54.THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 

BY 

H. G. WELLS

54.THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 

The third quarter of the eighteenth century thus saw the remarkable and unstable spectacle of a Europe divided against itself, and no longer with any unifying political or religious idea, yet through the immense stimulation of men’s imaginations by the printed book, the printed map, and the opportunity of the new ocean-going shipping, able in a disorganized and contentious manner to dominate all the coasts of the world. It was a planless, incoherent ebullition of enterprise due to temporary and almost accidental advantages over the rest of mankind. By virtue of these advantages this new and still largely empty continent of America was peopled mainly from Western European sources, and South Africa and Australia and New Zealand marked down as prospective homes for a European population.

The motive that had sent Columbus to America and Vasco da Gama to India

was the perennial first motive of all sailors since the beginning of

things—trade. But while in the already populous and productive East

the trade motive remained dominant, and the European settlements

remained trading settlements from which the European inhabitants hoped

to return home to spend their money, the Europeans in America, dealing

with communities at a very much lower level of productive activity,

found a new inducement for persistence in the search for gold and

silver. Particularly did the mines of Spanish America yield silver.

The Europeans had to go to America not simply as armed merchants but as

prospectors, miners, searchers after natural products, and presently as

planters. In the north they sought furs. Mines and plantations

necessitated settlements. They obliged people to set up permanent

overseas homes. Finally in some cases, as when the English Puritans

went to New England in the early seventeenth 336}century to escape

religious persecution, when in the eighteenth Oglethorpe sent people

from the English debtors’ prisons to Georgia, and when in the end of

the eighteenth the Dutch sent orphans to the Cape of Good Hope, the

Europeans frankly crossed the seas to find new homes for good. In the

nineteenth century, and especially after the coming of the steamship,

the stream of European emigration to the new empty lands of America and

Australia rose for some decades to the scale of a great migration.

So there grew up permanent overseas populations of Europeans, and the

European culture was transplanted to much larger areas than those in

which it had been developed. These new communities bringing a

ready-made civilization with them to these new lands grew up, as it

were, unplanned and unperceived; the statecraft of Europe did not

foresee them, and was unprepared with any ideas about their treatment.

The politicians and ministers of Europe continued to regard them as

essentially expeditionary establishments, sources of revenue,

“possessions” and “dependencies,” long after their peoples had

developed a keen sense of their separate social life. And also they

continued to treat them as helplessly subject to the mother country

long after the population had spread inland out of reach of any

effectual punitive operations from the sea.

Because until right into the nineteenth century, it must be remembered,

the link of all these overseas empires was the oceangoing sailing ship.

On land the swiftest thing was still the horse, and the cohesion and

unity of political systems on land was still limited by the limitations

of horse communications.

Now at the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century the

northern two-thirds of North America was under the British crown.

France had abandoned America. Except for Brazil, which was Portuguese,

and one or two small islands and areas in French, British, Danish and

Dutch hands, Florida, Louisiana, California and all America to the

south was Spanish. It was the British colonies south of Maine and Lake

Ontario that first demonstrated the inadequacy of the sailing ship to

hold overseas populations together in one political system.

These British colonies were very miscellaneous in their origin and

character. There were French, Swedish and Dutch settlements as well as

British; there were British Catholics in Maryland and British

ultra-Protestants in New England, and while the New Englanders farmed

their own land and denounced slavery, the British in Virginia and the

south were planters employing a swelling multitude of imported negro

slaves. There was no natural common unity in such states. To get from

one to the other might mean a coasting voyage hardly less tedious than

the transatlantic crossing. But the union that diverse origin and

natural conditions denied the British Americans was forced upon them by

the selfishness and stupidity of the British government in London.

They were taxed without any voice in the spending of the taxes; their

trade was sacrificed to British interests; the highly profitable slave

trade was maintained by the British government in spite of the

opposition of the Virginians who—though quite willing to hold and use

slaves—feared to be swamped by an ever-growing barbaric black

population.

Britain at that time was lapsing towards an intenser form of monarchy,

and the obstinate personality of George III (1760- 1820) did much to

force on a struggle between the home and the colonial governments.

The conflict was precipitated by legislation which favoured the London

East India Company at the expense of the American shipper. Three

cargoes of tea which were imported under the new conditions were thrown

overboard in Boston harbour by a band of men disguised as Indians

(1773). Fighting only began in 1775 when the British government

attempted to arrest two of the American leaders at Lexington near

Boston. The first shots were fired in Lexington by the British; the

first fighting occurred at Concord.

So the American War of Independence began, though for more than a year

the colonists showed themselves extremely unwilling to sever their

links with the mother land. It was not until the middle of 1776 that

the Congress of the insurgent states issued “The Declaration of

Independence.” George Washington, who like many of the leading

colonists of the time had had a military training in the wars against

the French, was made commander-in-chief. In 1777 a British general,

General Burgoyne, in an attempt to reach New York from Canada, was

defeated at Freemans Farm and obliged to surrender at Saratoga. In the

same year the French and Spanish declared war upon Great Britain,

greatly hampering her sea communications. A second British army under

General Cornwallis was caught in the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia and

obliged to capitulate in 1781. In 1783 peace was made in Paris, and

the Thirteen Colonies from Maine to Georgia became a union of

independent sovereign States. So the United States of America came

into existence. Canada remained loyal to the British flag.

