Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, had made great though silent progress.
Broken off in Germany into two parties, the Lutheran and the Calvinist,
who hated each other, as usual, in exact proportion to the smallness of
their difference, the union was still kept up between them as regarded
their antagonism to the Papists. With all three denominations, the
religious part of the question had fallen into terrible abeyance. It
was now looked on by the leaders entirely as a matter of personal
advancement and political rule. In this pursuit the fanaticism which
is generally limited to theology took the direction of men's political
conduct; and there were enthusiasts among all the sects, who saw
visions, and dreamed dreams, about the succession to thrones and the
raising of armies, as used to happen in more ancient times about the
bones of martyrs and the beatification of saints. The great object of
Protestants and Catholics was to obtain a majority in the college of
the Prince Electors by whom the Empire was bestowed. This consisted of
the seven chief potentates of Germany, of whom four were secular,--the
King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of
Saxony, and the Marquis of Brandenburg; and three ecclesiastic,--the
Archbishops of Mentz, Trèves, and Cologne. The majority was naturally
secured to the Romanists by the official adhesion of these last. But it
chanced that the Elector of Cologne fell violently in love with Agnes
of Mansfeldt, a canoness of Gerrestein; and having of course studied
the history of our Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, he determined to
follow his example, and offered the fair canoness his hand. He was
unwilling, however, to offer his hand without the Electoral crozier,
and, by the advice of his friends, and with the promised support
of many of the Protestant rulers, he retained his ecclesiastical
dignity and made the beautiful Agnes his wife. This would not have
been of much consequence in a lower rank, for many of the cathedral
dignitaries in Cologne and other places had retained their offices
after changing their faith; but all Germany was awake to the momentous
nature of this transaction, for it would have conveyed a majority
of the Electoral voices to the Protestants and opened the throne of
the empire itself to a Protestant prince. Such, however, was the
strength at that time of the opposition to Rome, that all the efforts
of the Catholics would have been ineffectual to prevent this ruinous
arrangement but for a circumstance which threw division into the
Protestant camp. Gebhard had adhered to the Calvinistic branch of the
Reformation, and the Lutherans hated him with a deadlier hatred than
the Pope himself. With delight they saw him outlawed by the Emperor
and excommunicated by Rome, his place supplied by a Prince of Bavaria,
who was elected by the Chapter of Cologne to protect them from their
apostate archbishop, and the head of the house of Austria strengthened
by the consolidation of his Electoral allies and the unappeasable
dissensions of his enemies. While petty interests and the narrowest
quarrels of sectarianism divided the Protestants, and while the
Electors and other princes who had adopted their theological opinions
were doubtful of the political results of religious freedom, and many
had waxed cold, and others were discontented with the small extent of
the liberation from ancient trammels they had yet obtained, a very
different spectacle was presented on the other side. Popes and Jesuits
were heartily and unhesitatingly at work. "No cold, faint-hearted
doubtings teased them." Their object was incommoded by no refinements
or verbal differences; they were determined to assert their old
supremacy,--to trample out every vestige of resistance to their power;
and they entered upon the task without scruple or remorse. Ferdinand
the Emperor, the prop and champion of the Romish cause, was as sincere
and as unpitying as Dominic. When he had been nominated King Elect of
Bohemia, in 1598, while yet in his twentieth year, his first thought
was the future use he might make of his authority in the extermination
of the Protestant faith. The Jesuits, by whom he was trained from his
earliest years, never turned out a more hopeful pupil. His ambition
would have been, if he had had it in his power, to become a follower of
Loyola himself; but, as he was condemned by fate to the lower office
of the first of secular princes, he determined to employ all its power
at the dictation of his teachers. He went a pilgrimage to Loretto,
and, bowing before the miraculous image of the Virgin, promised to
reinstate the true Church in its unquestioned supremacy, and bent all
his thoughts to the fulfilment of his vow. Two-thirds of his subjects
in his hereditary states were Protestant, but he risked all to attain
his object. He displaced their clergy, and banished all who would not
conform. He introduced Catholics from foreign countries to supply the
waste of population, and sent armed men to destroy the newly-erected
schools and churches of the hateful heretics. This man was crowned King
of Bohemia in 1618, and Emperor of Germany in the following year.
