The effort at concerted action by the classes was manifested in the States General of France, Spain, and Portugal, the Diet in Germany, and the Parliament in England.  All these, except the Parliament, were ineffective and as it were accidental in their action; all they did was to preserve in a manner the notion of liberty.  The circumstances of England were exceptional.  The Parliament did not govern; but it became a mode of government adopted in principle, and often indispensable in practice.

Nothing, however, could arrest the march of centralisation.  In France the war of independence against England brought a sense of national unity and purpose, and feudalism was finally overthrown, and the central power made dominant, by the policy of Louis XI.  Similar effects were brought about in Spain by the war against the Moors and the rule of Ferdinand.  In England feudalism was destroyed by the Wars of the Roses, and was succeeded by the Tudor despotism.  In Germany, the House of Austria began its long ascendancy.  Thus in the fifteenth century the new principles prevailed; the old forms, the old liberties were swept aside to make way for centralised government under absolute rulers.

At the same time another new fact entered into European history.  The kings began to enter into relations with each other, to form alliances; diplomacy was created.  Since it is in the nature of diplomacy to be conducted more or less secretly by a few persons, and since the peoples did not and would not greatly concern themselves in it, this development was favourable to the strengthening of royalty.

VII.—­The Spiritual Revolt

Although the Church until the sixteenth century had successfully suppressed all attempts at spiritual independence, yet the broadening of men’s minds that began with the Crusades, and received a vigorous impetus from the Renaissance, made its mark even in the fifteenth century upon ecclesiastical affairs.  Three main facts of the moral order are presented during this period:  the ineffectual attempts of the councils of Constance and Bale to reform the Church from within; the most notable of which was that of Huss in Bohemia; and the intellectual revolution that accompanied the Renaissance.  The way was thus prepared for the event that was inaugurated when Luther burnt the Pope’s Bull at Wittenberg in 1520.

The Reformation was not, as its opponents contend, the result of accident or intrigue; nor was it, as its upholders contend, the outcome of a simple desire for the reform of abuses.  It was, in reality, a revolt of the human spirit against absolute power in spiritual affairs.  The minds of men were during the sixteenth century in energetic movement, consumed by desire for progress; the Church had become inert and stationary, yet it maintained all its pretensions and external importance.  The Church, indeed, was less tyrannical than it had formerly been, and not more corrupt.  But it had not advanced; it had lost touch with human thought.