For four years these States had only a very feeble central government

under certain Articles of Confederation, and they seemed destined to

break up into separate independent communities. Their immediate

separation was delayed by the hostility of the British and a certain

aggressiveness on the part of the French which brought home to them the

immediate dangers of division. A Constitution was drawn up and

ratified in 1788 establishing a more efficient Federal government with

a President holding very considerable powers, and the weak sense of

national unity was invigorated by a second war with Britain in 1812.

Nevertheless the area covered by the States was so wide and their

interests so diverse at that time, that—given only the means of

communication then available—a disintegration of the Union into

separate states on the European scale of size was merely a question of

time. Attendance at Washington meant a long, tedious and insecure

journey for the senators and congressmen of the remoter districts, and

the mechanical impediments to the diffusion of a common education and a

common literature and intelligence were practically insurmountable.

Forces were at work in the world however that were to arrest the

process of differentiation altogether. Presently came the river

steamboat and then the railway and the telegraph to save the United

States from fragmentation, and weave its dispersed people together

again into the first of great modern nations.

Twenty-two years later the Spanish colonies in America were to follow

the example of the Thirteen and break their connection with Europe.

But being more dispersed over the continent and separated by great

mountainous chains and deserts and forests and by the Portuguese Empire

of Brazil, they did not achieve a union among themselves. They became

a constellation of republican states, very prone at first to wars among

themselves and to revolutions.

Brazil followed a rather different line towards the inevitable

separation. In 1807 the French armies under Napoleon had occupied the

mother country of Portugal, and the monarchy had fled to Brazil. From

that time on until they separated, Portugal was rather a dependency of

Brazil than Brazil of Portugal. In 1822 Brazil declared itself a

separate Empire under Pedro I, a son of the Portuguese King. But the

new world has never been very favourable to monarchy. In 1889 the

Emperor of Brazil was shipped off quietly to Europe, and the United

States of Brazil fell into line with the rest of republican America.

53.THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE EUROPEANS IN ASIA AND OVERSEAS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 

BY 

H. G. WELLS

53.THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE EUROPEANS IN ASIA AND OVERSEAS 

While Central Europe thus remained divided and confused, the Western Europeans and particularly the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the British were extending the area of their struggles across the seas of all the world. The printing press had dissolved the political ideas of Europe into a vast and at first indeterminate fermentation, but that other great innovation, the ocean-going sailing ship, was inexorably extending the range of European experience to the furthermost limits of salt water.

The first overseas settlements of the Dutch and Northern Atlantic

Europeans were not for colonization but for trade and mining. The

Spaniards were first in the field; they claimed dominion over the whole

of this new world of America. Very soon however the Portuguese asked

for a share. The Pope—it was one of the last acts of Rome as mistress

of the world—divided the new continent between these two first-comers,

giving Portugal Brazil and everything else east of a line 370 leagues

west of the Cape Verde islands, and all the rest to Spain (1494). The

Portuguese at this time were also pushing overseas enterprise southward

and eastward. In 1497 Vasco da Gama had sailed from Lisbon round the

Cape to Zanzibar and then to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were

Portuguese ships in Java and the Moluccas, and the Portuguese were

setting up and fortifying trading stations round and about the coasts

of the Indian Ocean. Mozambique, Goa, and two smaller possessions in

India, Macao in China and a part of Timor are to this day Portuguese

possessions.

The nations excluded from America by the papal settlement paid little

heed to the rights of Spain and Portugal. The English, the Danes and

Swedes, and presently the Dutch, were soon staking out claims in North

America and the West Indies, and his Most Catholic Majesty of France

heeded the papal settlement as little as any Protestant. The wars of

Europe extended themselves to these claims and possessions.

In the long run the English were the most successful in this scramble

for overseas possessions. The Danes and Swedes were too deeply

entangled in the complicated affairs of Germany to sustain effective

expeditions abroad. Sweden was wasted upon the German battlefields by

a picturesque king, Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant “Lion of the

North.” The Dutch were the heirs of such small settlements as Sweden

made in America, and the Dutch were too near French aggressions to hold

their own against the British. In the far East the chief rivals for

empire were the British, Dutch and French, and in America the British,

French and Spanish. The British had the supreme advantage of a water

frontier, the “silver streak” of the English Channel, against Europe.

The tradition of the Latin Empire entangled them least.

France has always thought too much in terms of Europe. Throughout the

eighteenth century she was wasting her opportunities of expansion in

West and East alike in order to dominate Spain, Italy and the German

confusion. The religious and political dissensions of Britain in the

seventeenth century had driven many of the English to seek a permanent

home in America. They struck root and increased and multiplied, giving

the British a great advantage in the American struggle. In 1756 and

1760 the French lost Canada to the British and their American

colonists, and a few years later the British trading company found

itself completely dominant over French, Dutch and Portuguese in the

peninsula of India. The great Mongol Empire of Baber, Akbar and their

successors had now far gone in decay, and the story of its practical

capture by a London trading company, the British East India Company, is

one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole history of

conquest.

