ed cutting each others' throats there were hardly
enough of them left to make a strong stand. Occasionally they tried to
do so, as in the revolt of Sickingen in Germany, of the Northern Earls
in England, and in the early stages of the rising of the Communeros in
Spain. In every case they were defeated, and the work of the sword was
completed by the axe and the dagger. Whether they trod the
blood-soaked path to the Tower, or whether they succumbed to the hired
assassins of Catharine, the old nobles were disposed of and the power
of their caste was broken. But their places were soon taken by new
men. Some bought baronies and titles outright, others ripened more
gradually to these honors in the warmth of the royal smile and on the
sunny slopes of manors wrested from the monks. But the end finally
attained was that the coronet became a mere bauble in the hands of the
rich, the final badge of social deference to success in money-making.

[Sidenote: Plunder the church]

Still more violent was the spoliation of the church. The confiscations
carried out in the name of religion redounded to the benefit of the
newly rich. It is true that all the property taken did not fall into
their hands; some was kept by the prince, more was used to found or
endow hospices, schools and asylums for the poor. {551} But the most
and the best of the land was soon thrown to the eager grasp of traders
and merchants. In England probably one-sixth of all the cultivated
soil in the kingdom was thus transferred, in the course of a few years,
into the hands of new men. Thus were created many of the "county
families" of England, and thus the new interest soon came to dominate
Parliament. Under Henry VII the House of Lords, at one important
session, mustered thirty spiritual and only eighteen temporal peers.
In the reign of his son the temporal peers came to outnumber the
spiritual, from whom the abbots had been subtracted. The Commons
became, what they remained until the nineteenth century, a plutocracy
representing either landed or commercial wealth.

Somewhat similar secularizations of ecclesiastical property took place
throughout Germany, the cities generally leading. The process was
slow, but certain, in Electoral Saxony, Hesse and the other Protestant
territories, and about the same time in Sweden and in Denmark. But
something the same methods were recommended even in Roman Catholic
lands and in Russia of the Eastern Church, so conta