In Germany towards the end of 1929 employment melted away so rapidly that the prosperous period seemed to have been a mere illusion. In Austria the prosperity had been less convincing in any case, and soon the streets of Vienna seemed crowded with beggars. The Socialist Chancellor of Germany, Hermann Müller, resigned, and Hindenburg called upon the leader of the Centre party, Heinrich Brüning, to succeed him in the spring of 1930. Behind Brüning, and far more than he ever realised, intrigues were concentrating upon plans to make Hindenburg more of a pre-1914 emperor, and to reduce the powers of the Reichstag accordingly: these intrigues emanated from a ‘political general’ called Kurt von Schleicher, a friend of the President's son Oscar. When in July 1930 Brüning failed to get the agreement of the Reichstag to some deflationary measures of his, Hindenburg, encouraged by Schleicher, enforced them by emergency decree. Brüning thought it correct to dissolve the Reichstag, which had been elected in May 1928 in the prosperous period.

Elections were held on 14 September 1930: the results were like a bombshell for Germany and for Europe. The number of Communist deputies increased from 54 to 77 and the National Socialist Party (Nazis) shot up from 12 in the last Reichstag to 107: they were now the largest party after the Social Democrats. These Nazis were the followers of the Austrian agitator, Adolf Hitler, who had ignominiously failed to seize power in Munich in November 1923.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of 11 November 1918 the cease-fire sounded along the western front. It was the end of the first world war, which had killed not less than 10 million persons, had brought down four great empires and had impoverished the continent of Europe. The defeat of Germany, so long invincible to more than half the world, had been registered at dawn that day in the Armistice of Compiègne. Its heavy terms were in the main those proposed by Marshal Foch, the Allied generalissimo, and lay between the views of the British Field-Marshal Haig, who overestimated the German capacity for continued resistance and advocated more lenient conditions, and those of the American General Pershing, who had argued in favour of refusing an armistice and maintaining the Allied advance. This matched the attitude of the former president Theodore Roosevelt and a popular American demand for unconditional surrender. As it was, one month after the armistice, Ebert, head of the first government of the new German republic, greeted returning German formations at the Brandenburger Tor with the words: ‘No foe has overcome you … You have protected the homeland from enemy invasion.’

No less important in the long run than the terms of the armistice were the preconditions governing its signature. When the German government had applied to President Wilson on 4 October 1918 for an armistice it had adroitly proposed that peace negotiations, and not only those for an armistice, should be based upon the ‘fourteen points’ of his address of 8 January 1918, as amplified in his subsequent pronouncements.

A comparison between the countries round the Baltic and those round the Mediterranean in the middle of the sixteenth century sheds light L on conditions in the north at a time when the political situation was vastly different from the present one. Though in varying degrees, the European countries on the Mediterranean all had an ancient cultural heritage, and during the last few centuries they had evolved a new culture—the Renaissance—in conscious relation to classical antiquity. The former political disunity was partly overcome in France, was on the way to being overcome in the Iberian peninsula, but was still acute in Italy. At the eastern end of the Mediterranean, on the other side of an ‘iron curtain’, lay the cultural world of the Orient. For centuries it had given many impulses to southern Europe. Now the links were broken, and most of Europe's trade with the Far East followed new routes.

Similarly, in the middle of the sixteenth century the eastern and western sides of the Baltic belonged to different cultural spheres in religion, education, language and custom; the main line of demarcation was between Russia on the one side, and her neighbours Sweden-Finland and Poland on the other. But the dissimilarities to southern Europe were enormous. The northern countries were economically and culturally primitive compared with those in the south. The refinement of the Renaissance had as yet left only small traces in northern Europe, primarily in art. The Reformation's programme, however, had quickly and effectively reached northern Germany, Poland and Scandinavia, spreading not so much among the masses as in certain social groups—particularly the middle-class townspeople—and within government circles.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis ended a war that had become, if indeed it had not started as, ‘a race between spent horses’. It was a peace of exhaustion and it endured because for many years to come none of the states of western Europe felt strong enough to risk another general conflict. Yet although all were afraid to strike, some were still willing to wound. And the internal instability that afflicted all of them, bred of exhaustion and fevered by a crisis of conscience in religion, gave to any dissatisfied power repeated hopes of undermining the foundations upon which the 1559 settlement rested.

In that settlement the British Isles occupied a crucial position. For the treaties left one of the two outstandingly great powers of western Europe, France, hemmed in and all but encircled by the territories of the other, Spain. The dominions of Philip II of Spain ran almost all around France—from Spain itself through the Balearic islands, Sardinia, and Sicily to Naples, the Tuscan ports, Parma, and Milan, with dependent Corsica, Genoa, and Savoy-Piedmont linking on to Franche-Comté and the Netherlands. If the British Isles or at least England could be added to these, as during Mary Tudor's marriage to Philip II (1554–8), then the ring would be complete and virtually unbreakable. If, on the other hand, the French could control England as well as Scotland, then the sea route through the Channel and the Straits of Dover could be closed to the Spaniards.