netherlands. The little country of Portugal was in the alliance; so too was, for a while, another small country, the Duchy of Savoy in the north-west corner of Italy. Later Savoy went over to the Habsburg party. The Emperor was on the side of the allies.
Besides the Netherlands, the allies were victorious in Bavaria, in Italy, and for a moment in Spain itself. The approach of an English army to Madrid actually forced the king to leave his throne and his capital; but that advance was not maintained, the allies were defeated in Spain, and he was re-established. Between English and French, the war was fought so far from home as Canada—much to the English advantage in the peace by which it was concluded. But before Louis would make peace on terms that the allies were willing to accept, his armies had to suffer further defeat in the Netherlands at the hands of Marlborough. Oudenarde in 1708 and Malplaquet in the following year are the places and dates of these two English victories which were really decisive of the war.
Marlborough's success and the ascendancy which he and his duchess had gained over the queen, made him many enemies at home. We begin about this time to hear of the two great political parties, Tories and Whigs. Marlborough was of the latter party, which was in power till 1710, in which year they lost place to the former. Marlborough was dismissed from his command in the year following; and with his dismissal negotiations for peace were renewed.
Peace of Utrecht
It was not until 1713 that its terms were finally agreed, in the Peace of Utrecht; and in the main it gave the allies what they had fought for. Certain frontier fortress towns were ceded to the Netherlands by France. Louis, as representing the Habsburg house, gave up all claim to the Spanish Netherlands. The King of Spain was recognised as ruler in his own country, but renounced all right to the French Crown. On the other hand, it was the Peace of Utrecht that made Austria dominant for many years in Italy. In Canada, England gained a large territory from the French.
Look where we may on the scene of the great story in this period, we find great misery everywhere. No sooner had the wars of religion ceased than there began those wars over the succession to the thrones of the newly formed or forming nations. It seems that as soon as the people began to have any sense of nationality, as we say—any feeling that as a nation they had an existence free and independent of the others—they at once found themselves faced by the danger of some one nation, or some one Royal house ruling several nations, becoming so strong as to take their liberty from them. First were the Habsburgs and next the power of Spain, then that of France: nor have we even so by any means come to the end of these wars of succession. We have to hear of more. The nations could no longer endure the idea of an empire such as Charlemagne's, with authority over them.
The Emperor, still so-called, had little power: it was scarcely more than nominal over the German States by which he was elected. About the date of the Peace of Utrecht, an event took place in those German States which was to be of much importance in the future. That was the accession of the Elector—the ruler who had a vote for the election of the Emperor—of Brandenburg, to the throne of Prussia. Its import, of course, was not seen at the time, but it was the beginning of the dominance of Prussia over Germany.
The Emperor, with such power as he might command, had been one of the allies against Louis, but he had his own troubles on his north-eastern boundary to occupy his attention. We have before now, in course of the story, seen a King of Sweden coming down from the north and fighting in Germany. That was in the days of the great Gustavus Adolphus, commanding the Protestant forces and dying in the hour of victory at Lutzen, near Leipsic.
Charles XII
Now, in the early years of the eighteenth century, we have another King of Sweden, Charles XII., fighting in Germany; but it is no religious war that he is waging. He is fighting in the first place to maintain his right to his kingdom of Sweden. Kings of Sweden had at one time or other coveted the throne of Poland. But also more than one King of Poland had laid claim to the throne of Sweden. And now, although this claim had been formally renounced, Charles XII. had no sooner acceded, than Danes (including Norwegians), Poles, and Russians united to dethrone him. That very remarkable ruler, Peter the Great, was at this time Tsar.
The young King of Sweden first met and defeated the Danes, next the Russians, and then marched his victorious troops into Poland, which he conquered and overran. As a result of his victories he seems to have gained little, however, beyond the maintenance of his own throne in Sweden, and, after remaining two years or more in Poland, he set a king of his own nomination, Leszynska, on its throne, made peace with his enemies and went back to his own country. Three years later, however, he was again fighting in Russia, and it was during this campaign, that his armies pushed into Germany also. In Russia he finally suffered an overwhelming defeat at Pultowa: this was in 1709, and one result of that disaster was that his nominee lost the crown of Poland.
After Pultowa, Charles fled to the Turks, engaged them as his allies and persuaded them to send an army of invasion into Russia; but after a short campaign peace was made between Russia and Turkey, and in 1714 Charles returned to his own country. He died four years later; and thereafter Sweden was no more a great actor in our story. The power of Russia, on the other hand, continually increased, and within a few years Russian armies were victoriously overrunning Sweden itself. The Swedes, nevertheless, preserved their independence, but were no longer dangerously aggressive to the nations south of the Baltic.
