The absolutists monarchs of the seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries attempted to establish a monopoly on power and authority in their states through a number of different ways. The methods they used differed according to the preexisting structures of government and social realities in their states. In France, for example, the Bourbon monarchy had no real legislative body to contend with. He did have, however, a system of courts, controlled by nobles, that often worked at cross-purposes with the monarch. Of these so-called parlements, the one in Paris was the strongest. Additionally, nobles within cities still enjoyed old feudal privileges that they claimed made them immune to the decrees of Louis. The so-called "Sun King" attempted to rectify this by creating a bureaucratic state staffed with "nobles of the robe," lesser nobility that owed their positions to Louis himself. This was expensive and unwieldy, and truthfully Louis never really exercised anywhere near as much power as he claimed. That said, he was extraordinarily effective in promoting himself as an absolute monarch, holding court at Versailles, where he cultivated the image of a "sun king" who was the living embodiment of France itself. Louis also tried to cultivate French national unity by repealing the Edict of Nantes, which had extended toleration to French Protestants, on the grounds that it created a state within a state. So while Louis unquestionably expanded the powers of the French monarchy and the state, and was perhaps the most "absolute" of the European absolutists, his powers were always limited. In England, the Stuarts monarchy attempted to create an absolutist state modeled along French lines. But James I and especially Charles I ran up against a Parliament that was jealous of its authority, and especially unwilling to levy taxes that had not originated with its members. While Louis also had to deal with such issues, the Parliament in England was more established, and enjoyed more support from a growing middle class that resented Stuart pretensions. This issue culminated with the English Civil War, which ended with the establishment of a Puritan Commonwealth in which Oliver Cromwell ironically ruled with more power than the Stuarts had ever wielded. In eastern Europe, Prussian and especially Russian monarchs had to deal with entrenched nobles that generally opposed moves toward consolidation of power. Monarchs attempted to coopt these nobles into their power-building projects, but were only so successful. Prussian "Junkers," for example, would continue to maintain considerable influence over the monarchy because they represented the officer class in the military. Russian nobles maintained a great deal of autonomy (though they had to adopt some Western cultural trends under Peter the Great) through their control over serf and peasant populations. So overall, despite the pageantry and the rhetoric, and the fact that they did wield much more power than their predecessors, most absolutist monarchs faced real limitations.