This East India Company had been originally at the time of its

incorporation under Queen Elizabeth no more than a company of sea

adventurers. Step by step they had been forced to raise troops and arm

their ships. And now this trading company, with its tradition of gain,

found itself dealing not merely in spices and dyes and tea and jewels,

but in the revenues and territories of princes and the destinies of

India. It had come to buy and sell, and it found itself achieving a

tremendous piracy. There was no one to challenge its proceedings. Is

it any wonder that its captains and commanders and officials, nay, even

its clerks and common soldiers, came back to England loaded with

spoils?

Men under such circumstances, with a great and wealthy land at their

mercy, could not determine what they might or might not do. It was a

strange land to them, with a strange sunlight; its brown people seemed

a different race, outside their range of sympathy; its mysterious

temples sustained fantastic standards of behaviour. Englishmen at home

were perplexed when presently these generals and officials came back to

make dark accusations against each other of extortions and cruelties.

Upon Clive Parliament passed a vote of censure. He committed suicide

in 1774. In 1788 Warren Hastings, a second great Indian administrator,

was impeached and acquitted (1792). It was a strange and unprecedented

situation in the world’s history. The English Parliament found itself

ruling over a London trading company, which in its turn was dominating

an empire far greater and more populous than all the domains of the

British crown. To the bulk of the English people India was a remote,

fantastic, almost inaccessible land, to which adventurous poor young

men went out, to return after many years very rich and very choleric

old gentlemen. It was difficult for the English to conceive what the

life of these countless brown millions in the eastern sunshine could

be. Their imaginations declined the task. India remained romantically

unreal. It was impossible for the English, therefore, to exert any

effective supervision and control over the company’s proceedings.

And while the Western European powers were thus fighting for these

fantastic overseas empires upon every ocean in the world, two great

land conquests were in progress in Asia. China had thrown off the

Mongol yoke in 1360, and flourished under the great native dynasty of

the Mings until 1644. Then the Manchus, another Mongol people,

reconquered China and remained masters of China until 1912. Meanwhile

Russia was pushing East and growing to greatness in the world’s

affairs. The rise of this great central power of the old world, which

is neither altogether of the East nor altogether of the West, is one of

the utmost importance to our human destiny. Its expansion is very

largely due to the appearance of a Christian steppe people, the

Cossacks, who formed a barrier between the feudal agriculture of Poland

and Hungary to the west and the Tartar to the east. The Cossacks were

the wild east of Europe, and in many ways not unlike the wild west of

the United States in the middle nineteenth century. All who had made

Russia too hot to hold them, criminals as well as the persecuted

innocent, rebellious serfs, religious secretaries, thieves, vagabonds,

murderers, sought asylum in the southern steppes and there made a fresh

start and fought for life and freedom against Pole, Russian and Tartar

alike. Doubtless fugitives from the Tartars to the east also

contributed to the Cossack mixture. Slowly these border folk were

incorporated in the Russian imperial service, much as the highland

clans of Scotland were converted into regiments by the British

government. New lands were offered them in Asia. They became a weapon

against the dwindling power of the Mongolian nomads, first in Turkestan

and then across Siberia as far as the Amur.

The decay of Mongol energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

is very difficult to explain. Within two or three centuries from the

days of Jengis and Timurlane Central Asia had relapsed from a period of

world ascendancy to extreme political impotence. Changes of climate,

unrecorded pestilences, infections of a malarial type, may have played

their part in this recession—which may be only a temporary recession

measured by the scale of universal history—of the Central Asian

peoples. Some authorities think that the spread of Buddhist teaching

from China also had a pacifying influence upon them. At any rate, by

the sixteenth century the Mongol, Tartar and Turkish peoples were no

longer pressing outward, but were being invaded, subjugated and pushed

back both by Christian Russia in the west and by China in the east.

All through the seventeenth century the Cossacks were spreading

eastward from European Russia, and settling wherever they found

agricultural conditions. Cordons of forts and stations formed a moving

frontier to these settlements to the south, where the Turkomans were

still strong and active; to the north-east, however, Russia had no

frontier until she reached right to the Pacific....

52.THE AGE OF POLITICAL EXPERIMENTS; OF GRAND MONARCHY AND PARLIAMENTS AND REPUBLICANISM IN EUROPE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 

BY 

H. G. WELLS

52.THE AGE OF POLITICAL EXPERIMENTS; OF GRAND MONARCHY AND PARLIAMENTS AND REPUBLICANISM IN EUROPE 

The Latin Church was broken, the Holy Roman Empire was in extreme decay; the history of Europe from the opening of the sixteenth century onward is a story of peoples feeling their way darkly to some new method of government, better adapted to the new conditions that were arising. In the Ancient World, over long periods of time, there had been changes of dynasty and even changes of ruling race and language, but the form of government through monarch and temple remained fairly stable, and still more stable was the ordinary way of living. In this modern Europe since the sixteenth century the dynastic changes are unimportant, and the interest of history lies in the wide and increasing variety of experiments in political and social organization.

