had worked out their independence from the centre of
Italy to the North Sea, promised for a moment to transform European society. Even in the capitals of great
princes, in Rome, in Paris, and, for two terrible days, in London, the commons obtained sway. But the curse of
instability was on the municipal republics. Strasburg,
according to Erasmus and Bodin, the best governed of
all, suffered from perpetual commotions. An ingenious
historian has reckoned seven thousand revolutions in the
Italian cities. The democracies succeeded no better than
feudalism in regulating the balance between rich and
poor. The atrocities of the Jacquerie, and of Wat
Tyler's rebellion, hardened the hearts of men against
the common people. Church and State combined to
put them down. And the last memorable struggles of
mediæval liberty—the insurrection of the Comuneros in
Castile, the Peasants' War in Germany, the Republic of
Florence, and the Revolt of Ghent—were suppressed by
Charles V. in the early years of the Reformation.
The middle ages had forged a complete arsenal of constitutional maxims: trial by jury, taxation by representation, local self-government, ecclesiastical independence, responsible authority. But they were not secured by institutions, and the Reformation began by making the dry bones more dry. Luther claimed to be the first divine who did justice to the civil power. He made the Lutheran Church the bulwark of political stability, and bequeathed to his disciples the doctrine of divine right and passive obedience. Zwingli, who was a staunch republican, desired that all magistrates should be elected, and should be liable to be dismissed by their electors; but he died too soon for his influence, and the permanent action of the Reformation on democracy was exercised through the Presbyterian constitution of Calvin. It was long before the democratic element in Presbyterianism began to tell. The Netherlands resisted Philip II. for fifteen years before they took courage to depose him, and the scheme of the ultra-Calvinist Deventer, to subvert the ascendency of the leading States by the
