Part 2 — Chapter III. (These four articles abrogated by the four articles following them, 118-122.) Article 118. The Federal Constitution may at any time be amended. (continued 35)

The humiliating failure of Charles V. to crush the Reformation in Germany was no doubt prominent among the experiences which sickened him of the imperial office and determined him to abdicate the throne, which he did in the autumn of 1556.

Reformation in Switzerland.

A generation had now passed since the Lutheran movement of Reformation was begun in Germany, and, within that time, not only had the wave of influence from Wittenberg swept over all western Europe, but other reformers had risen independently and contemporaneously, or nearly so, in other countries, and had co-operated powerfully in making the movement general. The earliest of these was the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, who began preaching against indulgences and other flagrant abuses in the Church, at Zurich, in 1519, the same year in which Luther opened his attack. The effect of his preaching was so great that Zurich, four years later, had practically separated itself from the Roman Church. {1060} From that beginning the Reformation spread so rapidly that in half-a-dozen years it had mastered most of the Cantons of Switzerland outside of the five Forest Cantons, where Catholicism held its ground with stubbornness. The two religions were then represented by two parties, which absorbed in themselves all the political as well as the religious questions of the day, and which speedily came to blows. The Catholics allied themselves with Ferdinand of Austria, and the Protestants with several of the imperial cities of Germany. But such an union between the Swiss and the German Protestants as seemed plainly desirable was prevented; mainly, by the dictatorial obstinacy of Luther. Zwingli's reforming ideas were broader, and at the same time more radical, than Luther's, and the latter opposed them with irreconcilable hostility. He still held with the Catholics to the doctrine of transubstantiation, which the Swiss reformer rejected. Hence Zwingli was no less a heretic in Luther's eyes than in the eyes of the pope, and the anathemas launched against him from Wittenberg were hardly less thunderous than those from Rome. So the two contemporaneous reformation movements, German and Swiss, were held apart from one another, and went on side by side, with little help or sympathy from one another. In 1531 the Forest Cantons attacked and defeated the men of Zurich, and Zwingli was slain in the battle. Peace was then concluded on terms which left each canton free to establish its own creed, and each congregation free to do the same in the common territories of the confederation.

Reformation in France.

In France, the freer ideas of Christianity—the ideas less servile to tradition and to Rome—that were in the upper air of European culture when the sixteenth century began, had found some expression even before Luther spoke. The influence of the new classical learning, and of the "humanists" who imbibed its spirit, tended to that liberation of the mind, and was felt in the greatest center of the learning of the time, the University of Paris. But not sufficiently to overcome the conservatism of the Sorbonne—the theological faculty of the University; for Luther's writings were solemnly condemned and burned by it in 1521, and a persecution of those inclined toward the new doctrines was early begun. Francis I., in whose careless and coarse nature there was some taste for letters and learning, as well as for art, and who patronized in an idle way the Renaissance movements of his reign, seemed disposed at the beginning to be friendly to the religious Reformers. But he was too shallow a creature, and too profoundly unprincipled and false, to stand firmly in any cause of righteousness, and face such a power as that of Rome. His nobler sister, Margaret of Angoulême, who embraced the reformed doctrines with conviction, exerted a strong influence upon the king in their favor while she was by his side; but after her marriage to Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, and after Francis had suffered defeat and shame in his war with Charles V., he was ready to make himself the servant of the Papacy for whatever it willed against his Protestant subjects, in order to have its alliance and support. So the persecution grew steadily more fierce, more systematic, and more determined, as the spirit of the Reformation spread more widely through the kingdom.

Calvin at Geneva.

One of the consequences of the persecution was the flight from France, in 1534, of John Calvin, who subsequently became the founder and the exponent of a system of Protestant theology which obtained wider acceptance in Europe than that of Luther. All minor differences were practically merged in the great division between these two theologies—the Lutheran and the Calvinistic—which split the Reformation in twain. After two years of wandering, Calvin settled in the free city of Geneva, where his influence very soon rose to so extraordinary a height that he transformed the commonwealth and ruled it, unselfishly, and in perfect piety, but with iron-handed despotism, for a quarter of a century.

The French Court.

The reign of Francis I. has one other mark in history, besides that of his persecution of the Reformers, his careless patronage of arts and letters, and his unsuccessful wars with the Emperor. He gave to the French Court—at least more than his predecessors had done—the character which made it in later French history so evil and mischievous a center of dissoluteness, of base intrigue, of national demoralization. It was invested in his time with the fascinations which drew into it the nobles of France and its men of genius, to corrupt them and to destroy their independence. It was in his time that the Court began to seem to be, in its own eyes, a kind of self-centered society, containing all of the French nation which needed or deserved consideration, and holding its place in the order of things quite apart from the kingdom which it helped its royal master to rule. Not to be of the Court was to be non-existent in its view; and thus every ambition in France was invited to push at its fatal doors.

Catherine de' Medici and the Guises.

Francis I. died in 1547, and was followed on the throne by his son Henry II., whose marriage to Catherine de' Medici, of the renowned Florentine family, was the most important personal act of his life. It was important in the malign fruits which it bore; since Catherine, after his death, gave an evil Italian bend-sinister to French politics, which had no lack of crookedness before. Henry continued the war with Charles V., and was afterwards at war with Philip II., Charles' son, and with England, the latter country losing Calais in the contest,—its last French possession. Peace was made in 1559, and celebrated with splendid tournaments, at one of which the French king received a wound that caused his death.

He left three sons, all weaklings in body and character, who reigned successively. The elder, Francis II., died the year following his accession. Although aged but seventeen when he died, he had been married some two years to Mary Stuart, the young queen of Scots. This marriage had helped to raise to great power in the kingdom a family known as the Guises. They were a branch of the ducal House of Lorraine, whose duchy was at that time independent of France, and, although the father of the family, made Duke of Guise by Francis I., had become naturalized in France in 1505, his sons were looked upon as foreigners by the jealous Frenchmen whom they supplanted at Court. {1061} Of the six sons, there were two of eminence, one (the second duke of Guise) a famous general in his day, the other a powerful cardinal. Five sisters completed the family in its second generation. The elder of these, Mary, had married James V. of Scotland (whose mother was the English princess, Margaret, sister of Henry VIII.), and Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, born of that marriage, was therefore a niece of the Guises. They had brought about her marriage to Francis II., while he was dauphin, and they mounted with her to supreme influence in the kingdom when she ascended the throne with her husband. The queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, was as eager as the Guises to control the government, in what appeared to her eyes the interest of her children; but during the short reign of Francis II. she was quite thrust aside, and the queen's uncles ruled the state.

The death of Francis II. (1560) brought a change, and with the accession of Charles IX., a boy of ten years, there began a bitter contest for ascendancy between Catherine and the Guises; and this struggle became mixed and strangely complicated with a deadly conflict of religions, which the steady advance of the Reformation in France had brought at this time to a crisis.

The Huguenots.

Under the powerful leadership which Calvin assumed, at Geneva, the reformed religion in France had acquired an organized firmness and strength which not only resisted the most cruel persecution, but made rapid headway against it. "Protestantism had become a party which did not, like Lutheranism in Germany, spring up from the depths." "It numbered its chief adherents among the middle and upper grades of society, spread its roots rather among the nobles than the citizens, and among learned men and families of distinction rather than among the people." "Some of the highest aristocracy, who were discontented, and submitted unwillingly to the supremacy of the Guises, had joined the Calvinistic opposition—some undoubtedly from policy, others from conviction. The Turennes, the Rohans, and Soubises, pure nobles, who addressed the king as 'mon cousin,' especially the Bourbons, the agnates of the royal house, had adopted the new faith" (Hausser). One branch of the Bourbons had lately acquired the crown of Navarre. The Spanish part of the old Navarrese kingdom had been subjugated and absorbed by Ferdinand of Aragon; but its territory on the French side of the Pyrenees—Béarn and other counties—still maintained a half independent national existence, with the dignity of a regal government. When Margaret of Angoulême, sister of Francis I., married Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, as mentioned before, she carried to that small court an earnest inclination towards the doctrines of the Reform. Under her protection Navarre became largely Protestant, and a place of refuge for the persecuted of France. Margaret's daughter, the famous Jeanne d'Albret, espoused the reformed faith fully, and her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, as well as Antoine's brother, Louis de Condé, found it politic to profess the same belief. For the Protestants (who were now acquiring, in some unknown way, the name of Huguenots) had become so numerous and so compactly organized as to form a party capable of being wielded with great effect, in the strife of court factions which the rivalry of Catherine and the Guises produced. Hence politics and religion were inextricably confused in the civil wars which broke out shortly after the death of Francis II. (1560), and the accession of the boy king, Charles IX. These wars belong to a different movement in the general current of European events, and we will return to them after a glance at the religious Reformation, and at the political circumstances connected with it, in England and elsewhere.

England.

Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, made king of England by his victory at Bosworth, established himself so firmly in the seat of power that three successive rebellions failed to disturb him. In one of these (1487) a pretender, Lambert Simnel, was put forward, who claimed to be the Earl of Warwick. In another (1491-1497) a second pretender, Perkin Warbeck, personated one of the young princes whom Richard III. had caused to be murdered in the tower. Neither of the impostures had much success in the kingdom. Henry VII. was not a popular king, but he was able and strong, and he solidified all the bases of monarchical independence which circumstances had enabled Edward IV. to begin laying down.

