All this meant that the strong hand of the English monarch
had been laid upon commerce and industry as well as upon justice,
finance, and religion.
The power of the Tudors had rested largely upon their popularity with
the growing influential middle class. They had subdued sedition, had
repelled the Armada, had fostered prosperity, and had been willing at
times to cater to the whims of their subjects. They had faithfully
personified national patriotism; and the English nation, in turn, had
extolled them.
Yet despite this absolutist tradition of more than a century's
duration, England was destined in the seventeenth century to witness a
long bitter struggle between royal and parliamentary factions, the
beheading of one king and the exiling of another, and in the end the
irrevocable rejection of the theory and practice of absolutist divine-
right monarchy, and this at the very time when Louis XIV was holding
majestic court at Versailles and all the lesser princes on the
Continent were zealously patterning their proud words and boastful
deeds after the model of the Grand Monarch.
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