Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/239

 exhausted with political struggles, turning their back on politics altogether to seek new and more profitable interests in new channels, and to leave the battle of rights and wrongs to settle itself; the clergy, on the one side left alone among the estates to continue the tradition of liberty, but on the other declining rapidly from their function of the national conscience and memory, to be mere officials, servants of the great monarchical administrative unity that towered so high over the prostrate estates; all three alike in isolation or in. pitiful sympathy left the national action at the disposal of a king, a king like Henry VII, who would be a tyrant only in self-defence, to be succeeded by a son who would be a tyrant in very self-will. England, growing rich in the peace which its politic king and its busy people alike left all else to cultivate, growing stronger in wealth and union and abeyance of liberty, was likewise ready to act as a force at the will of one man.

Spain had finished the seven centuries of her crusade, and the two rival kingdoms, rid at last of the enemy, met and were united in the Catholic couple. In Germany Maximilian had at last concentrated in his own hands the territorial acquisitions of his house, had united Austria and her outlying states, had obtained for his son the accumulation of Burgundian fiefs, and for his grandsons the crown of Spain and Sicily, the reversion of Hungary and Bohemia besides. The Hapsburg power is a union of many unions, ill compacted, heterogeneous, uncongenial, but of extremely great might, a power consolidated by legal titles, happy and unhappy marriages, legal windfalls, traditional pretensions, but yet the most important factor for many years to come in the welfare of Europe. The strength of France is in her compactness and concentration, that of Charles V, for in him the Austrian force is first impersonated, in its extent and universality. To that extent and universality the discovery and the rapid pouring in of the wealth of America gave still new weapons and greater opportunities. France and Austria were both equipped for their struggle.

The minor actors had somehow girt up their loins also: the popes, giving up their place as the overseers of a too wide dominion, had begun to accumulate the territorial aggregate