ia the strain of the Reformation withdrew Henry and his
successor from any effective interference in the strife across the
Channel; and in spite of the conflict with the Armada Elizabeth aimed at
the close as at the beginning of her reign mainly at keeping her realm
as far as might be out of the struggle of western Europe against the
ambition of Spain. Its attitude of isolation was yet more marked when
England stood aloof from the Thirty Years' War, and after a fitful
outbreak of energy under Cromwell looked idly on at the earlier efforts
of Lewis the Fourteenth to become master of Europe. But with the
Revolution this attitude became impossible. In driving out the Stuarts
William had aimed mainly at enlisting England in the league against
France; and France backed his effort by espousing the cause of the
exiled king. To prevent the undoing of all that the Revolution had done
England was forced to join the Great Alliance of the European peoples,
and reluctantly as she was drawn into it she at once found herself its
head. Political and military genius set William and Marlborough in the
forefront of the struggle; Lewis reeled beneath the shock of Blenheim
and Ramillies; and shameful as were some of its incidents the Peace of
Utrecht left England the main barrier against the ambition of the House
of Bourbon.

Nor was this a position from which any change of domestic policy could
withdraw her. So long as a Stuart pretender threatened the throne of the
Revolution, so long every adherent of the cause of the Revolution,
whether Tory or Whig, was forced to guard jealously against the
supremacy of the power which could alone bring about a Jacobite
restoration. As the one check on France lay in the maintenance of a
European concert, in her efforts to maintain this concert England was
drawn out of the narrower circle of her own home interests to watch
every movement of the nations from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. And
not only did the Revolution set England irrevocably among the powers of
Europe, but it assigned her a special place among them. The result of
the alliance and the war had been to establish what was then called a
"balance of power" between the great European states; a balance which
rested indeed not so much on any natural equilibrium of forces as on a
compromise wrung from warring nations by the exhaustion of a great
struggle; but which, once recognized and established, could be adapted
and readjusted, it was hoped