The Protestant Puritanism which 1s 97 even yet so strong in these islands, has no analogue in the Protestantism of the rest of Europe, but is a strange isolated fact, the result probably of some qualities inherent in the population, and developed by circumstances: indeed there are traces of it discoverable in medieval England, and that not amongst the Lollards only; and it must be confessed that the origin of this spirit is as obscure as the fact of its existence is baneful. Its long-enduring and deep-seated strength may be gauged by the success that always attends appeals made to it in the present day by time-serving politicians and popularity-hunting journalists.71
As regards politics, Charles V. is the personality representing the great change on that side of things. The welding of Spain into a nation, begun under Ferdinand and Isabella, the conquerors of Granada, was accomplished by him. Under the pressure of his attempts to unify Germany in the same manner, the rulers of the great territories, the princes of the Empire, consolidated their lands, and turned them 100 from feudal domains into political nations, as Prussia, Brunswick, Saxony, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Hesse Cassel, Wurtemberg, and others of less importance.
Charles V.’s rival, Francis I., continued the consolidation of the French kingdom, begun with such vigour, astuteness, and consequent success, by Louis XI. In England the Tudor monarchy put the last touch to the creation of a political nation, under the cover of the strange phantasm of the divine right of kings,—so contrary to the mediæval idea of the responsibility of the king to the feudal hierarchy in general,—which seems to have been partly the outcome of the Puritan worship of the Old Testament with its despotic oriental principles.
All this meant the crushing out of the old feudal vassals, the creation of a fresh nobility wholly dependent on the king, mere courtiers waiting on his person, or functionaries appointed to manage his estate; for the new