was not merely
the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt
instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the
empire which her house had inherited from Norman and Plantagenet.

But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a
change is now apparent. As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as
Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so
from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England
arises a new nation. This declares itself in the altered course of her
policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland. In Ireland, for
instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to
bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond
the Pale. Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king. In
politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I. He
abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland
he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of
reverting to the Plantagenet policy. He defeats the Scots at Flodden;
but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are
not defeated at all. King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls
around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him,
"companions," _comites_ indeed, in that title's original meaning. But
the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII,
recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when
these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery,
and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow
deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united.
The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of
nationality, cement the union.

In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between
causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or
sink from sight altogether. As in geology the century is useless as a
unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in
astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar
spaces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the
conscious life of a State, the lustrum, the dekaetis, or even the
generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year.
The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the
futu