It was in the reign of Henry that America was discovered, and he might have been the patron of Columbus, the beneficiary of the great voyage, and the proprietor and lord of the grand realm which Isabella and Ferdinand secured. But he lacked the funds or the faith—apparently both—and put aside his unequaled opportunity. When the field of westward exploration had been opened, however, he was early in entering it, and sent the Cabots upon those voyages which gave England her claim to the North American coasts.

During the reign of Henry VII. there were two quiet marriages in his family which strangely influenced subsequent history. One was the marriage, in 1501, of the king's eldest son, Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon, youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. The other, in 1503, united the king's daughter, Margaret, to James IV., King of Scotland. It was through this latter marriage that the inheritance of the English crown passed to the Scottish House of Stuart, exactly one hundred years later, upon the failure of the direct line of descent in the Tudor family. The first marriage, of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, was soon dissolved by the death of the prince, in 1502. Seven years afterwards the widowed Catherine married her late husband's brother, just after he became Henry VIII., King of England, upon the death of his father, in 1509. Whence followed notable consequences which will presently appear.

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Henry VIII. and his breach with Rome.

It was the ambition of Henry VIII. to play a conspicuous part in European affairs; and as England was rich and strong, and as the king had obtained nearly the absoluteness of the crown in France, the parties to the great contests then going on were all eagerly courting his alliance. His ambitions ran parallel, too, with those of the able minister, Thomas Wolsey, who rose to high influence at his side soon after his reign began. Wolsey aspired to the Papal crown, with the cardinal's cap as a preparatory adornment, and he drew England, as we have seen, into the stormy politics of the sixteenth century in Europe, with no gain, of glory or otherwise, to the nation, and not much result of any kind. When the Emperor Maximilian died, in 1519, Henry entered the lists against Maximilian's grandson, Charles of Spain, and Francis I. of France, as a candidate for the imperial crown. In the subsequent wars which broke out between his two rivals, he took the side of the successful Charles, now Emperor, and helped him to climb to supremacy in Europe over the prostrate French king. He had dreams of conquering France again, and casting the glories of Henry V. in the shade; but he carried his enterprise little beyond the dreaming. When it was too late to check the growth of Charles' overshadowing power, he changed his side and took Francis into alliance.

But Henry's motives were always selfish and personal—never political; and the personal motives had now taken on a most despicable character. He had tired of his wife, the Spanish Catherine, who was six years older than himself. He had two pretexts for discontent with his marriage: 1, that his queen had borne him only a daughter, whereas England needed a male heir to the throne; 2, that he was troubled with scruples as to the lawfulness of wedlock with his brother's widow. On this latter ground he began intrigues to win from the Pope, not a divorce in the ordinary sense of the term, but a declaration of the nullity of his marriage. This challenged the opposition of the Emperor, Catherine's nephew, and Henry's alliances were naturally changed.

The Pope, Clement VII., refused to annul the marriage, and Henry turned his unreasoning wrath upon Cardinal Wolsey, who had conducted negotiations with the Pope and failed in them. Wolsey was driven from the Court in disgrace and died soon afterwards. He was succeeded in the king's favor by a more unscrupulous man, Thomas Cromwell. Henry had not yet despaired of bringing the Pope to compliance with his wishes; and he began attacks upon the Church and upon the papal revenues which might shake, as he hoped, the firmness of the powers at Rome. With the help of a pliant minister and a subservient Parliament, he forced the clergy (1531-1532) in Convocation to acknowledge him to be the Supreme Head of the English Church, and to submit themselves entirely to his authority. At the same time he grasped the "annates," or first year's income of bishoprics, which had been the richest perquisite of the papal treasury. In all these proceedings, the English king was acting on a line parallel to that of the continental rising against Rome; but it was not in friendliness toward it nor in sympathy with it that he did so. He had been among the bitterest enemies of the Reformation, and he never ceased to be so. He had won from the Pope the empty title of "Defender of the Faith," by a foolish book against Luther, and the faith which he defended in 1521 was the faith in which he died. But when he found that the influence of Charles V. at Rome was too great to be overcome, and that the Pope could be neither bribed, persuaded nor coerced to sanction the putting away of his wife, he resolved to make the English Church sufficient in authority to satisfy his demand, by establishing its ecclesiastical independence, with a pontiff of its own, in himself. He purposed nothing more than this. He contemplated no change of doctrine, no cleansing of abuses. He permitted no one whose services he commanded in the undertaking to bring such changes into contemplation. So far as concerned Henry's initiative, there was absolutely nothing of religious Reformation in the movement which separated the Church of England from the Church of Rome. It accomplished its sole original end when it gave finality to the decree of an English ecclesiastical court, on the question of the king's marriage, and barred queen Catherine's appeal from it. It was the intention of Henry VIII. that the Church under his papacy should remain precisely what it had been under the Pope at Rome, and he spared neither stake nor gibbet in his persecuting zeal against impudent reformers.

But the spirit of Reformation which was in the atmosphere of that time lent itself, nevertheless, to King Henry's project, and made that practicable which could hardly have been so a generation before. The influence of Wyclif had never wholly died out; the new learning was making its way in England and broadening men's minds; the voice of Luther and his fellow workers on the continent had been heard, and not vainly. England was ripe for the religious revolution, and her king promoted it, without intention. But while his reign lasted, and his despotism was heavy on the land, there was nothing accomplished but the breaking of the old Church fetters, and the binding of the nation anew with green withes, which, presently, it would burst asunder.

The conspicuous events of Henry's reign are familiarly known. Most of them bear the stamp of his monstrous egotism and selfishness. He was the incomparable tyrant of English history. The monarch who repudiated two wives, sent two to the block, and shared his bed with yet two more; who made a whole national church the servant of his lusts, and who took the lives of the purest men of his kingdom when they would not bend their consciences to say that he did well—has a pedestal quite his own in the gallery of infamous kings.

Edward VI. and the Reformation.

Dying in 1547, Henry left three children: Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, and Edward, son of Jane Seymour. The latter, in his tenth year, became King (Edward VI.), and his uncle, the Duke of Somerset, acquired the control of the government, with the title of Protector. Somerset headed a party which had begun before the death of the king to press for more changes in the character of the new Church of England and less adherence to the pattern of Rome. There seems to be little reason to suppose that the court leaders of this party were much moved in the matter by any interest of a religious kind; but the growth of thinking and feeling in England tended that way, and the side of Reformation had become the stronger. They simply gave way to it, and, abandoned the repression which Henry had persisted in. At the same time, their new policy gave them more freedom to grasp the spoils of the old Church, which Henry VIII. had begun to lay hands on, by suppression of monasteries and confiscation of their estates. The wealth thus sequestered went largely into private hands.

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It was in the short reign of Edward VI. that the Church of England really took on its organic form as one of the Churches of the Reformation, by the composition of its first prayer-books, and by the framing of a definite creed.

Lady Jane Grey.

In 1553, the young king died. Somerset had fallen from power the previous year and had suffered death. He had been supplanted by Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, and that minister had persuaded Edward to bequeath his crown to Lady Jane Grey, grand-daughter of the younger sister of Henry VIII. But Northumberland was hated by the people, and few could recognize the right of a boy on the throne to change the order of regal succession by his will. Parliament had formally legitimated both Catherine's daughter, Mary, and Anne Boleyn's daughter, Elizabeth, and had placed them in the line of inheritance. Mary's legal title to the crown was clear. She had adhered with her mother to the Roman Church, and her advent upon the throne would mean the subjection of the English Church to the Papacy anew; since the constitution of the Church armed the sovereign with supreme and indisputable power over it. The Protestants of the kingdom knew what to expect, and were in great fear; but they submitted. Lady Jane Grey was recommended to them by her Protestant belief, and by her beautiful character; but her title was too defective and her supporters too much distrusted. There were few to stand by the poor young girl when Northumberland proclaimed her queen, and she was easily dethroned by the partisans of Mary. A year later she was sent to the block.

Catholicism was now ascendant again, and England was brought to share in the great reaction against the Reformation which prevailed generally through Europe and which we shall presently consider. Before doing so, let us glance briefly at the religious state of some other countries not yet touched upon.

The Reformation in Scotland.

In Scotland, a deep undercurrent of feeling against the corruptions of the Church had been repressed by resolute persecutions, until after the middle of the sixteenth century. Wars with England, and the close connection of the Scottish Court with the Guises of France, had both tended to retard the progress of a reform sentiment, or to delay the manifestation of it. But when the pent-up feeling began to respond to the voice of the great Calvinistic evangelist and organizer, John Knox, it swept the nation like a storm. Knox's first preaching, after his captivity in France and exile to Geneva, was in 1555. In 1560, the authority of the Pope was renounced, the mass prohibited, and the Geneva confession of faith adopted, by the Scottish Estates. After that time the Reformed Church in Scotland—the Church of Presbyterianism—had only to resist the futile hostility of Mary Stuart for a few years, until it came to its great struggle against English Episcopacy, under Mary's son and grandson, James and Charles.

The Reformation in the North.

In the three Scandinavian nations the ideas of the Reformation, diffused from Germany, had won early favor, both from kings and people, and had soon secured an enduring foothold. They owed their reception quite as much, perhaps, to the political situation as to the religious feeling of the northern peoples.

