Henrietta wished to see her husband great and powerful, and she could not appreciate that the day of despotism which in France was beginning, in England was ending. Charles had not in him the stuff of greatness, but it is doubtful if even a Henry IV or a Richelieu could have put back the hands of the clock and realized her ambition. The despotism which was building up on the other side of the Channel in this country was tottering to its fall by the development of the intellect and character of the people. Henrietta clung to the ideals of the past instead of stretching out to meet the ideals of the future, and so her work failed even as did that of Strafford, in spite of his greatness. And this national development was connected with perhaps the most important aspect of the matter. The Civil War was, more fundamentally than anything else, a war of religion, another act in the great drama which had been played in France half a century earlier, and which was still being played in Germany. Henry VIII and Elizabeth seemed to have saved England from the common fate of Europe; but it was not so: they only delayed the strife and gave it a turn unknown elsewhere, adding to the disadvantages of the champion of tradition this last, that he was a renegade in the eyes of the party to which by the logic of history he belonged. To many of their enemies, perhaps to most of them in certain moods, Charles and Henrietta were not so much the hinderers of political freedom as the supporters of an alien and blasphemous system of religion. It was the peculiar fortune of England that it gained liberty by the lever of religion. But for the fear of Popery it is far from improbable that the nation would not have arisen to strike down thus violently the despotism of the Tudors. Rather, the monarchy might have been gradually transformed, and with a very different and more tardy result, by the character of the people. But Puritan England could not leave irresponsible power in the hands of a sovereign whose very Protestantism was not unimpeachable, and thus the victories which were won by sectarian enthusiasm resulted not in the advancement of a barren fanaticism, but in the sure laying of the foundations of the liberty of the people. In France, where, among many differences from England, there was this great one, that the people and the monarch were substantially agreed on religious matters, there was discontent, even rebellion, but there was no revolution, and the people was left for another century and a half to bear the accumulating load of its misery, until the burden became unbearable and was cast off with a shock from which Europe still trembles.