Hildebrand, who boldly declared that the Church compared to the State was as the sun to the moon--the State only shining by light borrowed from the greater orb--was now on the papal throne. His giant intellect and tremendous personality had overawed Henry IV into ignominious capitulation at Canossa. With Europe at his feet Hildebrand cannot but have desired to assert his authority over the island-State across the Channel. William the Conqueror and Hildebrand were rarely-matched antagonists--the one determined to set bounds to the Pope's scheme of world-domination; the Pope equally determined to bend the stubborn Norman to his will. It was the Conqueror who won. The conception of the Norman Conquest has shifted from the grotesque over-estimate of Thierry to the under-estimate of Freeman and Maitland. To the moderns the Conquest is now little more than a change of dynasty. A juster estimate would be that the very change of dynasty gave the Conquest its vital importance.... The effects were really immense. The Conquest substituted for the degenerate race of Anglo-Saxon kings a virile dynasty able to give to England what it needed--a vigorous central administration--and brought the English people into the stream of European civilisation. It was the hope of Erasmus that Catholic forms could be blended with the Greek spirit. Luther's songs express the very soul of old Germany; above all, the great hymn "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott." Though the Reformation in freeing the mind of man from ecclesiastical tyranny made eventually for political liberty, its whole tendency in England for the time being was in favour of absolute monarchy. Its first outcome here was to set up a secular monarchy, supreme in Church and State, founded on the theory of the divine right of kings, based on an aristocracy made loyal by the instinct of self-interest. Commerce and national wealth were at stake in the war between England and Spain in the sixteenth century, and not merely, perhaps not even mainly, religion. Drake was a very great sailor, but he was undoubtedly a buccaneer. Many Ministers had been sent to the block for offences far less rank than those of Charles I; nevertheless, his execution was absolutely illegal and a fatal mistake in policy. Few men experienced such hard treatment at the hands of fortune as Cromwell. In every case, save the rule of the major-generals, his constitutional experiments were wise, far-seeing and well-conceived. It was the perverse conduct of those who professed to be his followers that ruined all. There has never been a shrewder king on a throne than Charles II.