put forth her strength and to rise into a powerful nation. The death of Henry V. of England was an event favourable to France. The evils attendant on a long minority, the dissensions of the English court, and the absence of steady enterprize in the general proceedings of England, afforded the French a favourable opportunity of recovering the territories which they had lost. The court and the nobles combined on this occasion with earnestness, and by degrees stripped the English of all their possessions in France, with the exception of Calais and its vicinity. As soon as this conquest was effected, the French kings found themselves in a position to adopt bolder and more comprehensive plans than they had hitherto ventured on. They watched the proceedings of surrounding nations, and sought how they might strengthen themselves by taking advantage of events as they occurred; while they were in their turn regarded with some fear and suspicion by their neighbours. The feudal power then began to experience the effects of the contests between France and England. The inefficiency of a feudal army for combined and longcontinued plans of warfare, became so sensibly felt, that the necessity for some change was apparent to every monarch. By the steps which we have noted, a body of mercenary troops was established; but it was not till the reign of Charles VII., (A.D. 1420—1460), that a decisive step was taken. Under pretext of having always ready a force sufficient to defend the kingdom against any sudden invasion of the English, he retained under arms a body of nine thousand cavalry and sixteen thousand infantry. He appropriated funds for the regular payment of these troops, stationed them in different parts of the kingdom, and appointed experienced officers to command them. There came to be a kind of glittering pomp attached to the command of this army, and the nobles courted the office as an honourable post. It was soon perceived that the feudal militia became insignificant by the side of these troops; imperfectly armed and disciplined, and isolated in INFLUENCE OF A STANDING ARMY. 119 small and scattered bodies without any central authority over the whole, the retainers of the barons found that they no longer commanded respect, or had importance attached to them. "The strength of an army,' as Robertson remarks, was no longer estimated solely by the number of cavalry which served in it. From the time that gunpowder was invented, and the use of cannon in the field became general, horsemen cased in complete armour lost all the advantages which gave them pre-eminence over other soldiers. The helmet, the shield, and the breast-plate, which resisted the arrow or the spear, no longer afforded them security against these new instruments of destruction. The service of infantry rose again into esteem, and victories were gained, and conquests made, chiefly by their efforts. The nobles and their military tenants, though sometimes summoned to the field, according to ancient form, were considered as an incumbrance upon the troops with which they acted, and were viewed with contempt by soldiers accustomed to the vigorous and steady operations of regular service. Thus the regulations of Charles VII., by establishing the first standing army known in Europe, occasioned an important revolution in its affairs and policy. By taking from the nobles the sole direction of the national military force, which had raised them to such high authority and importance, a deep wound was given to the feudal aristocracy in that part where its power seemed to be most complete. France, by forming this body of regular troops at a time when there was hardly a squadron or company kept in constant pay in any other part of Europe, acquired such advantages over its neighbours, either in attack or defence, that self-preservation made it necessary for them to imitate the example. Mercenary troops were introduced into all the considerable kingdoms on the continent. They gradually became the only military force that was employed or trusted.' Besides these causes of change, others conspired towards the same end. The barons of France had expended so much wealth in the wars against England, that many of them were greatly impoverished. The lands of many others had been overrun by the contending armies, and reduced almost to ruin. The people, too, having to pay large contributions towards the national force, had little to give to their feudal superiors; and the coin of the realm having been regulated so as to suit the exigencies of the state, the various payments to the barons, fixed by ancient usage, such as fines and quit-rents, became greatly reduced in value, and seriously lessened the revenues of the feudal nobility. Charles also established a system whereby he obtained subsidies from the people, without obtaining or even asking the assent of the nobles, and thus added to the power which was gradually undermining them. The proceedings which Charles VII. thus commenced, his son Louis XI. completed. It was under the reign of this skilful but cruel monarch that feudalism virtually ceased to exist in France. He obtained possession, by various means, of several great fiefs, or feudal provinces of the kingdom, such as Burgundy, Artois, Provence, and Rousillon, thus consolidating France into a compact kingdom. Against the feudal nobles generally he planned and executed a systematic course of fraud, violence, and deceit, having constantly in view the annihilation of the feudal power. He placed in all the departments of government men of mean birth and condition, who deriving all their advantages from him, became the obsequious instruments of his will. The nobles were studiously excluded from honours, emoluments, and privileges, so that they had to choose between two modes of life, either to attend court as mere powerless shadows of what they had once been, or to remain secluded and unnoticed in their castles. More than this, Louis strove to reduce them to the level of other subjects, by stripping them of their exclusive privileges one by one. Whenever any one of them could be made amenable to the law in the slightest degree, he was treated with all possible ignominy, in order that the people, by DOWNFAL OF FEUDALISM IN FRANCE. 121 seeing the nobles reduced to such an abject state, might hold them in indifference or contempt, and transfer all their reverence to the sovereign. As a means of preventing the nobles, roused as they were to exasperation, from planning any combined mode of resistance, he resorted to the meanest and most contemptible arts for fomenting quarrels and differences between feudal families; there was nothing too violent, nothing too cruel, nothing too dastardly and unmanly for Louis to adopt, provided it tended to the object which he had in view. Without tracing out the events of his extraordinary reign, we may state that feudalism in France effectually ceased under him, and was not again revived. Had the institution been fitted for the permanent well-being of society, it would have revived. But it had performed its part in the progress of civilization; it had formed a connected link between the barbarism of previous times, and the enlightenment of subsequent ages, and was now become unsuited to the wants and state of society. Meanwhile similar results were being worked out in other nations of Europe. Henry VII. of England, as soon as the termination of the contest between the rival houses of York and Lancaster had placed him on the throne, began to imitate in some degree the example of Louis. Caution, however, was necessary, for he held the sceptre of a disputed title; a popular faction was ready every moment to take arms against him, and the regal power had been so long relaxed by the civil wars which had distracted the kingdom, that the feudal nobles had maintained much of their individual importance and independence of the crown. He therefore pursued a more silent and unobtrusive system in undermining the feudal power. By laws which he passed, permitting the barons to 'break the entail' of their estates, and expose them for sale; by his regulations to prevent the nobility from keeping in their service those numerous bands of retainers, which rendered them formidable and turbulent; by favouring the rising power of the Commons; by encouraging population, agriculture, and commerce; by accustoming his subjects to an equitable administration of the laws; and by the maintenance of peace during the greater part of his reign;-he quietly effected in England, by much less reprehensible means, that change which Louis had wrought in France. He bequeathed to his son Henry VIII. a kingdom in which the feudal nobles possessed very little power, except such as belonged to them as wealthy subjects of the monarch; and we thus arrive at the period when feudalism may be said to have ceased in England. In Spain, the great circumstance which about the same period led to the rise of the monarchical power on the ruins of the feudal system, was the union of the kingdoms of Arragon and Castile by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. Before that period Spain had been convulsed by the disagreements of one province with another, of one coterie of nobles with another, and by the fierce contests between all of these and the Moors. But when the union of the two important sub-kingdoms, if we may use the term, had added to the strength of both, they were in a condition to attack the Moors with more force than before, and finally to expel them from the kingdom of Granada, which thenceforward became part of the Spanish kingdom. Every accession of regal authority, by establishing a central government, is in its very nature inimical to a feudal institution, which is essentially federal and not central. Hence the nobles of Spain gradually lost much of the power and consideration which had before attached to them. There have been circumstances in operation down to our own day, which have given to the Spanish grandee an imposing hauteur and pomp hardly equalled in any other country of Europe; but so far as regarded the peculiar relation between baron and vassal, the feudal system may be said to have pretty well terminated in that country |