Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them, who t'advance, and who
To trash for overtopping, new created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang'd ‘em,
Or else new form' d ‘em, having both the key
Of officer and office, set all hearts i'th'state
To what tune pleased his ear…1
FROM EARLY in the sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth two conflicts intertwined: the religious struggle that began with the Reformation and which provoked horrific civil wars throughout Europe; and the efforts of the Habsburg dynasty to establish a true imperial realm in Europe. These two interacting dramas culminated in the Peace of West-phalia in 1648, which ratified the role of the kingly state as the dominant, legitimate form of government in western Europe. During this period of more than a century, the kingly state—a domain of absolute authority that made the king the personification of the State—achieved pre-eminence, although the seeds of its successor, the territorial state, were sown by the same treaties that ratified the kingly states' dominance. Before the kingly state could prevail, however, the international scope of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire, whose weakening had facilitated the emergence of the princely state, had to be shattered. The Habsburg drive for hegemony put these stakes on the table by uniting two goals—to restore Catholic universality and to make the Holy Roman Empire a universal power—and it was the Habsburg defeat that brought the kingly state to triumph.