When the ferment of the Reformation movement began, the three crowns were worn by one king, as they had been since the "Union of Calmar," in 1397, and the King of Denmark was the sovereign of the Union. His actual power in Sweden and Norway was slight; his theoretical authority was sufficient to irritate both. In Sweden, especially, the nobles chafed under the yoke of the profitless federation. Christian II., the last Danish king of the three kingdoms, crushed their disaffection by a harsh conquest of the country (1520), and by savage executions, so perfidious and so numerous that they are known in Swedish history as the Massacre of Stockholm. But this brutal and faithless king became so hateful in his own proper kingdom that the Danish nobles rose against him in 1523 and he was driven from the land. The crown was given to his uncle, Frederick, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. In that German Duchy, Lutheranism had already made its way, and Frederick was in accord with it. On coming to the throne of Denmark, where Catholicism still prevailed, he pledged himself to attempt no interference with it; but he felt no obligation, on the other hand, to protect it. He demanded and established a toleration for both doctrines, and gave to the reformers a freedom of opportunity which speedily undermined the old faith and overthrew it.

In the meantime, Sweden had undergone the important revolution of her history, which placed the national hero, Gustavus Vasa, on the throne. Gustavus was a young noble whose title to the crown was not derived from his lineage, but from his genius. After Christian II. had bloodily exterminated the elder leaders of the Swedish state, this young lord, then a hostage and prisoner in the tyrant's hands, made his escape and took upon himself the mission of setting his country free. For three years Gustavus lived a life like that of Alfred the Great in England, when he, too, struggled with the Danes. His heroic adventures were crowned with success, and Sweden, led to independence by its natural king, bestowed the regal title upon him (1523) and seated him upon its ancient throne. The new Danish king, Frederick, acknowledged the revolution, and the Union of Calmar was dissolved. Sweden under Gustavus Vasa recovered from the state of great disorder into which it had fallen, and grew to be a nation of important strength. As a measure of policy, he encouraged the introduction of Lutheranism and promoted the spread of it, in order to break the power of the Catholic clergy, and also, in order, without doubt, to obtain possession of the property of the Church, which secured to the Crown the substantial revenues it required.

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Italy.

In Italy, the reformed doctrines obtained no popular footing at any time, though many among the cultivated people regarded them with favor, and would gladly have witnessed, not only a practical purging of the Church, but a revision of those Catholic dogmas most offensive to a rational mind. But such little movement as stirred in that direction was soon stopped by the success of the Emperor, Charles V., in his Italian wars with Francis I., and by the Spanish domination in the peninsula which ensued thereon. The Spain of that age was like the bloodless octopus which paralyzes the victim in its clutch, and Italy, gripped in half of its many principalities by the deadly tentacles thrust out from Madrid, showed no consciousness for the next two centuries.

The Council of Trent.

The long demanded, long promised General Council, for considering the alleged abuses in the Church and the alleged falsities in its doctrine, and generally for discussion and action upon the questions raised by the Reformation, assembled at Trent in December, 1545. The Emperor seems to have desired with sincerity that the Council might be one which the Protestants would have confidence in, and in which they might be represented, for a full discussion of their differences with Rome. But this was made impossible from the beginning. The Protestants demanded that "final appeal on all debated points should be made to the sole authority of Holy Scripture," and this being refused by the Pope (Paul III.), there remained no ground on which the two parties could meet. The Italian prelates who composed the majority of the Council made haste, it would seem, to take action which closed the doors of conciliation against the Reformers. "First, they declared that divine revelation was continuous in the Church of which the Pope was the head; and that the chief written depository of this revelation—namely, the Scriptures—had no authority except in the version of the Vulgate. Secondly, they condemned the doctrine of justification by Faith. … Thirdly, they confirmed the efficacy and the binding authority of the Seven Sacraments." "The Council terminated in December [1563] with an act of submission, which placed all its decrees at the pleasure of the Papal sanction. Pius [Pius IV. became Pope in 1560] was wise enough to pass and ratify the decrees of the Tridentine fathers by a Bull dated on December 26, 1563, reserving to the Papal sovereign the sole right of interpreting them in doubtful or disputed cases. This he could well afford to do; for not an article had been penned without his concurrence, and not a stipulation had been made without a previous understanding with the Catholic powers. The very terms, moreover, by which his ratification was conveyed, secured his supremacy, and conferred upon his successors and himself the privileges of a court of ultimate appeal. At no previous period in the history of the Church had so wide, so undefined, and so unlimited an authority been accorded to the See of Rome" (Symonds).

Some practical reforms in the Church were wrought by the Council of Trent, but its disciplinary decrees were less important than the dogmatic. From beginning to end of its sessions, which, broken by many suspensions and adjournments, dragged through eighteen years, it addressed itself to the task of solidifying the Church of Rome, as left by the Protestant schism,—not of healing the schism itself or of removing the provocations to it. The work which the Council did in that direction was of vast importance, and profoundly affected the future of the Papacy and of its spiritual realm. It gave a firm dogmatic footing to the great reactionary new forces which now came into play, with aggressive enthusiasm and zeal, to arrest the advance of the Reformation and roll it back.

The Catholic reaction.

The extraordinary revival of Catholicism and thrusting back of Protestantism which occurred in the later half of the sixteenth century had several causes behind it and within it.

1. The spiritual impulse from which the Reformation started had considerably spent itself, or had become debased by a gross admixture of political and mercenary aims. In Germany, the spoils derived from the suppressing of monastic establishments and the secularizing of ecclesiastical fiefs and estates, appeared very early among the potent inducements by which mercenary princes were drawn to the side of the Lutheran reform. Later, as the opposing leagues, Protestant and Catholic, settled into chronic opposition and hostility, the struggle between them took on more and more the character of a great political game, and lost more and more the spirit of a battle for free conscience and a free mind. In France, as we have noticed, the political entanglements of the Huguenot party were such, by this time, that it could not fail to be lowered by them in its religious tone. In England, every breath of spirituality in the movement had so far (to the death of Henry VIII.) been stifled, and it showed nothing but a brazen political front to the world. In the Netherlands, the struggle for religious freedom was about to merge itself in a fight of forty years for self-government, and the fortitude and valor of the citizen were more surely developed in that long war than the faith and fervor of the Christian. And so, generally throughout Europe, Protestantism, in its conflict with the powers of the ancient Church, had descended, ere the sixteenth century ran far into its second half, to a distinctly lower plane than it occupied at first. On that lower plane Rome fronted it more formidably, with stronger arms, than on the higher.

2. Broadly stating the fact, it may be said that Protestantism made all its great inroads upon the Church of Rome before partisanship came to the rescue of the latter, and closed the open mind with which Luther, and Zwingli, and Farel, and Calvin were listened to at first. It happens always, when new ideas, combative of old ones, whether religious or political, are first put forward in the world, they are listened to for a time with a certain disinterestedness of attention—a certain native candor in the mind—which gives them a fair hearing. If they seem reasonable, they obtain ready acceptance, and spread rapidly,—until the conservatism of the beliefs assailed takes serious alarm, and the radicalism of the innovating beliefs becomes ambitious and rampant; until the for and the against stiffen themselves in opposing ranks, and the voice of argument is drowned by the cries of party. That ends all shifting of masses from the old to the new ground. That ends conversion as an epidemic and dwindles it to the sporadic character.

3. Protestantism became bitterly divided within itself at an early stage of its career by doctrinal differences, first between Zwinglians and Lutherans, and then between Lutherans and Calvinists, while Catholicism, under attack, settled into more unity and solidity than before.

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4. The tremendous power in Europe to which the Spanish monarchy, with its subject dominions, and its dynastic relations, had now risen, passed, in 1556, to a dull-brained and soulless bigot, who saw but one use for it, namely, the extinction of all dissent from his own beliefs, and all opposition to his own will. Philip II. differed from his father, Charles V., not in the enormity of his bigoted egotism—they were equals, perhaps, in that—but in the exclusiveness of it. There was something else in Charles, something sometimes faintly admirable. He did have some interests in life that were not purely malignant. But his horrid vampire of a son, the most repulsive creature of his kind in all history, had nothing in him that was not as deadly to mankind as the venom secreted behind the fang of a cobra. It was a frightful day for the world when a despotism which shadowed Spain, Sicily, Italy and the Low Countries, and which had begun to drag unbounded treasure from America, fell to the possession of such a being as this. Nothing substantial was taken away from the potent malevolence of Philip by his failure of election in Germany to the Imperial throne. On the contrary, he was the stronger for it, because all his dominion was real and all his authority might assume to be absolute. His father had been more handicapped than helped by his German responsibilities and embarrassments, which Philip escaped. It is not strange that his concentration of the vast enginery under his hands to one limited aim, of exterminating what his dull and ignorant mind conceived to be irreligion and treason, had its large measure of success. The stranger thing is, that there was fortitude and courage to resist such power, in even one corner of his realm.

5. The Papacy was restored at this time to the purer and higher character of its best ages, by well-guided elections, which raised in succession to the throne a number of men, very different in ability, and quite different, too, in the spirit of their piety, but generally alike in dignity and decency of life, and in qualities which command respect. The fiery Neapolitan zealot, Caraffa, who became Pope in 1555 as Paul IV.; his cool-tempered diplomatic successor, Pius IV., who manipulated the closing labors of the Council of Trent; the austere inquisitor, Pius V.; the more commonplace Gregory XIII., and the powerful Sixtus V., were pontiffs who gave new strength to Catholicism, in their different ways, both by what they did and by what they were.

