The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Meanwhile in Europe, the game was being played according to a new set of rules. Under the old rules, a king as powerful and as rich as Philip II of Spain – with wealth pouring in from the Americas – would have conquered half Europe. His problem was that he lacked the kind of simple-minded drive that could have made him a worthy successor to his father, Charles V. He was an uncomfortable mixture of hard-working bureaucrat and religious fanatic. A sensible king would have pacified his Dutch subjects – ignoring their Protestantism – leaned over backward to maintain friendly relations with England, and turned his full military strength against the Turks. Instead he persecuted the Dutch and quarrelled with the English, while still trying to crush the Moslem menace in the Mediterranean. He had weakened himself by dividing his forces; so that when the English fleet and the bad weather destroyed the Armada in 1588, his schemes collapsed like a house of cards. And the Turks, although defeated at Lepanto, went on expanding for another century. Philip’s bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour would have made him a world conqueror, in an earlier age; but in Europe, the china shop was getting too small and too overcrowded, and a world conqueror was likely to end up on the floor surrounded by broken crockery.

Queen Elizabeth’s successor, James I, was not at all a bull in a china shop. He was a strange, feeble man, a homosexual who was given to bursting into tears, who slobbered as he talked, and whose legs were so weak that he had to lean on people’s shoulders when he talked to them. But he sensibly kept England out of further conflict with Spain, and also aloof from the conflict – which began with the Dutch revolt – that became the Thirty Years War. James believed firmly in the divine right of kings – that kings were appointed by God – and seemed to be in an excellent position for forcing his opinion on his subjects. But here too he discovered that the game was not being played according to the old rules. His problem was that his subjects were not openly rebellious; they merely had quite definite ideas about their rights. When he summoned his parliament to vote him funds, they insisted on talking about their own rights, and later on, flatly refused to vote him money, declaring that he was wasting it on his favourites – such as the tall and handsome Robert Carr, who shared the king’s bed. Moreover, at a Church conference at Hampton Court, a new group of religious reformers known as Puritans – because they wanted to purify the Church of Roman Catholic rituals – presented a demand for more control over the rich and powerful bishops. Once again there were clashes, and the king had to recognise that his subjects might be obedient but they had minds of their own. There was more trouble when James announced a plan to marry his son Charles to a Spanish princess. This eventually fell through – because the Spaniards also hated the idea – and parliament voted him some of the money he wanted. But most of James’s life was spent in frustrating struggles with parliament. He was forced to learn that there was a new spirit abroad, that people felt they had a right to think for themselves and to assert their individuality. His son Charles I learned this greatly to his cost when his parliament went to war against him, and eventually cut off his head.

In France, the situation looked altogether more stable, closer to the world of the Middle Ages. After the murder of Henry of Navarre by Ravaillac in 1610, Henry’s wife, Marie de Medici, became regent – since the heir, Louis XIII, was only nine years old. Marie showed herself an expert in intrigue, and ruled with the aid of her lady-in-waiting, Leonora Galigai, and her husband Concini. The shy and introverted boy-king, whose only pleasure was hunting, poured out his heart to this chief falconer, Luynes. One day, the commander of the guard pushed his way through a crowd of courtiers, walked up to Concini, and signalled his men, who raised their guns and killed Concini on the spot. ‘Now I am really king,’ said Louis proudly, while his mother had hysterics in bed. Three-quarters of a century earlier, the young king of Russia, Ivan the Terrible – who was thirteen at the time – ordered his servants to murder his enemy Prince Shuisky and throw his corpse to the dogs; it was the beginning of a bloody but highly successful reign. But Louis was living in the new century. Luynes turned out to be greedy and corrupt as an adviser. The queen mother had to be recalled from her exile, together with her chief adviser, Cardinal Richelieu. And it was Richelieu who became head of the royal council, made bargains with England, Holland and Denmark, plotted against the descendants of Charles V – the Hapsburgs – and eventually involved France in the disastrous Thirty Years War. Unlike Russia, France had no place for a tsar; it needed a diplomat capable of turning double somersaults.

The Thirty Years War is another demonstration of how the rules of history were changing. It started as the great culminating clash between Protestants and Catholics, when Ferdinand of Bohemia – another Hapsburg – tried to crush Lutherans and Calvinists in his dominions. The Protestants of Bohemia rebelled, and threw two leading Catholic governors out of the window of Prague Castle – the famous ‘defenestration of Prague’. (Amusingly, one of the attackers shouted angrily: ‘Now let’s see if the Virgin will help him’; then looked out of the window and said: ‘My God, she has! He’s crawling away…’) The Spanish sent troops to help Ferdinand put down the rebellion, and a Protestant German prince, Frederick of the Palatinate, marched in on the side of the rebels. Hungary was dragged into the war, then Sweden. The history of the conflict resounds with great names: Tilly – the Fighting Monk, Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus. If Ferdinand had not mistrusted his great general Wallenstein so deeply, he would probably have won the war; as it was, Wallenstein was murdered by his own side, to the delight of the Protestants. Then the Catholic Richelieu came into the war on the side of the Protestants, for he had no desire to see a Hapsburg become the most powerful ruler in Europe. So the war dragged on to its indecisive end in 1648, and neither side could claim victory. In retrospect, it was a pure waste of time.

Thanks to Richelieu, France came out of the Thirty Years War stronger than ever, so that the next king, Louis XIV, was able to behave like a Roman caesar. If anyone stood a chance of recalling the ways of an old-time conqueror, it was the Sun King, who had so much money that he was able to bribe half the monarchs of Europe. He was certainly strong enough to revoke the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and outlaw Protestantism in France. He built Versailles and had the sense to choose as his chief minister a shopkeeper’s son – Jean Baptiste Colbert – who revolutionised France’s industry and made it rich. Then, powerful and secure, he began to behave like an emperor. He flatly declined to entertain Colbert’s idea that the nobles ought to pay taxes like everybody else, since he felt that wealthy and idle nobles ought to decorate the court of a truly great king. The result is that Louis drained the national wealth as fast as Colbert created it. Then, deciding that a great king ought to be a great conqueror, he found an excuse to pick a quarrel with Spain, marched 120,000 troops into the Spanish Netherlands and ended with vast tracts of land and important trade concessions. But the Dutch cities revolted and, under the leadership of William of Orange, gradually forced Louis to withdraw. When William of Orange became king of England by deposing the bigoted Catholic James II, the English and the Dutch, joined by Sweden, Spain and Savoy (on the Swiss-Italian border) so harassed Louis’s forces on land and sea that he was forced to sue for peace. He was learning that, in this complicated modern world, there is no room for absolute emperors. When his grandson, Philip of Anjou, became king of Spain in 1701, Louis saw the chance of a masterstroke – of permanently uniting France and Spain into one empire. This was the last thing the rest of Europe wanted, particularly the Dutch, who had suffered so much from Spain. Louis marched again into the Netherlands to try to force the Dutch to agree, but in 1702, England and Holland declared war on France, and half Europe joined in. The war dragged on until 1713, when Louis finally made peace – having been forced to agree that his grandson Philip could never become king of France. So twelve years of effort was wasted, and Louis felt old and tired and oddly let-down – just as Charles V had in his last years; he died two years later, in 1715. If he had concentrated on trade and expansion in the colonies, the French Empire would have spread across the world, and the people of the United States would today probably be speaking French. As it was, France lost its American possessions within a few decades, and the king of France lost his head before the end of the century. If Louis XIV had not been so determined to play at being Charlemagne, the French Revolution would never have taken place.