The attention of the British public had been particularly directed to
German interests for the six years preceding this date, by the marriage
of Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, with Elizabeth, the
graceful and accomplished daughter of King James. Frederick was young
and ambitious, and was endeared to the English people as leader of the
Protestant cause against the overweening pretensions of the house of
Austria. That house was still the most powerful in Europe; for though
the Spanish monarchy was held by another branch, for all the purposes
of despotism and religion its weight was thrown into the same scale.
Spanish soldiers, and all the treasures of America, were still at the
command of the Empire; and perhaps Catholicism was rather strengthened
than weakened by the adherence of two of the greatest sovereigns in the
world, instead of having the personal influence of only one, as in the
reign of Charles the Fifth. All the Elector's movements were followed
with affectionate interest by the subjects of his father-in-law;
but James himself disapproved of opposition being offered to the
wildest excesses of royal prerogative either in himself or any other
anointed ruler. Besides this, he was particularly hostile to the
young champion's religious principles, for the latter was attached to
the Calvinistic or unepiscopal party. [A.D. 1619.] James declined to
give him any aid in maintaining his right to the crown of Bohemia, to
which he was elected by the Protestant majority of that kingdom on the
accession of Ferdinand to the Empire, and managed to show his feelings
in the most offensive manner, by oppressing such of Frederick's
co-religionists as he found in any part of his dominions. The advocates
of peace at any price have praised the behaviour of the king in this
emergency; but it may be doubted whether an energetic display of
English power at this time might not have prevented the great and cruel
reaction against freedom and Protestantism which the victory of the
bigoted Ferdinand over his neglected competitor introduced. A riot,
accompanied with violence against the Catholic authorities, was the
beginning of the troubles in Bohemia; and Ferdinand, as if to explain
his conduct to the satisfaction of James, published a manifesto,
which might almost be believed to have been the production of that
Solomon of the North. "If sovereign power," he says, "emanates from
God, these atrocious deeds must proceed from the devil, and therefore
must draw down divine punishment." This logic was unanswerable at
Whitehall, and the work of extermination went on. Feeble efforts were
forced upon the unwilling father-in-law; for all the chivalry of
England was wild with sympathy and admiration of the Bohemian queen.
Hundreds of gallant gentlemen passed over to swell the Protestant
ranks; and when they returned and told the tale of all the horrors
they had seen, the remorseless vengeance of the triumphant Church, and
all the threatenings with which Rome and the Empire endeavoured to
terrify the nations which had rebelled against their yoke, Puritanism,
or resistance to the slightest approach towards Popery either in
essentials or externals, became patriotism and self-defence; and at
this very time, while men's minds were inflamed with the descriptions
of the torturings and executions which followed the battle of Prague in
1620, and the devastation and depopulation of Bohemia, James took the
opportunity of forcing the Episcopal form of government on the Scottish
Presbyterians.
"The greatest matter," he says, in an address to the prelates of
the reluctant dioceses,--"the greatest matter the Puritans had to
object against the Church government was, that your proceedings were
warranted by no law, which now by this last Parliament is cutted
short. The sword is now put in your hands. Go on, therefore, to use
it, and let it rest no longer till ye have perfected the service
trusted to you; or otherwise we must use it both against you and
them." While the people of both nations were willing to sink their
polemic differences of Calvinist and Anglican in one great attempt
to deliver the Protestants in Germany from the power of the house
of Austria,--while for this purpose they would have voted taxes
and raised armies with the heartiest good will,--the king's whole
attention was bestowed on a set of manoeuvres for the obtaining a
Spanish-Austrian bride for his son. To gain this he would have humbled
himself to the lowest acts. At a whisper from Madrid, he interfered
with the German war, to the detriment of his own daughter; and
England perceived that his ineradicable love of power and hatred of
freedom had blinded him to national interests and natural affections.
If we follow the whole career of James, and a great portion of his
successor's, we shall see the same remarkable coincidence between the
events in England and abroad,--unpopularity of the king, produced by
his apparent lukewarmness in the general Protestant cause as much as
by his arbitrary acts at home. Whatever the nation desired, the king
opposed. When Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, began his
triumphant career in 1630, and re-established the fallen fortunes of
Protestantism, Charles concluded a dishonourable peace with Spain,
without a single provision in favour of the Protestants of the German
States, and allowed the Popish Cardinal Richelieu first to consolidate
his forces by an unsparing oppression of the Huguenots in France, and
then to almost compensate for his harshness by a gallant support of the
Swedish hero in his struggle against the Austrian power.