The political history of the world from the sixteenth century onward

was, we have said, an effort, a largely unconscious effort, of mankind

to adapt its political and social methods to certain new conditions

that had now arisen. The effort to adapt was complicated by the fad

that the conditions themselves were changing with a steadily increasing

rapidity. The adaptation, mainly unconscious and almost always

unwilling (for man in general hates voluntary change), has lagged more

and more behind the alterations in conditions. From the sixteenth

century onward the history of mankind is a story of political and

social institutions becoming more and more plainly misfits, less

comfortable and more vexatious, and of the slow reluctant realization

of the need for a conscious and deliberate reconstruction of the whole

scheme of human societies in the face of needs and possibilities new to all the former experiences of life.

What are these changes in the conditions of human life that have

disorganized that balance of empire, priest, peasant and trader, with

periodic refreshment by barbaric conquest, that has held human affairs

in the Old World in a sort of working rhythm for more than a hundred centuries?

They are manifold and various, for human affairs are multitudinously

complex; but the main changes seem all to turn upon one cause, namely

the growth and extension of a knowledge of the nature of things,

beginning first of all in small groups of intelligent people and

spreading at first slowly, and in the last five hundred years very

rapidly, to larger and larger proportions of the general population.

But there has also been a great change in human conditions due to a

change in the spirit of human life. This change has gone on side by

side with the increase and extension of knowledge, and is subtly

connected with it. There has been an increasing disposition to treat a

life based on the common and more elementary desires and gratifications

as unsatisfactory, and to seek relationship with and service and

participation in a larger life. This is the common characteristic of

all the great religions that have spread throughout the world in the

last twenty odd centuries, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam alike.

They have had to do with the spirit of man in a way that the older

religions did not have to do. They are forces quite different in their

nature and effect from the old fetishistic blood-sacrifice religions of

priest and temple that they have in part modified and in part replaced.

They have gradually evolved a self-respect in the individual and a

sense of participation and responsibility in the common concerns of

mankind that did not exist among the populations of the earlier

civilizations.

The first considerable change in the conditions of political and social

life was the simplification and extended use of writing in the ancient

civilizations which made larger empires and wider political

understandings practicable and inevitable. The next movement forward

came with the introduction of the horse, and later on of the camel as a

means of transport, the use of wheeled vehicles, the extension of roads

and the increased military efficiency due to the discovery of

terrestrial iron. Then followed the profound economic disturbances due

to the device of coined money and the change in the nature of debt,

proprietorship and trade due to this convenient but dangerous

convention. The empires grew in size and range, and men’s ideas grew

likewise to correspond with these things. Came the disappearance of

local gods, the age of theocrasia, and the teaching of the great world

religions. Came also the beginnings of reasoned and recorded history

and geography, the first realization by man of his profound ignorance,

and the first systematic search for knowledge.

For a time the scientific process which began so brilliantly in Greece

and Alexandria was interrupted. The raids of the Teutonic barbarians,

the westward drive of the Mongolian peoples, convulsive religious

reconstruction and great pestilences put enormous strains upon

political and social order. When civilization emerged again from this

phase of conflict and confusion, slavery was no longer the basis of

economic life; and the first paper-mills were preparing a new medium

for collective information and co-operation in printed matter.

Gradually at this point and that, the search for knowledge, the

systematic scientific process, was resumed.

And now from the sixteenth century onward, as an inevitable by-product

of systematic thought, appeared a steadily increasing series of

inventions and devices affecting the intercommunication and interaction

of men with one another. They all tended towards wider range of action,

greater mutual benefits or injuries, and increased co-operation, and

they came faster and faster. Men’s minds had not been prepared for

anything of the sort, and until the great catastrophes at the beginning

of the twentieth century quickened men’s minds, the historian has very

little to tell of any intelligently planned attempts to meet the new

conditions this increasing flow of inventions was creating. The history

of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an

imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison

that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but

incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and

incongruous dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and opportunity.

Since history is the story not of individual lives but of communities,

it is inevitable that the inventions that figure most in the historical

record are inventions affecting communications. In the sixteenth

century the chief new things that we have to note are the appearance of

printed paper and the sea-worthy, ocean-going sailing ship using the

new device of the mariner’s compass. The former cheapened, spread, and revolutionized teaching, public information and discussion, and the fundamental operations of political activity. The latter made the

round world one. But almost equally important was the increased

utilization and improvement of guns and gunpowder which the Mongols had

first brought westward in the thirteenth century. This destroyed the

practical immunity of barons in their castles and of walled cities.

Guns swept away feudalism. Constantinople fell to guns. Mexico and Peru fell before the terror of the Spanish guns.

The seventeenth century saw the development of systematic scientific

publication, a less conspicuous but ultimately far more pregnant

innovation. Conspicuous among the leaders in this great forward step

was Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) afterwards Lord Verulam, Lord

Chancellor of England. He was the pupil and perhaps the mouthpiece of

another Englishman; Dr. Gilbert, the experimental philosopher of

Colchester (1540-1603). This second Bacon, like the first, preached

observation and experiment, and he used the inspiring and fruitful form

of a Utopian story, _The New Atlantis_, to express his dream of a great service of scientific research.

