ABSTRACT
Nearly everywhere kings and their immediate dependants were as firmly in control of central governments in 1700 as in 1600. But in two of the great states of the west, the power of hereditary monarchs had been resisted with some success. By an oddly appropriate combination of design and accident, William of Orange, who had brought the Netherlands 1 closer than ever before to dynastie rule, arrived in 1689 on the throne from which English political leaders had, for the second time in half a century, in effect deposed their king. Throughout their internal conflicts, the affairs of the two countries had been interwoven by rivalries, alliances, and similarities of theory and practice. Each had been bitterly divided between centralizing and decentralizing forces, between rival economic interests, between versions of Protestant Christianity that served to rouse emotion and belligerence. Each had a single great city so rich that governments could not easily resist its political demands. After repeated commercial and military struggles against each other, they now seemed firmly united in the exhausting wars against France. They were agreed in offering a limited toleration in religion and in political ideas, combined with intense suspicion of their Catholic minorities. They were agreed too in accepting as a permanent part of their governing machinery a central representative body. A large share of power was held, in Holland and England more than in the countries joined to them, by men whose wealth came from the accumulation and use of capital rather than simply from land. If the two stories are set side by side they may throw some light on each other.
