tful, that with so
powerful an instrument of government, England, instead of standing
aside from the rapid bureaucratic recasting of European civilisation
which was the work of the French Crown, might have led the way in that
chief of modern experiments. One can imagine the Stuarts, had they
possessed revenue, doing what the Bourbons did: one can imagine the
modern State developing under an English Crown wealthier than any
other European Government, and the re-birth of Europe happening just
to the north, instead of just to the south, of the Channel.

But the speculation is vain. As a fact, the whole of the new wealth
slipped rapidly from between the fingers of the English King.

When of three forces which still form an equilibrium two are
stationary and one is pressing upon these two, then, if either of the
stationary forces be removed, that which was pressing upon both
overwhelms the stationary force that remains. The monastic system had
been marking time for over 100 years, and in certain political aspects
of its power had perhaps slightly dwindled. The monarchy, for all its
splendour, was in actual resources no more than it had been for some
generations. Pressing upon either of these two institutions was the
rising and still rising force of the squires. It is not wonderful that
under such conditions the spoil fell to the younger and advancing
power.

Consider, for example, the extraordinary anxiety of so apparently
powerful a king as Henry for the formal consent of the Commons to his
acts. It has been represented as part of the Tudor national policy and
what not, but those who write thus have not perhaps smiled, as has the
present writer, over the names of those who sat for the English shires
in the Parliament which assented to the Dissolution of the great
monastic houses. Here is a Ratcliffe from Northumberland, and a
Collingwood; here is a Dacre, a Musgrave, a Blenkinsop; the Constables
are there, and the Nevilles from Yorkshire; the Tailboys of Lincoln, a
Schaverell, a Throgmorton, a Ferrers, a Gascoyne; and of course,
inevitably, sitting for Bedfordshire, a hungry Russell.

Here is a Townshend, a Wingfield, a Wentworth, an Audley--all from
East Anglia--a Butler; from Surrey a Carew, and that FitzWilliam whose
appetite for the religious spoils proved so insatiable; here is a
Blount out of Shropshire; a Lyttleton, a Talbot (and yet _another_
Russell!), a Darrell, a Paulet, a Courtney, (to see what could be
pic