Presently arose the Royal Society of London, the Florentine Society,

and later other national bodies for the encouragement of research and

the publication and exchange of knowledge. These European scientific

societies became fountains not only of countless inventions but also of

a destructive criticism of the grotesque theological history of the

world that had dominated and crippled human thought for many centuries.

Neither the seventeenth nor the eighteenth century witnessed any

innovations so immediately revolutionary in human conditions as printed

paper and the ocean-going ship, but there was a steady accumulation of

knowledge and scientific energy that was to bear its full fruits in the

nineteenth century. The exploration and mapping of the world went on.

Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand appeared on the map. In Great Britain

in the eighteenth century coal coke began to be used for metallurgical

purposes, leading to a considerable cheapening of iron and to the

possibility of casting and using it in larger pieces than had been

possible before, when it had been smelted with wood charcoal. Modern machinery dawned.

Like the trees of the celestial city, science bears bud and flower and

fruit at the same time and continuously. With the onset of the

nineteenth century the real fruition of science—which indeed henceforth

may never cease—began. First came steam and steel, the railway, the

great liner, vast bridges and buildings, machinery of almost limitless

power, the possibility of a bountiful satisfaction of every material

human need, and then, still more wonderful, the hidden treasures of

electrical science were opened to men ....

We have compared the political and social life of man from the

sixteenth century onward to that of a sleeping prisoner who lies and

dreams while his prison burns about him. In the sixteenth century the

European mind was still going on with its Latin Imperial dream, its

dream of a Holy Roman Empire, united under a Catholic Church. But just

as some uncontrollable element in our composition will insist at times

upon introducing into our dreams the most absurd and destructive

comments, so thrust into this dream we find the sleeping face and

craving stomach of the Emperor Charles V, while Henry VIII of England and Luther tear the unity of Catholicism to shreds.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dream turned to

personal monarchy. The history of nearly all Europe during this period

tells with variations the story of an attempt to consolidate a

monarchy, to make it absolute and to extend its power over weaker

adjacent regions, and of the steady resistance, first of the landowners

and then with the increase of foreign trade and home industry, of the

growing trading and moneyed class, to the exaction and interference of

the crown. There is no universal victory of either side; here it is

the King who gets the upper hand while there it is the man of private

property who beats the King. In one case we find a King becoming the

sun and centre of his national world, while just over his borders a

sturdy mercantile class maintains a republic. So wide a range of

variation shows how entirely experimental, what local accidents, were all the various governments of this period.

A very common figure in these national dramas is the King’s minister,

often in the still Catholic countries a prelate, who stands behind the

King, serves him and dominates him by his indispensable services.

Here in the limits set to us it is impossible to tell these various

national dramas in detail. The trading folk of Holland went Protestant

and republican, and cast off the rule of Philip II of Spain, the son of

the Emperor Charles V. In England Henry VIII and his minister Wolsey,

Queen Elizabeth and her minister Burleigh, prepared the foundations of

an absolutism that was wrecked by the folly of James I and Charles I.

Charles I was beheaded for treason to his people (1649), a new turn in

the political thought of Europe. For a dozen years (until 1660)

Britain was a republic; and the crown was an unstable power, much

overshadowed by Parliament, until George III (1760-1820) made a

strenuous and partly successful effort to restore its predominance.

The King of France, on the other hand, was the most successful of all

the European Kings in perfecting monarchy. Two great ministers,

Richelieu (1585-1642) and Mazarin (1602-1661), built up the power of

the crown in that country, and the process was aided by the long reign

and very considerable abilities of King Louis XIV, “the Grand Monarque” (1643-1715).

Louis XIV was indeed the pattern King of Europe. He was, within his

limitations, an exceptionally capable King; his ambition was stronger

than his baser passions, and he guided his country towards bankruptcy

through the complication of a spirited foreign policy with an elaborate

dignity that still extorts our admiration. His immediate desire was to

consolidate and extend France to the Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb

the Spanish Netherlands; his remoter view saw the French Kings as the

possible successors of Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He

made bribery a state method almost more important than warfare.

Charles II of England was in his pay, and so were most of the Polish

nobility, presently to be described. His money, or rather the money of

the tax- paying classes in France, went everywhere. But his prevailing

occupation was splendour. His great palace at Versailles with its

salons, its corridors, its mirrors, its terraces and fountains and

parks and prospects, was the envy and admiration of the world.

He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and princelet in Europe

was building his own Versailles as much beyond his means as his

subjects and credits would permit. Everywhere the nobility rebuilt or

extended their chateaux to the new pattern. A great industry of

beautiful and elaborate fabrics and furnishings developed. The

luxurious arts flourished everywhere; sculpture in alabaster, faience,

gilt woodwork, metal work, stamped leather, much music, magnificent

painting, beautiful printing and bindings, fine crockery, fine

vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine furniture went a strange race of

“gentlemen” in tall powdered wigs, silks and laces, poised upon high

red heels, supported by amazing canes; and still more wonderful

“ladies,” under towers of powdered hair and wearing vast expansions of

silk and satin sustained on wire. Through it all postured the great

Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of the meagre and sulky and bitter

faces that watched him from those lower darknesses to which his

sunshine did not penetrate.