6. The revival of zeal in the Roman Church, naturally following the attacks upon it, gave rise to many new religious organizations within its elastic fold, some reformatory, some missionary and militant, but all bringing an effectual reinforcement to it, at the time when its assailants began to show faltering signs. Among these was one—Loyola's Society of Jesus—which marched promptly to the front of the battle, and which contributed more than any other single force in the field to the rallying of the Church, to the stopping of retreat, and to the facing of its stubborn columns forward for a fresh advance. The Jesuits took such a lead and accomplished such results by virtue of the military precision of discipline under which they had been placed and to which they were singularly trained by the rules of the founder; and also by effect of a certain subtle sophistry that runs through their ethical maxims and their counsels of piety. They fought for their faith with a sublime courage, with a devotion almost unparalleled, with an earnestness of belief that cannot be questioned; but they used weapons and modes of warfare which the higher moral feeling of civilized mankind, whether Christian or Pagan, has always condemned. It is not Protestant enemies alone who say this. It is the accusation that has been brought against them again and again in their own Church, and which has expelled them from Catholic countries, again and again. In the first century or more of their career, this plastic conscience, moulded by a passionate zeal, and surrendered, with every gift of mind and body, to a service of obedience which tolerated no evasion on one side nor bending on the other, made the Jesuits the most invincible and dangerous body of men that was ever organized for defense and aggression in any cause.

The order was founded in 1540, by a bull of Pope Paul III. At the time of Loyola's death, in 1556, it numbered about one thousand members, and under Lainez, the second general of the order, who succeeded Loyola at the head, it advanced rapidly, in numbers, in efficiency of organization, and in wide-spread influence.

Briefly stated, these are the incidents and circumstances which help to explain—not fully, perhaps, but almost sufficiently—the check to Protestantism and the restored energy and aggressiveness of the Catholic Church, in the later half of the sixteenth century.

The Ruin of Spain.

In his kingdoms of Spain, Philip II. may be said to have finished the work of death which his father and his father's grand-parents committed to him. They began it, and appointed the lines on which it was to be done. The Spain of their day had the fairest opportunity of any nation in Europe for a great and noble career. The golden gates of her opportunity were unlocked and opened by good Queen Isabella; but the pure hands of the same pious queen threw over the neck of her country the noose of a strangler, and tightened it prayerfully. Her grandson, who was neither pious nor good, flung his vast weight of power upon it. But the strangling halter of the Spanish Inquisition did not extinguish signs of life in his kingdom fast enough to satisfy his royal impatience, and he tightened other cords upon the suffering body and all its limbs. Philip, when he came to take up the murderous task, found every equipment for it that he could desire. He had only to gather the strands of the infernal mesh into his hands, and bring the strain of his awful sovereignty to bear upon them: then sit and watch the palsy of death creep over his dominions.

Of political life, Charles really left nothing for his son to kill. Of positive religious life, there can have been no important survival, for he and his Inquisition had been keenly vigilant; but Philip made much of the little he could discover. As to the industrial life of Spain, father and son were alike active in the murdering of it, and alike ingenious. They paralyzed manufactures, in the first instance, by persecuting and expelling the thrifty and skilful Moriscoes; then they made their work complete by heavy duties on raw materials. To extinguish the agricultural industries of the kingdom, they had happy inspirations. {1066} They prohibited the exportation of one commodity after another—corn, cattle, wool, cloth, leather, and the like—until they had brought Spain practically to the point of being dependent on other countries for many products of skill, and yet of having nothing to offer in exchange, except the treasure of precious metals which she drew from America. Hence it happened that the silver and gold of the Peruvian and Mexican mines ran like quicksand through her fingers, into the coffers of the merchants of the Low Countries and of England; and, probably, no other country in Europe saw so little of them, had so little of benefit from them, as the country they were supposed to enrich.

If the killing of Spain needed to be made complete by anything more, Philip supplied the need, in the deadliness of his taxation. Spending vast sums in his attempt to repeat upon the Netherlands the work of national murder he had accomplished in Spain; losing, by the same act, the rich revenues of the thrifty provinces; launching into new expenditures as he pursued, by clumsy warfare, his mission of death into fresh fields, aiming now at the life of France, and now at the life of England,—he squeezed the cost of his armies and armadas from a country in which he had strangled production already, and made poverty the common estate. It was the last draining of the life-blood of a nation which ought to have been strong and great, but which suffered murder most foul and unnatural.

We hardly exaggerate even in figure when we say that Spain was a dead nation whim Philip quitted the scene of his arduous labors. It is true that his successors still found something for their hands to do, in the ways that were pleasant to their race, and burned and bled and crushed the unhappy kingdom with indefatigable persistency; but it was really the corpse of a nation which they practised on. The life of Spain, as a breathing, sentient state, came to an end under the hands of Philip II., first of the Thugs.

Philip II. and the Netherlands.

The hand of Charles V. had been heavy on the Netherlands; but resistance to such a power as that of Spain in his day was hardly dreamed of. It was not easy for Philip to outdo his father's despotism; less easy to drive the laborious Hollanders and Flemings to desperation and force them into rebellious war. But he accomplished it. He filled the country with Spanish troops. He reorganized and stimulated the Inquisition. He multiplied bishoprics in the Provinces, against the wish of even the Catholic population. He scorned the counsels of the great nobles, and gave foreign advisers to the Regent, his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, illegitimate daughter of Charles V., whom he placed at the head of the government. His oppressions were endured, with increasing signs of hidden passion, for ten years. Then, in 1566, the first movement of patriotic combination appeared. It was a league among certain of the nobles; its objects were peaceful, its plans were legal; but it was not countenanced by the wiser of the patriots, who saw that events were not ripe. The members of the league went in solemn procession to the Regent with a petition; whereupon one of her councillors denounced them as "a troop of beggars." They promptly seized the epithet and appropriated it. A beggar's wallet became their emblem; the idea was caught up and carried through the country, and a visible party rose quickly into existence.

The religious feeling now gained boldness. Enormous field-meetings began to be held, under arms, in every part of the open country, defying edicts and Inquisition. There followed a little later some fanatical and riotous outbreaks in several cities, breaking images and desecrating churches. Upon these occurrences, Philip despatched to the Netherlands, in the summer of 1567, a fresh army of Spanish troops, commanded by a man who was after his own heart—as mean, as false, as merciless, as little in soul and mind, as himself,—the Duke of Alva. Alva brought with him authority which practically superseded that of the Regent, and secret instructions which doomed every man of worth in the Provinces.

At the head of the nobility of the country; by eminence of character, no less than by precedence in rank, stood William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, who derived his higher title from a petty and remote principality, but whose large family possessions were in Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Luxemburg. Associated closely with him, in friendship and in political action, were Count Egmont, and the Admiral Count Horn, the latter of a family related to the Montmorencies of France. These three conspicuous nobles Philip had marked with special malice for the headsman, though their solitary crime had been the giving of advice against his tyrannies. William of Orange-"the Silent," as he came to be known—far-seeing in his wisdom, and well-advised by trusty agents in Spain, withdrew into Germany before Alva arrived. He warned his friends of their danger and implored them to save themselves; but they were blinded and would not listen. The perfidious Spaniard lured them with flatteries to Brussels and thrust them into prison. They were to be the first victims of the appalling sacrifice required to appease the dull rage of the king. Within three months they had eighteen hundred companions, condemned like themselves to the scaffold, by a council in which Alva presided and which the people called "the Council of Blood." In June, 1568, they were brought to the block.

Meantime Prince William and his brother, Louis of Nassau, had raised forces in Germany and attempted the rescue of the terrorized Provinces; but their troops were ill-paid and mutinous and they suffered defeat. For the time being, the Netherlands were crushed. As many of the people as could escape had fled; commerce was at a standstill; workshops were idle; the cities, once so wealthy, were impoverished; death, mourning, and terror, were everywhere. Alva had done very perfectly what he was sent to do.

The first break in the blackness of the clouds appeared in April, 1572, when a fleet, manned by refugee adventurers who called themselves Sea-Beggars, attacked and captured the town of Brill. From that day the revolt had its right footing, on the decks of the ships of the best sailors in the world. It faced Philip from that day as a maritime power, which would grow by the very feeding of its war with him, until it had consumed everything Spanish within its reach. The taking of Brill soon gave the patriots control of so many places in Holland and Zealand that a meeting of deputies was held at Dort, in July, 1572, which declared William of Orange to be "the King's legal Stadtholder in Holland, Zealand, Friesland and Utrecht," and recommended to the other Provinces that he be appointed Protector of all the Netherlands during the King's absence.

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Alva's reign of terror had failed so signally that even he was discouraged and asked to be recalled. It was his boast when he retired that he had put eighteen thousand and six hundred of the Netherlanders to death since they were delivered into his hands, above and beyond the horrible massacres by which he had half depopulated every captured town. Under Alva's successor, Don Louis de Requesens, a man of more justice and humanity, the struggle went on, adversely, upon the whole, to the patriots, though they triumphed gloriously in the famous defense of Leyden. To win help from England, they offered the sovereignty of their country to Queen Elizabeth; but in vain. They made no headway in the southern provinces, where Catholicism prevailed, and where the religious difference drew people more to the Spanish side. But when Requesens died suddenly, in the spring of 1576, and the Spanish soldiery broke into a furious mutiny, sacking Antwerp and other cities, then the nobles of Flanders and Brabant applied to the northern provinces for help. The result was a treaty, called the Pacification of Ghent, which contemplated a general effort to drive the Spaniards from the whole land. But not much came of this confederacy; the Catholic provinces never co-operated with the Protestant provinces, and the latter went their own way to freedom and prosperity, while the former sank back, submissive, to their chains.