There was no longer the same content and happiness in the towns
and country districts as there had been at the commencement of the
century. Men had looked with contempt and dislike on the proceedings
of James's court,--his coarse buffoonery, and disgraceful patronage
of a succession of worthless favourites; and they continued to look,
not indeed with contempt, but with increased dislike and suspicion,
on the far purer court and dignified manners of his unfortunate son.
A French princess, though the daughter of Henry the Fourth, was
regarded as an evil omen for the continuance of good government or
religious progress. Her attendants, lay and clerical, were not unjustly
considered spies, and advisers with interests hostile to the popular
tendencies. And all this time went on the unlucky coincidences which
distinguished this reign,--of Catholic cruelties in foreign lands,
and approaches to the Catholic ceremonial in the reformed Church.
While Tilly, the remorseless general of the Emperor, was letting loose
the most ferocious army which ever served under a national standard
upon the inhabitants of Magdeburg, heaping into the history of that
miserable assault all the sufferings that "horror e'er conceived or
fancy feigned,"--and while the echo of that awful butchery, which
has not yet died out of the German heart, was making sorrowful
every fireside in what was once merry England,--the king's advisers
pursued their blind way, torturing their opponents with knife and
burning-brand upon the pillory, flogging gentlemen nearly to death
upon the streets, and consecrating churches with an array of surplice,
and censer, and processions, and organ-blowings, which would have done
honour to St. Peter's at Rome. People saw a lamentable connection
between the excesses of Catholic cruelty and the tendency in our sober
establishment to Catholic traditions, and became fanatical in their
detestation of the simplest forms.
In ordinary times the wise man considers mere forms as almost below his
notice; but there are periods when the emblem is of as much importance
as the thing it typifies. Church ceremonies, and gorgeous robes, and
magnificent worship, were accepted by both parties as the touchstone
of their political and religious opinions. Laud pushed aside the
Archbishop of Glasgow, who stood at Charles's right hand on his visit
to Scotland in 1633, on the express ground that he had not the orthodox
fringe upon his habit,--a ridiculous ground for so open an insult, if
it had not had an inner sense. The Archbishop of Glasgow professed
himself a moderate Churchman by the plainness of his dress, and Laud
accepted it as a defiance. Meanwhile the essential insignificance of
the symbol threw an air of ridicule over the importance attached to it.
Dull-minded men, who had not the faculty of seeing how deep a question
may lie in a simple exposition of it, or frivolous men, who could
not rise to the real earnestness which enveloped those discussions,
were scandalized at the persistency of Laud in enforcing his fancies,
and the obstinacy of a great portion of the clergy and people in
resisting them. But the Puritans, with clearer eyes, saw that a dance,
according to proclamation, on the village green on Sunday, meant not
a mere desecration of the Sabbath, but a crusade against the rights
of conscience and an assertion of arbitrary power. Altars instead of
communion-tables in churches meant not merely a restoration of the
Popish belief in the real sacrifice of the mass, but a placing of the
king above the law, and the abrogation of all liberty. They could not
at this time persuade the nation of these things. The nation, for the
most part, saw nothing more than met their bodily eyes; and, in despair
of escaping the slavery which they saw the success of Ferdinand in
Germany was likely to spread over Europe, they began the long train of
voyages to the Western World, which times of suffering and uncertainty
have continued at intervals to the present day. It is said that
a vessel was stopped by royal warrant when it was on the point of
sailing from the Thames with emigrants to America in 1637. On board
were various persons whose names would probably never have been heard
of if they had been allowed in peace and safety to pursue their way
to Boston, but with which in a few years "all England rang from side
to side." They were Oliver Cromwell, and Hampden, and Haselrig, Lord
Brook, and Lord Saye.
