of retaining the secondary industry of dyeing and dressing when the primary industry of weaving was surrendered to England. In Florence, as in Flanders, this policy was followed by ephemeral prosperity, marred by civil wars which were the death throes of the weaving industry. Then followed in Florence, as in Flanders, loss of freedom and ruin. But protected England grew ever richer and her cloth was carried throughout the Mediterranean by English merchants on English ships.

It was much more difficult to deal with the Hanseatic League than with the Venetians. The treaty of Utrecht gave English merchants the same rights in the Baltic as Hanse merchants enjoyed in England, but these rights in the Baltic were withheld. Until England had built an adequate navy nothing could, however, be done; and English merchants were forced, from fear of the sea power of the League, to acquiesce in a policy of masterly inactivity. Indeed an Act was passed in the reign of Henry VII. expressly exempting Hanse merchants from any restrictive commercial legislation which Parliament might pass. But even the commerce and sea power of the Hanse League, lacking the only sure foundation of national production, contained within itself the seeds of decay. At least the foundation of England's Tudor navy was laid in the reign of Henry VII. and the first dry dock was constructed, although it was left for other Tudors to build on this foundation. A way into the Baltic was also opened by the treaty with Denmark in 1490; and through this entrance English ships sailed ultimately to wrest from Germans the commerce of the League.

XVI

SPAIN ENTERS INTO TRADE COMPETITION

1490-1509

THE greatest problem which confronted Henry was the phenomenal growth of Spain. Until 1479 Spain was divided into two large Christian States, Castile and Aragon, the small Mahomedan kingdom of Granada, and the still smaller Christian State of Navarre. Though Castile was three times the size of its eastern neighbour Aragon, this difference was partly compensated by the Aragonese possessions in the Mediterranean, Corsica and Sardinia, and by the control Aragon exercised over Sicily. The union of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, which foreshadowed the absorption of Granada and Navarre, created a Spanish nation which occupied four-fifths of the Iberian peninsula. It seemed only too likely that Portugal, the remaining fifth, would also be permanently absorbed, as, somewhat later, it actually was united to Spain for sixty years.

Before the Catholic kings, Ferdinand, Isabella, and their successors, created national unity by asserting their royal power, Spanish nobles and Spanish Parliaments possessed even greater rights and freedom than the English had before the Tudors centralised

the government of England. There was more religious toleration in Spain than there was in England. Jews and Mahomedans worked side by side with Christians. The Spaniard excelled the English in manufactures, and, after Edward IV. sent the King of Aragon a present of English sheep, the wool of Spain became even finer than that of England. Live sheep had been sent to Spain in the reign of Edward III., but probably through carelessness in breeding Spanish wool was of inferior quality until after the reign of Edward IV. The success of the Portuguese in discovering the gold of Guinea and the sea route to the East was dwarfed when, in 1493, Ferdinand was told by Columbus of the discovery of America. A Pope had given the sanction of religion to the Portuguese monopoly of the sea route to the East and to the lands they had found in Africa. Another Pope, Alexander VI., a Spaniard by birth, gave Ferdinand and Isabella similar rights in the West. In the subsequent histories of Spain and England the effect of economic policy on national growth and national freedom can be clearly traced. Spain neglected her workers, and lost her freedom and colossal strength; whilst by pursuing an opposite policy England became both strong and free.

England could stop Spanish ships from passing Dover and Calais; Spain could exclude the English from the Mediterranean; hence a good understanding was important to both nations. After thirteen years of tedious negotiations Ferdinand's youngest daughter, Catherine, was married to Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII. and heir to the throne of England. A few

months later Arthur died, and Henry, who was at the time a widower, sought to marry his daughter-in-law. When her mother Isabella vetoed this curious proposal, Catherine was married to her brother-in-law, afterwards Henry VIII.

An unhappy fate attended most of the carefully planned marriages of Ferdinand's five children. His eldest daughter, Isabella, married the Crown Prince of Portugal in 1490, only to become a widow in a few months' time. In 1497 she married her husband's cousin and successor, Emanuel, and died giving birth to a son, who also died in infancy. Ferdinand's third daughter, Maria, then became Emanuel's wife. Had Isabella's son lived he would have united Spain and Portugal, since Ferdinand's only son, Juan, died without issue in 1497. Between Maria and the Crown of Spain there were Ferdinand's second daughter, Juanna, and her two sons, Charles and Ferdinand. Just as Isabella and Maria were used to bring Portugal under Spanish control, so Juan and Juanna were used to detach Flanders from France. The story of this change in Flanders is closely intertwined with English history.

Mary of Burgundy died in 1482 leaving Maximilian a widower with two children, Philip and Margaret. Just before his death, in 1483, Louis XI. signed the Peace of Arras and betrothed the Dauphin, soon to be Charles VIII., to the baby princess, Margaret, of Flanders, who was kept at Paris until she should arrive at a marriageable age. Confusion reigned in the Low Countries after Mary's death. The chief interest of the French fief, Flanders, was weaving, and

English cloth was prohibited in Flanders. The merchants of Bruges watched with anger the passing of their prosperity to Antwerp, which imported English cloth for Brabant and the other provinces. There was economic division in Brabant, as well as in Flanders, since Brabantine weavers were also being ruined by English cloth; but, on the whole, Flanders was in favour of protection and the German fiefs of free trade.

The Flemish obtained possession of the child duke, Philip, and refused to allow his German father, Maximilian, any voice in their government. With Margaret at Paris and Philip in Flanders, with England weakened by a King, Richard III., whose vices had disgusted his people, and with the economic interests of the Flemish forcing them towards France, the political union of Flanders and France would probably have been accomplished but for two reasons. The annexation of Flanders would almost certainly have caused war between France and Maximilian's father, the Emperor of Germany, and the prospect of annexing Brittany to France diverted the interest of the French from Flanders. Hence when Henry VII. became King of England, Maximilian had, after a civil war, established his authority over the Low Countries, France was moving towards the final conquest of Brittany, and fate was preparing, for what is now called Belgium economic and political ruin. The short-lived prosperity of Brabant, which came from the free trade of Antwerp, was about to place the southern provinces of the Netherlands under Spanish rule and to make them for centuries a battlefield where European nations fought for any issue except the