succession which troubled England to the days of Elizabeth.  Nor was the contest of less import in the history of France.  If it struck her for the moment from her height of pride, it raised her in the end to the front rank among the states of Europe.  It carried her boundaries to the Rhone and the Pyrenees.  It wrecked alike the feudal power of her noblesse and the hopes of constitutional liberty which might have sprung from the emancipation of the peasant or the action of the burgher.  It founded a royal despotism which reached its height in Richelieu and finally plunged France into the gulf of the Revolution.

[Sidenote:  The Imperial Alliance]

Of these mighty issues little could be foreseen at the moment when Philip and Edward declared war.  But from the very first the war took European dimensions.  The young king saw clearly the greater strength of France.  The weakness of the Empire, the captivity of the Papacy at Avignon, left her without a rival among European powers.  The French chivalry was the envy of the world, and its military fame had just been heightened by a victory over the Flemish communes at Cassel.  In numbers, in wealth, the French people far surpassed their neighbours over the Channel.  England can hardly have counted more than four millions of inhabitants, France boasted of twenty.  The clinging of our kings to their foreign dominions is explained by the fact that their subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have equalled in number their subjects in England.  There was the same disproportion in the wealth of the two countries and, as men held then, in their military resources.  Edward could bring only eight thousand men-at-arms to the field.  Philip, while a third of his force was busy elsewhere, could appear at the head of forty thousand.  Of the revolution in warfare which was to reverse this superiority, to make the footman rather than the horseman the strength of an army, the world and even the English king, in spite of Falkirk and Halidon, as yet recked little.  Edward’s whole energy was bent on meeting the strength of France by a coalition of powers against her, and his plans were helped by the dread which the great feudatories of the empire who lay nearest to him, the Duke of Brabant, the Counts of Hainault and Gelders, the Markgrave of Juliers, felt of French annexation.  They listened willingly enough to his offers.  Sixty thousand crowns purchased the alliance of Brabant.  Lesser subsidies bought that of the two counts and the Markgrave.  The king’s work was helped indeed by his domestic relations.  The Count of Hainault was Edward’s father-in-law; he was also the father-in-law of the Count of Gelders.  But the marriage of a third of the Count’s daughters brought the English king a more important ally.  She was wedded to the Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, and the connexion that thus existed between the English and Imperial Courts facilitated the negotiations which ended in a formal alliance.