Affairs had now reached such a crisis that they could no longer
continue undecided. A Parliament was called in 1640, after an
unexampled interval of eleven years, and, after a few days' session,
was angrily dissolved. Another, however, was indispensable in the
same year, and on the 3d of November the Long Parliament met. The
long-repressed indignation of the Commons broke forth at once. Laud
and Wentworth, the principal advisers of the king, were tried and
executed, and precautions taken, by stringent acts, to prevent a
recurrence of arbitrary government. Everywhere there seemed a rally
in favour of the Protestant or liberal cause. The death of Richelieu,
the destroyer of French freedom, opened a prospect of recovered
independence to the Huguenots; the victories of Torstenson the
Swede, worthy successor of Gustavus Adolphus, brought down the pride
of the Austrian Catholics; and Puritans, Independents, and other
outraged sects and parties, by the restoration of the Parliament,
got a terrible instrument of vengeance against their oppressors. A
dreadful time, when on both sides the forms of law were perverted to
the most lawless purposes; when peacefully-inclined citizens must
have been tormented with sad misgivings by the contending claims of
Parliament and King,--a Parliament correctly constituted and in the
exercise of its recognised authority, a King with no flaw to his
title, and professing his willingness to limit himself to the undoubted
prerogatives of his place. [A.D. 1642.] It was probably a relief to
the undecided when the arbitrament was removed from the court of
argument to the field of battle. All the time of that miserable civil
war, the other states of Europe were in nearly as great confusion as
ourselves. France was torn to pieces by factions which contended for
the mantle of the departed cardinal; Germany was traversed from end
to end by alternately retreating and advancing armies. But still the
simultaneousness of events abroad and at home is worthy of remark. The
great fights which decided the quarrel in England were answered by
victories of the Protestant arms in Germany and the apparent triumph
of the discontented in France. The young king, Louis the Fourteenth,
carried from town to town, and disputed between the parties, gave
little augury of the despotism and injustice of his future throne.
There were barricades in Paris, and insurrections all over the land.
But at last, and at the same time, all the combatants in England,
and France, and Germany--Huguenot, Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant,
and Papist--were tired out with the length and bitterness of the
struggle. So in 1648 the long Thirty Years' War was brought to a close
by the Peace of Westphalia. Kingly power in France was curtailed, the
house of Austria was humbled; and Charles was carried prisoner to
Windsor. The Protestants of Germany, by the terms of the peace, were
replaced in their ancient possessions. They had freedom of worship
and equality of civil rights secured. A general law preserved them
from the injustice or aggressions of their local masters; and the
compromise guaranteed by so many divergent interests, and guarded by
such equally-divided numbers, has endured to the present time. The
English conquerors would be contented with no less than their foreign
friends had obtained. But the blot upon their conduct, the blood
of the misguided and humbled Charles, hindered the result of their
wisest deliberations. Moderate men were revolted by the violence of
the act, and old English loyalty, delivered from the fear of foreign
or domestic oppression, was awakened by the sad end of a crowned and
anointed King. [A.D. 1649.] Nothing compensates in an old hereditary
monarchy for the want of high descent in its ruler. Not all Cromwell's
vigour and genius, his glory abroad and energetic government at home,
attracted the veneration of English squires, whose forefathers had
fought at Crecy, to the grandson of a city knight, or, at most, to the
descendant of a minister of Henry the Eighth. Charles the Second rose
before them with the transmitted dignity of a hundred kings. He counted
back to Scottish monarchs before the Norman Conquest, and traced by
his mother's side his lineal ancestry up to Charlemagne and Clovis.
English history presents no instance of the intrusion of an unroyal
usurper in her list of sovereigns. Cromwell stands forth the solitary
instance of a man of the people virtually seizing the crown; and the
ballads and pamphlets of the time show how the comparative humility of
his birth excited the scorn of his contemporaries. And this feeling was
not limited to ancient lords and belted cavaliers: it permeated the
common mind. There was something ennobling for the humblest peasant
to die for King and Cause; but, however our traditions and the lapse
of two hundred years may have elevated the conqueror at Worcester and
Dunbar, we are not to forget that, in the estimation of those who had
drunk his beer at Huntingdon or listened to his tedious harangues in
Parliament, there would be neither patriotism nor honour in dying for
bluff Old Noll. But there were more dangerous enemies to bluff Old Noll
than the newness of his name. The same cause which had made the nation
dissatisfied with the arbitrary pretensions of James and Charles was at
work in making it intolerant of the rule of the usurpers.