of Lewis XII. and Anne of Britanny. This had the twofold effect of making the king of the French and the king of the English alike what their titles imported. When the crown of France had entered by forfeiture on Normandy, Anjou, and Touraine, it had become far stronger than any single feudatory. Again, the Plantagenet kings, cut off from their old home, began to be really English rulers. Hitherto England had been a dependency of Normandy or Anjou; now Aquitaine became a dependency of England. The wars of Henry II. and Richard I. were French wars, the struggles of a French feudatory striving to get the better of his suzerain. The wars of Edward III., and still more those of Henry V., were English wars. They began, indeed, in French dynastic claims, but it soon appeared that their real object was the subjection of France to England. As such, they do not immediately concern our subject. The aspect in which they do bear upon it is this. By the peace of Bretigny Edward III. resigned his claims on the crown of France; but he was recognised in return as independent Prince of Aquitaine, without any homage or superiority being reserved to the French monarch. When Aquitaine, then, was conquered by France, partly in the fourteenth, fully in the fifteenth century, it was not the "réunion" of a forfeited fief, but the absorption of a distinct and sovereign state. The sentiments of Aquitaine itself seem to have been divided. The nobles to a great extent, though far from universally, preferred the French connection. It may very well have fallen in better with their notions of chivalry, feudal dependency, and the like; the privileges, too, which French law conferred on noble birth would make their real interests lie that way. But the great cities, and, we have reason to believe, the mass of the people also, clave faithfully to their ancient dukes; and they had good reason to do so. The English kings, both by habit and by interest, naturally protected the municipal liberties of Bourdeaux and Bayonne, and exposed no part of their subjects to the horrors of French taxation and general oppression. When, in 1451, the first conquest was achieved, and the Bourdelese for the first time felt what the hand of a French master really was, they speedily revolted in favour of the more distant and more indulgent lord. The French conquest of Aquitaine was very much like what a French conquest of the Channel Islands would be now. The theory of natural boundaries claims them equally, and the theory of identity of language claims them with better right. But in the teeth of all theories, the people of Bourdeaux knew then, and the people of Jersey know now, that practical liberty and good government does not lie on the side of the power to which abstract theories would assign them.

We have anticipated somewhat in order to complete the history of the English dominion in France. We now return to the thirteenth century. Besides Normandy and Anjou, the forfeited goods of the felon John, the crown of France, during that century, obtained the county of Champagne by marriage, and that of Toulouse as the ultimate result of the Albigensian wars. Of the six lay peerages, Flanders and Burgundy alone remain. French Burgundy was granted out by Hugh Capet to a younger branch of his own family, and, when that race of dukes became extinct, the same policy was carried on by Charles V. in 1363, when he invested his son Philip with the duchy. Philip obtained by marriage the remaining peerage, the county of Flanders. We need not go at length through the career of the Burgundian dukes, told with such eloquence by M. de Barante. Under Charles the Bold there seemed every prospect of Burgundy, in its later sense, becoming a greater kingdom than ever Burgundy had been in the old. The fiefs of the empire and of the crown of France held by the Valois dukes of Burgundy raised them to a place among the most important powers of Europe. At last the might and the hopes of Charles were shivered beneath the halbert of the free Switzer. Ducal Burgundy itself fell into the grasp of Lewis XI,, and a fifth great fief was "reunited" to the Parisian crown. But Flanders remained, together with those imperial fiefs which nature seems to have connected with it, to become not the least valuable possession of the universal monarchy of Charles V. For Flanders and for Artois Charles V. was the nominal liegeman of his rival Francis. The treaty of Madrid abolished this antiquated claim of suzerainty; and in vain did the Parliament of Paris, some years later, strive to secure the right, and to carry out against Charles the same process which, three hundred years sooner, had been so successfully carried out against John Lackland. The Count of Flanders and Artois was summoned to the court of his liege lord, and, not appearing, was deprived of his lands for contumacy. But the sentence was more easily pronounced than executed against a Count of Flanders and Artois, who was also Emperor of the Romans and King of Spain and the Indies. Flanders and Artois remained to the house of Austria till the wars of Lewis XIV. incorporated all Artois and part of Flanders with the French monarchy. The rest of Flanders was reserved, by a happier lot, to form part of the free monarchy of Belgium.*

Thus, at various periods spread over more than four hundred years, were all the great feudal states of France gradually incorporated with the crown. On the other hand, the nominal

*The extreme northern part of the old county belongs to the kingdom of the Netherlands, but much the greater part is Belgian.

boundaries of Capetian France have receded in three places. The feudal superiority of the French crown extended over three districts which now form part of other states. As we have implied in our last paragraph, King Leopold owes no homage to the Parisian despot for the county of Flanders; nor is any paid by her Catholic Majesty for the county of Barcelona, the royal rights over which, even more nominal than elsewhere, were, as we have already mentioned, finally surrendered by St. Lewis. Our own sovereign also retains, with the most perfect good will of the inhabitants, those insular portions of the duchy of Normandy against which Philip's sentence of forfeiture was pronounced in vain. With these three exceptions, the France of 1860 includes the whole of the France of 987; it also includes a great deal besides.

