The Beginnings of New England. Fiske John

The old nobility was almost annihilated, both in person and in property; for along with the slaughter there went wholesale confiscation, and this added greatly to the disposable wealth of the crown. The case was essentially similar in France and Spain. In all three countries the beginning of the sixteenth century saw the power of the crown increased and increasing. Its vast accessions of wealth made it more independent of legislative assemblies, and at the same time enabled it to make the baronage more subservient in character by filling up the vacant places with new creations of its own. Through the turbulent history of the next two centuries, we see the royal power aiming at unchecked supremacy and in the principal instances attaining it except in England. Absolute despotism was reached first in Spain, under Philip II.; in France it was reached a century later, under Louis XIV.; and at about the same time in the hereditary estates of Austria; while over all the Italian and German soil of the disorganized empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland and the dykes of the Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up a host of petty tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great autocrats at Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [[Sidenote: Increasing power of the crown]