The German people remained politically divided throughout this period

of the monarchies and experimental governments, and a considerable

number of ducal and princely courts aped the splendours of Versailles

on varying scales. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), a devastating

scramble among the Germans, Swedes and Bohemians for fluctuating

political advantages, sapped the energies of Germany for a century. A

map must show the crazy patchwork in which this struggle ended, a map

of Europe according to the peace of Westphalia (1648). One sees a

tangle of principalities, dukedoms, free states and the like, some

partly in and partly out of the Empire. Sweden’s arm, the reader will

note, reached far into Germany; and except for a few islands of

territory within the imperial boundaries France was still far from the

Rhine. Amidst this patchwork the Kingdom of Prussia—it became a

Kingdom in 1701—rose steadily to prominence and sustained a series of

successful wars. Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740-86) had his

Versailles at Potsdam, where his court spoke French, read French

literature and rivalled the culture of the French King.

In 1714 the Elector of Hanover became King of England, adding one more

to the list of monarchies half in and half out of the empire.

The Austrian branch of the descendants of Charles V retained the title

of Emperor; the Spanish branch retained Spain. But now there was also

an Emperor of the East again. After the fall of Constantinople (1453),

the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great (1462-1505), claimed to be

heir to the Byzantine throne and adopted the Byzantine double-headed

eagle upon his arms. His grandson, Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible

(1533-1584), assumed the imperial title of Cæsar (Tsar). But only in

the latter half of the seventeenth century did Russia cease to seem

remote and Asiatic to the European mind. The Tsar Peter the Great

(1682-1725) brought Russia into the arena of Western affairs. He built

a new capital for his empire, Petersburg upon the Neva, that played the

part of a window between Russia and Europe, and he set up his

Versailles at Peterhof eighteen miles away, employing a French

architect who gave him a terrace, fountains, cascades, picture gallery,

park and all the recognized appointments of Grand Monarchy. In Russia

as in Prussia French became the language of the court.

Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia and Russia was the Polish

kingdom, an ill-organized state of great landed proprietors too jealous

of their own individual grandeur to permit more than a nominal kingship

to the monarch they elected. Her fate was division among these three

neighbours, in spite of the efforts of France to retain her as an

independent ally. Switzerland at this time was a group of republican

cantons; Venice was a republic; Italy like so much of Germany was

divided among minor dukes and princes. The Pope ruled like a prince in

the papal states, too fearful now of losing the allegiance of the

remaining Catholic princes to interfere between them and their subjects

or to remind the world of the commonweal of Christendom. There remained

indeed no common political idea in Europe at all; Europe was given over altogether to division and diversity.

All these sovereign princes and republics carried on schemes of

aggrandizement against each other. Each one of them pursued a “foreign

policy” of aggression against its neighbours and of aggressive

alliances. We Europeans still live to-day in the last phase of this

age of the multifarious sovereign states, and still suffer from the

hatreds, hostilities and suspicions it engendered. The history of this

time becomes more and more manifestly “gossip,” more and more unmeaning

and wearisome to a modern intelligence. You are told of how this war

was caused by this King’s mistress, and how the jealousy of one

minister for another caused that. A tittle-tattle of bribes and

rivalries disgusts the intelligent student. The more permanently

significant fact is that in spite of the obstruction of a score of

frontiers, reading and thought still spread and increased and

inventions multiplied. The eighteenth century saw the appearance of a literature profoundly sceptical and critical of the courts and policies

of the time. In such a book as Voltaire’s _Candide_ we have the

expression of an infinite weariness with the planless confusion of the

European world.

51.THE EMPEROR CHARLES V | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 

BY 

H. G. WELLS

51.THE EMPEROR CHARLES V 

The Holy Roman Empire came to a sort of climax in the reign of the Emperor Charles V. He was one of the most extraordinary monarchs that Europe has ever seen. For a time he had the air of being the greatest monarch since Charlemagne.

His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the creation

of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I (1459- 1519). Some

families have fought, others have intrigued their way to world power;

the Habsburgs married their way. Maximilian began his career with

Austria, Styria, part of Alsace and other districts, the original

Habsburg patrimony; he married—the lady’s name scarcely matters to

us—the Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him

after his first wife’s death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he

tried unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in

succession to his father, Frederick III, in 1493, and married the duchy

of Milan. Finally he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of

Ferdinand and Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella of Columbus, who not

only reigned over a freshly united Spain and over Sardinia and the

kingdom of the two Sicilies, but over all America west of Brazil. So

it was that this Charles V, his grandson, inherited most of the

American continent and between a third and a half of what the Turks had

left of Europe. He succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506. When his

grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516, he became practically king of the

Spanish dominions, his mother being imbecile; and his grandfather

Maximilian dying in 1519, he was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively tender age of twenty.

He was a fair young man with a not very intelligent face, a thick upper

lip and a long clumsy chin. He found himself in a world of young and

vigorous personalities. It was an age of brilliant young monarchs.

Francis I had succeeded to the French throne in 1515 at the age of

twenty-one, Henry VIII had become King of England in 1509 at eighteen.

