The gradual weakening of the Feudal System, which acted as a check upon the authority of the rulers, and the awakening of the national consciousness, prepared the way for the policy of centralisation. France, which consisted formerly of a collection of almost independent provinces, was welded together into one united kingdom; a similar change took place in Spain after the union of Castile and Aragon and the fall of the Moorish power at Granada. In England the disappearance of the nobles in the Wars of the Roses led to the establishment of the Tudor domination. As a result of this centralisation the Kings of France, Spain, and England, and the sovereign princes of Germany received a great increase of power, and resolved to make themselves absolute masters in their own dominions. Having abandoned the unfortunate peasants who had been led to slaughter by his writings, Luther determined to make it clear that his religious policy was in complete harmony with the political absolutism aimed at by the temporal rulers. With this object in view he put forward the principle of royal supremacy, according to which the king or prince was to be recognised as the head of the church in his own territories, and the source of all spiritual jurisdiction. By doing so he achieved two very important results. He had at hand in the machinery of civil government the nucleus of a new ecclesiastical organisation, the shaping of which had been his greatest worry; and, besides, he won for his new movement the sympathy and active support of the civil rulers, to whom the thought of becoming complete masters of ecclesiastical patronage and of the wealth of the Church opened up the most rosy prospects. In Germany, in England, and in the northern countries of Europe, it was the principle of royal supremacy that turned the scales eventually in favour of the new religion, while, at the same time, it led to the establishment of absolutism both in theory and practice. From the recognition of the sovereign as supreme master both in Church and State the theory of the divine rights of kings as understood in modern times followed as a necessary corollary. There was no longer any possibility of suggesting limitations or of countenancing rebellion. The king, in his own territories, had succeeded to all the rights and privileges which, according to the divine constitution of the Church, belonged to the Pope.