In the last, short, chapter I tried to tell the story of the early years of the eighteenth century up to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Principally it is the story of the humbling of France, and of the checking of the ambition of Louis XIV. to unite in his descendants, together with the Crown of France, all that was included in the monarchy of Spain. That ambitious design was checked, and from now onward we shall see that a great motive in the story is the preservation of what became known as "the balance of power in Europe"; so that no one nation should have too preponderant a superiority over the rest.
The purpose of the present chapter is to carry forward the story to the middle of the century, or, more precisely, to another very important peace treaty, that between England and France, signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748.
The Peace of Utrecht had indeed included in its provisions a settlement between England and France; but within a few years war broke out again in Europe, which involved both these countries, and again it was war over the succession to thrones. There was war over the succession to the throne of Poland, to the throne of Austria, and, although it is not written of by historians as a war of succession, it really was a small war of the same kind in which England very soon found herself engaged in Scotland.. And, as ever of old, France and her Catholic king sided with the Scottish Catholics against the English Protestant king. The Court of France had, as we have noted, given welcome and shelter to the son, by his second marriage, of James II., who had a claim by birth to the English Crown.
Hanoverian English Kings
But by a recent law of England no Catholic could succeed to the throne. The Act of Settlement gave the Crown of England to George, Elector of Hanover, who was a Protestant and son of a Protestant grand-daughter of James I. It was thus that the Hanoverian dynasty, represented by our present King George V., attained the throne of England. Until Queen Victoria's accession, the sovereignty of Hanover, which became a kingdom when the Bourbon king was restored to the throne of France, also belonged to the King of England. But the laws of Hanover did not recognise succession through the female line, or admit of a queen as ruler; and therefore the two Crowns were separated when Victoria became sovereign of England.
The son of James II. came over to Scotland in 1715 and raised a revolt there, with the aid of some of the Highland clans; but this rising, known in history, from its date, as "The Fifteen," was easily put down and made no abiding mark on the story.
The next, which really was of some importance, of the wars of succession was that waged about the throne of Poland. It was a throne, as we have seen, in frequent dispute, but generally the trouble was fought out between Russia, Sweden, and Poland itself, with eastern German States taking some hand in it. Usually these German States acted as a kind of buffer between that particular trouble and the West of Europe, rather as Austria, southward, acted as a buffer for the West against the Turk. But now the King of France was drawn into the fight, because he had married a daughter of the Leszynska whom Charles of Sweden had made King of Poland for a few years before the disastrous overthrow of the Swedes at Pultowa. Russia supported the cause of a rival candidate to the throne, and Leszynska and his French allies were defeated. The chief importance of this war of the Polish succession, for the general story, is that it resulted in a large increase of Russia's power over Poland. The successive rulers of Russia began to be more and more fully recognised as the heads of the Slav people and the supreme upholders of the Greek Church.
At the same time another power, a Protestant power, that of Prussia, was becoming more and more formidable along the shores of the Baltic to the north of Poland, and the time is near at hand when we shall see these two, Russia and Prussia, playing a very leading part in the story.
For the moment, however, the western nations are perhaps not considering them greatly. They are occupied with wars amongst themselves. France and Spain are in arms against each other within a very few years after the peace signed at Utrecht. In the Mediterranean, fighting is nearly perpetual. Venice takes part of Greece from the Turks, and the Turks regain it. Italy and the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily are the scenes of battles and exchanges of territory. But still we have to remember what we have seen reason to note before, that we should quite misunderstand the effect of the wars if we were to estimate them by anything like the scale which the last Great War has painfully made known to us. The fighting was all done by the professional soldiers, and the numbers engaged were what we should deem very small, even in comparison with the far smaller population of the countries at that date. The area of the fighting was restricted, so that comparatively small tracts were laid waste; nor was the land so cultivated as it is now. There were not the same crops to be destroyed.
The Austrian Succession
After the war over the Spanish Succession, which terminated with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, the most important of the wars of the same kind was that over the succession to the Austrian throne, which begun in 1740 on the accession of Maria Theresa, who was the daughter and heiress of the Emperor and Austrian Grand Duke, Charles VI.
Frederick II., King of Prussia, known in history as Frederick the Great, appears to have thought the opportunity good for getting a slice of Austrian territory for himself. It was that land which was called Silesia, and he claimed it on the ground that it had at one time belonged to the Electors of Brandenburg. The Electors of Brandenburg, we shall remember, had become rulers of the kingdom of Prussia.
Frederick was a great general, and two successive victories quickly induced Maria Theresa to make peace with him, ceding him a portion of that Silesia for which he had gone to war.