For a short time after the death of Requesens, Philip was represented in the Netherlands by his illegitimate half-brother, Don John of Austria; but Don John died in October, 1578, and then came the great general, Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, who was to try the patriots sorely by his military skill. In 1579, the Prince of Orange drew them more closely together, in the Union of Utrecht, which Holland, Zealand, Gelderland, Zutphen, Utrecht, Overyssel, and Groningen, subscribed, and which was practically the foundation of the Dutch republic, though allegiance to Philip was not yet renounced. This followed two years later, in July, 1581, when the States General, assembled at the Hague, passed a solemn Act of Abjuration, which deposed Philip from his sovereignty and transferred it to the Duke of Anjou, a prince of the royal family of France, who did nothing for the Provinces, and who died soon after. At the same time, the immediate sovereignty of Holland and Zealand was conferred on the Prince of Orange.

In March, 1582, Philip made his first deliberate attempt to procure the assassination of the Prince. He had entered into a contract for the purpose, and signed it with his own hand. The assassin employed failed only because the savage pistol wound he inflicted, in the neck and jaw of his victim, did not kill. The master-murderer, at Madrid, was not discouraged. He launched his assassins, one following the other, until six had made their trial in two years. The sixth, one Balthazar Gerard, accomplished that for which he was sent, and William the Silent, wise statesman and admirable patriot, fell under his hand (July 10, 1584). Philip was so immeasurably delighted at this success that he conferred three lordships on the parents of the murderer.

William's son, Maurice, though but eighteen years old, was immediately chosen Stadtholder of Holland, Zealand and Utrecht, and High Admiral of the Union. In the subsequent years of the war, he proved himself a general of great capacity. Of the details of the war it is impossible to speak. Its most notable event was the siege of Antwerp, whose citizens defended themselves against the Duke of Parma, with astonishing courage and obstinacy, for many months. They capitulated in the end on honorable terms; but the prosperity of their city had received a blow from which it never revived.

Once more the sovereignty of the Provinces was offered to Queen Elizabeth of England, and once more declined; but the queen sent her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, with a few thousand men, to help the struggling Hollanders (1585). This was done, not in sympathy with them or their cause, but purely as a self-defensive measure against Spain. The niggardliness and the vacillations of Elizabeth, combined with the incompetency of Leicester, caused troubles to the Provinces nearly equal to the benefit of the forces lent them. Philip of Spain was now involved in his undertakings with the Guises and the League in France, and in his plans against England, and was weakened in the Netherlands for some years. Parma died in 1592, and Count Mansfield took his place, succeeded in his turn by the Marquis Spinola. The latter, at last, made an honest report, that the subjugation of the United Provinces was impracticable, and, Philip II. being now dead, the Spanish government was induced in 1607 to agree to a suspension of arms. A truce for twelve years was arranged; practically it was the termination of the war of independence, and practically it placed the United Provinces among the nations, although the formal acknowledgment of their independence was not yielded by Spain until 1648.

England under Mary.

While the Netherlands had offered to Philip of Spain a special field for his malice, there were others thrown open to him which he did not neglect. He may be said, in fact, to have whetted his appetite for blood and for burned human flesh in England, whither he went, as a young prince, in 1554, to marry his elderly second cousin, Queen Mary. We may be sure that he did not check the ardor of his consort, when she hastened to re-establish the supremacy of the Pope, and to rekindle the fires of religious persecution. The two-hundred and seventy-seven heretics whom she is reckoned to have burned may have seemed to him, even then, an insignificant handful. He quickly tired of her, if not of her congenial work, and left her in 1555. In 1558 she died, and the Church of Rome fell once more, never to regain its old footing of authority.

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England under Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, who now came to the throne, was Protestant by the necessities of her position, whether doctrinally convinced or no. The Catholics denied her legitimacy of birth, and disputed, therefore, her right to the crown. She depended upon the Protestants for her support, and Protestantism, either active or passive, had become, without doubt, the dominant faith of the nation. But the mild schism which formerly took most of its direction from Luther, had now been powerfully acted upon by the influence of Calvin. Geneva had been the refuge of many ministers and teachers who fled from Mary's fires, and they returned to spread and deepen in England the stern, strong, formidable piety which Calvin evoked. These Calvinistic Protestants now made themselves felt as a party in the state, and were known ere long by that name which the next century rendered famous in English and American history—the great name of the Puritans. They were not satisfied with the stately, decorous, ceremonious Church which Elizabeth reconstructed on the pattern of the Church of Edward VI. At the same time, no party could be counted on more surely for the support of the queen, since the hope of Protestantism in England depended upon her, even as she was dependent upon it.

The Catholics, denying legitimacy to Elizabeth, recognized Mary Queen of Scots as the lawful sovereign of England. And Mary was, in fact, the next in succession, tracing her lineage, as stated before, to the elder sister of Henry VIII. If Elizabeth had been willing to frankly acknowledge Mary's heirship, failing heirs of her own body, it seems probable that the partisans of the Scottish queen would have been quieted, to a great extent. But Mary had angered her by assuming, while in France, the arms and style of Queen of England. She distrusted and disliked her Stuart cousin, and, moreover, the whole idea of a settlement of the succession was repugnant to her mind. At the same time, she could not be brought to marry, as her Protestant subjects wished. She coquetted with the notion of marriage through half her reign, but never to any purpose.

Such were the elements of agitation and trouble in England under Elizabeth. The history of well-nigh half-a-century was shaped in almost all its events by the threatening attitude of Catholicism and its supporters, domestic and foreign, toward the English queen. She was supported by the majority of her subjects with staunch loyalty and fidelity, even though she treated them none too well, and troubled them in their very defense of her by her whims and caprices. They identified her cause with themselves, and took such pride in her courage that they shut their eyes to the many weaknesses that went with it. She never grasped the affairs she dealt with in a broadly capable way. She never acted on them with well considered judgment. Her ministers, it is clear, were never able to depend upon a reasonable action of her mind. Her vanity or her jealousy might put reason in eclipse at any moment, and a skilful flatterer could make the queen as foolish as a milkmaid. But she had a royal courage and a royal pride of country, and she did make the good and glory of England her aim. So she won the affection of all Englishmen whose hearts were not in the keeping of the Pope, and no monarch so arbitrary was ever more ardently admired.

Mary, Queen of Scots.

In 1567, Mary Stuart was deposed by her own subjects, or forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son, James. She had alienated the Scottish people, first by her religion, and then by her suspected personal crimes. Having married her second cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, she was accused of being false to him. Darnley revenged his supposed wrongs as a husband by murdering her secretary, David Rizzio. In the next year (1567) Darnley was killed; the hand of the Earl of Bothwell appeared quite plainly in the crime, and the queen's complicity was believed. She confirmed the suspicions against herself by marrying Bothwell soon afterwards. Then her subjects rose against her, imprisoned her in Loch Leven Castle, and made the Earl of Murray regent of the Kingdom. In 1568 Mary escaped from her Scottish prison and entered England. From that time until her death, in 1587, she was a captive in the hands of her rival, Queen Elizabeth, and was treated with slender magnanimity. More than before, she became the focus of intrigues and conspiracies which threatened both the throne and the life of Elizabeth, and a growing feeling of hostility to the wretched woman was inevitable.

In 1570, Pope Pius V. issued against Elizabeth his formal bull of excommunication, absolving her subjects from their allegiance. This quickened, of course, the activity of the plotters against the queen and set treason astir. Priests from the English Catholic Seminary at Douai, afterwards at Rheims, began to make their appearance in the country; a few Jesuits came over; and both were active agents of the schemes on foot which contemplated the seating of Mary Stuart on the throne of Elizabeth Tudor. Some of these emissaries were executed, and they are counted among the martyrs of the Catholic Church, which is a serious mistake. The Protestantism of the sixteenth century was quite capable of religious persecution, even to death; but it has no responsibilities of that nature in these Elizabethan cases. As a matter of fact, the religion of the Jesuit sufferers in the reign of Elizabeth was a mere incident attaching itself to a high political crime, which no nation has ever forgiven.

The plotting went on for twenty years, keeping the nation in unrest; while beyond it there were thickening signs of a great project of invasion in the sinister mind of Philip II. At last, in 1586, the coolest councillors of Elizabeth persuaded her to bring Mary Stuart to trial for alleged complicity in a conspiracy of assassination which had lately come to light. Convicted, and condemned to death, Mary ended her sad life on the scaffold, at Fotheringay, on the 8th of February, 1587. Whether guilty or guiltless of any knowledge of what had been done in her name, against the peace of England and against the life of the English queen, it cannot be thought strange that Protestant England took her life.

The Spanish Armada.

A great burst of wrath in Catholic Europe was caused by the execution of Mary, and Philip of Spain hastened forward his vast preparations for the invasion and conquest of England. In 1588, the "invincible armada," as it was believed to be, sailed out of the harbors of Portugal and Spain, and wrecked itself with clumsy imbecility on the British and Irish coasts. It scarcely did more than give sport to the eager English sailors who scattered its helpless ships and hunted them down. Philip troubled England no more, and conspiracy ceased.

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England at Sea.

