James I. tried to govern as Henry VIII. had governed before him, that is to say, he tried to govern without summoning a Parliament. Legally it was Parliament only that could vote the money that the king required to carry on the government. James tried to extort this money by what were politely called "loans." If those from whom they were demanded paid the required contributions, well and good. If they refused to pay, the Crown had sufficient power to misuse the processes of the law so as to punish them for their refusal. [Sidenote: The "middle class"] Henry had been able to govern despotically because the power of the nobles had been so reduced by the Wars of the Roses, and because he did not hesitate to reduce their power still further by executing all who withstood him. But by the time we come to the seventeenth century and the Stuart kings we find a change in the composition of the nation. It is a change which had been in progress elsewhere in Europe. It was that change by which what was soon to be called the "middle class" came into existence. We saw it beginning first, where all modern culture had its first beginning and rebirth (renaissance) in the cities of Italy. It was the change occasioned by the growing habit of men to live in towns and cities, in larger collections, no longer so scattered. After the cities of Italy, we saw that the cities of the Netherlands came to be strong and to acquire much independence. In our own land London was, from a very early day, the chief city. Its power was the greater because it had, like the Continental cities, its trained bands, {71} its citizens who were more or less trained as soldiers, ready to fight for the city liberties under the lead of the Lord Mayor as the chief citizen. Our country never produced quite such important citizens of this class as the Doges, as the rulers of Venice were called, or the Medici, the great bankers, the merchant princes, of Florence, and others. We may class our Lord Mayor more nearly with the Burgomasters of the semi-independent cities of the Netherlands. True, he never either had or claimed an independence equal to theirs at the time of their greatest power: but that was a power which became much diminished during the struggles of the Reformation period. It is worth notice that many words in our language indicate how the dwellers in cities and towns seem to have been considered as necessarily superior in culture and civilisation to the countrymen. The very word "civilisation" itself is from "civis," a citizen, one who lives in a city. The man of "urbane" or "polite" manners is the man who lives in an "urbs," which is Latin for "town," or πόλις, which is Greek for "city."