Nevertheless the country was growing richer and more peaceful. The Tudor period had seen the decay of the castle and the rise of the palace and mansion. Old castles might still be defended in a civil war, but no nobleman now ever dreamt of building a new castle. Palaces and mansions, like that of the Cecils at Hatfield, Holland House at Kensington, or the houses of that famous lady called Bess of Hardwick at Bolsover, Hardwick, and Chatsworth, were being built not for defence, but for beauty and comfort. The famous architect, Inigo Jones, was employed by the first two Stuart kings and their nobles. He built largely in the Italian style, and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, designed to be part of a new royal palace which was never completed, is the best example of his work.

The feudal system had all but gone. There were still relics in the shape of troublesome customs. But Parliament was already bargaining with the king to get rid of them.

The nobility no longer possessed the great powers they had enjoyed in the Middle Ages; the Tudors had done away with all. that. But they were still the leaders of social life, and supplied most of the great politicians and statesmen, except during the Commonwealth. In the Civil War they raised troops from their own tenantry. One of them, the Marquis of Hertford, was rich enough to furnish £120,000 at one time to the king's war-chest, whilst the Marquis of Newcastle estimated what he spent in the same cause at nearly a million pounds sterling. These sums would equal five or six times the same amount in our money.

Yet it was the other side, the side of the more numerous middle classes, that won. The country gentry, and the middle classes, and the merchants and citizens in the towns were rising both in wealth and in influence in the State. It was mostly the country squires of good family, like Hampden, Cromwell, Hutchinson, and Ludlow, who came to the front in the war and in Parliament.

The greatest changes since the early seventeenth century have taken place in the position and influence of the towns. Life and society in the country have changed far less. Labourers, tenant-farmers, freeholders, squires, and great landowners, whose families have been settled in one spot since the Norman Conquest, are still found all over England.

In every county some great nobleman was lord-lieutenant and responsible for raising and arming the militia, which was then the principal and almost the only armed force in the country; No standing army existed. The county train-bands or militia had never seen actual warfare, and were badly equipped and officered. On special occasions men were "impressed" or compelled to serve as soldiers or sailors. It was the question of the raising and control of an army and navy that, amongst other things, brought Charles I into conflict with the Parliament and led to civil war.

How were soldiers armed, and how did they fight? The foot-soldiers relied chiefly upon the pike and the musket. The days of archers were over a generation ago. The pikemen wore steel caps, breast-plates and back-plates, and a covering of steel for the thighs. The musketeers had enough to do to carry and use their muskets without burdening themselves with armour, so their coats of mail and steel plates were not used. The musket itself was a clumsy and rather ineffective weapon. It was so long and heavy that few men were strong enough to hold one and take aim steadily. So the barrel was laid in a forked rest, which, of course, had to be carried. As there were no cartridges, the soldier had to carry a smouldering string—the match. What with his bullets in a pouch and his powder in a flask, his wads of paper or rag, his burning match, his forked rest, and the heavy musket itself—remembering that the shot did not after all carry very far—the musketeer was not by any means the most dangerous sort of enemy.

No wonder such soldiers were swept off the field by horse-soldiers or cavalry. The pikemen, when trained to stand firm, did far more damage in a battle, and, in fact, pikemen were always used to protect the musketry while they fell back to reload their guns.

The knights, of olden days had given place to the more quickly-moving cavalry. Generals and a few of the higher officers still wore suits of complete armour, as is shown by a visit to the Tower of London, where some of the very suits worn at that time are kept. But the bulk of the cavalry only helmet, breast-plate and back-plate, and tasset for the thighs, carried a couple of pistols, and, instead of a lance, relied chiefly on the sword.

Dragoons—that is, horsemen armed with a short and light musket—were used to precede an army, sometimes by acting as dismounted infantry and seizing positions before the regular foot-soldiers could come up. The seventeenth century was, however, the great age of cavalry, and most of the important battles of the Civil War were chiefly decided by the skilful use of horse and sword, not by gunpowder.

Under James I the navy was in a poor state. The Admiralty was not only inefficient, but so dishonest that money voted for ships and stores was pocketed by officers and contractors, whilst the ships were rotting and their sailors were disbanded. Charles I made many improvements, and the famous "ship-money" was spent in building and equipping a better fleet than had ever been sent out.

Charles's finest ship, the Sovereign of the Seas, was, a three-decker, 230 feet long and of 1,700 tons burden, and carried about 130 guns, the heaviest being 60-pounders. This ship had a long life. It was rebuilt, and at different times it was under the command of Blake, Monk, Penn, the Duke of York, Rupert, Russell, and others. At last it was burnt by accident. The common ships of that time were small vessels of 200 to 500 tons. Compare these with our huge "Dreadnoughts" of to-day!

Far away in the West Indies and the Spanish Main, Englishmen were still carrying on in their own fashion the traditions of Drake and Hawkins, but the sea-dogs of Elizabeth were becoming buccaneers, that is, adventurers; who were mere pirates; under self-appointed leaders. More respectable adventurers and traders were exploring North America and the East Indies, where they came in conflict with the Dutch. Elizabeth had sanctioned the formation of the East India Company in 1600. Virginia and Newfoundland were beginning to be colonised. Baffin and Hudson left their names in Baffin's Bay and Hudson's Bay, whilst in 1620 the Mayflower  sailed with the Pilgrim Fathers, the founders of New England, across the Atlantic Ocean.

If we turn from what men were doing to what they were thinking and saying, we come upon some striking facts. The plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, written mostly in the early years of the seventeenth century, are full of thoughts so modern that they might have been uttered to-day. Both writers had left the Middle Ages behind them, and would have felt at home with the writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century. There are passages in both writers that might have been written as a satire—to poke fun at many of the popular notions put forward in the last century, and even in our own days. Of a somewhat different character were the writings of the great Puritan poet, John Milton, whose lofty verse gave expression to all that was best in the religious thought of the age.

There were two main directions in which men's thoughts were bent, especially during the first half of the century; and there were two great passions that left their mark on our history. Ever since the country had, been set free from the danger of invasion by the defeat of the Spanish Armada, people had had time to think about the internal affairs of the nation and to brood over religion. They began to wish for more freedom in both politics and religion. They wanted a greater share in government and in deciding what the national religion should be. We shall find these two passions asserting themselves over and over again throughout the age of the Stuarts. Religion and politics are mingled in almost every great event Thus, the Pilgrim Fathers and many of the later American colonists were religious refugees; the wars with Scotland were "Bishops' Wars," fought for the sake of establishing bishops in Scotland; the great Civil War was a war of Church and Crown against Puritans and Parliament. Cavaliers were Churchmen; Roundheads were Nonconformists; and these two eventually merged into Tories and Whigs, names which will become very familiar to us from the reign of Charles II onwards.

It was to be an age of intense seriousness on one side, and of licence and dissipation on the other. Puritans, who thought it sinful to play games, who turned Sunday into a sombre and joyless day, who made of the Bible a guide for the smallest concerns of life, and who found in prayer-meetings inspiration for the execution of a king, were to match themselves against dissolute pleasure-lovers, who scoffed at praying tinkers and preaching soldiers. There were, of course, saints and sober Christians on both sides, but the two parties had very different ideals of life.

The greatest learning and the noblest poetry existed side by side with the grossest superstition. Nearly eighty thousand so-called witches are said to have been put to death—many of them by being burnt alive—in less that eighty years.

It was to be an age of strife, but the strife was not for ignoble things, and it produced heroes in plenty on both sides. Well might a later poet cry:—