But the undeclared, half-piratical warfare which private adventurers had been carrying on against Spanish commerce for many years now acquired fresh energy. Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, Grenvil, Raleigh, were the heroic spirits of this enterprising warfare; but they had many fellows. It was the school of the future navy of England, and the foundations of the British Empire were laid down by those who carried it on.

Otherwise, Elizabeth had little war upon her hands, except in Ireland, where the state of misery and disorder had already been long chronic. The first really complete conquest of the island was accomplished by Lord Mountjoy between 1600 and 1603.

Intellectual England.

But neither the political troubles nor the naval and military triumphs of England during the reign of Elizabeth are of much importance, after all, compared with the wonderful flowering of the genius of the nation which took place in that age. Shakespeare, Spenser, Bacon, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Hooker, Raleigh, Sidney, are the great facts of Elizabeth's time, and it shines with the luster of their names, the period most glorious in English history.

The Religious Wars in France.

Wherever the stealthy arm of the influence of Philip II. of Spain could reach, there the Catholic reaction of his time took on a malignant form. In France, it is quite probable that the Catholics and the Huguenots, if left to themselves, would have come to blows; but it is certain that the meddling fingers of the Spanish king put fierceness and fury into the wars of religion, which raged from 1562 to 1596, and that they were prolonged by his encouragement and help.

Catherine de' Medici, to strengthen herself against the Guises, after the death of Francis II., offered attentions for a time to the Huguenot nobles, and encouraged them to expect a large and lasting measure of toleration. She went so far that the Huguenot influence at court, surrounding the young king, became very seriously alarming to Catholic onlookers, both at home and abroad. Among the many remonstrances addressed to the queen-regent, the one which appears to have been decisive in its effect came from Philip. He coldly sent her word that he intended to interfere in France and to establish the supremacy of the Catholic Church; that he should give his support for that purpose to any true friend of the Church who might request it. Whether Catherine had entertained an honest purpose or not, in her dealing with the Huguenots, this threat, with what lay behind it, put an end to the hope of justice for them. It is true that an assembly of notables, in January, 1562, did propose a law which the queen put forth, in what is known as the "Edict of January," whereby the Huguenots were given, for the first time, a legal recognition, ceasing to be outlaws, and were permitted to hold meetings, in the daytime, in open places, outside of walled cities; but their churches were taken away from them, they were forbidden to build more, and they could hold no meetings in walled towns. It was a measure of toleration very different from that which they had been led to expect; and even the little meted out by this Edict of January was soon shown to have no guarantee. Within three months, the Duke of Guise had found an opportunity for exhibiting his contempt of the new law, by ordering his armed followers to attack a congregation at Vassy, killing fifty and wounding two hundred of the peaceful worshippers. This outrage drove the Huguenots to arms and the civil wars began.

The frivolous Anthony, King of Navarre, had been won back to the Catholic side. His staunch wife, Jeanne d'Albret, with her young son, the future Henry IV., and his brother, Louis, Prince of Condé, remained true to their faith. Condé was the chief of the party. Next to him in rank, and first in real worth and weight, was the noble Admiral Coligny. The first war was brief, though long enough to end the careers of Anthony of Navarre, killed in battle, and the Duke of Guise, assassinated. Peace was made in 1563 through a compromise, which conceded certain places to the Huguenots, wherein they might worship God in their own way. But it was a hollow peace, and the malicious finger of the great master of assassins at Madrid never ceased picking at it. In 1566, civil war broke out a second time, continuing until 1570. Its principal battles were that of Jarnac, in which Condé was taken prisoner and basely assassinated by his captors, and that of Moncontour. The Huguenots were defeated in both. After the death of Condé, young Henry of Navarre, who had reached his fifteenth year, was chosen to be the chief of the party, with Coligny for his instructor in war.

Again peace was made, on a basis of slight concessions. Henry of Navarre married the King's sister, Margaret of Valois; prior to which he and his mother took up their residence with the court, at Paris, where Jeanne d'Albret soon sickened and died. The Admiral Coligny acquired, apparently, a marked influence over the mind of the young king; and once more there seemed to be a smiling future for the Reformed. But damnable treacheries were hidden underneath this fair showing. The most hideous conspiracy of modern times was being planned, at the very moment of the ostentatious peace-marriage of the King of Navarre, and the chief parties to it were Catherine de' Medici and the Guises, whose evil inclinations in common had brought them together at last. On the 22d of August, 1572, Coligny was wounded by an assassin, employed by the widow and son of the late Duke of Guise, whose death they charged against him, notwithstanding his protestations of innocence. Two days later, the monstrous and almost incredible massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day was begun. Paris was full of Huguenots—the heads of the party—its men of weight and influence—who had been drawn to the capital by the King of Navarre's marriage and by the supposed new era of favor in which they stood. To cut these off was to decapitate Protestantism in France, and that was the purpose of the infernal scheme. The weak-minded young king was not an original party to the plot. When everything had been planned, he was easily excited by a tale of pretended Huguenot conspiracies, and his assent to summary measures of prevention was secured. A little after midnight, on the morning of Sunday, August 24, the signal was given, by Catherine's order, which let loose a waiting swarm of assassins, throughout Paris, on the victims who had been marked for them. The Huguenots had had no warning; they were taken everywhere by surprise, and they were easily murdered in their beds, or hunted down in their hopeless flight.

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The noble Coligny, prostrated by the wound he had received two days before, was killed in his chamber, and his body flung out of the window. The young Duke of Guise stood waiting in the court below, to gloat on the corpse and to basely spurn it with his foot.

The massacre in Paris was carried on through two nights and two days; and, for more than a month following, the example of the capital was imitated in other cities of France, as the news of what were called "the Paris Matins" reached them. The total number of victims in the kingdom is estimated variously to have been between twenty thousand and one hundred thousand. Henry of Navarre and the young Prince of Condé escaped the massacre, but they saved their lives by a hypocritical abjuration of their religion.

The strongest town in the possession of the Huguenots was La Rochelle, and great numbers of their ministers and people of mark who survived the massacre now took refuge in that city, with a considerable body of armed men. The royal forces laid siege to the city, but made no impression on its defences. Peace was conceded in the end on terms which again promised the Huguenots some liberty of worship. But there was no sincerity in it.

In 1574, Charles IX. died, and his brother, the Duke of Anjou, who had lately been elected King of Poland, ran away from his Polish capital with disgraceful haste and secrecy, to secure the French crown. He was the most worthless of the Valois-Medicean brood, and the French court in his reign attained its lowest depth of degradation. The contending religions were soon at war again, with the accustomed result, in 1576, of another short-lived peace. The Catholics were divided into two factions, one fanatical, following the Guises, the other composed of moderate men, calling themselves the Politiques, who hated the Spanish influence under which the Guises were always acting, and who were willing to make terms with the Huguenots. The Guises and the ultra-Catholics now organized throughout France a great oath-bound "Holy League", which became so formidable in power that the king took fright, put himself at the head of it, and reopened war with the Reformed.

More and more, the conflict of religions became confused with questions of politics and mixed with personal quarrels. At one time, the king's younger brother, the Duke of Alençon, had gone over to the Huguenot side; but stayed only long enough to extort from the court some appointments which he desired. The king, more despised by his subjects than any king of France before him had ever been, grew increasingly jealous and afraid of the popularity and strength of the Duke of Guise, who was proving to be a man quite superior to his father in capability. Guise, on his side, was made arrogant by his sense of power, and his ambition soared high. There were reasons for believing that he did not look upon the throne itself as beyond his reach.

After 1584, when the Duke of Alençon (Duke of Anjou under his later title) died, a new political question, vastly disturbing, was brought into affairs. That death left no heir to the crown in the Valois line, and the King of Navarre, of the House of Bourbon, was now nearer in birth to the throne than any other living person. Henry had, long ere this, retracted his abjuration of 1572, had rejoined the Huguenots and taken his place as their chief. The head of the Huguenots was now the heir presumptive to the crown, and the wretched, incapable king was being impelled by his fear of Guise to look to his Huguenot heir for support. It was a strange situation. In 1588 it underwent a sinister change. Guise and his brother, the Cardinal, were both assassinated by the king's body-guard, acting under the king's orders, in the royal residence at the Castle of Blois. When the murder had been done, the cowardly king spurned his dead enemy with his foot, as Guise, sixteen years before, had spurned the murdered Coligny, and said "I am King at last." He was mistaken. His authority vanished with the vile deed by which he expected to reinvigorate it. Paris broke into open rebellion. The League renewed its activity throughout France. The king, abandoned and cursed on all sides, had now no course open to him but an alliance with Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots. The alliance was effected, and the two Henrys joined forces to subdue insurgent Paris. While the siege of the city was in progress (1589), Henry III. fell a victim, in his turn, to the murderous mania of his depraved age and court. He was assassinated by a fanatical monk.

Henry of Navarre.

Henry of Navarre now steps into the foreground of French history, as Henry IV., lawful King of France as well as of Navarre, and ready to prove his royal title by a more useful reign than the French nation had known since it buried St. Louis, his last ancestor on the throne. But his title was recognized at first by few outside the party of the Huguenots. The League went openly into alliance with Philip of Spain, who even half-stopped his war in the Netherlands to send money and troops into France. The energies of his insignificant soul were all concentrated on the desire to keep the heretical Béarnese from the throne of France. But happily his powers were no longer equal to his malice; he was still staggering under the blow which destroyed his great Armada.