We have thus traced the steps by which the kings of Paris gradually gathered under their immediate dominion the whole, or nearly so, of those states which were at least nominally dependent upon them. We have now to follow the course of annexation in those countries which had never, even nominally, formed part of the Capetian monarchy. In so doing we mean to pass lightly over mere temporary conquests, and to confine ourselves to those annexations which have really become part and parcel of the French monarchy. Thus the Valois Kings were always conquering and always losing Naples and Milan, as well as Piedmont and Savoy; but Piedmont, Naples, and Milan have never permanently become parts of France. Thus again, under Napoleon I., the French empire threatened to become the empire of all Europe; but this extended dominion has happily not descended to Napoleon III. But we suspect that people in general are not aware how much territory, originally French in no sense, has been gradually and permanently swallowed up by the Parisian monarchy since the reign of Philip the Fair.

France, as it stood under the early Capets, was bounded to the south by the various kingdoms of Spain, to the east by the states holding of the Holy Roman Empire. With Spain France has had comparatively little to do. The existence of a real "natural boundary" may have had something to do with this; but the line of the Pyrenees has not always been held perfectly sacred on either side. More than one of the French kings ruled also as kings of Navarre by a personal hereditary right. The Bourbon dynasty permanently bore the title; but their Navarre consisted only of that small portion of the kingdom which lies north of the Pyrenees. At the eastern end of the mountain range the frontier was long unsettled, and Roussillon did not finally become French till the peace of 1659. In the space between Navarre and Roussillon, the sovereigns of

France, in the character, however, not of kings but of Counts of Foix, have appeared in the more honourable aspect of Protectors of the Republic of Andorra. But the relations of France towards Spain are of far less importance than her relations towards the Empire. We left the German kingdom at the moment of its definitive separation from that of Western France in 888. In the next century Otto the Great permanently united to it the crown of Italy, or the Lombard kingdom, and also the imperial crown of Rome. In the next century the kingdom of Burgundy was acquired by virtue of the bequest of its last separate sovereign. Thus were the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy united under a single ruler. The King of the Eastern Franks both inherited the imperial style of Charles the Great and possessed three out of the four divisions of his empire. He held alike the Teutonic and the Italian capital of the great Emperor. Western France might look like a single province torn away from the main body of the Frankish realm. During the three first centuries of the Capetian dynasty, France was weak and Germany strong. The great Saxon, Frankish, and Swabian emperors possessed a far more practical authority over the whole of their vast dominions than the king of Paris enjoyed over his nominal realm of Latin France. But while the Capets were gradually consolidating their power over France, the Emperors began to lose theirs over Germany and Italy. After Frederick II. and the great interregnum, the empire gradually became a mere name, especially in its Burgundian provinces. Frederick Barbarossa was crowned at Arles as King of Burgundy; but a century afterwards the allegiance of Provence to King Rodolf of Hapsburg was very precarious indeed. As France grew stronger and more united, she found her whole eastern frontier, from Hainault to Provence, formed by a succession of petty states, duchies, counties, bishoprics, and free cities, disunited among themselves, and owning a very nominal subjection to their imperial suzerain. The King of the French was to most of them at once a nearer and a more powerful neighbour than the Emperor of the Romans: he was a more dangerous foe and a more desirable friend. Many provinces had a greater resemblance in language and manners to France than to Germany. To the nobles, and even to the princes themselves, the splendours of the French court offered a constant attraction. To take a familiar instance, the great house of Guise, in the sixteenth century, deserted their position as princes of the sovereign blood of Lorraine to assume that of French nobles and French party-leaders. The whole of these small states lay admirably open alike to French intrigue and to French violence; by one means or the other nearly all have been acquired. The

five centuries and a half since Philip the Fair are one long record of French aggrandisement at the expense of the territories of the Empire.

Of the three kingdoms attached to the Empire, Italy has been constantly overrun by French armies, and portions, like Milan, Piedmont, and Genoa, have been held by France, by conquest or by some pretended hereditary right, for considerable periods. But no portion of the Italian mainland has been permanently retained by France. But in the last century, by one of the most disreputable of juggles, France obtained the Italian island of Corsica without a shadow of right, and has been repaid by obtaining from thence the line of its own tyrants.

The kingdom of Germany has suffered considerable dismemberments. In the sixteenth century the three Lotharingian bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun were seized upon; but it was only late in the last century that the duchy in which those bishoprics were enclaves was finally incorporated with France. Lewis XIV. literally stole Strassburg and all Elsass; a province still essentially German, though the fact is disguised, as in so many other cases, by giving a French spelling to its The same monarch, at the time when he recovered a portion of the old French fief of Flanders, seized also a portion of the imperial fief of Hennegau,-Gallicè Hainault.

name.

But it has been against the old kingdom of Burgundy that the aggressions of the Parisian monarchy have been most constant and most successful. For that very reason they are much less familiarly known: more people know that Lorraine has not always been French than that the same is true of Provence. It is therefore specially desirable to trace them in order. We have seen that the old frontier, the "natural boundary," of France to the east was the Rhone, the line above Lyons being continued along the Saone. From the Rhone to the Alps was the kingdom of Boso, afterwards, as we have seen, united to the imperial crown. At the expense of that kingdom France has, in the space of five centuries, gained twelve departments, besides as many more as she may think good to make out of her last stealings of Savoy and Nizza. The Burgundian kingdom, more remote from the imperial power than either Germany or Italy, fell away earlier and more completely than either, and split up into a host of small principalities and commonwealths. All of these, except those which still retain their independence as portions of the Swiss League, have been gradually swallowed up by the vultures of Paris. The Rhone frontier was first permanently violated by Philip the Fair in 1310. In the free imperial city of Lyons, as in so many others, violent disputes raged between the citizens and the prince-archbishops. Philip seized the favourable

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