It was the age of Baber in India (1526-1530) and Suleiman the

Magnificent in Turkey (1520), both exceptionally capable monarchs, and

the Pope Leo X (1513) was also a very distinguished Pope. The Pope and

Francis I attempted to prevent the election of Charles as Emperor

because they dreaded the concentration of so much power in the hands of

one man. Both Francis I and Henry VIII offered themselves to the

imperial electors. But there was now a long established tradition of

Habsburg Emperors (since 1273), and some energetic bribery secured the election for Charles.

At first the young man was very much a magnificent puppet in the hands of his ministers. Then slowly he began to assert himself and take control. He began to realize something of the threatening complexities of his exalted position. It was a position as unsound as it was splendid.

From the very outset of his reign he was faced by the situation created

by Luther’s agitations in Germany. The Emperor had one reason for

siding with the reformers in the opposition of the Pope to his

election. But he had been brought up in Spain, that most Catholic of

countries, and he decided against Luther. So he came into conflict

with the Protestant princes and particularly the Elector of Saxony. He

found himself in the presence of an opening rift that was to split the

outworn fabric of Christendom into two contending camps. His attempts

to close that rift were strenuous and honest and ineffective. There

was an extensive peasant revolt in Germany which interwove with the

general political and religious disturbance. And these internal

troubles were complicated by attacks upon the Empire from east and west

alike. On the west of Charles was his spirited rival, Francis I; to

the east was the ever advancing Turk, who was now in Hungary, in

alliance with Francis and clamouring for certain arrears of tribute

from the Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and army of Spain

at his disposal, but it was extremely difficult to get any effective

support in money from Germany. His social and political troubles were complicated by financial distresses. He was forced to ruinous borrowing.

On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful

against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was North

Italy; the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances and

retreats depended mainly on the arrival of reinforcements. The German

army invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back into Italy,

lost Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and

unsuccessful siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces,

defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. But thereupon the Pope and Henry

VIII, still haunted by the fear of his attaining excessive power,

turned against Charles. The German troops in Milan, under the

Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than followed their

commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed the city and pillaged it

(1527). The Pope took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo while the

looting and slaughter went on. He bought off the German troops at last

by the payment of four hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such

confused fighting impoverished all Europe. At last the Emperor found

himself triumphant in Italy. In 1530, he was crowned by the Pope—he

was the last German Emperor to be so crowned—at Bologna.

Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They had

defeated and killed the king of Hungary in 1526, they held Buda-Pesth,

and in 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took Vienna. The

Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances, and did his utmost to

drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest difficulty in getting

the German princes to unite even with this formidable enemy upon their

very borders. Francis I remained implacable for a time, and there was

a new French war; but in 1538 Charles won his rival over to a more

friendly attitude after ravaging the south of France. Francis and

Charles then formed an alliance against the Turk. But the Protestant

princes, the German princes who were resolved to break away from Rome,

had formed a league, the Schmalkaldic League, against the Emperor, and

in the place of a great campaign to recover Hungary for Christendom

Charles had to turn his mind to the gathering internal struggle in

Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the opening war. It was a

struggle, a sanguinary irrational bickering of princes, for ascendancy,

now flaming into war and destruction, now sinking back to intrigues and

diplomacies; it was a snake’s sack of princely policies that was to go

on writhing incurably right into the nineteenth century and to waste

and desolate Central Europe again and again.

The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at work in

these gathering troubles. He was for his time and station an

exceptionally worthy man, and he seems to have taken the religious

dissensions that were tearing Europe into warring fragments as genuine

theological differences. He gathered diets and councils in futile

attempts at reconciliation. Formulæ and confessions were tried over.

The student of German history must struggle with the details of the

Religious Peace of Nuremberg, the settlement at the Diet of Ratisbon,

the Interim of Augsburg, and the like. Here we do but mention them as

details in the worried life of this culminating Emperor. As a matter

of fact, hardly one of the multifarious princes and rulers in Europe

seems to have been acting in good faith. The widespread religious

trouble of the world, the desire of the common people for truth and

social righteousness, the spreading knowledge of the time, all those

things were merely counters in the imaginations of princely diplomacy.

Henry VIII of England, who had begun his career with a book against

heresy, and who had been rewarded by the Pope with the title of

“Defender of the Faith,” being anxious to divorce his first wife in

favour of a young lady named Anne Boleyn, and wishing also to loot the

vast wealth of the church in England, joined the company of Protestant

princes in 1530. Sweden, Denmark and Norway had already gone over to the Protestant side.

The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after the death of

Martin Luther. We need not trouble about the incidents of the

campaign. The Protestant Saxon army was badly beaten at Lochau. By

something very like a breach of faith Philip of Hesse, the Emperor’s

chief remaining antagonist, was caught and imprisoned, and the Turks

were bought off by the promise of an annual tribute. In 1547, to the

great relief of the Emperor, Francis I died. So by 1547 Charles got to

a kind of settlement, and made his last efforts to effect peace where

there was no peace. In 1552 all Germany was at war again, only a

precipitate flight from Innsbruck saved Charles from capture, and in

1552, with the treaty of Passau, came another unstable equilibrium..