Henry received some help in money from Queen Elizabeth, and 5,000 English and Scotch came over to join his army. He was an abler general than any among his opponents, and he made headway against them. His splendid victory at Ivry, on the 14th of March, 1590, inspirited his followers and took heart from the League. He was driven from his subsequent siege of Paris by a Spanish army, under the Duke of Parma; but the very interference of the Spanish king helped to turn French feeling in Henry's favor. On the 25th of July, 1593, he practically extinguished the opposition to himself by his final submission to the Church of Rome. It was an easy thing for him to do. His religion sat lightly on him. He had accepted it from his mother; he had adhered to it—not faithfully—as the creed of a party. He could give it up, in exchange for the crown of France, and feel no trouble of conscience. But the Reformed religion in France was really benefited by his apostacy. Peace came to the kingdom, as the consequence,—a peace of many years,—and the Huguenots were sheltered in considerable religious freedom by the peace. Henry secured it to them in 1598 by the famous Edict of Nantes, which remained in force for nearly a hundred years.

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The reign of Henry IV. was one of the satisfactory periods in the life of France, so far as concerns the material prosperity of the nation. He was a man of strong, keen intellect, with firmness of will and elasticity of temper, but weak on the moral side. He was of those who win admiration and friendship easily, and he remains traditionally the most popular of French kings. He had the genius for government which so rarely coincides with royal birth. A wise minister, the Duke of Sully, gave stability to his measures, and between them they succeeded in remarkably improving and promoting the agricultural and the manufacturing industries of France, effacing the destructive effects of the long civil wars, and bringing economy and order into the finances of the overburdened nation. His useful career was ended by an assassin in 1610.

Germany and the Thirty Years War.

The reactionary wars of religion in Germany came half-a-century later than in France. While the latter country was being torn by the long civil conflicts which Henry IV. brought to an end, the former was as nearly in the enjoyment of religious peace as the miserable contentions in the bosom of Protestantism, between Lutherans and Calvinists (the latter more commonly called "the Reformed"), would permit. On the abdication of Charles V., in 1556, he had fortunately failed to bring about the election of his son Philip to the imperial throne. His brother Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and King of Bohemia and Hungary, was chosen Emperor, and that sovereign had too many troubles in his immediate dominions to be willing to invite a collision with the Protestant princes of Germany at large. The Turks had overrun Hungary and established themselves in possession of considerable parts of the country. Ferdinand obtained peace with the redoubtable Sultan Suleiman, but only by payments of money which bore a strong likeness to tribute. He succeeded, through his prudent and skilful policy, in making both the Hungarian and the Bohemian crowns practically hereditary in the House of Austria.

Dying in 1564, Ferdinand transmitted both those kingdoms, with the Austrian Archduchy and the imperial office, to his son, Maximilian II., the broadest and most liberal minded of his race. Though educated in Spain, and in companionship with his cousin, Philip II., Maximilian exhibited the most tolerant spirit that appears anywhere in his age. Perhaps it was the hatefulness of orthodox zeal as exemplified in Philip which drove the more generous nature of Maximilian to revolt. He adhered to the Roman communion; but he manifested so much respect for the doctrines of the Lutheran that his father felt called upon at one time to make apologies for him to the Pope. Throughout his reign he held himself aloof from religious disputes, setting an example of tolerance and spiritual intelligence to all his subjects, Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics alike, which ought to have influenced them more for their good than it did. Under the shelter of the toleration which Maximilian gave it, Protestantism spread quickly over Austria, where it had had no opportunity before; revived the old Hussite reform in Bohemia; made great gains in Hungary, and advanced in all parts of his dominions except the Tyrol. The time permitted to it for this progress was short, since Maximilian reigned but twelve years. He died in 1576, and his son Rudolph, who followed him, brought evil changes upon the country in all things. He, too, had been educated in Spain, but with a very different result. He came back a creature of the Jesuits; but so weakly wilful a creature that even they could do little with him. Authority of government went to pieces in his incompetent hands, and at last, in 1606, a family conclave of princes of the Austrian house began measures which aimed at dispossessing Rudolph of his various sovereignties, so far as possible, in favor of his brother Matthias. Rudolph resisted with some effect, and in the contests which ensued the Protestants of Austria and Bohemia improved their opportunity for securing an enlargement of their rights. Matthias made the concession of complete toleration in Austria, while Rudolph, in Bohemia, granted the celebrated charter, called the Letter of Majesty (1609), which gave entire religious liberty to all sects.

These concessions were offensive to two princes, the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, and Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, who had already taken the lead in a vigorous movement of Catholic reaction. Some proceedings on the part of Maximilian, which the Emperor sanctioned, against the Protestant free city of Donauwörth, had caused certain Protestant princes and cities, in 1608, to form a defensive Union. But the Elector Palatine, who attached himself to the Reformed or Calvinist Church, was at the head of this Union, and the bigoted Lutherans, especially the Elector of Saxony, looked with coldness upon it. On the other hand, the Catholic states formed a counter-organization—a Holy League—which was more compact and effective. The two parties being thus set in array, there rose suddenly between them a political question of the most disturbing character. It related to the right of succession to an important duchy, that of Juliers, Clèves, and Berg. There were several powerful claimants, in both of the Saxon families, and including also the Elector of Brandenburg and the Palsgrave of Neuberg, two members of the Union. As usual, the political question took possession of the religious issue and used it for its own purposes. The Protestant Union opened negotiations with Henry IV. of France, who saw an opportunity to weaken the House of Austria and to make some gains for France at the expense of Germany. A treaty was concluded, and Henry began active preparations for campaigns in both Germany and Italy, with serious intent to humble and diminish the Austrian power. The Dutch came into the alliance, likewise, and James I. of England promised his co-operation. The combination was formidable, and might have changed very extensively the course of events that awaited unhappy Germany, if the whole plan had not been frustrated by the assassination of Henry IV., in 1610. All the parties to the alliance drew back after that event, and both sides waited.

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In 1611, Rudolph was deposed in Bohemia, and the following year he died. Matthias, already King of Hungary, succeeded Rudolph in Bohemia and in the Empire. But Matthias was scarcely stronger in mind or body than his brother, and the same family pressure which had pushed Rudolph aside now forced Matthias to accept a coadjutor, in the person of the vigorous Ferdinand, Archduke of Styria. For the remainder of his reign Matthias was a cipher, and all power in the government was exercised by Ferdinand. His bitter opposition to the tolerant policy which had prevailed generally for half-a-century was well understood. Hence, his rise to supremacy in the Empire gave notice that the days of religious peace were ended. The outbreak of civil war was not long in coming.

Beginning of the war in Bohemia.

It began in Bohemia. A violation of the Protestant rights guaranteed by the Letter of Majesty provoked a rising under Count Thurn. Two of the king's councilors, with their secretary, were flung from a high window of the royal castle, and this act of violence was followed by more revolutionary measures. A provisional government of thirty Directors was set up and the king's authority set wholly aside. The Protestant Union gave prompt support to the Bohemian insurrection and sent Count Mansfield with three thousand soldiers to its aid. The Thirty Years War was begun (1618).

Early in these disturbances, Matthias died (1619). Ferdinand had already made his succession secure, in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, and the imperial crown was presently conferred on him. But the Bohemians repudiated his kingship and offered their crown to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, lately married to the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I. of England. The Elector, persuaded, it is said, by his ambitious young wife, unwisely accepted the tempting bauble, and went to Prague to receive it. But he had neither prudence nor energy to justify his bold undertaking. Instead of strengthening himself for his contest with Ferdinand, he began immediately to enrage his new subjects by pressing Calvinistic forms and doctrines upon them, and by arrogantly interfering with their modes of worship. His reign was so brief that he is known in Bohemian annals as "the winter king." A single battle, won by Count Tilly, in the service of the Catholic League and of its chief, Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, ended his sovereignty. He lost his Electorate as well as his kingdom, and was a wandering fugitive for the remainder of his life. Bohemia was mercilessly dealt with by the victorious Ferdinand. Not only was Protestantism crushed, and Catholicism established as the exclusive religion, but the very life of the country, intellectually and materially, was extinguished; so that Bohemia never again stood related to the civilization of Europe as it had stood before, when Prague was an important center of learning and thought. To a less extent, Austria suffered the same repression, and its Protestantism was uprooted.

In this sketch it is unnecessary to follow the details of the frightful Thirty Years War, which began as here described. During the first years it was carried on mainly by the troops of the Catholic League, under Tilly, acting against Protestant forces which had very little coherence or unity, and which were led by Count Mansfield, Christian of Anhalt, and other nobles, in considerable independence of one another. In 1625 the first intervention from outside occurred. Christian IV. of Denmark took up the cause of threatened Protestantism. As Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, he was a prince of the Empire, and he joined with other Protestant princes in condemning the deposition of the Elector-Palatine, whose electorate had been conferred on Maximilian of Bavaria. King Christian entered into an alliance with England and Holland, which powers promised help for the reinstatement of the Elector. But the aid given was trifling, and slight successes which Christian and his German allies obtained against Tilly were soon changed to serious reverses.

Wallenstein.

