Spaniards in that hemisphere; and there their reckless courage and superior seamanship won for them pretty much all the wealth which was not fabulous, and laid the foundation of the commercial enterprise of England. By this they converted a people once jovial, indolent, and generous into a nation of sordid, if energetic traders and restless money-getters, whose very courage was the courage of the counting-house, and the greater part of this was exercised vicariously at the expense of their hardliving employés by land and sea.
All was tending towards the irreconcilable quarrel which took place in the next reign between the court and the bourgeoisie, and which was nearly as much religious as political.
Meantime in France the last remnants of the old feudalism struggled in 113 the party warfare of the “Fronde” against Mazarin and his bureaucracy of simple corruption. Finally Louis XIV. put the coping-stone on the French monarchy by forcing his nobility, high and low, into the position of his courtiers, while his minister Colbert developed the kingdom as a tax-gathering machine by the care and talent with which he fostered the manufactures of France, just before his time at a very low ebb indeed. There was no need, therefore, to touch the revenues of the nobility, who were free to spend them in dancing attendance on the court; nay, were not free to do otherwise. The century began with the French monarchy triumphant over all its great vassals; it finished by reducing all its vassals, great and small, to the condition of courtiers, with little influence in the country-side, and diminished rents — mere absentee landlords of the worst type, endowed with privileges which could only be exercised at the cost of the starvation of the people, and the exasperation of the bourgeoisie, who furnished the funds for the court glory.