To them the island was merely
a part of their great inheritance on the continent--a sort of colony
inhabited by rather backward people upon whom they forced their own
language and civilisation. Gradually however the "colony" of England
gained upon the "Mother country" of Normandy. At the same time the
Kings of France were trying desperately to get rid of the powerful
Norman-English neighbours who were in truth no more than disobedient
servants of the French crown. After a century of war fare the French
people, under the leadership of a young girl by the name of Joan of Arc,
drove the "foreigners" from their soil. Joan herself, taken a prisoner
at the battle of Compiegne in the year 1430 and sold by her Burgundian
captors to the English soldiers, was burned as a witch. But the English
never gained foothold upon the continent and their Kings were at last
able to devote all their time to their British possessions. As the
feudal nobility of the island had been engaged in one of those strange
feuds which were as common in the middle ages as measles and small-pox,
and as the greater part of the old landed proprietors had been killed
during these so-called Wars of the Roses, it was quite easy for the
Kings to increase their royal power. And by the end of the fifteenth
century, England was a strongly centralised country, ruled by Henry VII
of the House of Tudor, whose famous Court of Justice, the "Star Chamber"
of terrible memory, suppressed all attempts on the part of the surviving
nobles to regain their old influence upon the government of the country
with the utmost severity.

In the year 1509 Henry VII was succeeded by his son Henry VIII, and from
that moment on the history of England gained a new importance for the
country ceased to be a mediaeval island and became a modern state.

Henry had no deep interest in religion. He gladly used a private
disagreement with the Pope about one of his many divorces to declare
himself independent of Rome and make the church of England the first of
those "nationalistic churches" in which the worldly ruler also acts as
the spiritual head of his subjects. This peaceful reformation of 1034
not only gave the house of Tudor the support of the English clergy, who
for a long time had been exposed to the violent attacks of many Lutheran
propagandists, but it also increased the Royal power through the
confiscation of the former possessions of the monasteries. At the same
time it made Henry popu