Such is the brief outline of the politics of the Empire for thirty-two

years. It is interesting to note how entirely the European mind was

concentrated upon the struggle for European ascendancy. Neither Turks,

French, English nor Germans had yet discovered any political interest

in the great continent of America, nor any significance in the new sea

routes to Asia. Great things were happening in America; Cortez with a

mere handful of men had conquered the great Neolithic empire of Mexico

for Spain, Pizarro had crossed the Isthmus of Panama (1530) and

subjugated another wonder-land, Peru. But as yet these events meant no

more to Europe than a useful and stimulating influx of silver to the

Spanish treasury.

It was after the treaty of Passau that Charles began to display his

distinctive originality of mind. He was now entirely bored and

disillusioned by his imperial greatness. A sense of the intolerable

futility of these European rivalries came upon him. He had never been

of a very sound constitution, he was naturally indolent and he was

suffering greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made over all his

sovereign rights in Germany to his brother Ferdinand, and Spain and the

Netherlands he resigned to his son Philip. Then in a sort of

magnificent dudgeon he retired to a monastery at Yuste, among the oak

and chestnut forests in the hills to the north of the Tagus valley.

There he died in 1558.

Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this retirement, this

renunciation of the world by this tired majestic Titan, world-weary,

seeking in an austere solitude his peace with God. But his retreat was

neither solitary nor austere; he had with him nearly a hundred and

fifty attendants: his establishment had all the splendour and

indulgences without the fatigues or a court, and Philip II was a

dutiful son to whom his father’s advice was a command.

And if Charles had lost his living interest in the administration of

European affairs, there were other motives of a more immediate sort to

stir him. Says Prescott: “In the almost daily correspondence between

Quixada, or Gaztelu, and the Secretary of State at Valladolid, there is

scarcely a letter that does not turn more or less on the Emperor’s

eating or his illness. The one seems naturally to follow, like a

running commentary, on the other. It is rare that such topics have

formed the burden of communications with the department of state. It

must have been no easy matter for the secretary to preserve his gravity

in the perusal of despatches in which politics and gastronomy were so

strangely mixed together. The courier from Valladolid to Lisbon was

ordered to make a detour, so as to take Jarandilla in his route, and

bring supplies to the royal table. On Thursdays he was to bring fish

to serve for the jour maigre that was to follow. The trout in the

neighbourhood Charles thought too small, so others of a larger size

were to be sent from Valladolid. Fish of every kind was to his taste,

as, indeed, was anything that in its nature or habits at all approached

to fish. Eels, frogs, oysters, occupied an important place in the

royal bill of fare. Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great

favour with him; and he regretted that he had not brought a better

supply of these from the Low Countries. On an eel-pasty he

particularly doted.”

In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III granting him a

dispensation from fasting, and allowing him to break his fast early in

the morning even when he was to take the sacrament.

Eating and doctoring! it was a return to elemental things. He had never

acquired the habit of reading, but he would be read aloud to at meals

after the fashion of Charlemagne, and would make what one narrator

describes as a “sweet and heavenly commentary.” He also amused himself

with mechanical toys, by listening to music or sermons, and by

attending to the imperial business that still came drifting in to him.

The death of the Empress, to whom he was greatly attached, had turned

his mind towards religion, which in his case took a punctilious and

ceremonial form; every Friday in Lent he scourged himself with the rest

of the monks with such good will as to draw blood. These exercises and

the gout released a bigotry in Charles that had hitherto been

restrained by considerations of policy. The appearance of Protestant

teaching close at hand in Valladolid roused him to fury. “Tell the

grand inquisitor and his council from me to be at their posts, and to

lay the axe at the root of the evil before it spreads further.” . .. He

expressed a doubt whether it would not be well, in so black an affair,

to dispense with the ordinary course of justice, and to show no mercy;

“lest the criminal, if pardoned, should have the opportunity of

repeating his crime.” He recommended, as an example, his own mode or

proceeding in the Netherlands, “where all who remained obstinate in

their errors were burned alive, and those who were admitted to

penitence were beheaded.”

And almost symbolical of his place and role in history was his

preoccupation with funerals. He seems to have had an intuition that

something great was dead in Europe and sorely needed burial, that there

was a need to write Finis, overdue. He not only attended every actual

funeral that was celebrated at Yuste, but he had services conducted for

the absent dead, he held a funeral service in memory of his wife on the

anniversary of her death, and finally he celebrated his own obsequies.

“The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds of

wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness. The

brethren in their conventual dress, and all the Emperor’s household

clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge catafalque, shrouded also

in black, which had been raised in the centre of the chapel. The

service for the burial of the dead was then performed; and, amidst the

dismal wail of the monks, the prayers ascended for the departed spirit,

that it might be received into the mansions of the blessed. The

sorrowful attendants were melted to tears, as the image of their

master’s death was presented to their minds—or they were touched, it

may be, with compassion by this pitiable display of weakness. Charles,

muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing a lighted candle in his hand,

mingled with his household, the spectator of his own obsequies; and the

doleful ceremony was concluded by his placing the taper in the hands of

the priest, in sign of his surrendering up his soul to the Almighty.”

Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And the brief

greatness of the Holy Roman Empire died with him. His realm was

already divided between his brother and his son. The Holy Roman Empire struggled on indeed to the days of Napoleon I but as an invalid and dying thing. To this day its unburied tradition still poisons the political air.