For the first time during the war, the Emperor now brought into the field an army acting in his own name, and not in that of the League. It was done in a singular manner—by contract, so to speak, with a great soldier and wealthy nobleman, the famous Wallenstein. Wallenstein offered to the Emperor the services of an army of 50,000 men, which he would raise and equip at his own expense, and which should be maintained without public cost—that is, by plunder. His proposal was accepted, and the formidable body of trained and powerfully handled brigands was launched upon Germany, for the torture and destruction of every region in which it moved. It was the last appearance in European warfare of the "condottiere" of the Middle Ages. Wallenstein and Tilly swept all before them. The former failed only before the stubborn town of Stralsund, which defied his siege. Mansfield and Christian of Anhalt both died in 1627. Peace was forced upon the Danish king. The Protestant cause was prostrate, and the Emperor despised its weakness so far that he issued an "Edict of Restitution," commanding the surrender of certain bishoprics and ecclesiastical estates which had fallen into Protestant hands since the Treaty of Passau. At the same time, he yielded to the jealousy which Wallenstein's power had excited, by dismissing that commander from his service.

Gustavus Adolphus.

The time was an unfavorable one for such an experiment. A new and redoubtable champion of Protestantism had just appeared on the scene and was about to revive the war. This was Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, who had ambitions, grievances and religious sympathies, all urging him to rescue the Protestant states of Germany from the Austrian-Catholic despotism which seemed to be impending over them. His interference was jealously resented at first by the greater Protestant princes. The Elector of Brandenburg submitted to an alliance with him only under compulsion. The Elector of Saxony did not join the Swedish king until (1631) Tilly had ravaged his territories with ferocity, burning 200 villages. When Gustavus had made his footing in the country secure, he quickly proved himself the greatest soldier of his age. Tilly was overwhelmed in a battle fought on the Breitenfeld, at Leipsic. The following spring he was again beaten, on the Lech, in Bavaria, and died of wounds received in the battle. Meantime, the greater part of Germany was at the feet of the Swedish king; and a sincere co-operation between him and the German princes would probably have ended the war. But small confidence existed between these allies, and Richelieu, the shrewd Cardinal who was ruling France, had begun intrigues which made the Thirty Years War profitable in the end to France. The victories of Gustavus seemed to bear little fruit. Wallenstein was summoned once more to save the Emperor's cause, and reappeared in the field with 40,000 men. The heroic Swede fought him at Lützen, on the 16th of November, 1632, and routed him, but fell in the battle among the slain.

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With the death of Gustavus Adolphus, the possibility of a satisfactory conclusion of the war vanished. The Swedish army remained in Germany, under the military command of Duke Bernhard of Saxe Weimar and General Horn, but under the political direction of Axel Oxenstiern, the able Swedish Chancellor. On the Imperial side, Wallenstein again incurred distrust and suspicion. His power was so formidable that his enemies were afraid to let him live. They plotted his death by assassination, and he was murdered on the 25th of February, 1634. The Emperor's son Ferdinand now took the command of the Imperial forces, and, a few months later, having received reinforcements from Spain, he had the good fortune to defeat the Swedes at Nördlingen.

The French in the War.

The Elector of Saxony, and other Protestant princes, then made peace with the Emperor, and the war was only prolonged by the intrigues of Richelieu and for the aggrandizement of France. In this final stage of it, when the original elements of contention, and most of the original contestants, had disappeared, it lasted for yet fourteen years. Ferdinand II. died in 1637, and was succeeded by his son Ferdinand III. Duke Bernhard died in 1639. In the later years of the war, Piccolomini on the Imperial side, Baner, Torstenson and Wrangel at the head of the Swedes, and Turenne and Condé in command of the French, were the soldiers who made great names.

Destructiveness of the War.

In 1648, the long suffering of Germany was eased by the Peace of Westphalia. Years of quiet, and of order fairly restored, would be needed to heal the bleeding wounds of the country and revive its strength. From end to end, it had been trampled upon for a generation by armies which plundered and destroyed as they passed. There is nothing more sickening in the annals of war than the descriptions which eye-witnesses have left of the misery, the horror, the desolation of that frightful period in German history. "Especially in the south and west, Germany was a wilderness of ruins; places that were formerly the seats of prosperity were the haunts of wolves and robbers for many a long year. It is estimated that the population was diminished by twenty, by some even by fifty, per cent. The population of Augsburg was reduced from 80,000 to 18,000; of Frankenthal, from 18,000 to 324 inhabitants. In Würtemberg, in 1641, of 400,000 inhabitants, 48,000 remained; in the Palatinate, in 1636, there were 201 peasant farmers; and in 1648, but a fiftieth part of the population remained" (Häusser).

The Peace of Westphalia.

By the treaties of Westphalia, the religious question was settled with finality. Catholics, Lutherans, and the Reformed (Calvinists), were put on an equal footing of religious liberty. Politically, the effects of the Peace were radical and lasting in their injury to the German people. The few bonds of Germanic unity which had survived the reign of feudalism were dissolved. The last vestige of authority in the Empire was destroyed. "From this time Germany long remained a mere lax confederation of petty despotisms and oligarchies with hardly any national feeling. Its boundaries too were cut short in various ways. The independence of the two free Confederations at the two ends of the Empire, those of Switzerland and the United Provinces, which had long been practically cut off from the Empire, was now formally acknowledged. And, what was far more important, the two foreign kingdoms which had had the chief share in the war, France and Sweden, obtained possessions within the Empire, and moreover, as guarantors or sureties of the peace, they obtained a general right of meddling in its affairs." "The right of France to the 'Three Lotharingian Bishoprics,' which had been seized nearly a hundred years before, was now formally acknowledged, and, besides this, the possessions and rights of the House of Austria in Elsass, the German land between the Rhine and the Vosges, called in France Alsace, were given to France. The free city of Strasburg and other places in Elsass still remained independent, but the whole of South Germany now lay open to France. This was the greatest advance that France had yet made at the expense of the Empire. Within Germany itself the Elector of Brandenburg also received a large increase of territory" (Freeman).

Among the treaties which made up the Peace of Westphalia was one signed by Spain, acknowledging the independence of the United Provinces, and renouncing all claims to them.

France under Richelieu.

The great gains of France from the Thirty Years War were part of the fruit of bold and cunning statesmanship which Richelieu had ripened and plucked for that now rising nation. For a time after the death of Henry IV., chaos had seemed likely to return again in France. His son, Louis XIII., was but nine years old. The mother, Marie de' Medici, who secured the regency, was a foolish woman, ruled by Italian favorites, who made themselves odious to the French people. As soon as the young king approached manhood, he put himself in opposition to his mother and her favorites, under the influence of a set of rivals no more worthy, and France was carried to the verge of civil war by their puerile hostilities. Happily there was something in the weak character of Louis XIII. which bent him under the influence of a really great mind when circumstances had brought him within its reach. Richelieu entered the King's council in 1624. The king was soon an instrument in his hands, and he ruled France, as though the scepter was his own, for eighteen years. He was as pitiless a despot as ever set heel on a nation's neck; but the power which he grasped with what seemed to be a miserly and commonplace greed, was all gathered for the aggrandizement of the monarchy that he served. He believed that the nation needed to have one master, sole and unquestioned in his sovereignty. That he enjoyed being that one master, in reality, while he lived, is hardly doubtful; but his whole ambition is not so explained. He wrought according to his belief for France, and the king, in his eyes, was the embodiment of France. He erected the pedestal on which "the grand monarch" of the next generation posed with theatrical effect.

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Three things Richelieu did;

1. He enforced the royal authority, with inexorable rigor, against the great families and personages, who had not learned, even under Henry IV., that they were subjects in the absolute sense.

2. He struck the Huguenots, not as a religious sect, but as a political party, and peremptorily stopped their growth of strength in that character, which had clearly become threatening to the state.

3. He organized hostility in Europe to the overbearing and dangerous Austro-Spanish power, put France at the head of it, and took for her the lion's share of the conquests by which the Hapsburgs were reduced.

Mazarin and the Fronde.

The great Cardinal died near the close of the year 1642; and Louis XIII. followed him to the grave in the succeeding May, leaving a son, Louis XIV., not yet five years of age, under the regency of his mother, Anne of Austria. The minister, Cardinal Mazarin, who enjoyed the confidence of the queen-regent, and who was supposed to enjoy her affections as well, had been Richelieu's disciple, and took the helm of government on Richelieu's recommendation. He was an adroit politician, with some statesmanlike sagacity, but he lacked the potent spirit by which his master had awed and ruled every circle into which he came, great or small. Mazarin had the Thirty Years War to bring to a close, and he managed the difficult business with success, wasting nothing of the effect of the brilliant victories of Condé and Turenne. But the war had been very costly. Mazarin was no better financier than Richelieu had been before him, and the burdens of taxation were greater than wise management would have made them. There was inevitable discontent, and Mazarin, as a foreigner, was inevitably unpopular. With public feeling in this state, the Court involved itself in a foolish conflict with the Parliament of Paris, and presently there was a Paris revolution and a civil war afoot (1649). It was a strange affair of froth and empty rages—this war of "The Fronde," as it was called—having no depth of earnestness in it and no honesty of purpose anywhere visible in its complications. The men and women who sprang to a lead in it—the women more actively and rancorously than the men—were mere actors of parts in a great play of court intrigue, for the performance of which unhappy France had lent its grand stage. There seems to have been never, in any other civil conflict which history describes, so extraordinary a mixture of treason and libertinism, of political and amorous intrigue, of heartlessness and frivolity, of hot passion and cool selfishness. The people who fought most and suffered most hardly appear as noticeable factors in the contest. The court performers amused themselves with the stratagems and bloody doings of the war as they might have done with the tricks of a masquerade.