Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/240

 of provinces in which they also could call themselves the state. Gustavus Vasa was reconstructing Sweden; although the attempt to unite the Scandinavian kingdoms had failed, the same influence that was knotting up the south into bundles was knotting up the north.

And so the struggle of powers begins. First comes the rivalry of Francis I and Charles V; with Henry VIII and the popes hovering round the combatants, aspiring to hold the balance between them, and made alternately their tools and scapegoats. The struggle is a curious one: the older idea of rights to be fought for has not altogether disappeared, but now the interest is not in the right, but in the battle. So it has been since Charles VIII, marching into Italy, had opened the new drama. Rights were sought out and put forward as the pretexts of the struggle, but the straggle was for superiority and the hold on power. The action of the house of Austria was in itself defensive action; on every side its spreading dominions were at the mercy of the strong enemy whom they seemed to hem in; the action of Francis and Henry II was necessarily aggressive; wherever they turned, except seawards, there were the forces of Austria watching them; over the Pyrenees, over the Alps, over the Rhone, over the Rhine, within the historic limits of France, northwards and eastwards, there was the rival power, and even on the sea-board there were the hostile fleets.

Next comes the Reformation, a struggle it may be said of ideas, as the Hapsburg struggle with France is a struggle of rights, but primarily a struggle of powers; the rights in the one case, the ideas in the other, being the occasion rather than the essential ingredients of the rivalry.

But setting the idea side of the Reformation for the moment in the background, follow the rivalry of the foremost powers. In this aspect the Reformation cuts curiously across the earlier dividing lines: it breaks up such unity of German action as has yet existed, and gives France its first great advantage: the strange alliance of Henry II with the Protestant powers, an alliance most distinctly of force, not of idea, strikes the first hard blow at the