As modern kingdoms thus grew at the expense of empire and papacy above, so they also grew at the expense of feudal dukedoms, earldoms, and baronies below.  The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal to feudalism as to world-empire and world-church.  A series of wars occurring at this time were especially remarkable for the wholesale slaughter of the feudal nobility, whether on the field or under the headsman’s axe.  This was a conspicuous feature of the feuds of the Trastamare in Spain, of the English invasions of France, followed by the quarrel between Burgundians and Armagnacs, and of the great war of the Roses in England.  So thorough-going was the butchery in England, for example, that only twenty-nine lay peers could be found to sit in the first parliament of Henry vii in 1485.  The old nobility was almost annihilated, both in person and in property; for along with the slaughter there went wholesale confiscation, and this added greatly to the disposable wealth of the crown.  The case was essentially similar in France and Spain.  In all three countries the beginning of the sixteenth century saw the power of the crown increased and increasing.  Its vast accessions of wealth made it more independent of legislative assemblies, and at the same time enabled it to make the baronage more subservient in character by filling up the vacant places with new creations of its own.  Through the turbulent history of the next two centuries, we see the royal power aiming at unchecked supremacy and in the principal instances attaining it except in England.  Absolute despotism was reached first in Spain, under Philip ii.; in France it was reached a century later, under Louis xiv.; and at about the same time in the hereditary estates of Austria; while over all the Italian and German soil of the disorganized empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland and the dykes of the Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up a host of petty tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great autocrats at Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [Sidenote:  Increasing power of the crown]

As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but be struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong nationality without sacrificing self-government.  Powerful, indeed, is the tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward political death.  Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not to the Oriental method.  As often as we reflect upon the general state of things at the end of the seventeenth century—­the dreadful ignorance and misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe, and apparently without hope of remedy—­so often must we be impressed anew with the stupendous significance of the part played by self-governing England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the very existence of modern civilization.  It is not too much to say that in the seventeenth century